“Dial M For Murder” by Frederick Knott is a traditional well-made play for the West End of 1952, with a lot of details in the text that only real boffins of locked room mysteries would relish in. It would have been very easy to have a production that felt stuffy. Moving it to the 1960s, and taking the staging away from realistic naturalism in a softly fluent way, brought a freshness to this famous “howcatchem.”
Tom Chambers, as the femicidal husband Tony Wendice, glided around his affluent London flat like a jazz dancer high on wickedness. He knew his wife was being unfaithful; he knew she had made him her heir in her will; and for the last year he had been quietly planning how to get her murdered. Chambers’ performance was mercurial: his mobile face and body expressing every nuance of glee in his plans, and even more so with disbelief as the plans started to go wrong.
As Max Halliday, Michael Salami gave an intelligent performance in his dual capacities of a professional writer of murder mysteries for television – and Margot Wendice’s illicit lover. It particularly moved up a gear in the last part of the play, when Max’s feelings for Margot were driving the action, and Salami was putting love and despair and desperation into every moment he had.
As Margot Wendice, Diana Vickers was quietly elegant in sustaining the façade of the outwardly dutiful wife who then genuinely becomes a very wronged woman. And sadly, her story and the disbelief she encountered in fictional 1963 is still one that goes on today, and is quite pertinent to our times.
Completing the cast was Christopher Harper as both Captain Lesgate and Inspector Hubbard. A consummate character actor, Harper made both characters his own. Captain Lesgate strode bullishly around the flat in the first half, out-dominating Tony with every posture, until Tony could blackmail him into committing the murder: – a very nice moment showed director Anthony Banks knows where “to testify” originally came from. In the second half, Inspector Hubbard was pale and geeky and apologetic, but with an eye for detail (both as the detective and in Harper’s performance) that would have made Hercule Poirot proud.
Director Anthony Banks utilised a lot of modern staging techniques to keep the story heightened. He was especially good at getting the actors to use isolation or exaggeration in their physical movements, factoring in a percussive use of sound, and having the domestic lighting of light bulbs and car headlights became exaggerated to enhance particular moments.
Lighting designer Lizzie Powell especially had fun when
getting all the lights in the flat to unexpectedly show the turmoil going on
inside Margot. Set and costume designer David Woodhead was very tasteful in his
recreation of 1960's fashions, from Margot’s babydoll pyjamas to Lesgate’s
maroon leather shoes. Composers and sound designers Ben and Max Ringham went
full-on with the psychedelic music of the 1960's, drowning the stage in twanging
guitars and ethereal keyboards and the Beatles’s song “Tomorrow Never Knows.”
Reviewer - Thalia Terpsichore
on - 15.11.21
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