Theatreguide.London
www.theatreguide.london
The Theatreguide.London Review
In March 2020 the covid-19 epidemic
forced the closure of all British theatres. Some companies adapted
by putting archive recordings of past productions online, others
by streaming new shows, and various online archives preserve still
more vintage productions. Even as things return to normal we
continue to review the experience of watching live theatre
onscreen.
Murder
In The Dark
Original
Theatre Online Spring 2024
The
touring
Original Theatre introduced this new play by Torben Betts in September
2023 and have now made a video version available online.
It
is
not a very good play, but if you're in a generous and non-judgemental
mood it might catch and hold you.
The
play is built on some surprise twists, and a Mousetrap-style note in the
accompanying online programme begs us not to give away any spoilers, so
I must be incomplete in my description.
We
open with Danny, a middle-aged man with a younger girlfriend, being
welcomed into a rundown farmhouse by the helpful woman farmer after a
car crash on an icy road.
They
are joined soon by his ex-wife, brother and son, all off them returning
from his mother's funeral; and all, along with their hostess, are going
to be snowed in at least for the night.
Backstories
and family tensions quickly surface. A few decades back Danny abandoned
the family to join a boy band that had a few years of success but now,
broke and alcoholic, he hopes for reconciliation.
Meanwhile
there are spooky things going on in the farmhouse, and the kindly host
may not be all she seems. And here is where I have to be careful about
spoilers.
Suffice
to say that everything I just told you turns out to be not quite true,
and nor does almost everything we see with our own eyes through much of
the play.
A
bit in the tradition of Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth, Murder In The Dark is
less a whodunnit than a
who's-doing-what-to-whom-and-is-any-of-this-real.
Now,
that sort of thing can be fun, but one of the big problems with Betts's
play is that it is not merely in the same genre as other works, but
almost totally derivative of other works.
Just
about every scene, device and plot twist reminds you of something almost
identical in a previous play by Anthony Shaffer, John Osborne, Arthur
Miller, Alan Ayckbourn, Tom Stoppard or someone else (not to mention
films by Hitchcock, Clouzot, et al).
Any
mental moment you spend thinking 'This reminds me of...' weakens the
spell of the play – and there are a lot of such moments.
And
when everything finally does get explained, you might find the
explanation itself a bit of a dramatic cliché and a letdown.
As
directed by Philip Franks, the cast led by Tom Chambers as Danny deserve
a lot of credit for going through it all with straight faces, though
they're not helped by the video version, whose close-ups sometimes show
the strain.
I'm sure Susie Blake as the hostess is effective in the theatre, but onscreen her bug-eyed 'I am signalling that my character is weird' mode makes Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch Of The West seem like subtle underacting.
Gerald
Berkowitz
|
Receive
alerts
when we post new reviews
|