It Could Be Any One Of Us

This latest offering from the talented St. Jude’s Players is an atmospherically staged and energetically performed production of a sedately formulaic play.

Ayckbourn’s script takes its sweet time setting up a stereotypical British country-house murder-mystery plot. One dark and stormy night, frustrated composer Mortimer (Les Zeitlein) invites a former piano student, Wendy (Bernadette Abberdan) to come visit him at his gothic mansion in the north of England, where his two failed artist siblings, Brinton & Jocelyn (Jarrod Chave & Anita Canala), are also staying, along with Jocelyn’s philistine boyfriend, Norris (Jack Robins) and emo-teen daughter, Amy (Georgia Bolton).

Much bickering ensues as these neurotic characters try to co-habitate without killing each other. Ultimately they are unsuccessful, someone dies and all the surviving guests are revealed to have a motive for murder. Various clues and red herrings are tossed out for the audience to mull over, before the play concludes with everyone seated in the lounge for the designated sleuth to deliver a grand “summing up” monologue. Ayckbourn wrote three possible endings, so the run will feature different murderers on alternate nights.

The argumentative dialogue contains many darkly comic zingers, but not enough to save the first act from dragging. Come act two, when the whodunnit stuff kicks in, the pacing picks up, although the conclusion feels oddly abrupt.

That said, the somewhat pedestrian material is given a lift by the hard work of the production team. Normajeane Ohlsson’s stylised set is suitably foreboding, the house’s twisted structure serving as a mirror of the characters’ fractured psyches. Leigh Wheatley’s eerie lighting and sound is similarly evocative. The colourful costumes (conceived by Maxine Bowles, Fran Hardie, Myra Waddell & Jill Wheatley) are very eye catching and sometimes serve to provide an extra layer of comedy to the proceedings.

But by far the greatest asset of this production is its lively and uninhibited cast. Zetlein’s puffed-up, sanctimonious pompousness is incredible to behold and plays off well against the slimy disingenuousness of Canala. Bolton is sometimes unnervingly intense, a time bomb of repressed anger and resentment, primed to explode at any second. Chaves is similarly unpredictable, his wildly erratic jitters perfectly suited to the arrested development of his manchild character. In comparatively more restrained roles, Abberdan & Robins still invest their characters with a striking physicality, and the latter pulls off a tricky northern accent with aplomb.

Overall, fans of the material are likely to be satisfied with what St. Jude’s have done with it, whilst those who are not fans are unlikely to be converted by this production, accomplished though it is.

Benjamin Orchard

Photographer: Alex Makeyev