Reviews

Inspector Norse (tour – Bury St Edmunds, Theatre Royal)

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14 November 2012

A self-assembly Swedish crime thriller
is how Inspector Norse – the latest piece of
deceptively casual nonsense from LipService – subtitles itself.
Maggie Fox and Sue Ryding take television’s current fascination
with Scandinavian crime novels and series (not to mention a certain
detective’s taste in knitwear and the seemingly ubiquitous craze for
flat-pack furnishings) and fashion them into an evening which has
some very willing audience participation as well as constant gales of
laughter.

There’s an engaging use of puppetry and
those two-dimensional landscapes and interior scenes common to folk
art the world over. What at first sight appears to be a cheap edition
of a book, several times price-reduced, opens to reveal the main
locations in sequence as a woman detective muses on her calling (Ryding). She is much
given to introspection and constantly bedevilled by
phone-calls at the least appropriate moments in connexion with a new
sweater currently in construction on her mother’s knitting needles.

It transpires that there is a mystery
about a former famous pop group quartet which has broken up after the
inevitable bickering over money, fans’ preferences and creativity
versus stage-craft. This takes Norse and her sidekick Erik (Fox) on a
mountainous journey (cue a wholesale massacre of furry wildlife as
the police car screeches its speed-limit-breaking way to where singer
Freya lives). Fox has great fun with this latter-day Garbo while
Ryding has a series of fast wig and headpiece changes as other
members of the collapsed group.

Projected video links several scenes,
not to mention introducing us to all the people who have knitted
props (look out for the spanner). A hard-working stage manager called
Rob has meantime planted a cut-out plywood tree whose bare branches
will be hung with woolly leaves during the interval (well, I did say
that this was a participatory show). But don’t be fooled by the
apparently vague amateurishness of the introduction. This is a
well-thought out, split-second timed romp of thorough-going
professionalism.