GRISLY GLEE
If there is any aspect of 21c Western culture sorely in need of being laughed at, it s ithe morbid fascination with police-procedural telly,, especially true-crime and its gruesome forensics. Murder has fascinated people ever since Jack the Ripper, but the digital age has made it more intensely. fictionalized and memorialized, screened and podcasted-about all the way from the wild fringes to endless BBC Sounds trails (forgetting the Corporation’s old Quaecunque motto: look it up)
So hurrah for John Brittain, Matthew Floyd Jones and Fabian Aloise, and their joyful invention of Kathy and Stella, from Beverley near Hull, young adults consoling their failure-to- launch by running a halfbaked true crime podcast chat from Kathy’s Mum’s garage. And, gloriously, insisting on involving themselves in the matter of the Hull Decapitator, to the irritation of the police DI Shaw (Elliotte Williams-N’Dure, who gets a lovely second-half number about the difficulty of these huge investigations and how sometimes theres “no justice – just us”). Their public appeals are wonderful – illustrated by an ensemble of the deluded fans dancing around them and lines like “If you know anyone with a history of arson and animal torture in the Beverley area…”
Kathy, the brighter researcher of the pair, had dropped out of University in depression. Stella is a sacked beautician. A touching set of flashbacks to their child selves bonding over murder books rather than Sweet Valley High gives us the story, and there is real heart in their relationship. As Stella’s mother sings, Kathy is “the only one who understands you, the only one who can actually stand you”. But it threatens to end when Kathy, in a hilariously bad taste morgue scene, learns that she could study forensics as a degree, and move her real life on. A thoughtful duet for our age has them both relating to the wonders of the internet; Stella singing about the comfort of the “approooooval of strangers, Kathy looking at university courses.
They’re a wonderful pair, Rebekah Hinds as Stella in fishnets, shorts and miniskirt, Bronté Barbé as Kathy in droopy ethnic cotton. Hannah Jane Fox does the full diva as “Felicia”, the true-crime writer who they admire and who gets murdered herself, her head in a bag posted to the podcasters by the mystery villain ( Stella knows she shouldn’t have taken a selfie with it…). All the cast are full of glee; the songs (Floyd Jones is musical director, composer and co-lyricist) are sharp power ballads.
It’s been at the fringe in 2022 and Manchester last year. And it is heartening to happen upon it in the little Ambassadors, proper West End. Because something good is happening when a young group, outside the established and celebrated mainstream, get together and make a show on the fringes, daring to be different, facing the perils of launching it it down the slipway to fill the stalls with surprised glee. Especially when the product is fresh but also disciplined, worked-up with a meticulous affection sometimes missing from weary lollipop revivals. A decade ago it was Mischief Theatre with the Goes-Wrong plays. In 2017 it was SIX, two years later Operarion Mincemeat. Both are now mainstream must-sees. This could be heading that way.
box office atgtickets.com to 14 Sept
rating 4
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