The guests are assembled in the drawing room of a mansion in which host Harriet has devised a murder mystery game that bears oddly similar features of her own story.
We have casino owner Jack with the murky past and his Miss Scarlett of a young online influencer partner, Candida. There is Harriet’s unloved husband Paul, the lawyer Stephanie, both with their own secrets, and making up the party John Rebus, a cop back in the days before "box ticking and gender awareness courses."
With a play largely written by Ian Rankin, the ingredients seemed likely to bring the pot, and the plot, nicely to the boil.
Sadly, and it seems like daubing graffiti on a monument to say this, Rankin may be the country’s greatest crime writer, but on this evidence, as his detective might conclude, not yet much of a playwright. The first half is wordy and slow, the motives too flimsy for any yet-to-happen grisly stuff.
Matters improve somewhat after the interval, helped by the occasional tension-building silence, but even then more suspense is generated between the characters, as they turn on each other, than with regard to the actual incident that has taken place upstairs.
Gray O’Brien, best known as the villainous Tony Gordon in Coronation Street, is a lugubrious, laid-back Rebus, quietly reading the room of potential ill-doers. Richard Hodder plays Jack as a man you would be wise not to cross and Jade Kennedy his unlikely, bloggy, shallow, social-climbing other.
Teresa Banham is the mansion-owning Harriet, whose idea of a takeaway is a hire-in chef, and Neil McKinven her demeaning husband Paul, with Abigail Thaw as Stephanie, who together with Harriet maintains a sort of dignity among these deeply unlovable examples of privileged arrogance.
Rankin talks in the show programme about the different and difficult challenges of structuring a play compared with writing a novel. Unlike his famous detective, he has this time failed to come up with the perfect solution.
The production tour continues to Oxford, Cheltenham, Guildford and Poole to the end of November.