Ten strangers having a black-tie dinner in an airport lounge. That’s the opening tableau of And Then There Were None. The airport lounge turns out to be a posh house on a tiny island to which the guests have been invited by an absent puppet-master named U.N. Owen. Speaking from a pre-recorded LP, the mysterious host accuses each diner of having committed a murder. Naturally, they deny the allegations. It’s not exactly a frisky opening. Ten charges, ten rebuttals. The play silts up in a stream of explanatory jabber. Then the bumpings-off start. A chortling fool drops dead in a pool of jam. The maid is throttled during an afternoon catnap. A white-haired booby gets Trotskied with a pick-axe. Each death prompts a panicky discussion which is interrupted by another death, so the play settles into a flat, nervy rhythm — chat, poisoning, chat, stabbing, chat, shooting, chat, chopping. You long for a mass suicide to speed things up.
Kevin Elyot’s script is vague on place and time (England, 1940s, I’d guess) and scuppers itself with Nineties slang like ‘barking’ and ‘skinful’. More to the point, he can’t decide whether to honour Agatha Christie’s original or jeer at it. One actor, in particular, makes strenuous efforts to mock his role but the audience declines to respond. If the territory is worth visiting at all, it’s worth respecting. The show is hampered by a huge and gruesomely plain set which seems to suck all the performances into its soaring white spaces. In Row K, I felt I was watching far-off mice scurrying around a lab. Once half the cast is dead, things pick up. The play’s premise is original and ingenious: every character is murderer, suspect, victim and culprit, and with the cast reduced to five the suspense becomes genuine, the friction palpable. Towards the climax, there are some brilliant twists and one or two sensational visual surprises. And then the sinister U.N. Owen (Unknown) is revealed and there are numerous loose ends left over which the script insists on tying up. Long after you’ve ceased to care, the closing speech drones on. It’s like listening to a taxi driver with a PhD. This baggy, rambling show would be perfect for ITV when the slicings and bludgeonings might be interspersed with adverts for cake, yoghurt and holidays. As a play it’s a drag.
The Sound Theatre, off Leicester Square, is a new venue conceived and built in Soho’s fashionable high style: manky staircases, a tin floor, farty leather seats and a rip-off bar. Zoe Lewis’s play, Flanders Mare, has all the elements of a fascinating drama. Henry VIII contracts a marriage with ugly, intelligent Anne of Cleves, who is having an affair with the painter Holbein. Henry, meanwhile, seduces the thick, beautiful Katherine Howard away from the nobleman Culpepper, Henry’s best friend at court. Passion and intrigue aplenty here but the writer spends an hour on tedious background details and she strays into subplots about Thomas Cromwell and Michelangelo. Most fatally, she wants her script to seem hip, so she besprinkles it with drug-gags and other attempts at knee-jerk comedy. The play is a showcase for Keith Allen, a wry, charismatic, sexually rampant Henry, and if you’re a fan of his you can pop along and watch him, as I did on a Saturday night, playing to an audience of 11.
The Brothers — best play I’ve seen for months — is a wonderful new comedy by Angie Le Mar. She extracts maximum value from an ancient narrative pattern: A loves B who loves C who is best friends with A. The stand-up Richard Blackwood, supported by a fine cast, moves frictionlessly between comedy and melodrama. Le Mar has acute senses, and her writing is both naturalistic and witty. She seems to understand blokes instinctively and can write them as if she were one herself. Oddly enough, she writes women like a man, too, and a judgmental right-wing sexist man at that. Her females are a bunch of needy, grasping, soppy, manipulative, narcissistic nymphomaniacs. They’re funny, too, a saving grace. The show is let down by a flimsy design made from cardboard boxes and by the venue’s acoustics, which dampen the actors into inaudibility. No matter. On the night that I went I was surrounded by gangs of fidgety youngsters, theatre virgins mostly, who contributed their own dialogue when they felt like it. ‘Slap her!’ yelled a girl behind me at a critical moment. Huge laughter. A West End crowd would have frowned, but it proved the audience was hooked.
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