Theatre Royal Nottingham – until Saturday 16th August 2025
Reviewed by Chris Jarvis
3***
The Classic Thriller Season has been a regular fixture during the summer at the Theatre Royal in Nottingham since 1986 attracting a loyal and welcoming audience. Originally founded by legendary producer Colin McIntyre and since his death in 2011 the season has been renamed in his honour.
Death by Fatal Murder, the first of only three plays this year, is a spoof of Agatha Christie whodunnit mysteries with deliberate exaggeration for greater comedy. It is the third play in a trilogy written by Peter Gordon featuring the inept, bungling and aptly named Inspector George Algernon Pratt, played tonight by Mark Pearce who managed to both “look and sound the part”!
As the curtain rose, we saw the body of a police officer on the floor – recognisable by him still wearing his police helmet – in the guest’s sitting room of a country manor, Bagshot House. Set in 1940 during WWII, I loved the old-fashioned set with velvet sofa and cushions, armchairs, fireplace and many old paintings hanging on the walls. Sets these days are more likely to be an interpretation than a perfect replica.
A short introduction to the play features the ‘homeowner’ Nancy Allwright (Sarah Wynne Kordas) arriving home to find the body on the floor. She screams in terror when she sees ‘who knows who’ behind the door to the next room! At this point the curtain comes down, taking me back to the time when the audience was shielded from set changes. These days actors seem to make scene changes before our eyes, but this felt right for the era of the play.
The curtain soon rises with no sign of the body, and we gradually meet the 8 characters in the play including the ‘over the top’ seemingly ‘upper crust’ Ginny Farquhar (Juliette Strobel) with an incredible ‘haw, haw’ laugh! Ginny is a land girl sent by her family to support the war effort looking after her “sprites, brussel sprites!”
Constable Thomkins (Pavan Maru) has arrived searching for his missing colleague Constable Atkins – presumably the body!! He is waiting for his senior officer Inspector Pratt (Mark Pearce) to arrive with great trepidation as he has worked with him in the past and it didn’t sound to be a great experience – though apparently memorable for the wrong reasons.
We soon learn that the many of the occupants of Bagshot House – past and present – have a poor opinion of Inspector Pratt’s record of crime detection. Presumably those in the audience who saw the previous parts in the trilogy will know this! It seems that as soon as he arrives chaos reigns supreme.
During his investigations, Pratt is soon embroiled in more mystery and another murder! He is aided and abetted by house guests Enzo Garibaldi (Jeremy Lloyd Thomas) an Italian gigolo who can’t keep his hands off Ginny, and Blodwyn Morgan (Susan Earnshaw) an interfering, Welsh clairvoyant and busybody. Miss Maple (Karen Henson), who appears from the village vicarage having heard rumours, is an amateur sleuth who has been part of the Inspector Pratt trilogy. Her intelligence and confidence in contradicting him has been integral to solving previous cases. Would this be the case tonight, as she has good reason for the killer not to be found?
Secretly invited by Blodwyn to a séance at midnight, Miss Maple and Inspector Pratt witness two brilliant possessions by Blodwyn as she switches from her Welsh accent to the clearly Scots Dougal McDougal and into the well-spoken Colonel Craddock who’s spirit apparently witnessed some, but not all of Constable Atkins demise. All just adding to the confusion and blowing Pratts mind!
Everything is thrown into even greater chaos with the arrival of RAF Squadron Leader (Stiffy) Allwright (Andrew Ryan) – Nancy’s husband who was presumed dead having been shot down in aerial combat. Is Nancy pleased to see him? The plot thickens.
Despite a few clues being drip fed, we learn the identity of the murder/s and the reasons why at the very end of Act 2 by which time my brain had switched off leaving me understanding the outcome, but unsure of the full story behind it.
The acting was excellent in every case with much slapstick and hilarious one liners and spoonerisms, but maybe not fast enough for a complicated farce, though still an enjoyable night.