KEN Ludwig has a literary CV that most authors only dream about, and as he has already shown with his adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express, he knows how to create those well- known and much-loved Agatha Christie characters on stage.

In this touring production he is aided and abetted by his production team. Mike Britton’s swiftly changing two tiered, panelled set really makes you feel that you are watching a story developing on the SS Karnak as it steams up the Nile, and it fixes the story and characters firmly in the 1930s period.

Although one or two of them are a little too broadly drawn, from the nine suspects and one victim you will have to pay a visit to the Theatre Royal to discovery who gets murdered. They readily fit into this expertly-drawn picture, giving Mark Hadfield’s dapper Hercule Poirot an ideal set of targets at which to aim his little grey cells. There is the dashingly handsome Simon Doyle (Nye Occomore), who deserts his passionate finance Jaqueline De Bellefort (Esme Hough) for the rich, arrogant heiress Linnet Ridgeway (Libby Alexandra-Cooper). There is her devious lawyer Annabelle Pennington (Helen Katamba), the embittered Egyptologist Atticus Praed (Howard Gossington), with Nicholas Prasad painting a lovely, self-effacing portrait of his doctor son Ramses , forming a fine partnership with Camilla Anvar’s gently lovelorn Rosealie Otterbourne. Whilst Nicholas and Camill, along with Bob Barrett, (an urban Colonel Race), were quietly underplaying, Glynis Barber and Terence Wilton were taking the opportunity to create two far more outrageous characters in Rosalie’s mother Salome and the ageing Shakespearean actor Septimus Troy.

Director Lucy Baily produced some fine images, particularly the lining of the suspects in shadow behind the body of the murder victim sending the audience out for their interval refreshments with a whole line of characters to suspect as the possible killer/s.

Adapter Ken Ludwig found plenty of sly humour in the story, and Mark Hadfield took full advantage of those opportunities, and although there was less tension than you would expect with so many Agatha Christie twists and turns in the plot, you were never going to loose interest, and or to wonder how Hercule was going to solve the insoluble puzzle placed before him.

If you cannot get along to see Death on the Nile at Bath, you can catch up with it in Torquay’s Princess Theatre between 18th and 22nd November.

GRP