Murder by Misadventure (tour)
Partnerships are rarely infinite and you could know someone intimately for a hundred years without anticipating that they could be capable of committing the most deadly of sins – murder.
Edward Taylor’s Murder by Misadventure is a shrewd, tightly plotted thriller with more twists and loops than a bowl of spaghetti. This is at once a darkly absorbing and cautionary tale of what could occur when one partner decides to sever the ties but his cohort refuses to be cut loose.
Under Ian Dickens’ detailed tense direction, the action takes place in a luxurious, high-tech apartment that serves as an ideal trapping ground with its self-locking doors and state of the art gizmos. Harold ‘the pusher’ Kent and Paul ‘the spark’ Riggs have been penning TV thrillers for the past ten years. The successful duo are due to collect a BAFTA at the impending British awards ceremony, but difficulties arise when Harold decides that he’s reached a plateau in their partnership and announces that he wants a divorce. The puerile, self-centred Paul however, has just hit on an idea for a new murder plot – ‘Murder by Misadventure’ and is adamant that the partnership should continue.
In the central role, Robert Powell’s chiselled, steely blue-eyed looks capture Harold’s unruffled character well. His cool, detached impassiveness offers the right qualities for a murderer, although for all his understanding of plot structure and mechanism he proves a poor match against the duplicitous Paul.
David Griffin steals the limelight with his electric performance as the temperamental back-stabber Paul. His character buzzes with a powerful controlling quality, and his sardonic deliverance places him almost on a par with those dastardly cartoon anti-heroes.
Kent’s outwardly supine wife, played by Liza Goddard, starts out as an honest character, clearly out of her depth, but proves to be an equally cunning vixen in Act Two, rearing her crafty head and adding more poison to the chalice. Michael Kirk’s initially irksome, stereotypical police inspector clarifies itself when we discover that he is in fact a RADA trained actor employed by Paul to interrogate Harold in his engineered murder enquiry.
Ultimately there are no winners. Except the audience, that is, for attending this engaging evening of drama.
Emma Edgeley (reviewed at
Stoke-on-Trent Regent)
