‘Christie in Love’ Exudes Grisly Panache

Like his contemporary and sometime-collaborator David Hare, British playwright Howard Brenton first came to prominence as an anti-establishment gadfly poking fun at society’s sacred cows.

What better way to send up the arbitrary nature of what society deems acceptable than by dramatizing the life of one far beyond society’s pale--a murderer whose depredations indirectly resulted in a massive institutional shake-up and social reform?

Brenton’s 1970 piece “Christie in Love” at City Garage is a brief, black-edged satire about the life and times of serial slayer John Reginald Halliday Christie, a deceptively meek-looking monster who converted his famous digs at 10 Rillington Place into a makeshift morgue. England’s ban on capital punishment came about largely because of the scandal that erupted when it was revealed that an innocent man had been hanged for Christie’s crimes.

Director Stephen Pocock attacks Brenton’s wickedly cheeky morality play with grisly panache. Slides of Christie’s actual victims--including his own hapless missus--lend a human immediacy to events far removed in time. Charles A. Duncombe Jr.’s set is devastating in its simplicity: a fenced enclosure full of crumpled newspapers expressionistically evokes the corpse-strewn garden behind Christie’s flat. As a Constable (Scott Donovan) digs persistently among the debris, we can almost hear the crunch of shovel on bone.

Pocock loses some authority when he has his cast launch into lip-synced standards of the day. A signature style of the late Dennis Potter, these lip-synced sequences overplay the queasy humor inherent in Brenton’s macabre fable of crime, punishment and prurience. Among the cast, which includes Joel Drazner and Jaime Arze, Donovan stands out as a simple man sick at heart over his glimpse into the unholy abyss of Christie’s soul.

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* “Christie in Love,” City Garage, 1340 1/2 4th St. (alley), Santa Monica. Wednesdays-Thursdays, 8 p.m. Ends Feb. 26. $10. (310) 319-9939. Running time: 1 hour, 10 minutes.