Simon Button talks about Frederick Knott’s classic Dial M For Murder with director Anthony Banks and cast members Tom Chambers, Sally Bretton,  Michael Salami and Christopher Harper. The play is currently on tour.

Bringing the classic thriller Dial M for Murder to the stage for a 2020 UK tour, Anthony Banks feels fans of the genre will be surprised by its unique twist.

“It’s the opposite of a whodunnit because we know who’s gonna do it from the beginning,” says the director who most recently had audiences on the edge of their seats with his critically-acclaimed touring production of The Girl On The Train.

The instigator of the crime here is Tony Wendice, a former tennis pro who discovers his socialite wife Margot is having an affair and blackmails an old university pal into doing the dastardly deed for him. And that’s not giving spoilers because, as Anthony points out, Wendice is “the ultimate charmer whose actions are all in view in all their beautiful ugliness from the beginning”.

No stranger to the genre (his other credits include Gaslight and Strangers on a Train), Banks notes that Frederick Knott’s masterpiece combines traditional thriller tropes with an exploration of social class.

“They really are rare, these plays, because what you usually get is political history or socio-economic observation or your sort-of standard whodunnit. This play takes elements from all of those and combines them in a unique way.”

Cambridge-educated Knott was a wannabe screenwriter who penned a stage play as a stepping stone into movies, except no-one would produce it. Instead Dial M for Murder was originally put on in 1952 by the BBC as a live broadcast and was such a hit with viewers that West End impresarios were suddenly knocking on his agent’s door eager to stage it.

It ran at the Westminster Theatre (on the site of what is now The Other Palace) for a year, then went to Broadway, was translated and performed around the world, and in 1954 it was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock with Ray Milland and Grace Kelly as Wendice and Margot, with Knott himself supplying the script.

Hitchcock shot it in 3-D but the process was technically glitchy and cinemagoers had grown tired of the format so, after a few half-empty screenings, it went out as a 2-D release to big box office success.

More than six decades later, and with the three dimensions of the stage at his disposal, Banks sees it as a timeless story with a juicy premise. “It’s about right and wrong and it’s a bit like Macbeth in that this guy has a sniff of something that might be possible and two hours later he’s become a complete sociopath. It’s about tumbling into the darkest place you could possibly imagine.”

Another draw for the director was how Knott’s play presents a vivid picture of social class in London through its main characters: The wealthy heroine, her charming husband who has married into her money, a struggling writer who has become her lover, a working class Northern detective and the hired killer, who is a member of ‘the old boy network’ of former male-only school chums.

The 1950s-penned text doesn’t state a specific time frame so the director has decided to root his production in 1963. “It feels contemporary,” he explains, “because furniture shops now are full of Sputnik lamps with balls shooting out of them, L-shaped sofas and 60s-style patterns on curtains and upholstery, plus suits and dresses have a very 60s cut.”

And he notes how it deals with very contemporary themes: The North-South divide, imbalances between men and women and disparities between haves and have-nots, with one character remarking ‘People with capital don’t realise how lucky they are’.

Leading man Tom Chambers, who came to fame as registrar Sam Strachan on Holby City and was crowned Strictly Come Dancing champ in 2008, is interested in exploring Wendice’s complexities, saying: “We’re trying not to go down the obvious cad root. Our take on Tony is as a friendly, warm person who is caring and honest – like a politician might seem on the surface – but behind the scenes he’s working a whole load of stuff out.”

The actor thinks setting the story in the 60s is an apt one. “It makes it a bit more dynamic and sexy and the dialogue is so modern. It’s timeless in that respect.”

Since Strictly Tom has mostly been doing musicals like Top Hat and Crazy for You and smiles about the differences between singing-and-dancing shows and straight plays. “The energy output is the same in terms of the focus but your body isn’t screaming for some ligament release.”

But he’s a fan of all stage work. “With television you’ve done the scene and you can delete it from your short-term memory but with a play you’re plugged-in and you can’t unplug until the job is finished. You have to maintain your focus and your health, but that’s what makes it exciting.”

Sally Bretton, who plays Margot, hadn’t done theatre for a decade before playing Lady Chiltern in the 2018 revival of An Ideal Husband. The actress had been busy raising a family and appearing on TV in the likes of Lewis and playing recurring roles in Not Going Out and Death in Paradise. “Then I got back on stage and it was like ‘Oh yes!’ It’s why most people go into acting. I love the rehearsal process and working as a team.”

She sums up Margot as “a good person at heart who tried hard to make her marriage work”. She feels lonely and unseen by Tony, then she meets writer Max Halliday. “And she feels seen for the first time,” says Bretton, “but because of social constraints she has to try and make the best of a bad job.”

Sally sees parallels between Margot’s time and today. “It was a more male-dominated world back then but the curtain has been lifted on how male-dominated it still is. With the #MeToo movement and stuff, everything’s been blown open, prior to which people weren’t necessarily aware they were being manipulated or that they had the power to change things.”

The object of Margot’s affection is played by Michael Salami, the America-born and London-raised actor who has appeared everywhere from The Old Vic to Southwark Playhouse and was in Just A Couple and Hollyoaks on TV. “Max is deeply in love with Margot and wants to be with her,” Michael says of their problematic relationship, “but in societal terms it just wouldn’t work – this young, penniless, black guy who is in love with a gorgeous white aristocrat.”

The character’s ethnicity isn’t stated in the script. “And at first when I was approached to play him I thought ‘But he’s white’. There’s nowhere in the text that refers to his race and I think it’s very brave and clever of Anthony to do it this way. It raises interesting questions.”

Like his cast mates, Salami has a particular fondness for the theatre. “Stage work is something you can’t beat. You have to ride every mistake and every beat. Everything is in the moment and that’s the beauty of it.”

Christopher Harper agrees. “It’s like pinging an arrow at the start of the evening and off it goes,” says the man who, having previously worked with Anthony Banks on Strangers on a Train, is on double duty here.

In act one he plays Captain Lesgate aka Charles Swann – “a misfit and try hard who is always on the make” whom Tony tracks down and manipulates into becoming a murderer.

“He’s a wonderful, slimy, dark character,” grins Harper, who in act two plays Inspector Hubbard. “He’s not your normal Poirot, comes-in-and-solves-it kind of guy,” says the actor who, careful to avoid spoilers, adds: “There’s something odd or rotten going on there as well.”

Best known for playing Nathan Curtis on Coronation Street and with a long line of theatre credits on his CV, Harper points out: “The psychology of this story is very contemporary. What we’re seeing here is old establishment men with their clubs – and in this case a man who essentially phones up an old chum for a murder, then you see how he’s controlling his wife and yet she’s a modern woman. She’s not just a put-upon housewife; she has her own love burning away in the background.”

Michael Salami understands the current appetite for stage thrillers. “Right now everyone can see what everyone’s doing at any given time,” he observes, “and we’re all very nosy. Thrillers make you feel like flies on a wall, where you’re getting to see something – like someone being murdered – you wouldn’t get to see in the real world. It’s an adrenaline rush and everyone thinks they’re smart. Everyone wants to be the clever one who goes ‘I knew that from the beginning’.”

Anthony Banks feels this new version of Dial M for Murder will hook in theatregoers. “This is not a play where you can hear the characters thinking. They have the thought and they do it, and that’s really quite modern. A lot of classic thrillers are about the words but this one is about action.”

He smiles. “Given the success of Tarantino’s films and Killing Eve on television, I think there’s a real appetite for this kind of storytelling.”

Photo by Manuel Harlan