Write Me a Murder

Southwold Summer Theatre

Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 26 July 2012

Every summer season needs at least one good murder. This is it.

A clever plot, told well and set in the obligatory ramshackle country house with dark nights outside and creakings upstairs concerns a watertight plan to do away with a thoroughly unpleasant man.

The play uses the devices of whodunnit writers to pose a hypothetical solution to a problem. However, the perfect murder is a rare thing, and the curse of the unexpected thwarts the perpetrators.

At the heart of it are two brothers, the Cain and Abel story in a sense. The older one is to inherit the estate and title, the younger one has nothing except a writer’s imagination. Mark Jackson and Jonny McPherson play them with panache, both cunning men, with little love lost between them.

Jill Freud is their astute former nanny/doctor who misses little. The brash outsider is captured convincingly by Simon Snashall while Kate Middleton is his long-suffering wife who thinks she will be free of him and wants only to be loved.

Director Phil Clark keeps the pace of twists and turns going and the final comeuppance is satisfying and timed perfectly.