A TRUE-CRIME RICARDIAN ROMCOM
Here’s a wonderfully 1950s retro play, not just in style and simplicity but in the willowy vintage-Harrods outfits of Rachel Pickup as the willowy Marta Hallard, visiting Inspector Grant in he bleak hospital room where all the action takes place – barring a couple of Shakespearean ranting moments for contrast, and two neat cocktail bar scenes stage right.
It’s adapted from the most famous novel by Josephine Tey, who stands alongside Christie in the golden age of crime fiction, a write artful and readable though with an enthusiasm for a particular strict Englishness (laced with Balmoralish Scottishness) that can jar the modern ear. Inspector Grant is her hero, and in this unusual tale is stuck in hospital with a broken leg, bored and restive with nothing to detect.
His actress pal Marta gives him – as a judge of interesting faces – a postcard portrait of Richard III. He sees the face of Shakespeare’s notorious villain as “more like a judge or soldier”, strong and honest. He then finds what all passionate Ricardians will tell you: that Shakespeare drew on st Thomas More, who was barely seven at Bosworth, and that the story of Richard’s crimes was, basically, cooked up by the Tudor victors after they’d stripped the last Plantagenet’s corpse and chucked him under a future car park in Leicester.
The book is a classic, the detective assisted by a young historian at the BL, Marta and his sergeant wafting in and out amid occasional exasperated nurses. Adapting it, M.Kilburg Reedy has been pretty faithful to the track of archival discovery , and has added two rather wonderful nurses, Janna Fox as the one who is sceptical and prefers Richard the Lionheart, and Halsa Abbasi who is stagestruck, and thrilled that the nefarious Shakespeare play is running up West and starring Marta’s fiance’.
Who is also the playwright’s invention: , because a rom-com situation is bolted on to the basic story, with a very un-Tey unspoken “chemistry” between the cop and the diva, mirrored by the love life of young Brent the researcher. Who like Grant risks romantic happiness for detective preoccupation…
It’s a bit too long at 2 hrs 45, slow burn at the start but turns out unexpectedly rewarding: a lot of the good sharp lines are Tey’s own, and Rob Pomfret has sufficient commanding presence to hold us happy despite being static in a hospital bed in striped pajamas for the whole of the first half. Moreover, Harrison Sharpe as Brent the earnest researcher is a glorious comic : puppyish, forever hauling crumpled notes out of his jacket, trousers and shoes, excitedly emotional (at one point to the extreme of a somersault). And the nurses are terrific foils to Grant, especially when he and Brent run out of tintacks for their Plantagenet-Woodville storyboard and steal syringe needles instead.
So it’s a great deal of fun, decently low-priced, gives old Richard his due in dignity ,and the romcom additions stay just this side of annoying. Oh, and here’s a gracious deed: the CX theatre obligingly puts Richard III and Anne Nevill’s 4-generation family tree on the back of its free panto flyer, so even those who didnt buy programmes can follow it..
charingcrosstheatre.co.uk to 13 sept
Rating 4
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