THE UNEXPECTED GUEST: touring
Nottingham/Tour
THE UNEXPECTED GUEST
by Agatha Christie
Theatre Royal: Tkts 0115 989 5555 www.royalcentre-nottingham.co.uk
Runs: 2hr 10min One interval till26th May
Performance times: 7.30pm, (matinees 2.00pm Wed and 2.30pm Sat)
Touring info from The Agatha Christie Theatre Company
Review: Alan Geary: 21 May 2007
Provides an entertaining evening.
The victim of this fifties whodunnit seems by all accounts to have been a thorough-going wrong-un. Not only was he a big game hunter, which is bad enough, but he was mauled by a lion and reduced to taking pot-shots at squirrels and sparrows from his wheel-chair when he wasn’t being beastly to everyone. On one occasion he tried to kill a little old lady who’d called round collecting for a flag day.
There’s an array of characters, therefore, all of whom have adequate motive for his murder.
For a lot of the time my money was on the half-brother Jan (Dean Gaffney). It’s not just the crazed way he talks or the babyish way he likes to lie with his head in his sister-in-law’s lap: it’s that permatan, his parting in the middle, his set of gleaming white teeth and, what seems like the clincher, that dodgy patterned pullover.
Even Gary Richards’s Sergeant Cadwallader seems a bit twitchy at times - it being Christie, no-one’s above suspicion - but to be fair it’s only because he’s bald and he’s got a Welsh accent.
Despite its potential for being sent up, this isn’t played as such, which is a problem because the plot, though entertaining, is psychologically implausible. But it’s well acted by the likes of Jack Ellis as Michael Starkwedder, the unexpected guest himself, with his working-class accent, and Virginia Stride as Old Mrs Warwick, the victim’s mum, who gives a sensitive and dignified performance.
Tracey Childs, classy-looking and imperious as Laura Warwick, is an eyeful. Intentionally or not, she has a declamatory way of speaking, as if she’s playing an actress in a fifties thriller. She doesn’t actually say “But surely Inspector!” but you can tell she’s thinking it a lot of the time.
And what’s all this? Mark Wynter was a teenage heart-throb in the early sixties (remember Venus in Blue Jeans?) and here he is doing well as one of the suspects, Julian Farrar, a Liberal candidate who looks so pin-striped and county that you wonder what his Tory opponent must be like.
The audience wanted to laugh at this play but jokes are few and fairly muted. On the other hand, the plot isn’t sufficiently absorbing for the whole thing to work as a thriller pure and simple; it lacks complexity.
It provides an entertaining evening all the same.
Richard Warwick: Nicholas Shackleford
Laura Warwick: Tracey Childs
Michael Starkwedder: Jack Ellis
Miss Bennett: Kate Best
Jan Warwick: Dean Gaffney
Mrs Warwick: Virginia Stride
Henry Angel: Eugene Washington
Sergeant Cadwallader: Gary Richards
Inspector Thomas: Frazer Hines
Julian Farrar: Mark Wynter
Director: Joe Harmston
Designer: Simon Scullion
Lighting Designer: Matt Drury
Sound Designer: Ian Horrocks-Taylor
Costume Designer: Brigid Guy
2007-05-24 08:10:37