A Tale of trickery and entrapment
The Business of Murder
Devonshire Park Theatre, Eastbourne,
Wednesday, April 30th to Saturday, May 3rd, 2025
by Tony Flood
The plot in award-winning writer Richard Harris’ psychological thriller The Business of Murder takes a long time to unravel as the audience is kept guessing, but it is worth the wait.
Tabs Productions (Who Killed Agatha Christie and Murdered to Death) return to The Devonshire Park Theatre with an enigmatic tale of trickery and entrapment.
It is cleverly written for a cast of three, with the mysterious Mr Stone bringing a detective and a playwright to his flat under false pretences.
Harris, whose television credits include A Touch Of Frost, The Sweeney, The Avengers and The Last Detective, is guilty of a slow, wordy start. But things hot up when the female playwright Dee discovers that her lover Detective Inspector Hallett has also been invited to the nondescript flat.
Excellent performances by David Gilbrook as Stone, John Goodrum, perfectly cast as cocky DI Hallett, and Sarah Wynne Kordas (Dee) bring out the best in Harris’ script.
The play, which ran for seven years in the West End, is set in the 1980s, and an old fashioned telephone plugged into the wall provides a vital clue.
Hallett was contacted by Stone supposedly to be given information by Stone’s son about a drug dealer, while Dee was expecting to discuss a script she believes has been written by Stone’s wife. But we have been told that Stone’s wife is dead, and we suspect that his son does not exist so what are his motives?
Gilbrook does a great job fluently delivering a large amount of dialogue and switching brilliantly from an inoffensive ‘nobody’ to a hate-filled man full of venom and menace. Goodrum gives Hallett the right amount of arrogrance, while Kordas captures both Dee’s confidence and vulnerability.
This revived production also benefits from director Karen Henson’s intimate staging and the 1980s atmosphere created by Conal Walsh’s set design which includes many props from that period.
The Business of Murder, which contains moments of humour to lighten the tension, deserved a bigger attendance than that at Wednesday’s opening night.
