Love From A Stranger
Feb 20th - 22nd 2020
Wheathampstead
***
Cruising
happily down my blogs I see that I have not thrown my incisive, or irritating,
theatrical opinion through Wheathampstead’s ample doors for nigh on eighteen
months. They gave us a cracker (My mother
Said etc.), lovingly scribed, and a damp squib (The Herd), sensibly silent. I love to praise, or at least commend,
and found little in the latter. But they clearly miss me, given all the get
well/stuffed cards I never received. Wait
Until Dark may have been good, I am told it was, but thrillers on stage do
not do a lot for me. Explains why in over forty years of directing I have only
ever done two. And one of those was the real life Rattenbury murder case. Much
more fun. But you should support local theatre and they do not get much more
local than WDS. On a dreary Saturday night I threw my twenty quid for two into
their collecting tin and prayed that the only murders on stage would be welcome
ones.
Love From A Stranger may have Agatha Christie’s illustrious name on it but
it is no Gaslight or Shadow of a Doubt. The main character is
clearly a killer, probably a serial one, but there the similarity ends. The
others have tension and narrative thrusts in spades, this Stranger had little. Teasing clues should engender a growing
awareness in the prospective victim to deliciously engage a breathless
audience. It’s a given. I am blowed if I could sense much in this script, not a
great help to actors, and what there was suffered from muted direction and
prosaic presentation. Director Robin Langer’s first port of call with an old
fashioned pot boiler should have been to create oodles of menace in which to
immerse the characters. But lack of atmospheric music and unimaginative country
cottage setting scuppered that particular trick.
So
it says a lot that most of those on stage turned in more than passable
offerings and one or two were exceptionally good. Given some fine and spooky
packaging they were skilled enough to add a grip the play never delivered. Or
so I thought whilst contemplating a few more of those get stuffed cards. Damon
Pattison was skilled and confident in his creation of the mysterious stranger
who wins the heart of gullible and nouveau
riche Cecily Harrington (Lisa
Fitzgerald). Eminently watchable, Mr Pattison’s too good to be true Bruce
Lovell hinted at menace and danger almost from his first entrance. But if there
were any warning bells in Ms Fitzgerald’s portrayal of the innocent prey they
were pretty well muffled. Clues, some of them clunky, abounded but it was only
in a slightly overwritten last scene that pennies seemed to finally drop. A
signalling of earlier doubt would have enhanced an otherwise competent
performance.
Other
than Mr Pattison the best bit of acting came from Julie Gough in the role of
best friend and London flatmate Mavis Wilson. Ms Gough has impressed before and
her crystal cut accent created a character with brains and poise. I reckon she
would have soon sent an incipient American killer and his mysterious suitcase
packing. Her warning bells were decidedly not muffled. Viv Fairley made for a
very nice Auntie Loo-Loo, even if the sniffy critic in me sensed a requirement
for a more comic portrayal, and Sheila Scull was a pleasing country cottage
maid. If she wasn’t making Cumberland pies offstage, everything about her
suggested she should be. Steve Leadbetter struggled with his posh accent in the
thankless role of Ms Harrington’s ditched boy friend and John Simpson, looking
every inch the benign country doctor, merely struggled. I have no wish to be
unkind and if Mr Simpson had relaxed into his role it could have been an
absolute scene stealer. Especially in the scene where notorious past murderers
are lovingly regaled to the unbelieving Ms Harrington. Malcolm Hobbs did a
splendid job as the curmudgeon country gardener Hodgson and created so many
alarm bells, buried peroxide bottles and financial chicanery, the heroine
should have been out on her bike long before the last scene.
But
Love From A Stranger is not a logical
play. It is a bit of 1950’s thriller nonsense, adapted from a Christie short
story by Frank Vosper, and needs mixing up in sign posted menace and dangerous
atmosphere to make it work. Mysterious suitcases, prohibited cellars, the
sinister bottles, and books on notorious murderers, are all very fine. They can
provide a solid and pleasingly vicarious base to the most prosaic of plots.
Christie does it in spades in her books. Wheathampstead had a pretty good cast
overall but rather than murder most foul we got murder most bland. I quite
enjoyed my evening, they deserve my twenty quid. But I shall of course, given
my less than enthusiastic review, look warily for the get stuffed letters and
any number of peroxide bottles. I reckon Crippen had similar problems. Roy Hall
