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British touring theatre at the moment is often a case of watching the TV detectives. Inspector Morse: House of Ghosts is in Sheffield this week and Hercule Poirot in Death on the Nile reaches Northampton next week, with both shows on the road well into spring. DSI Roy Grace and DI John Rebus investigated deaths live last year.
The latest telly cop to be let out of the box is DCI Barnaby who, in Midsomer Murders, has occupied ITV prime time for 28 years, an age that residents of the Hampshire-adjacent village here often need a lot of luck to reach.
Writer-director Guy Unsworth starts with the first of Caroline Graham’s source novels, The Killings at Badger’s Drift, which also began the TV franchise in 1997. A horticulturist is found dead in her kitchen, leading Barnaby to overturn the local GP’s verdict of old age after interviewing shifty village eccentrics. On TV, British showbiz stalwarts each inhabit one oddball but three of Unsworth’s main cast of seven actors entertainingly play trios of suspects/victims, enjoyably swapping costumes and genders.
All of the screen cops recently brought to stage have at some point filled ITV’s mid-evening, which is significant to the rhythms of these theatre nights. The downtown American murder rate of rural English Midsomer was partly due to another slaying being a good way of bridging the commercial break. Unsworth sensibly uses the interval to the same end and gives great fun with a stage equivalent of TV’s easy cutting, actors sliding in on trucks and Julie Legrand at one point playing two characters almost simultaneously.
While Midsomer Murders is essentially harmless entertainment, there was a scandal and production reboot in 2011 when a producer suggested that the series offered viewers a haven from multiculturalism. Unsworth seems quietly to acknowledge this when DS Troy, played by the British-Filipino actor James Bradwell, doing plucky work in an underwritten part, suffers some othering from Badger’s Drift bigots.
Daniel Casey, following John Nettles and Neil Dudgeon as TV’s Barnabys, gamely copes with being the straight man among wits and twits. Generally loving towards its source, the adaptation is occasionally lethal, as in an allusion to how Barnaby’s annual appraisal with the chief constable might go, given the body-count on his patch. Another daring touch is verbal; the words “Constable”, in the police sense, and “Picasso”, in its art meaning (paintings are central to the subplot), are delivered in ways that would have ITV up before the regulator.
Going for jokes even more than the TV show – particularly in the transposition of English countryside with behaviours from Greek tragedy – Unsworth might be daringly exploring a new genre of homicidal panto. But, as crime stories and cross-dressed comic grotesques are British theatre’s core winter forms, this may be the way to a financial killing. If you don’t watch the TV series, only book a ticket over your dead body but, for fans of the programme, there will be huge pleasures on a tour of the UK and Ireland that, fittingly, continues almost until next midsummer.
