King’s Theatre, Edinburgh
Three stars
To suggest that Lucy Bailey’s staging of Agatha
Christie’s double-bluffing yarn concerning a murderous affair between a couple
on the run lulls the audience into a false sense of security is something of an
understatement. In fact, things go round town and country houses for so long
before getting to the point one wonders at times where exactly it’s headed for.
None of this is the fault of Bailey or the cast of Frank Vosper’s adaptation of
Christie’s short story, Philomel Cottage, updated here to the 1950s. It’s just
that, for all the dark-room black-outs and red-outs on Mike Britton’s modernist
des-res set, the script needs the sharpest of knives taken to it to give things
the full oomph required.
Bayswater gel Cecily finds herself in a whirlwind
romance with American pretty-boy charmer Bruce after he views the flat-share
she’s vacating to marry drippy Michael, who’s just returned from Sudan. After
assorted shenanigans involving Cecily’s flat-mate Mavis and her annoying aunt,
Michael is left in the lurch. By the second act, Cecily and Bruce are shacked
up in a crumbling West Sussex pile. It is here things take an infinitely darker
turn, even with the light relief of an ancient gardener and his nosy
grand-daughter, not to mention an amateur criminologist quack.
With a panoply of psycho-sexual sport at play in a
show led by Helen Bradbury and Sam Frenchum as the dangerously impulsive new
couple, there are clear shades of The League of Gentlemen at play here, however
accidental. This just about gets past some of the dialogue’s cottage cheese in a gloriously amoral piece of
cut-glass froth so magnificently unlikely that evidence of its two-faced bid
for credibility would almost certainly never stand up in court.
The Herald, June 6th 2018
ends
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