CHRISTIE IN LOVE
Howard Brenton’s 1969 drama Christie in Love explores the absurdity of trying to explain the actions of a badly twisted mind. It goes on to imply–as much by what it conceals as by what it declares–that judgment is even more pointless than explication.
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Brenton offers a dark vision of the crimes of John Reginald Christie, a self-effacing serial killer who over a period of 13 years murdered and raped eight women, including his wife. Christie’s sexual repression exploded in murder–usually strangulation followed by rape. He buried the bodies in his garden, in the walls of his apartment, and in the case of his wife under the floorboards. Though Christie, like Dahmer, pleaded insanity, the gambit failed: he was hanged in July 1953, a mere four months after the first corpses had been unearthed.
The lines spoken by the blundering cops–who blandly compare Christie’s crimes to pilfering handbags and torturing kittens–contain less feeling than Christie’s incoherent laments. After Christie is symbolically hanged by being hoisted up in a harness, the action returns to the garden mound, from which a bogeyman Christie emerges, one more skeleton in his own boneyard. No matter the sentence, the crime remains a mystery.
