Laughs and thrills aplenty

Published on 02/08/2012 09:05

bY John Shawcroft

THE keynote of the Theatre Royal Nottingham’s Classic Thriller Season is murder, mystery and suspense.

But it’s also about entertainment and Nottingham audiences got the full dose in the season’s opening from Antony Shaffer’s Whodunnit.

It offered comedy and plot twists right to the very end, with continual revelations leading up blind alleys.

A mysterious hostess invites six strangers for dinner at 1930s Orcas Champflower Manor, appropriately in the depths of the countryside.

Little do they suspect that they will be threatened with blackmail by one of their fellow guests, the loathsome Andreas Capidistriou (John Goodrum). It emerges that everybody has something to hide and Capidistriou exploits this to the full. A respected family lawyer (Jeremy Lloyd Thomas), a Rear-Admiral (John Hester), an aristocrat (Susan Earnshaw), a sweet young thing (Jo Castleton), a black sheep (Chris Sheridan), and an eccentric archaeologist (Karen Henson) – all are easy targets. As is a wonderfully over-the-top inebriated butler (Patric Kearns).

You can’t really write much more about the plot without giving the whole thing away but it is safe to say that there are a couple of murders and that nobody is quite what they seem.

It’s all a bit much for Nicholas Briggs’s Inspector Bowden of the Yard and his sidekick (Al Naed).

This is a comedy thriller and the Agatha Christie murder mystery genre becomes a target, with the investigations in a library fit for purpose with its dark wood and wall-mounted swords. Bowden, donning cape and hat, carries out a prolonged reconstruction but it all goes pear-shaped. There are laughs a-plenty amidst an intricate and twisting plot that demands attention to the end.

It represents a new venture for the classic thriller team and it is unquestionably one of their best efforts.

Long-terms connoisseurs will welcome Patric Kearns’s mention of colleagues from seasons past Richard Colson and Bruce Green and it all makes for a splendid evening’s entertainment.

Lifestyle

Looking for...

Featured advertisers

Jobs

Search for a job

Motors

Search for a car

Make Model Price from Price to

Property

Search for a house

Buy Rent

Bedrooms Price from Price from Price to Price to

What is a Cookie?
What is a Flash Cookie?
Can I opt out of receiving Cookies?
About our Cookies

Cookies are small data files which are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) from a website you visit. They are stored on your electronic device.
This is a type of cookie which is collected by Adobe Flash media player (it is also called a Local Shared Object) - a piece of software you may already have on your electronic device to help you watch online videos and listen to podcasts.
Yes there are a number of options available, you can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only "trusted" sites to set them, or to only accept them from the site you are currently on.

However, please note - if you block/delete all cookies, some features of our websites, such as remembering your login details, or the site branding for your local newspaper may not function as a result.
The types of cookies we, our ad network and technology partners use are listed below:
- Revenue Science ►
  
  A tool used by some of our advertisers to target adverts to you based on pages you have visited in the past. To opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Google Ads ►
  
  Our sites contain advertising from Google; these use cookies to ensure you get adverts relevant to you. You can tailor the type of ads you receive by visiting here or to opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Webtrends / Google Analytics ►
  
  This is used to help us identify unique visitors to our websites. This data is anonymous and we cannot use this to uniquely identify individuals and their usage of the sites.
- Dart for Publishers ►
  
  This comes from our ad serving technology and is used to track how many times you have seen a particular ad on our sites, so that you don't just see one advert but an even spread. This information is not used by us for any other type of audience recording or monitoring.
- ComScore ►
  
  ComScore monitor and externally verify our site traffic data for use within the advertising industry. Any data collected is anonymous statistical data and cannot be traced back to an individual.
- Local Targeting ►
  
  Our Classified websites (Photos, Motors, Jobs and Property Today) use cookies to ensure you get the correct local newspaper branding and content when you visit them. These cookies store no personally identifiable information.
- Grapeshot ►
  
  We use Grapeshot as a contextual targeting technology, allowing us to create custom groups of stories outside out of our usual site navigation. Grapeshot stores the categories of story you have been exposed to. Their privacy policy and opt out option can be accessed here.
- Subscriptions Online ►
  
  Our partner for Newspaper subscriptions online stores data from the forms you complete in these to increase the usability of the site and enhance user experience.
- Add This ►
  
  Add This provides the social networking widget found in many of our pages. This widget gives you the tools to bookmark our websites, blog, share, tweet and email our content to a friend.
- 3rd Party Cookies ►
  
  We use Advertising agencies to provide us with some of the advertising on our websites. These include (but are not limited to) Specific Media, The Rubicon Project, AdJug, AdConion, Context Web. Please click on the provider name to visit their opt-out page.

Laughs and thrills aplenty

Top stories

Lifestyle