12. Feb, 2017

What's To Do With 'Taboo'?

James Delaney has gone too far.  Even Heathcliffe stopped at hanging a spaniel and Bill Sykes commited a solitary horrific murder.  James's habit of literally tearing people's hearts out, now seems to have included the unfortunate Winter, who, mysteriously drawn by his charmless demeanour, regularly popped up uttering gnomic remarks about not being afraid of him.  How wrong can you be?  Darling of the brothel keeper, her character seemed destined for better things but, as with so many others, has met with a premature demise, like the Malay with the silver tooth, barely glimpsed before James offed him.

I'm trying to follow the dialogue, but a throatily hoarse delivery is the order of the day for most of the men, while the East India Company is splenetically afflicted by tourettes.  Prinny is built like a stuffed ostrich and apparently eats emu eggs for breakfast, clearly bad for both complexion and corpulence.  

The perky actress widow is getting a bit tedious, hanging around the hearth a lot, eating the household hard tack provided by the flinty domestic.  She gets out so little, you wonder how she can pronounce so confidently that the question of James's wherebouts is the talk of London.  Frankly, he's hard to miss, struggling round the docks up to his oxters in muck and extras, who have clearly studied the Art of Coarse Acting, each upstaging the last by being more warts and all than could possibly be called for.   

It is beginning to look as if James's dead mother, as homicidally deranged as Mrs. Rochester and prone to looming about in the river like Miss Jessel, may be behind all this.  No sooner has his peculiar half sister murdered her husband so she and James can get  on with proving that 'incest is best' (how thrillingly Byronic), than their mother gets in on the act, swooping in with a bonnet of feathers a la Lady in Black, and bobs your uncle,  he's half throttled the poor lass.

With so much going on, not to mention gunpowder manufacture, drowned slaves and bouts of rumoured cholera, which, rather like the yellow fever in Arsenic and Old Lace, provides useful cover for burying inconvenient corpses, I'm really starting to miss the Molly House, where there is gaiety and laughter and always a bit of a party going on.  More tea, vicar?