REVIEW: Sleuth – Malvern Theatres (Monday, April 8 to Saturday, April 13).
AS far as I’m concerned, it’s no mystery whatsoever why Todd Boyce was given the role of sinister prankster Andrew Wyke in this nail-chewing version of the Anthony Shaffer thriller classic.
For having been on the edge of my sofa during several months of witnessing his psychotic murder-fest in Coronation Street, I can certainly vouch for the utter darkness and menace that this superbly gifted actor brings to the role of the cuckolded crime writer intent on vengeance.
The thing is that this latter-day killer on the cobbles manages to seamlessly adapt his penchant for playing the pitiless persona in a way that draws one to him in the manner that the moth must dance round a candle.
However, there is only one individual who’s about to get his wings burned and that’s Milo Tindle, the jack-the-lad hairdresser who’s been doing rather more than trimming, perming and peroxiding Wyke’s wife Margeurite.
Tindle, played with a gloriously spiky, working-class attitude by Neil McDermott, has a chip on his shoulder the size of a rail track sleeper, chuffed that’s he’s bedded an upper-class bint, but now very nervous in the presence of a husband whose responses don’t seem to fit the circumstances.
Tindle would probably prefer a lot of shouting, then a punch-up in the time-honoured tradition. But Wyke has other plans, involving a clown’s outfit and the staging of a fake burglary that would solve his rival’s cash-flow problem.
This is foreign territory for Tindle. No wonder then that our Mr Teasy-Weasy is becoming decidedly queasy as a ghastly scenario starts to unfold.
The tension soon starts to build, fuelled by Wyke’s constant trips to the drinks cabinet, and Tindle – essentially now a prisoner in his host’s Gothic pile – soon finds himself like a love-rat caught in a trap.
Boyce and McDermott squeeze every drop of emotion out of Shaffer’s acid dialogue, a haranguing match that seeps and burns its way across the Festival Theatre stage until eventually casting its dank cloud across the entire auditorium.
Sleuth is brimming with plots, counterplots and wickedly inventive double-crossing. And these two fine actors make the very most of it, never once allowing the taut-as-a-fiddle-string stress factor to slacken.
It’s a fascinating essay of jealousy, conflict, but above all an intriguing study of the lengths to which the cruelly creative and manipulative mind will go in pursuit of revenge.
Crisply directed by Rachel Kavanaugh, it’s this week’s must-see show at Malvern, and no amount of praise from this critic can do it justice… a relentlessly tense tale that will keep you guessing right up until the final curtain.