An artist is dead in his Chelsea studio, stabbed in the throat, blood everywhere. But this stage is no crime scene: the only red stuff is the strawberry jam that policeman Harold Webber spreads on his bread. That’s because Mark Ravenhill has sliced off the first act from Charles Bennett’s thriller, best known for becoming Alfred Hitchcock’s first talkie in 1929.
We don’t see the artist’s attack on a young woman, Alice, who kills him in self-defence. In Ravenhill’s version – half his dialogue, half Bennett’s – we instead hear about it in grim detail. Alice (Jessie Hills) tells first Harold (Gabriel Akuwudike), to whom she is engaged, and later her mum, Ada (Lucy Speed).
