Murder in PLay

This was Bethan’s first foray into the world of direction and she did a very good job indeed. I am not a great fan of the play but I must admit that she did a great job here and did a lot towards making it a lot more palatable for me.

The premise is that a rather amateurish professional company are preparing to open a production of a play and rehearsals are going very badly. Hidden secrets and past relationships interfere and the inevitable murder of the leading lady takes place just before the interval. The cast of the play is then shuffled around so people are having to learn new roles in all the confusion while two younger cast members become sleuths to solve the mystery.

It is an entertaining and clever premise, but what I never like about plays that lampoon performance is that the performances portrayed are so hackneyed and amateurish that surely not even the worst theatre company would ever come up with such performances? I hated “The play that goes wrong” for the same reason. I loathed “Peter Pan Goes Wrong”! I can just about cope with “Noises Off” because that is so well written. However, that said, KATS coped well with this aspect of the production and there were some very entertaining performances.

Casting was well thought through and Jill Brock brought out the monstrous Grande dame in Renee Savage. Her digs at Christa D’Amato played by Dee White were very entertaining especially when she threatens to expose rather dirty dealings in Christa’s past.  Jill swept around the stage with great poise as befitted her character and it was a shame she got murdered!!

Grant Davis was entertaining as the embattled producer Boris Smolensky, smitten with his sexy but dim young love Ginette, nicely played by Olivia Radford. The fact that Renee is his cuckolded wife adds to the myriad of red herrings flying around.

Young Tara Roberts displayed what a real emerging and mature talent she is as Sophie Lawton and Jenny Wood showed her comic ability as the rather hapless Harriet Bracewell.

George Broadhurst Preece as Tim Fermor and Alex Rosso as the timid stage manager Pat, forced into a role when re-casting takes place due to the murder, completed a very strong line up.

Despite my misgivings about the material, the cast played it to the hilt and Bethan’s direction was clean and neat and tidy. She kept the pace moving (essential to avoid the audience dwelling too much on the idiotic goings on) and there was much to admire.

As always here, the set was superb and beautifully furnished. Smolensky productions might be putting on a naff play but the set, and dressings, was truly magnificent as were the costumes.

I always enjoy Kats autumn plays and the audience enjoyed this once they had got used to the play within a play format and warmed to the proceedings.

So, overall, I commend the society for this production, which was a great presentation of what I regard as a rather second-rate play.

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