Turpentine: A New Gothic Play by Tommy James Green

You’d be mad to miss Turpentine - new gothic play bedevilling Flight Path Theatre between February 19th and March 1st and the debut production of Sydney/Eora theatre company Popular Playhouse!

Cut throats and fever ravage the streets of London in the winter of 1887. One bedridden victim, seven-year-old Tiberius Milton, dies in the dead of night and is smuggled urgently to the door of Doctor Raymond Crow by his mother Cynthia and Uncle Percy. This gin-soaked surgeon and the electrifying mechanisms hidden in the cellar beneath his barbershop are their best chance at bringing the boy back before the rot sets in and the servants start to talk. However, Crow - their childhood physician - is haunted by terrible crimes and soon worse than ghosts join the Miltons in the maddening gloom.

Set over the course of a single-night in the Doctor’s cellar-come-laboratory, Turpentine traps five characters together as they attempt to reanimate the innocent successor of an aristocratic dynasty. The monstrous love child of Frankenstein and Sweeney Todd, the play crackles with Wildean wit and probes in the dark at questions of loss, guilt and the desperate human desire to reverse the irreversible. “Turpentine is a feast-for-the-senses, its own Frankenstein’s monster cobbled together from the best bits of the genre,” says playwright Tommy James Green “While it pulses with pathos and humanity, it also provides a welcome portal to another-time-and-place… A cheap plane ticket to Victorian London!”

Actor-director Damien Ryan of Sport for Jove called the script “Terrific… bold mythic storytelling with a dangerous modern edge” while West End playwright Simon Nye (The Durrells, The Crown Jewels) said it was “Madcap, distinctive – with plenty of laughs!”

Directed by Katherine Hopwood Poulsen (Terminus, Marrickville Town Hall 2023), the play stars emerging talents Jarred Keane, Megan Elizabeth Kennedy, Cris Bocchi, Othniel Mani, Freddy Hellier and Charles Griffin.

Turpentine debuts at Flight Path Theatre in Marrickville with nine-shows between February 19th and March 1st. Tickets are on sale now! On the Flight Path Theatre website