12 – 17 February
Todd Boyce, best known for his portrayal of Stephen Reid in ITV’s Coronation Street, and Neil McDermott as series regular Ryan Malloy in BBC’s Eastenders are the sparring partners in this production of Anthony Shaffer’s 1970 psychological thriller – Boyce as the successful, now ageing and narcissistic detective novelist Andrew Wyke, McDermott as the second-generation immigrant Milo Tindle who has been invited over to Andrew’s Wiltshire country pile for a ‘little chat’. Milo is Andrew’s wife’s lover.
It’s a loaded situation. On Julie Godfrey’s elegant set – a grand living room in Wyke’s house with leaded glass windows and a grand staircase and balcony festooned with isosteric games, toys and mechanical puppets that reflect Andrew’s obsession with game-playing, a much bigger sport is about to play out. Andrew basks in his own cleverness – Milo, it seems, will become just another pawn in his latest wheeze, bamboozled by the audacity and cunning of his plan, every bit as devilish as any he has written for his literary hero, St John, Lord Merridew, the great detective. Revenge can be sweet, but is that the end of it?
Given a high degree of animation by Director Rachel Kavanagh, Shaffer’s play has a lot of fun with hidden identity and double bluff. Unfortunately, there were moments when our suspension of disbelief was tested hard – Inspector Doppler, for instance, looked and behaved more like one of Wyke’s clownish automatons than a policeman on a call-out near Swindon – his ‘Wiltshire’ accent hovering somewhere between broad Somerset and the Mid-West.
While the play explores issues of class and racial identity, it also exposes old ideas of patriarchal ‘ownership’ of women. Marguerite, Andrew’s wife, in absentia during the play, is ‘claimed’ by the older man even though she has clearly moved on. What amounts to willy-waving accounts for quite a bit of the dialogue between Wyke and Tindle as they try to outwit each other and claim the romantic and moral higher ground in what appears to be a nostalgic, Agatha Christie-like age.
The production did suffer slightly from Boyce’s high and sometimes thin voice, especially when coping with a cut glass accent, not always carrying well in the large auditorium. Sound by Andy Graham seemed somewhat underwhelming throughout – some more help picking up Boyce’s delivery would have helped the impact of the dialogue. However, when in more animated mode, we began to see that Boyce’s Wyke could carry real sparks of venomous resentment, giving teeth to the drama. McDermott’s more muscular projections as Milo occasionally reached high levels of eloquence, especially towards a highly charged final denouement, which was warmly applauded by the Bath audience.
★★★☆☆ Simon Bishop 13 February 2024
photo credit @ Jack Merriman
