MURDERER. To 22 January.

London

MURDERER
by Anthony Shaffer

Menier Chocolate Factory 51-53 Southwark Street SE1 To 22 January 2005
Tue-Sat 8pm Sat & Sun 4pm
Runs 2hr 25min One interval

TICKETS: 020 7907 7060
Review: Timothy Ramsden 24 November

Revival provides seasonal escapism at best.When he wrote this 1975 thriller, Anthony Shaffer was riding high on stage and screen. Sleuth was a long-runner, seen as re-inventing a tired format, while he had scripted cult-film-to-be The Wicker Man, drawing on primitive fertility rites.

Now, years after Shaffer's death (playwright brother Peter's funeral address is quoted in the Menier programme), the post-Sleuth vogue for new-wave thrillers (including one from Simon Gray) has long passed and weary, beery television tecs have taken over the small screen with more traditional whodunit tales.

Meanwhile, Shaffer had his own Whodunnit; a politically updated title for the Shaffer play first seen as The Case of the Oily Levantine. And, with Shaffer-like irony, The Mousetrap, arch example of the old-style thriller the playwright was once thought to have replaced, has for years been occupying Sleuth's former home, the St Martin's Theatre.

So a clear line's needed with this play today, especially in the Menier's open intimacy, where there's no proscenium-arch distance to lend enchantment. Yet director Adam Speers goes for a bag of staging tricks, from the wordless opening sequence determined to prove Guignol has never been more Grand.

Pulsing music, with distorted, extended organ notes and synthesiser hell accompany an apparent dismemberment, A determinedly Plod-like tec with an inconveniently filled bladder (the body's in the bath, not for the last time) turns up. Nosey village neighbours have tipped the constabulary the wink about strange goings-on.

Eventually, there is a murder, though it goes perplexingly wrong (one character seems to enter twice, once either side the interval did I miss something?). While Sleuth focuses on motive, Murderer homes in also on character, obsession with famous killings being the anorak covering the perpetrator's naked frailties.

So it's not whodunit so much as (i) when'shegoingtogetroundtoit, and (ii) willhegwetawaywithit? Given Les Dennis's effortful performance, with its sense of inadequacy but little else, the other question is who cares? Lisa Kay as mistress, Carline Langrishe as high-flying wife, are efficient in simply-drawn roles. So is George Potts as a stereotypical beaming policeman. But the plot, with its labyrinth of games, gets lost along with character.

Cast: Les Denis, Lisa Kay, Caroline Langrishe, George Potts

Director: Adam Speers
Designer: Simon Scullion
Lighting: Henry Pulling
Music: Gresby Nash

2004-11-29 08:40:20