Preview
DEAR BOSS
Vertigo Mystery Theatre
Written by Eric Woolfe
Directed by Michael Waller
Runs until March 20
Vertigo Playhouse (Tower Centre)
It may be the most infamous unsolved murder spree in the annals of crime: the gruesome slayings of five prostitutes in London’s poor Whitechapel district in the autumn of 1888.
The perp, of course, was Jack the Ripper. But who was Jack?
For more than a century, professional and amateur investigators have sifted through the existing clues and tried to nail down his identity. In the process, they’ve come up with some surprising suspects, including the son of the Prince of Wales and the author of Alice in Wonderland. Why, they even tried to pin the rap on Eric Woolfe’s ancestor.
"Montague Druitt was my mother’s grandmother’s great-uncle," explains actor-playwright Woolfe, whose Jack the Ripper play Dear Boss is now playing at Vertigo Mystery Theatre. "He was the suspect du jour in the 1960s, when a piece of correspondence called the McNaughton Memorandum was unearthed. Neville McNaughton, who was on the police force after the Ripper murders had ended, had written a letter to a reporter that all but pins it on Druitt. But he got the facts all wrong. Still, (Druitt) was everybody’s favourite for a time, until the Masonic conspiracy theory came to the forefront."
Woolfe could go on – he’s an expert in so-called Ripperology, who confesses to monopolizing more than one dinner-party conversation with his voluminous knowledge of Ripper lore. But with family connections like that, and a theatrical background to boot, how could he resist turning the tale of "saucy Jack" into a stage entertainment?
And Dear Boss is no mere Ripper retread, but something quite different. "For one thing, we have three actors and 30 puppets," says Woolfe, laughing. The puppets range from tabletop size to giant figures nine- and 17-feet tall.
That’s not the only unusual twist. Woolfe’s Ripper yarn also employs some other, unexpected characters from the world of Victorian England, including Joseph Merrick, a.k.a. The Elephant Man, and the whimsical creations from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Woolfe has good reasons for such "curious" (to use an Alice word) choices.
"Lewis Carroll was actually proposed as a suspect in a very strange book that came out in 1996, by a child psychologist," he says. "His theory is that Lewis Carroll had been raped at a boys’ school and that had driven him to this madness to kill prostitutes, and he’s confessed to it in the Alice books using anagrams." That nut-brain theory apart, Carroll’s books happened to be highly popular at the time of the murders, especially in London’s East End.
The Elephant Man, meanwhile, was living in Whitechapel Hospital during the killings. In Woolfe’s play, the sideshow freak-turned-poet serves as sidekick to Charles Fort, a real-life American chronologist who doubles here as an amateur detective trying to solve the slayings. "That’s my one historical inaccuracy," confesses Woolfe. "Fort did live in East London, but it wasn’t until four or five years after the Ripper murders."
Well, that’s no less credible than the usual Victorian sleuth assigned to the case – the fictional Sherlock Holmes, who was appropriated to track down Jack in a couple of films, A Study in Terror (1965) and Murder By Decree (1979).
Of course, the Jack the Ripper scare was hardly a Victorian phenomenon. Jack is a prototype of the modern serial killer and the hysterical coverage of his reign of terror in the London press mirrors more recent media frenzies. Woolfe says the resemblance struck him during the Washington sniper killings of 2002. "That was the last kick I needed to start putting pen to paper."
Dear Boss had its première in Toronto last winter, produced by Woolfe’s little company Eldritch Theatre and starring Woolfe, Darren Keay and ex-Calgarian Rebecca Northan. It was Northan who pitched the play to Vertigo but, ironically, she wasn’t able to repeat her role in her hometown due to a conflicting gig with Toronto’s Second City. Burgandy Code is filling her shoes. Otherwise, Woolfe says this is virtually a remount of the original production and marks his and his company’s debut out West.
Woolfe is a Londoner – not from Jack the Ripper’s London, but London, Ontario – who began acting at the age of 10. He’s been based in Toronto for 15 years, but it wasn’t until 1999 that he began dabbling in puppetry in the service of a one-man show. "I ended up being quite good at it," he says. He went on to mastermind a couple of puppet horror comedies, Grendelmaus and Sideshow of the Damned, which were fringe successes in T.O. "Very quickly I became the playwright-puppet guy who also happens to be an actor," he says.
Not surprisingly, Woolfe isn’t going to give away the identity of his Jack the Ripper, suffice it to say that it isn’t Montague Druitt or a children’s book writer.
"The theory that we present is quite a sound one," he says, "and I think it makes for the best play."
TOP FIVE RIPPING GOOD READS
Eric Woolfe’s Top Five Jack the Ripper books:
1. The Complete History of Jack the Ripper by Philip Sugden. "This is everything you’ve wanted to know about Jack the Ripper; it’s the most thoroughly researched and does the best job of separating fact from hypothesis."
2. Jack the Ripper: The Complete Casebook by Donald Rumbelow. "This is the first book to try to do what the first one does – take a real, unbiased look at all the facts."
3. Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution by Stephen M. Knight. "This is the most famous theory – the Royal-Masonic conspiracy theory that implicates everyone from Queen Victoria right on down. It’s a great theory, even if it’s patently untrue."
4. From Hell by Alan Moore. "The graphic novel that the movie was based on. It’s the best work of Ripper fiction."
5. Jack the Ripper: Light-Hearted Friend by Richard Wallace. "This is the funniest read – the one that claims it was Lewis Carroll. It’s hysterical." |
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