Skip to main content

Dial M For Murder 

King's Theatre, Edinburgh
Four stars
The scarlet drapes that hang down centre-stage surrounded by even more 
vivid rouge-flamed walls hide a multitude of sins at the start of Lucy 
Bailey's touring revival of her 2009 production of Frederick Knott's 
labyrinthine 1950s pot-boiler immortalised in Alfred Hitchcock's film. 
Such ravishing décor might well be engulfing an opulently realised 
Greek tragedy if it weren't for the elegant London town-house 
accoutrements and a tellingly red telephone that screams emergency as 
it furnishes the scene of the crime.

That crime isn't one of passion, but, as retired tennis star Tony 
Wendice plots to murder his faithless wife Sheila, who, as played by 
Kelly Hotten, has been conducting a long-distance amour with Philip 
Cairns' crime writer Max, it's one of pathologically driven, ice-cold 
calculation. That Tony blackmails an old school chum turned con-man to 
do the deed by proxy only serves to make it nastier, as though the 
flesh and blood of such an action is something Daniel Betts' flint-eyed 
Tony finds physically repulsive. When things go wrong, it takes 
Christopher Timothy's Inspector Hubbard to find the key that makes 
sense of the affair.

While it's hard at times to take Knott's stiff upper-lipped exchanges 
seriously, casting Max as a crime writer lends things a self-reflexive 
edge that's easy to theatricalise. At times the action is half-hidden 
by the slowly revolving and exquisitely choreographed drapes. During 
the murder scene, meanwhile, Mic Pool's brooding, trumpet-led 
underscore ups the volume to become something more jagged, with 
Sheila's amplified gasps blending in with stabbing staccato passages 
worthy of Bernard Herrmann in a psycho-sexual thriller in which the 
tension is heightened to the max.


The Herald, February 21st 2014

ends
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ron Butlin - The Sound of My Voice

When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid
Post a Comment
Read more

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) 1. THE STONE ROSES    Don’t Stop ( Silvertone   ORE   1989) The trip didn’t quite start here for what sounds like Waterfall played backwards on The Stone Roses’ era-defining eponymous debut album, but it sounds
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug
2 comments
Read more