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Picture You Dead

Theatre Royal, Glasgow

Three Stars 

 

Art, money and murder are at the heart of this latest adaptation of thriller writer Peter James’ Detective Roy Grace novels. Here, James, adaptor Shaun McKenna and director Jonathan O’Boyle here fling our hero into the cut and thrust world of art forgery, where greedy collectors salivate over reproductions of old masters that even con galleries into thinking they’re showing originals.

 

Roy and his sidekick Bella are investigating a murder that leads them to master forger Dave Hegarty, who Roy got banged up back in the day. Dave may have given up knocking out counterfeit Lowrys, but he can still turn his hand to doing a classic or two when required. Meanwhile, Harry and Freya Kipling might just have got more than they bargained for down at the car boot sale, and we’re not talking the 1970s swivel chair they picked up as well as a work in oils that was going for a song.

 

Cue predatory collector Stuart Piper and the gloriously named Roberta Kilgore, who spring petty thief Archie Goff from prison to do their dirty work. How anyone can spot the difference between reproductions the real thing, however, and which is worth more, becomes the crux of this fast moving yarn that crams an entire mini series’ worth of intrigue into the show’s two acts. 

 

George Rainsford makes a solid Grace as he and Gemma Stroyan’s Bella navigate their way through a rogues gallery of interested parties, from the seeming ordinariness of the Kiplings, played by Ben Cutler and Fiona Wade, to Mark Oxtoby’s likeably geezerish Hegarty. It is the cartoon villainy of Ore Oduba’s Piper and especially Jodie Steele’s Cruella de Vil-like Roberta who steal the show, however. Played out on Adrian Linford’s clever sliding doors set the end result is an archly realised detective story in which F is very much for Fake.


The Herald, June 12th 2025

 

ends

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