Night Must Fall is widely regarded as the forerunner of a number of stage and screen plays featuring psychopaths. I suppose you could describe Dan, played originally in London by the author himself, as Hannibal Lecter in a bell-boy’s pillbox hat. A review of the play in 1935 was headlined “A study is scizophrenia.” Later Williams confessed that he had to look up ‘schizophrenia’ in the dictionary.
Whatever emotional disability afflicts Dan, he is a complex character and his beaviour is the catalyst for what London Times in 1935 described as “a study of vanity, the vanity of the bore, the vanity of old age, the crazy histrionic vanity of the criminal.” In the late 1990s Night Must Fall betrays a certain quaintness and tendency toward the “spine-chilling melodrama referred to by an American newspaper in 1936, but it is still a well made play, and is of the accessible kind.
Cast and crew
Director
Don EvansCast
Mrs Bramson - Margaret LaubeOlivia Grayne - Vivienne Aitken
Hubert Laurie - Stuart Mathieson
Nurse Libby - Deborah Manning
Mrs Terence - Beth Stephens
Dora Parkoe - Justine Pierre
Inspector Belsize - Michael Andrewes
Dan - Gregor Henderson
Crew
Set design & construction - Jon WaiteWardrobe and set dressing - Charlotte Handley
Stage manager/script assistant - Natalie Milne
Light design/tech operation - Ian Leslie
Light design/tech operation - Toby Heal
Light design/tech operation - Corey Anderson
Properties - Justine Pierre
Properties - Natalie Milne
Properties - Deborah Manning
Publicity - Eddie Cleverley
Publicity - Beth Rask
Publicity - Stuart Mathieson
Sponsorship - Beth Rask
Sponsorship - Lyndon Hood
Poster Design - Simon Pickard
Wardrobe assistant - Jan Stroud
Production Assistant - Miriam Rask
Programme - Lyndon Hood