Average acting in crime thriller

Alex Ferns as the bereaved playwright is fairly certain his actors will want to help him find out who killed his former leading lady...

REHEARSAL FOR MURDER

(Opera House, Manchester, to Saturday)

I'M SURE there's a case to be made for some sort of moratorium on productions of stage crime thrillers.

Consider for a moment the disappointment they cause, gathering together the lower reaches of acting society, throwing a script at them and hoping for a good result, only to have dreams of thrills, murder and justice, and maybe a bit of sex, mostly dashed.

The stage thriller is pretty much dead on arrival. Back when Agatha Christie was a girl and entertainment consisted of going to the cinema, a night round the radio or at the theatre, the live equivalent of the TV detective series was all the rage.

Today Agatha Christie plays are little more than a joke, and we have so many high class detective series on TV, indeed whole channels devoted to them, in HD colour with intricate, gritty plots told over several hours, that why anyone would want to watch a mediocre one like this, not to mention the cost of doing so, is beyond me.

It's a shame because the pedigree of Rehearsal for Murder is pretty good. The writers, Richard Levinson and William Link, created many classic detective series including Columbo and Murder, She Wrote, as well as this, originally a made-for-TV movie adapted by David Rogers. The production is from Bill Kenwright and looks substantial and the director is Roy Marsden, well-known as a TV detective.

A playwright (Alex Ferns) gets together a group of actors for the reading of his new play on the first anniversary of the death of his leading lady and fiancée (Susie Amy), only for it to become clear that the script and the events of her suicide coincide - and the playwright is trying to flush out what he believes is her killer.

Apart from being a fairly ridiculous premise it's clear the writer knows exactly whodunnit, but plays the game to keep us guessing over a couple of hours of duff plot and average acting.

Alex Ferns is a fairly belligerent playwright and the show is peppered with middling TV faces. But the characters are sketchily drawn, sketchily handled and unconvincing. Much like the genre.