FORTY years ago, actors Roger Rees and Rick Elice wrote the “romantic-thriller” Double Double, in the same year that the film Down and Out in Beverley Hills was released. Both feature a rough sleeper who comes into a family home and upends the status quo.

But Double Double, revived at Cirencester’s Barn Theatre until 28th May, is much more like its contemporary play Sleuth and its ilk. You never quite know who’s who … or why, in Ryan McBryde’s production, which turns the Barn’s small stage into a four-level apartment filled with art treasures and high-end tech. Clap and the lights go off – tear up the FT to keep the crossword – choose your own 30-year single malt … that sort of thing.

It all starts when the elegantly-clad Philippa gets ready to bring a grimy, hairy man with a capacious backpack, picked up from the local hostel, into her flashy home. With his broad Scottish accent and light fingers, he doesn’t look like the sort of house guest she’d welcome.

But she has a proposition, which might be to their mutual advantage. Underneath his hirsute and dirty appearance, Phillippa has recognised a physical specimen who looks uncannily like her late husband Richard, who died off a remote beach in Panama just weeks earlier. And the thing is that Richard was just weeks away from the 40th birthday which would have brought him a huge inheritance, left by his mother, whose portrait looms over the apartment.

If the trustees believe that Richard is still alive, eight days from Duncan’s arrival at the flat, then Philippa gets the cash, and so she offers to split it with the down-and-out man. All he has to do is clean up to Richard-standard, and convincingly acquire an arrogant RP accent with no trace of Glaswegian.

OF COURSE, all is not what it seems, but just what does it seem, and who is telling what part of the truth in this scenario that is, literally, too good to be true.

Daniel Brocklebank and Faye Brookes, both known for their Coronation Street performances as well as many other stage, TV and film appearances, take on these two challenging roles with huge gusto and total authority.

As the stories unfold, Duncan’s demeanor, gait, stance and voice alter before our eyes, as he takes over the clothes and style of the Richard that Philippa describes, moving seemlessly back and forth between “himself” and the late husbande. Philippa, with her wonderful clothes (designed by Ethan Cheek) and ever-changing stories, keeps the questions coming. Secretive telephone calls and outings keep the tension mounting towards the “test’ party, and the critical birthday approaches.

You really don’t know who to believe, or what to believe, until the very end … and even then there’s a real glimmer of hope in what will come next … or is there?

It’s a very stylish, entertaining thriller, brilliantly performed by two actors with consummate vocal and physical skills, communicating real enjoyment and enough threat to keep an avid audience at the end of their seats throughout. Great fun, and just the thing to blot out the tension of the current world for a couple of hours.

GP-W

Photographs by Alex Tabrizi