YOU would do well to come to this the second stage play version of an Ian Rankin Inspector Rebus novel never having read any of his 25 Rebus novels, or seen the character depicted on TV by John Hannah and/or Ken Stott. If you have done either of these you probably have a very firm picture of the physical appearance and personality of John Rebus, and both will get in the way of you giving a fair hearing to Gray O’Brien’s portrayal of the character, now a 50-year-old retired polis.
I freely admit that I found it very difficult to expunge the vision of the crumpled and cynical Stott from my mind while O’Brien’s version, the still hard drinking but distinctly mellower Rebus, sat throughout Act 1 like an observer watching and listening as the five other guest he had joined at a murder mystery weekend revealed their characters and the way in which their lives were intertwined. His main contribution at this time was a series of well-timed witty interventions aimed at having fun at their expense.
Surprisingly, with a script written by Ian Rankin and former Bristol Old Vic artistic director Simon Reade, that short first Act was so crammed with information that it seemed to take much longer than its 40-minute duration. It also produced a built-in problem for the actors in Act 2 giving them the task of exploring those intertwining relationships in depth while at the same time trying to discover which one of them (if any) was responsible for the dead body discovered in a bedroom at the end of Act 1.
It says much for the quality of the acting that, while the plot lines may not always have been clear cut, they produced a series of well-crafted characters. Abigail Thaw is the slightly world- weary lawyer Stephanie Jeffries, who had been involved too many times with clients who did not deserve their not guilty verdicts. Billy Hartman is perhaps at times not quite hard enough as local gangster businessman Jack Fleming. Teresa Banham, in whose elegant Edinburgh house the story was unfolding, is Harriet Godwin, a widow who had remarried in haste and is now beginning to see through the phoney bonhomie of second husband Paul ( Neil McKinven). Jade Kennedy’s social influencer Candida Jones, thanks to a wealth of information stored on her smart phone, appears to know much more about her fellow guests than they do of her.
Candida proves to be a great help to Rebus when he comes out of his self-inflicted retirement to solve the mystery, and in so doing, allows many homes truths about the characters personal lives and relationships to be fully aired.
The way this comes about, with Candida’s continual revelations of new-found facts to Rebus via that smart phone, may be very modern, but it would have driven one of BBC West regions finest producers raving mad. He detested presenters on Radio and TV indulging in ‘in-jokes’. ‘You might think it’s funny,’ he would say, ‘but the listener or viewer do not know what is going on and will in the end become annoyed at being locked out of the joke’.
The number of times that Candida called Rebus over to look at what was displayed on her smart phone, and he would than disappear clutching his own phone, leaving the audience to ponder on what new discover had been made, had that same ability to leave them full of irritation at being left outside the action.
Set designer Terry Parsons provided a rich Edinburgh house, beautifully dressed with a series of fine classic paintings, that fitted the bill admirably. But in a play with too many words and too much ground to cover in order to fully explore six characters and solve a mystery, there were moments when it looked as if director Loveday Ingram was left with no option other than to move people to create a new picture rather than have any practical natural reason for the move.
Provided you keep your concentration as completely focused as the cast, there is much to enjoy in this view of the middle-aged John Rebus, and the other five stylishly created characters.
GRP
Photographs by Nobby Clark
The tour of Rebus ends its run at Poole Lighthouse from 26th to 30th November.