The risk of a successful crime story is that exponentially more people know whodunnit. The Mousetrap and 2:22: A Ghost Story plead with theatregoers to keep the secret. Adapting for the stage Kate Summerscale’s 2008 bestseller, which has also been serialised for ITV, Alexandra Wood’s problem is that millions already know The Suspicions of Mr Whicher’s solution to the mystery of the murder of a three-year-old in Wiltshire.
Wood ingeniously remedies this by intricately plaiting timelines so that even clued-up viewers can be confused about what happens next or possibly before. In 1881, dejected ex-Metropolitan police detective Jonathan Whicher visits Fulham prison to question Constance Kent about the 1860 case that finished his reputation. Beautifully, with fleeting changes of voice, posture and lighting (by Katy Morison), characters move between conversations 20 years apart.
Summerscale’s clever title alluded to Victorian doubts about the emerging art of detection and a low-class cop investigating the high-born. These suspicions quiver in the pivotal scenes between Eleanor Wyld’s haughty, haunted Constance and Christopher Naylor’s astute but cowed Whicher, whom she treats as a sort of butler of justice. The script also strongly brings out the misogynist psychology of the time, in which the belief that the life and work of men mattered more than that of women had devastating consequences. And fresh contemporary context comes with a frisson unavailable in earlier versions, thanks to Whicher’s lament that he has been blamed for “everything that is wrong with the Metropolitan police”.
The economy of Wood’s text is matched by Kate Budgen’s direction, which, in a tight hour-and-a-half playing time, gives two minutes to a daring silent interlude. Jim Creighton, Sam Liu, Robyn Sinclair and Connie Walker each play multiple people, speeding between types and times without adding extra puzzles to the crime.
The main losses from the 360-page book are the case’s links to the rise of crime fiction (Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens) and to sensational journalism, plus a theological subplot about the sanctity of confession in Anglo-Catholicism. But this deft, tense show means that Summerscale’s book, a key text in the rise of true-crime writing, has now succeeded in three media.
At the Watermill theatre, Newbury, until 10 June
