THE BUSINESS OF MURDER by Richard Harris
Venue: Duchess 1981
Directed by Hugh Goldie



Cast
Stone - Francis Matthews
George Sewell
Lynette Davies

Review

Murder and mystery plays have become more complex since the days of Agatha Christie, when the important thing was just to keep the audience puzzled and to hell with the characterisation. Now thriller writers are not only heavily into characterisation but abnormal psychology, and Richard Harris is no exception as he goes about The Business of Murder at the Duchess. He does of course observe the Christie ground rules of keeping the audience guessing and he does take an awfully long time to set the whole thing up in the first act, when we are far from certain about the connection between his three characters - the creepy, slimy Stone, the lady television playwright whom he has persuaded to visit his flat to give advice about his dying wife’s own writing capabilities, and the jovial but cynical police superintendent who has likewise called by request to investigate a drug’s matter connected with Stone’s son.

But after the interval matters perk up and considerably, spurred by our realisation that there is no wife, no son, that the relationship between playwright and policeman is very close indeed and that both of them have an even darker relationship with Stone, who turns out to be a man broken by his arrest for a murder of which he was innocent, the event being dramatised for all the nation to see by the playwright. What we are observing is Stone’s revenge, an elaborate framing of his two enemies, and Francis Matthews makes an excellent job of depicting Stone’s concealed glee at his own cleverness, with Lynette Davies as the writer gradually losing her cool and George Sewell as the tough copper who refuses to get rattled. It is a play with some disturbing moral undertones beneath its surface trickery, tightly directed by Hugh Goldie in John Page’s humdrum suburban setting.