Howard Brenton: Christie in Love

In November 1969, Howard Brenton joined the Portable Theatre and Christie in Love (Oval House, 1969) was his first major play with the company. Based on the life of the 1950s serial woman murder John Christie, it involves the London police’s search for Christie’s victims in his garden – the police officers are then confronted by a Christie risen from the grave, whom they abuse and then re-hang. It is a piece which depends on a strong sense of physical theatricality and plays with the ambivalent responses of the popular press to Christie, who is memorably resurrected from a knee-high pile of used newspapers. The audience is asked to examine what makes the killers of women figures of such public fascination a