Just one more question... it's classic whodunnit time at the Theatre Royal.
People love crime, a right famous writer told me that once, and he weren’t half right; we can’t get enough whodunnits, whydunnits, and will-he-get-away-with-its in our lives. So it’s good to see you can channel your inner Sherlock to your heart’s content at The Theatre Royal again.
Fatal Encounter is the second play in Theatre Royal’s 2024 classic thriller season, an event that’s now as much a part of Nottingham Summers as the sand between your toes after you’ve been posing at Market Square beach.
Set in Holland Park in that there London (it’s almost as nice as The Park, y’know) Howard is a husband turned sleuth when he tries to work out why his wife has been out of sorts; unexplained taxi rides, shifty excuses and money moving around accounts when it should have stayed put. Howard has to unravel the threads to find the truth, and discovers a lot more along the way...
Set in a pre-internet world, the period dialogue reflects the age of the story; but the script and the cast ratchet up the pace nicely, with red herrings, new motives and additional suspects at every turn. By the end of Act one, everyone around me in the audience was giving their best Columbo or Jessica Fletcher impressions as the safety curtain came down.
Part of seeing any thriller like this is the things we expect; a knock at the door before someone can confess, a telephone call that changes everything, salacious rumours and... Can’t tell you anymore. Don’t want to become the next unsolved crime…
The cast and crew did an excellent job carrying the story, and I was a big fan of the flashback scene where one character relives an unexpected meeting in a pub, the stage transformed with a splash of clever lighting and a cast who really made us believe, love it when theatre does that.
This is classic thriller territory, and if you’re the kind of person who goes from ‘Who put Midsomer Murders on’ to ‘I knew there was something iffy about that gardener’ in under three minutes flat, you’re in the right place.
Fatal Encounter plays at Nottingham's Theatre Royal until 17 August 2024.
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