BWW Reviews: THE PERFECT MURDER, New Wimbledon Theatre, October 27 2014

Things aren't going well for middle-class, middle-age, middle-of-the-road couple Victor and Joan - their marriage is as stale as week old croissants and their conversation as sour as fortnight old milk. With Victor spying a new life with his Croatian hooker, Kamila, on the proceeds of his wife's life insurance, he's soon putting a lifetime's study of detective novels and murder mysteries to practical use in hatching a plan. But Joan, having a fling of her own with beefcake taxi driver Don, has murder on her mind too. What will young copper DC Roy Grace make of it all?

A Perfect Murder (at New Wimbledon Theatre until 1 November and on tour) has something of Roald Dahl's "Tales of the Unexpected" about it. There's the dark humour, the grotesque characters, the twists and turns in the plot, the sense of the extraordinary hiding in plain sight. It's also staged (by Ian Talbot) in a very televisual style - people keep coming through doors and then leaving - I half-expected Fonzie to pop in at any moment! There's nothing here (in the structure anyway) to surprise anyone.

Robert Daws plays Victor as a horrid little man, but perhaps not quite as horrid as Dawn Steele plays his long-suffering wife, Joan, embittered by twenty years of being cooped up with a complacent husband, with no children to brighten her days. Gray O'Brien's Don is a wannabe Cockney wideboy, though he does have a sense of humour and a certain charm as he talks the talk required to bed desperate Joan. Good though all three actors are in their roles, it was such a relief when Simona Armstrong's feisty Kamila and Thomas Howes' dogged Detective Grace were on stage - at least we could warm to them!

The comedy between Victor and Joan was more bleak than black, so unpleasant were the exchanges, so selfish and cruel the barbs flung back and forth. There are laughs, but like those of Steptoe and Son, they turn hollow on contemplating the mismatched pair's situation.

There's plenty of plotting that just didn't make sense as the elaborate set-ups are constructed, but I suppose that's to be expected in the genre and the resolutions are undoubtedly satisfying - I was still working out who had done what and known what on the bus home half an hour after the curtain. I have no doubt that fans of Peter James' bestselling fiction will enjoy this production enormously. As for me? Well, maybe I saw a little more of myself in Victor's fifty-something whinging than was entirely comfortable and maybe felt that grown-ups should have done something about it a long, long time ago.

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