Coram Boy

Coram Boy, presented by bAKEHOUSE at King’s Cross Theatre, is an epic, plot-driven play set in 18th-century England. It spans eight years, boasts almost twice as many actors, and grapples with themes of capitalism, child-abuse, and class hypocrisy.

A philanthropist, Thomas Coram, opens a hospital in London for foundlings — abandoned babies or babies whose mothers need to give them up. Up sprout ‘Coram Men’, conniving opportunists who promise to take desperate mothers’ children to the hospital for a fee, but usually take the fee for themselves and abandon the babies. We join Coram Man Otis Gardner (Lloyd Allison-Young), his disabled and abused son Meshak (Joshua McElroy), a young lord with an ear for music Alexander Ashbrook (Ryan Hodson) and a potentially well-suited young woman Melissa Milcote (Annie Stafford). Around these four central figures (and many other semi-central ones) a story of hope and woe develops. 

Infanticide is a heinous, heinous crime. And the clarity with which our antagonist Allison-Young embodies this heinous criminality is frightening. The play’s political overture is in its unlikely comparison between this direct criminality and the criminality of class in general. Mrs Lynch (Ariadne Sgouros) makes the point: “The silk on your back, the sugar in your tea, all of this - all wealth is built on the suffering of others." This encourages real-life dinner-table conversations on the human cost of common Western luxuries. Garment workers in Bangladesh are still working and living far, far below the poverty line. The meat industry still eviscerates the dignity of animal lives. That bag of cocaine still has a calculable human cost above the hole in your wallet. While we can’t debate their relevance, we can question the efficacy of Coram Boy’s epic story coupled with a few didactic moments to meaningfully enliven these issues. 

What we cannot question is the skill with which co-directors John Harrison and Michael Dean present this vast tale. The size of the story and loftiness of the themes might seem to best fit a traditional stage, audience banks in stalls and a dress-circle, but the intimacy of KXT creates a new magic. The simple, close stage images sing. A child throws apples to his new friends on an estate. Birds held by long sticks float through a dim yellow sky in London. A boy struggles to breathe, rising and falling against waves outside of the docks. The directors conjure these unforgettable and personable images that burn into our skulls, and provide us with visual footholds as the plot races. There is real meat in the unfolding of an epic in close-quarters, and it's one that does credit to the live performance.

Coram Boy is sentimental but not sappy. There are interesting and well-meditated performances all around, and enough bashing of the colonial mentality to allow us to enjoy the period’s romantic aesthetic while reprobating its depraved milieu.