Bloody Murder

Lady Somerset’s annual soirée takes place on the isolated country estate where she lives with her morally loose nephew, Charles; her maid, Jane; and a couple of downstairs servants.  This year’s guests include a pompous major; a countess; a dissipated actor; a sweet ingénue…

Our stock characters mostly don’t know one another, don’t know quite why this stranger has invited them to the event, and are destined to become victims and suspects in a series of murders.  But by now they are frankly sick of being suspects and falling victim to murder and plot contrivances most foul.  They want out, and they determine that they won’t play the author’s game any more.

Will the author manage to bump some of them off anyway?

Ed Sala’s murder mystery is chock full of twists and reversals as fate and fatalities take their toll on the guest list.  Under directorial newcomer Josh Wiseman, Canberra Repertory’s cast (seeming far larger than it actually was) has made the most of the play’s comedy, which really takes off in Act Two, leaving its audience delighted.  The jokes inherent in the characters’ struggle against their own author came to life in the hands of an able cast whose skill in comedy — through excellent timing, use of accents and verbal tics, studied mannerisms, and enthusiastic physicality — was ably supported by precision timing in lighting and sound.

REP’s production of Bloody Murder took full advantage of the comic potential of characters’ sly acknowledgements of their play’s fictionality to deliver laughs at a cracking pace.

John P. Harvey.

Photographer: Ross Gould.