Bloody Murder by Ed Sala.
Directed and designed by Josh
Wiseman. Costume designer Suzan Cooper. Lighting Designer Nathan Sciberras.
Sound designer Neville Pye. Canberra Rep. November 21 – December 7. Bookings 62571950 or www.canberrarep.org.au
Reviewed by Peter Wilkins
Canberra Rep’s final play for the year Bloody Murder is meant to be a barrel of Yuletide laughs, something familiar, something peculiar, something for everyone a comedy tonight. Nothing too serious, nothing too deep, nothing to bore or put you to sleep. Josh Wiseman’s production does none of that. Wiseman, himself an accomplished actor , directs an excellent cast of stock characters scrambling about through a bevy of clichés and stereotypical characters of the popular murder mystery genre. Described in one instance as “Agatha Christie meets Pirandello “(Six Characters in Search of an Author) Ed Sala’s play has neither the ingenuity of a Christie whodunit nor the mysterious absurdity and intellectual polemic of a Pirandello. Although the play toys with the notion of truth versus reality it does not, as Pirandello does examine the nature of truth and reality. At a weekend retreat at Lady Somerset’s country estate the actors change characters with alarming rapidity in their search to discover who among them is the author who has placed them in their predicament. The result is chaos and confusion with none of the Agatha Christie challenge to guess the villain or Pirandello’s invitation to feel empathy for the characters in search of an author to release them from their quandary. Bloody Murder appears to be Sala’s only published play. He holds a Masters Degree in Playwrighting from Virginia University, but his biography reveals a career of impressive stage and screen acting credits.
What rescues this wordy and convoluted
parody from an evening of tedium is director Wiseman’s decision to play
everything over the top, and encourage his actors to ham it up in a
melodramatic romp that is more likely to have its audience rolling in the
aisles. In this production, the actors rise to the occasion, and it is the
performances of each and every member of the cast that on opening night swept
across an audience of smiles or gales of laughter. Arran McKenna’s bombastic
major is an effective foil for Stuart Roberts’s washed-up actor. Steph Roberts
as the maid with the obsessive compulsive dusting disorder is hilarious to
watch as she surreptitiously upstages. Antonia Kitzel’s matriarch of the manor
lends a fleeting touch of gravitas and impending senility. Holly Ross’s French countess
with the unintelligible accent is Jessica Rabbit meets Rita Hayworth. Glenn
Brighenti is suitably obsequious as the money hungry nephew as well as the dull
flatfoot. Characters change in a cascading sequence of death by poisoning,
death by gunshot, death by stabbing and death by the undetectable author.
It all ends as you would expect,
as madly as it began You will get to
know who the author is but maybe not. So many appear and die along the way,
but, as with The Mousetrap (The Agatha Christie long running production), Sala’s
Major urges the audience to keep Mum.
If you find it all too mind
bending to follow, you can always play spot the difference in the setting of
the second act (Spoiler alert: Check out the back wall of the set.). The
production team’s usual high standard is at play with the typical drawing room
set with a quirky wallpaper design, the footlights at the front and a stage
curtain to take you back to the good old days of British Rep.
If it’s just a bit of fun that
you’re after, then Rep’s production of Bloody
Murder will fill the bill. Just leave your critical faculties at home, take
along a dose of willing suspension of disbelief and sit back and relax and
enjoy Wiseman’s first rate cast at play.
