By Dan O’Farrell.
The crime genre has been a massively popular feature of British cultural life since the first Sherlock Holmes stories rolled off the Victorian printing presses. TV schedules are still awash with ‘whodunnits’, murder-mysteries and increasingly dark thrillers, and crime fiction remains the most reliably high-selling flavour in our nation’s bookstores, both real and virtual. Crime stories on stage, though, have enjoyed a bumpier journey through history: long-running adaptations like ‘The Mousetrap’ seeming to buck the modern trend to prefer nights at the theatre that feature singing, dancing and Disney licenses.
It’s pleasing for crime fans, then, to see the latest well-produced and well-promoted adaptation of the work of one of the most successful modern crime writers – Brighton-based Peter James – turning up for a three-night run at The Mayflower, and then continuing to tour the UK afterwards until the end of July.
‘Picture You Dead’ is a lively piece based around the murkily fascinating world of art-forgeries. James was inspired to write the original novel after meeting real-life art ‘copyist’ David Henty, who nurtured his ability to re-produce masterpieces during art-lessons he attended whilst serving a prison sentence for producing forged passports. Henty – fictionalised here as ‘Dave Hegarty’ – is a truly interesting character: ‘gone straight…ish’ but seemingly always one step ahead of the police and the crooks. Peter Ash’s performance does a great job of suggesting both the charm and decency that makes everyone want to trust the forger, and the undertow of possible dishonesty that floats behind him like a vapour trail.
The story revolves around the accidental acquisition of a highly valuable painting by a normal young married couple, Freya and Harry Kipling; their interactions with the seemingly helpful Hegarty, and the attempts of the villains of the piece – art-collector Stuart Piper and his deranged sidekick, Roberta – to retrieve the painting for themselves. It’s all enormous fun.
The production rollicks along at an amazing pace and mostly manages to straddle the ‘uncanny valley’ middle-zone that makes this genre difficult to stage: how to be naturalistic enough in most scenes to feel like the TV productions we all happily feast-on at home, yet theatrical and ‘larger-than-life’ enough at key moments to give us the theatrical thrill which has brought us off our sofas on a cold February night. The play’s winning fluency is helped by Adrian Linford’s highly effective set, which enables the action to ping-pong between the Kipling’s front room, Hegarty’s studio and Piper’s secret, candle-lit gallery without pausing for breath.
One of the staple pleasures of the crime genre is always the characterisation of the detective. ‘Picture You Dead’ stays true to its source material, however, and resists the temptation to give us a quirky or eccentric Roy Grace. George Rainsford plays James’ hero as the dedicated, thorough and realistically ‘normal’ character that inhabits the books. Assisted by his similarly straight-laced deputy – Gemma Stoyan’s effectively under-played Bella Moy – Grace is happily upstaged by the more seductively oleaginous charms of Nicholas Maude’s Piper, a study in pony-tailed arrogance and hipster-suited obsession. Jodie Steele also has great fun as Roberta, Piper’s murderous art-agent, played as if she’s parachuted in from an early episode of ‘Killing Eve’.
As any good crime mystery deserves, there are some decent twists in the second act and the multiplying copies of the ‘old French masterpiece’ create some pleasingly farcical moments, strangely reminiscent at times of the plot of the Marx Brothers’ classic ‘Animal Crackers’. There is enough gun-play, PG-grade violence and unexpected corpses to remind us that we are in a more serious universe, however, and the whole show adds up to a very entertaining night out.
Tickets for Peter James’ Picture You Dead (Thursday 27 February – Saturday 1 March 2025) are on sale at mayflower.org.uk or 02380 711811.
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