Review: SHEAR MADNESS, The Mill At Sonning
Is this record-breaking immersive murder mystery a cut above?
Move over Punchdrunk: the longest running immersive drama in the world has arrived in the UK. Set in a unisex hair salon, Shear Madness’ intriguing mix of murder mystery and interactive sleuthing comes to The Mill At Sonning where artistic director Sally Hughes helms one of the first adaptations to land on British shores.
At a time when many new plays only appear in front of a paying audience for weeks or maybe months, it is truly mind-boggling to think how many times Paul Pörtner’s 1963 work has been performed. It has been put on in eighteen countries with the United States being particularly fond of Marilyn Abrams and Bruce Jordan’s adaptation. In Washington’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, one production ran for almost 15,000 performances and only shut down last month after President Trump’s proposed closure of the venue; in London, only The Phantom Of The Opera, Les Miserables and The Mousestrap have been put on more. Meanwhile, another version in Boston ran from 1980 for forty years until Covid forced its closure in 2020.
Within Alex Marker’s colourful set design, we first meet hairdressers Tony Whitcomb (Daniel Cane) and Barbara McMarley (Rosaleen Burton) as they tend to their customers. Nick O’Brien (an excellent Paul O’Neill) lies back impatiently expecting a shave that never comes. The wealthy Mrs Shubert (Natalie Ogle) sits patiently under a blowdryer occasionally looking over to Edward Lawrence (Jonathan Markwood) who sits at one side with his briefcase tightly gripped. Maybe he’s waiting his turn. Maybe not.
Above the salon, the unseen Isabel Czerny loudly plays her piano to the consternation of Tony. When the gay barber’s patience finally snaps, he goes upstairs to remonstrate; soon after, the renowned musician is found dead with the murder weapon being a pair of hairdresser scissors. At that point, O’Brien reveals that he is a police officer and, with his young partner Mike Thomas (Gwithian Evans), sets about his detective work with the help of the audience.
And this is where the audience participation and interaction element comes in. Like Neil Kelso’s superior murder mystery Dead On Time (set over four hours on a train moving through the Kent countryside), punters can quiz the suspects with whatever comes to mind. How dead set (pun intended) was Tony on ending Isabel’s playing? Was Barbara’s relationship with the pianist purely platonic? What is inside Edward’s mysterious suitcase and why did he seem so physically intimate with Barbara?
Having tiered, semi-circular seating enables the large audience to really lean into this and feel engaged. Similar shows like the long-running Jury Duty or the recent Alibi: Dead Air are held in small rooms and, hence, have a more intense and intimate atmosphere but they lack the more convivial and localised feel of Shear Madness. And that localised feel is a key element of the show’s appeal. The script is full of verbal nods to nearby neighbourhoods and the area’s more famous personalities, O’Neill proudly wears his Reading FC football top and there are more references planted around the set.
Many of the play’s faults lie in the source material. The characters are all knowingly wafer-thin (at one point, Tony shouts out "I'm not a stereotype. I'm a prototype!"), the plotting is predictable and the whole setup hangs on the interactive element for its success. Hughes does what she can with the premise and adds cute immersive touches around the venue: ice-cream sellers are kitted out as police officers and crime scene tape adorns the walls. Her hands, though, are tied when it comes to giving this hackneyed comedy a modern feel, even with every conceivable corner of the zeitgeist - Taylor Swift's nuptials, the US World Cup and right-wing commentator Katie Hopkins - shoehorned in. A neverending barrage of ancient gags and wordplay (“You can’t believe Tony - he’s a genital liar!”) will either have you holding your sides or wanting to tear your ears off.
Pörtner called the work he would be best known for Scherenschnitt oder Der Mörder sind Sie, a title in which both halves do double duty. A Scherenschnitt refers to a paper silhouette but literally means "a scissor-cut": one part nods to the murderer whose identity is a mystery (even to the cast) until the very end; the other to how the unseen victim meets their gory end. The second half is blunter still: Der Mörder sind Sie translates to "the murderer is you", with the plural Sie telling us that there is not just one suspect on the stage but an entire shop full of them. Abrams and Jordan’s English retitling to Shear Madness keeps the pun going but trades Portner’s quietly menacing wordplay for a cheesy groan of a name.
And if the title alone doesn’t mentally trigger an avalanche of similar wisecracks, then maybe this isn’t the show for you. Is this play hair-raising? Not in the slightest. Are the tickets an absolute snip? Based on West End prices, they’re not too bad. Is Shear Madness a cut above? Hardly but, once the core dramatics are out of the way, there’s plenty of fun to be had all the same.
Shear Madness continues at The Mill At Sonning until 15 August.
Photo credit: Pamela Raith Photography
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