INSIDE JOB

for The Public Reviews

Ian Dickens Productions at the Mercury Theatre Colchester

14.06.10

Brian Clemens [OBE in last week's Honours List] is better known for his television work – he created the Avengers and the Professionals – but this thriller from the Eighties is the classic kind of ingenious, if stagey, intrigue that aims to keep the audience guessing.

It's set on the Costa del Crime, and the converted farmhouse boasts a big chimney, with gas laid on, fire-irons, and Toledo steel artistically arranged above. Sleeping pills in the desk, a revolver in the safe. More murder weapons than Colonel Mustard's country seat …

The plot is a series of deals, deceptions and double bluffs. “Trapped, twisted and turned”, the three characters prowl like predators. Hard to analyse the plot without spoiling the fun, but the game-playing and the treachery are all to do with revenge and rough justice. It'a all “diabolically clever”, and only at the end do we see how improbable the whole house of cards actually is. The dénouement, when it comes, has to be explained, which involves the two chief conspirators telling each other the very facts and coincidences that prompted them to devise the devious scheme in the first place.

Giles Watling's production bowls along nicely, with a really pacy sequence of panic in Act Two. The scene changes involve a tab curtain and lots of guitar music, and I was unconvinced by the car bomb, the machine gun wounds and the poker.

The cast included two heartthrobs from Emmerdale, including Matt Healey reprising his role as a bad lad, in this case a “bang man” on the run from Interpol. A limited range, dramatically, with eyebrows that seemed to be worked by strings and a cocky leer as his default expression. A sense of real menace, though, when things turned nasty. Suave Christopher Villiers was very watchable as the diamond dealer who is not all he seems, with glamorous Michelle Morris as the woman we take to be his wife.

Will Suzy and Larry make it to Rio ? Will the Spanish police pin it all on the separatists ? Which bullets are blanks, which diamonds are paste ?

This is the kind of cardboard drama that lives on in church halls long after the professionals have left it for dead. But the Mercury audience enjoyed a solid, slick production from the prolific Ian Dickens stable; it's touring to Crewe next week, with Darlington and Swansea later in the summer.

this piece first appeared on The Public Reviews