UPMARKET EDINBURGH ROCK, SORT OF
Sir Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus accounts for a tenth of all crime bestsellers within the UK: the traditional mazes round Edinburgh Castle, set towards te 18c dignity of the New Town, symbolize the tangled mysteries which his policeman’s thoughts should resolve. A novelist can evoke such a metropolis, play with time and house and stay within the detective’s head; display diversifications of Rebus replicate that. So it was courageous for Rankin, bored in lockdown, to jot down this for the stage (the earlier stage Rebus used Rona Munro as author). His lockdown imprisonment additionally, he has mentioned, meant confining it to 1 room, one set.
It’s a grand dining-room, with a startlingly crowded set of work beneath picture-lights (because it’s a touring set, my former theatre-electrician companion mused a bit about attainable difficulties of folding and unfolding the flats with all that fiddly wiring). The photos are Scottish 20c colourists, essential within the plot: Harriet’s first husband collected them, however Paul prefers whisky and playing. Their visitors on the momentous night are Jack the native Casino proprietor (Billy Hartman, bonhomously shady) and his slinky, elegantly braided i girlfriend Candida who’s an “influencer” and (one senses RAnkin’s revulsion on the commerce) steadily explains her lifetime of being comped and given freebies. Rebus is the plus-one for lawyer Stephanie – performed by Abigail Thaw, a determine cool sufficient to make you surprise if she’s the killer or, much more thrilling, a correct love curiosity for Rebus).
There’s a menacing thump of music because the lights drop, however then comes an extended interval of worryingly un-tense banter and chat. It’s largely a couple of murder-mystery recreation – all butlers and wine-cellars – plus remarks about Jack’s dodgy previous. In an apart Rebus (an agreeably dry, spry Gray O’Brien) explains that he hopes to nail Casino Jack. Meanwhile an offstage chef, Brendan, appears to have left the kitchen in a multitude. He could by the interval be reported lifeless.
Oh pricey. A homicide recreation with an actual corpse? It begins to really feel like an Agatha Christie tribute act, solely set in Scotland and with cellphones (Jade Kennedy’s Candida, a serpentine Instagram dream in a body-con frock), does a variety of Googling to help Rebus’ cerebral detective work). The complete factor is frankly clunky, in a calming Sunday-night-telly type of approach. Despite director Loveday Ingram’s valiant efforts to maintain the forged shifting it simply wastes too lengthy explaining back-stories: Rankine remaining in novelist-mode even whereas co-writing, as he’s right here, with Ian Reade.
I used to be a bit despondent about it by the interval – its two forty-minute acts, fairly brisk – however fortunately the second half livens up a bit. Hostilities and lies and the fracture of the hosts’ marriage are uncovered, with revelations about every part from a photograph of a Dubai freebie to a probably bloodstained vase and the non-public historical past of an offstage former detective. And is the lacking Brendan actually lifeless? If so whodunnit? Wait and see. It’ll all be defined. A bit too lengthily, and thru the fourth wall as Rebus returns to handle us. But O’Brien is ideal within the position, so eager readers received’t, I believe, be disenchanted.
cambridgeartstheatre.com to 7 September
then touring UK to 30 Nov
score 3
