Ian Rankin gave his spiky but oddly likable detective John Rebus a surname referring to puzzles involving images. So one of many nuanced clues in the stage play Rankin has co-written with Simon Reade is that the case confronting Rebus is crucially a pictorial challenge.
A dinner party the cop attends with a lawyer girlfriend (platonic, he regrets) in the wealthy end of Edinburgh takes place in a room so heavily hung with early 20th-century Scottish colourists that it resembles an art gallery; and these paintings prove more than decorative. Also enjoyably meta is that Rebus is helping to solve a fictional crime – set as a between-courses entertainment by hostess Harriet – when a real corpse is found. Rankin fans will relish a Jekyll and Hyde reference nodding back 37 years to Knots and Crosses, the first Rebus book, inspired by RL Stevenson’s story.
As Rebus teases the connections between a death and five rich people – the hostess, her gambler husband, the lawyer and a casino owner with a much younger “influencer” partner – there seems to be a deliberate nod to Inspector Goole, nemesis of the entitled in JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls. Although, given the centrality of mobile phones to sleuthing and solution, Rebus proves more Inspector Google. Rankin and Reade’s plot is so ingeniously elusive that the published text – surely the most expensive play script ever at £18.99 for 122 pages – is, informatively if not financially, worth it.
In what – given Rankin’s policy of ageing Rebus in real time – must sadly be regarded as late Rebus, the author seems to be closing the walls around his anti-hero. In a programme interview, the writer teases that the 25th Rebus novel, Midnight and Blue published next month, makes the policeman a prisoner, solving an inside crime. The single room setting of the play is another sort of cell, albeit one that Rebus can leave freely through two (this again a crucial detail) doors. But, in any time or place, the Scottish cop is fascinating and Gray O’Brien plays him dark-ish, but with more charm than other iterations. A moment when he breaks bad news powerfully suggests a man who has been death’s messenger too often.
At two 40-minute acts, this joins the small sub-set of plays that should have been longer but, touring until November, will warm many autumn nights.
• At Cambridge Arts theatre until 7 September, then touring
