Part of the problem lies in billing the play as a thriller; for a nation of avid crime and thriller fans this play does not live up to that marketing plug. A cipher, in our modern use of the word, conjures up spies, espionage, and cloak and dagger techniques. For cold war purists, John Le Carre novels epitomise the espionage thriller; modern TV viewers will have learnt all they need to know about spying in the 21st century from the long running TV series, Spooks. Sometimes the play reads like King simply lifted wholesale the humourless dialogue, central casting spymasters and plot lines from both UK and US spy dramas.
Code breakers call a cipher a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure – writing a thriller if you will. But scroll down the dictionary definitions and you hit on what caught King’s eye; taken from the historic use indicating a zero, a cipher describes a person of no importance, especially one who does the bidding of others and seems to have no will of their own. Justine is described as such a person by her sister and this is used to justify the less than believable denouement. I am not sure if I was more cross at the lack of motivation for Justine’s final act or the fact that the plot device borrowed directly from the current BBC version of Sherlock Holmes. Ultimately we don’t care enough about Justine for her fate to matter.As discussed in the lively post-show Q&A, it is a sign of our artistic times that touring productions of new works or bold revivals are increasingly joint ventures, like this one, due to the financial strictures that all companies work under. Sub-consciously do playwrights create works that only need a handful of actors to stage them, because of a financial imperative? Sometimes the doubling is very effective in Ciphers, at other times simply irritating. It is a shock at the curtain call to only see four people standing there, which is testament to the actors and their story telling, but quite often the costume devices used to differentiate between some characters jar or are the wrong choice for the part.
McIntyre’s direction (she was last at the Playhouse with a peerless The Seagull) is strong, the staging is inspired and some of the performances work well sometimes, but overall this is a disappointing play.