Tuesday 20th June. 2.30 PM – ‘J’ Stage, Shepperton Studios. A second visit to the torture chamber to discover the consequences of Walsingham’s prisoner talking.

Our torture chamber set is a series of dark, damp rooms, their walls sprayed down to give a greasy glint in the subterranean gloom. Around the walls hang the tools of the torturers trade, some specific to his work such as the scolds bridles, others which might equally serve in a butcher’s or carpenter’s shop. At one table sits the torturer, his casual manner betraying a worn indifference to the suffering of his ‘clients’. A close observer might note that the ‘table’ on which rests his half-eaten meal is in fact a rack. In the deep background a broken figure stumbles endlessly on inside a treadwheel.
But this is not, I hope, simply the ‘chamber of horrors’ image of a torture room but something darker. This is a place that reveals the terrifying banality of torture and the everyday, passionless, cruelty of the rackmasters as they search through the shattered personalities of their victims for the information that Walsingham, needs. Today however something even the rackmaster doesn’t expect is waiting in the shadows,
Justin