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Jessie Wallace as Joan.
Pictures: Honeybunn Photography The Perfect Murder
Coventry Belgrade
**** OF COURSE there’s no such thing as the
perfect murder. Some tell-tale clue, the smallest hint of DNA,
blood on the carpet, a trace of poison, the outline of a shoeprint, a
smidgeon of green paint, a faint discolouration, cruelly planted by an
Agatha Christie or Conon Doyle, will inevitably lead Miss Marple or
Poirot or Sherlock Holmes himself to unravel what seemed like an
unsolveable mystery - and spoil the fun. There’s a lot of fun
and entertainment in The Perfect Murder,
crafted as a novel by celebrated crime writer Peter James and now recast
as a stage play by adapter Shaun McKenna. It even features a prototype
version of James’s famed Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, transformed
back into a young constable - not even a detective, and no way near
being an inspector - who puts his finger on the pulse and steers us to
what seems to be a satisfactory conclusion. But The Perfect Murder scores heavily by being just that: you have the impression, perhaps the certainty, thanks to a glorious twist near the end, that this one will be got away with. First things first. Benjamin Wilkin turns in a calm, conscientious, careful performance as Grace, the young PC whose gentle probing and clever ear for detail spots the tiniest - or most obvious - inconsistency, trapping what becomes his chief murder suspect, the ingratiating but easily flappable Joan Smiley, into a series of ropy answers. Why is the gold watch on the sideboard? When did she call her absent husband’s mobile? What is that white van on the tarmac; and just who is the supposedly deaf young man working in the garage on joints and lead piping? Wilkin‘s calm is an important feature in enabling
the truth - the supposed truth - to emerge ever so gradually. Another is
the calm and rather touching way in which he deals in an upper room with
the ever so gentle prostitute Kamila (Simona Armstrong, managing an
accent that’s East Europeant to the hilt). Armstrong gives a lovely,
tender, winning performance, as loyal to the truth - mostly - as she is
to her customers, and it is she whose shocked discoveries set the whole
ball rolling for the discovery of malpractice in a suburban street. So what of the main
event? The Perfect Murder
is blessed with a cleverly thought out set (Michael Holt) - a little
cheap, even amateur, in carved-out look but artfully designed to enclose
a good size drawing room, an open passageway, a kitchen, an outdoor yard
and two upstairs rooms, bedrooms of differe The love triangle (actually a quartet) round whom things focus are a fairly staple group: infuriating but infuriated husband (Victor Smiley: Shane Richie) who is actually a decent kind of tyke, even when dreaming (as we see it) of absconding with Kamila, whom he visits each week, or speculating (how can we believe him?) that he’d like to polish off his missus to make that possible. Joan and Victor Smiley, Jessie Wallace and Shane Richie The moments in the living room when wife Joan
(the utterly splendid Jessie Wallace) is prattling on, the gloves are
off and his visions of doing her in come to the fore are among many very
amusing, and well-acted, touches which lend this kind of film noir its
black comedy moments. Those help the play early on, and in some ways it’s as well, for the script feels at times rather lax, and deploys far too many mild play-to-the-audience touches (‘Benedict Cucumberbatch’; ‘Younger than Joan Collins’; ‘Real men have dicks that work’, ‘mini kievs’ and a stream of rather too obvious rhyming cockney) to satisfy: one wants the action to intensify, not to fall flat, diverted with cheap and idle laughs. No, the joy of The Perfect Murder is not in
drippier attempts at quick-fire comedy, but in the overall conceit. For
Jessie Wallace, giving the performance of the evening (much of it rests
on her, and she is the most polished and accomplished of an enjoyable
team), turns the tables and - yes - bumps off her husband who was
contemplating finishing her off himself. Joined by her rather wastrel younger sexmate,
Don, she turns the conclusion of Act I into a marvellous, hilarious,
fast-driven and deliciously shambolic climax as she bonks husband Victor
with a hammer and send him, as they think, to the happy hunting ground. The sheer visual hoot of watching them attempting
to swathe him in black bin bags and sticky tape, tugging him this way
and that, then lumber him over to the freezer and dump him there, was an
absolute classic of Brian Rix-like visual comedy. Just the business - for Victor - of being bundled up must have been quite an experience. Shane Richie’s unusual skill in acting the passive victim, bloodied and manhandled, provided a large part of the fun: amusing, for if you’re pulling off what you think is the perfect murder, there has to be something incongruous about it. Act I certainly ended with a bang and a half. But it is Jessie Wallace’s even more entertaining
behaviour as the guilty party which latterly takes even further her
hilarious series of pulled faces, tiny knowing smirks and gloriously
smug, know-it-all gestures, that are amplified to give us much of the
treat that is Act 2. She laughs, shrieks, sniffles, purses her lips,
shrugs, yelps, gulps, giggles helplessly, in so many cleverly
understated (and more outrageous) ways, both on her own - when she is
always a delight to watch in action - and when faced by an increasingly
suspicious police questioning, that held the audience and gave it such
pleasure, as evidenced by their massive applause at the end. ‘Yes, I’ve got a while serial killer kit in my
handbag’. But what she hasn’t got is persuasive answers, and watching
her defence unravel before our eyes is one of the great bits of fun in
later stages of this play. Stephen Fletcher offers an
Marriage breakdown can be fatal for Joan and Victor But how free? All through the play, you feel
you’ve been party to murder; but not, patently, the perfect murder,
unless you think her fitting her lover up is the perfect bit. Something
is missing. Only at the close does one nagging suspicion
return to haunt us. When poor old, put-upon Victor was bundled into the
freezer, was he dead? The thought has crossed the perpetrators’ minds
too, as one of the funny scenes is when they struggle, amidst fears, to
check there is still a body in black bags in the freezer, shows. And
there is. So what’s wrong? It’s only when Shane Richies’s Victor, in many
respects another fine and appetising performance, first spooks her
upstairs (is it a ghost?) and then in reality seems to return (not for
real, surely?) to the room of his ‘murder’, that you discover it is not
she, but he, who will execute the perfect murder. Having explained how
he survived, escaped from the freezer, inserted a hapless other,
extracted a written confession from her so her death will read like
suicide and finally fed her mouthfuls of cyanide to put the final boot
in, he escapes with his innamorata on a motorcycle - a perfectly devised
ending. Keen-witted, punchy and exquisitely turning the
knife, this whodunit with a difference was a roaring hit with the
audience, and one could see why. All reservations aside, a very, very
sharp piece of theatre in popular vein. And another hit in the
Belgrade’s visiting homicide series, which will surge ahead later with
Roy Marsden’s production for the Classic Thriller Theatre Company of
Rehearsal for Murder, which will hit Coventry from 9-14 May. To 02-04-16 Roderic Dunnett 29-03-16
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hue (family; prostitute’s). That’s not bad for variety, and it works
very well, providing plenty of options for the director (Ian Talbot).
agreeable
oik of a lover in Don Kirk, who rather unquestioningly joins in the
murder and then, when Joan is up before the court, a scene of which we
only hear, is utterly shafted by her and left to serve the full sentence
for a killing to which she drove him, and not vice-versa. He sort of
turns up, screws and kills - his arrival seemed one of the weaker bits
of the script. But his sheer naivety helps serve the plot. More
importantly, it leaves her to walk free.