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Mates on a stag night . . . mare
Dead Simple
Malvern Theatres
**** STAG nights have grown in excitement and
extravagance, but Peter James’ play takes the idea to a whole new level
when Michael Harrison is about to marry his fiancée Ashley. He has played some tricks on some of his friends
on their stag nights, so together they have planned to get revenge, and
they do so outrageously. Their scheme results in the disappearance of
their friend and there follows a desperate attempt to recover him before
disaster strikes. Peter James’ trusty detective, Superintendent Roy
Grace, is coaxed on to the case and so develops a rollercoaster of ups
and downs, twists and turns, to keep the audience guessing about what is
going to unfold next. This stage adaptation of a crime thriller novel
requires some complexity in design to provide the necessary and varied
settings for the action of the play – the interior of Michael Harrison’s
flat, the road approaching the forest, the forest itself and various
other settings above and below ground! Michael Taylor’s clever set
manages to provide all the necessary elements to provide a context for
the many surprises in store for the audience.
The sound effects add filmic atmosphere to the
development of the plot and with the occasional crash, explosion or
gunfire, the audience is kept on edge and ready for anything! The nature of the genre is that the characters
are slightly shallow and not totally credible. This is important as we
cannot afford to get too sympathetic with them or we would find the
demise of some or many of them distressing and somewhat tragic. They are therefore not quite real, their
relationships not fully convincing, and the twists in the plot are
eventually so surprising and unlikely that we tend to focus our minds in
great measure on trying to answer the questions and solve the riddles
that the plot presents to us. Where has the body gone? Nonetheless there has to be sufficient engagement
with the characters and their fates that we are caught up in the story
and suspend disbelief sufficiently to be excited by their fortunes. Once
or twice the twists were just a bit too much and the audience was moved
to laugh at the improbabilities. However this is all part of the fun and
the nature of the genre. Tina Hobley, of Holby City fame, provides a
voluptuous ‘honeypot’ and is pivotal to the developing story. Her
performance is captivating and varied. Jamie Lomas, Rik Makarem and
Michael McKell surround her as Michael Harrison, Mark Warren and Bradley
Cunningham respectively; their dialogue is quick, sharp and often witty
and they keep the plot moving along briskly. Josh Brown as the autistic Davey Wheeler provides
some comedy as well as frustrating incompetence although at times his
words and the dialogue over the walkie-talkies was unclear. The detectives played by Gray O’Brien and Marc
Small completed a strong core and added some lightness as well as
pursuing the course of justice and truth and the ultimate criminal. This was a very enjoyable evening’s entertainment
– light, frivolous and exaggerated in the end, but sufficiently
convincing to carry the audience along with its characters. The
adaptation for the stage works very well; the show provides some
genuinely scary moments and surprises as the story unfolds. Audiences
love a story and this audience was royally entertained. To 14-02-15 Tim Crow
08-02-15
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