Tales of Unease: Superstitious Ignorance

I've been saving up this series of plays intended to cause unease rather than horror, so as not to get through all its episodes too quickly, but it's high time we had another one.

Superstitious Ignorance is about a young couple, Teddy and Penny, who go to view a down-at-heel house in an up-and-coming area. The tenant, Mrs Laristo, won't let them in and they have to get the estate agent to come in person to persuade the tenant to let them in. When they do get in, we are treated to what I can only describe as an absolute orgy of drama, as the tenant, Mrs Laristo, is adamant that the house is dangerous or evil in some way. She talks about voices in some of the rooms and she and her brood of filthy children start a sort of religious chant as they go up the house, building up the tension to an unexpected event at the end of the episode. I'm not going to tell you what happens, because I want you to see it yourself.

Remembering that this series isn't intended to be horror but to cause unease, the event at the end is relatively pedestrian in comparison to the horrors that Mrs Laristo has led us to expect, and I'm convinced that's the point. This episode builds up the unease in other ways; in gact it rather messes with the viewer's emotions. I have noticed, watching this a few times to write this post, that it does this more on successive viewings, so I would strongly recommend watching this one more than once.

For a start we have a member of the least-regulated and least-respectable profession in world history, namely an estate agent. The emotion that his presence brought out in me was exasperation. despite clearly knowing that the tenant of this house is impossible, he's just arranged the viewing for closing time on a Friday and sent the couple round without him. When he is persuaded to turn up and negotiate with the tenant, he stays mere minutes before literally running away after telling them only to ring him if they decide to make an offer. He's doing everything he can to fail to sell the house, and so we have this feeling of irritation at everyone involved.

In fact it's only the fact that they feel like this house is their only opportunity to get such a bargain in the area, that makes the couple perservere to the end of their viewing anyway. Personally i'd have told the agent that if he wants to sell such a difficult proposition he needs to be making some effort. If you wanted another emotion, therefore, you could well feel very irritated at this yuppie couple disturbing this poor, obviously deranged, woman in her home because of their greed to gentrify the house. I notice from the reviews online that this aspect really hits a lot of people first.

Another sense of unease it brings up is in the relationship between Teddy and Penny. Eventually Penny becomes quite spooked by the bizarre viewing of the house and chanting children, and tells him that she wants to go because she would rather live in Chelsea. Teddy will have none of this, but talks her down enough to persuade her to complete the viewing (and the unexpected event happens in the final room they see, which is the one Mrs Laristo has been most adamant they shouldn't see), so we have the unease of watching a relationship where he overrules her because of his greed for this house, His decision results in the event at the end, which wouldn't have happened had they left when Penny wanted to.

Then we have the way Mrs Laristo is depicted. The title of the episode and way she keeps talking about ghosts leads us to expect something quite different to what actually happens at the end; in fact I kept expecting the children to turn out to be ghosts and to vanish, or for their dead bodies to be found in one of the rooms. Mrs Laristo is not British, and is played very much to make her as alien as possible. We are intended to attribute her superstitious ignorance to her foreignness and we are then intended to feel a great deal of unease about this at the end if we don't already, when we find out that she was strangely right to tell them to keep away.

A final layer of unease is given by the event at the end of the viewing, which isn't at all what we are set up to expect, and is calculated to leave us sort-of disappointed and sort of horrified but not in a horror film sort of way. This is because the event which ends the viewing is very much of this world.

Literally my only criticism of this wonderful piece is that the estate agent's name is given as Faithwell, and he himself pronounces it as Faith-well when he tells the little boy to tell his mother that Mr Faithwell is there. However the other characters pronounce it much more like Faithfull. The fact that this is such a minor criticism is perhaps an indication of how excellent this show is, and perhaps it's just me but it did bug me.

All in all an excellent, subtle, drama, cunningly hiding behind a wall of high drama, which really messes with the viewer. Highly recommended.

No, wait, don't go. There's something we have to do. Because *some* people are always welcome in the United Kingdom.

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