Review: Murdered to Death by Sam Bass Community Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Peter Gordon's script of Murdered to Death is a loving send-up of the British "whodunit" and in particular of Agatha Christie's drawing room murder mysteries.
Dame Agatha's novels still sell vigorously today. Not so much in the United States, where we're more likely to encounter them at the public library or at used book sales along with discarded piles of Readers' Digest condensed books. But the French, the Germans, and -- presumably -- the British consume lots of Christie.
That tiny authoress, born in 1890 and died in 1976, has sold four billion copies of her novels to date, according to Wikipedia. Only the Bible has outsold her. She's the most translated author of all time, according to UNESCO, outsold only by the collective corporate output of Walt Disney. Her novels have appeared in 56 languages.
Perhaps because she constructed her tidy little puzzles in imagined comfortable settings stereotypical of the British landed gentry and bourgeoisie. Perhaps because she contrasted the elaborate politeness and bloodless deference of the educated English with their secret, bloody passions. Perhaps because in that world,crimes and mysteries were generally elucidated and the guilty were usually apprehended by the equally polite and deferential forces of order, guided almost always by an inspired amateur.
It's a familiar scene, that 1930s tranquility sealed up in our imaginations, safe from the depredations of the wider world. The tidy universe of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot is such a part of English literary tradition that it's ripe for ribbing and re-interpretation.
Playwright Peter Morgan happily employs Christie's devices and character types, and the cast at the Sam Bass Community Theatre plays them with due respect -- in fact, the more absurd the goings on, the more deadpan is the humor. And it's very amusing, indeed.
Crabbed spinster Mildred Bagshot lives in the country with her niece Dorothy, her sole heir. They play weekend hostess to a retired colonel and his wife, friends of long standing, as well as to a self-satisfied art dealer with French beret, French accent, and a languorously lovely wife. Her exquisite manners, sleek clothes and long wave of shimmering hair are reminiscent of those Veronica Lake. There's a white-haired, doddering butler named Bunting, who has a weakness for the drinks cart.
The niceties are carried out in an oh-so-polite English fashion. Hostess Mildred Bagshot (Nikki Bora) is a would-be femme fatale, slinking about outrageously as if she were the age of her prim young niece Dorothy (Dyann Green).
A neighbor comes calling: Miss Maple [cf.Christie's detective Miss Marple] , wearing her sensible hat and her sensible grey outfit and her sensible black walking shoes. You just know that in that atmosphere, once we get the house properly filled up, someone will wind up murdered.
Or "murdered to death," as the dimly earnest acting Inspector Pratt later confides to his rather smarter subordinate.
Miss Maple isn't at the scene of the murder, but rather in the midst of it. She sits, placidly knitting in the drawing room, when we see the gun poke through the doorway. We hear the shot that whizzes past her and leaves a victim sprawled in the dining room off stage right, visible only as a pair of shoes. A bit like the last glimpse we get of the Wicked Witch of the West in the movie.
Playwright Morgan constructs lots of intrigues, red herrings and possibilities, both for that murder and for a later one. The police come tramping in with their heavy boots, and a right mess they make of it, too.
Frank Benge in his defiantly ill-fitting suit is acting Inspector Pratt. (In British slang, a "prat" is someone who's delusional and dumb; "prat" can refer to buttocks, as in "pratfall.") The stereotype of the incompetent policeman is a clown of long and honorable history, dating back to Punch & Judy shows or even before. Rowland Atkinson's Mr. Bean is a distant relation; even closer is Atkinson's fabulously limited Inspector Fowler in the BBC's series The Thin Blue Line. Or think of Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau -- although to meet Frank Benge's stature, you would need to inflate Sellers like a dirigible.
David Dunlap as the carefully dressed, courteous Constable Thompkins does his best to guide his supervisor, but it's an eternally losing battle against low wattage.Veronica Pryor as Miss Maple knits her way with equanimity through these catastrophes, her sensible advice matching her sensible shoes.
There's a wealth of suspects, scattered about like the playing pieces in a game of Clue. Richard Dodwell is the harrumphing colonel, a caricature of the feckless former colonial administrator, coming eventually in his wooden way to self-realization and confession to Miss Maple.
His wife Margaret (Jan Phillips) has lots of his empty-headed sententiousness to endure, not always with good grace.
Offering ample grounds for suspicion are rascally Sean Hunter as the art dealer and Cici Barone as his poised woman confederate. And then there's Craig Kanne's deliciously inebriated butler, Bunting. Did he do it? Kanne is stiff in the joints when almost sober and he's admirably inclined, flexible and gregarious when not sober at all.
Costuming is superb. Veronica Prior gets a card full of gold stars in enthusiastic recognition of her eye, imagination and taste in fabrics.
Director Lynn Beaver and cast keep this pot of silly stew bubbling right along. Lynn says that Morgan has written two other plays about the intrepidly dense Inspector Pratt. Like this one, those may well make for engaging entertainments out in Round Rock some day.
EXTRA
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Murdered to Death
by Peter Gordon
Sam Bass Theatre Association
