The new play by Ian Rankin and Simon Reade comes to the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh. Weds 11- Sat 13th September.
During a lavish dinner party at an exclusive Edinburgh address, the hostess creates a murder-mystery game that baffles the select guests. Rebus, the plus-one of his lawyer friend, Stephanie, sits on the fringes and watches – until a real death occurs. John Rebus, (retired) springs into action, and solves both mysteries.
With its Golden Age setting, somewhere on the spectrum between Agatha Christie and JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, of course all the dinner guests (and hosts) have their own secrets and guilty shadows. In seeking out the whodunnit, these come to the fore and the resultant shocks and suspicion may well be the greatest fallout of the evening.
With one beautiful but increasingly claustrophobic set, the cast of potentially over-the-top characters remains fairly understated, neatly balancing humour and tragedy. It explores the ‘locked room’ mystery in the light of mobile phones and social media where nobody is actually isolated. It’s a cosy mystery on the surface, where the demons lurk in the backstory and fuel the actions off-stage.
The first half is a little slow, because there’s a lot of reference to absent characters and without seeing them, it’s a challenge to keep them straight, but the action picks up in Act 2. Rebus is, well, Rebus. well played and believable from Gray O’Brien. And well-supported by the rest of the cast: Abigail Thaw (Stephanie Jeffries); Billy Hartman (Jack Fleming); Teresa Banham (Harriet Godwin); Neil McKinven (Paul Godwin); Jade Kennedy (Candida Jones) and directed by Loveday Ingram.
A good old-school evening of entertainment.