Brenton’s experiments in theatre involved the audience participating in the plays, because audience functions as a valuable part of social structure and therefore helps evoke the social content in the plays. The audience watching Brenton’s plays are considered part of the play and expected to react and judge the actions taking place on stage. However, making a clear judgement about characters is often a difficult task in Brenton’s plays given their complexity and a difficulty to label them as simply good or bad. Reinelt exemplifies this dilemma on the play Christie in Love (1969) in which the main character is a murderer of several women, therefore should clearly be perceived as a villain, nonetheless Brenton portrays the remaining characters as non-living dolls, making the murderer the most human of all the characters. The audience is left uncertain of what to feel and full of inner struggle when realizing they may be sympathizing with a murderer. After one of the latest productions of the play, performed at the King’s Head Theatre in London in 2016, the young reviewer Connie Stride comments on the play …show more content…
I was uncertain of Curran’s rather comic and shouty portrayal as the Inspector. Perhaps it is an issue of script rather than performer, but I felt the depiction was insensitive to the actual events that occurred and the deaths of the women he murdered. The persona that Curran creates does create an interesting rapport between himself and Taylor – making the Inspector seem more of a bad guy than the murderer – Christie –