For some people, a new Rebus story is an event, in whatever form it arrives. This, the second time Ian Rankin’s (now-retired, but still active) detective has appeared on stage, is a brand-new story penned by Rankin and playwright Simon Reade.
I confess to never having read a Rebus, heard any of the several radio adaptations or seen his TV incarnations in the form of John Hannah and Ken Stott. So I couldn’t tell which of this outing's figures from the character’s past were audience favourites and which new inventions.
Rankin’s play is set entirely in a single location, the swanky dining room of an upmarket Edinburgh townhouse. As it opens, the characters are all assembled and already engaged in trying to solve the murder that has occurred. But this is an immediate red herring: the fabrication of hostess Harriet Godwin’s imagination in the murder mystery party game she’s constructed for the others to play. For a long time, there’s no real crime here—just the hint of simmering tensions.
As Harriet (Teresa Banham) continues to prompt her guests with clues, we get further glimpses of what drives the other characters. There’s Stephanie Jeffries (Abigail Thaw), a lawyer with past links to more than one of the other party attendees, and Jack Fleming (Billy Hartman), a local casino owner with a much younger woman on his arm: Candida Jones (Jade Kennedy), a social media influencer who spends a lot of the first half attached to her phone and finessing her lipstick. Harriet’s husband, Paul (Neil McKinven), is seemingly taking part in the game under some duress, though he’s keen to play host and top up the others’ glasses.
And there, hanging back, "reading the room" as he puts it, is John Rebus (Gray O’Brien). He’s slower than the others to offer theories as to the how-, why- and whodunit of the murder mystery they’re playing out—there as Stephanie’s plus one, he’s a watchful, quiet presence.
Rankin has spoken of his interest in introducing Rebus into a world from which he’s usually far removed, and of "some gentle ribbing of the traditional English whodunit." Needless to say, the fun and games are overtaken when an actual dead body is discovered. The plot does well to walk a line, keeping us guessing as to the identities of killer (and victim) without quite tipping over into the frustrating withholding of information.
Of course, ‘gentle ribbing’ of the genre feels a little tame when you think that numerous playwrights have long since exploded its improbabilities; Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound set a high bar for this way back in 1968, and the film See How They Run more recently paid homage to Stoppard’s skewering of Agatha Christie’s manor house murders.
Rebus devotees (of whom there are many) may enjoy this unfolding of a little more of the character’s psyche and history and the twists and turns which take each character to unexpected places. But Rebus has aged more or less in real time since his first appearance in 1987, and some of the lines and events feel a little like the product of an older mindset trying to get to grips with modern phenomena such as social media.
The steady drip-feed of new information successfully kept my attention, though some of the performances feel overly stagey, and quite a few of the character twists were beyond unexpected, instead veering close to implausible.
The highlight of Loveday Ingram’s production is Gray O’Brien’s incarnation of Rebus. Laconic, reserved, but with a magnetism that draws the eye, his is an efficient, complete-feeling sketch of the troubled, storied man. One need not have read the two dozen novels or seen the TV versions to feel the weight of history carried in O’Brien’s physicality and voice.
So, Rankin and Reade play some satisfying games with the (nearly) closed-room mystery genre; but ultimately, improbabilities of both plot and dialogue pile up to leave it one for completionists rather than a crucial new piece of the puzzle.