TORBEN Betts’ latest comedy thriller, Murder at Midnight, is a clever, often hilarious, conflation of Jacobean revenge tragedies with all their gory relish and 21st century attitudes.
It all starts as the familiarly-suited SOCOs and an insensitive Met cop chat over the blood-bath left in an Kent super-home when the bodies have been removed. It’s New Year’s Day. But what happened just before the clock struck midnight?
Colin Falconer’s clever design fills the stage with five spaces for the action, which centres on the living room and kitchen of a house owned by the drug dealing, money-laundering, vicious and often murderous gangland legend known as The Cyclops. Jonny has one eye, hence the name. In the house live his girlfriend Lisa, his mother Shirley and sometimes her Romanian, and illegal, carer Cristina.
On this particular turning of the year, Jonny has decided to take his mother and his girlfriend to Barbados, where he will propose to Lisa. Our anti-hero arrives in the late evening, with his oldest friend Trainwreck in tow, to greet his five rottweilers and the women in his life. They were not expecting him, and his plans are inauspicious – even Shirley’s Tarot cards are spelling doom.
To tell you any more would be to spoil the story.
Directed by Philip Franks, an actor whose own stage career is memorable for subtle interpretation, Murder at Midnight calls for a very specific approach. The characters must be just a tiny bit more than believable, without plunging into caricature … that way they mask clues hidden in plain sight, and this cast manages it to perfection.
It was interesting to observe the packed, and largely 60+, audience at Salisbury, who seemed unfazed by violence, profanity, drugs, quite graphic sex and mistrust of the forces of law and order, but were audibly distressed at the plight of an unseen dog. How times have changed.
Jason Durr is the clever and merciless Cyclops, with Susie Blake having great fun as the Lady of the Manor … and that’s Manor in the gangland meaning. Peter Moreton is oddly touching as the not-so-dumb Trainwreck, and Iryna Poplavska is perhaps the only really likeable character, Cristina. Katie McGlynn, an award-winning television actress, needs to slow down Lisa’s delivery – the interval audience reaction was that she often simply could not be heard or understood.
Murder at Midnight is often very funny, comically shocking – a modern revenge drama that Franks describes as Feydeau rewritten by Tarantino. We all need to laugh in these very difficult times.
Murder at Midnight is at Salisbury Playhouse until 14th March, and at Bath Theatre Royal from 16th to 21st March.
GP-W
PS: Thanks, Original Theatre, for the informative programme.