Getting Away With Murder
Old Fire Station Theatre
22-26 October

Whodunnit? Who decided to bring Stephen Sondheim's clunking murder mystery to Oxford, indeed why did Sondheim write a non-musical in the first place, and then who did the actors think they were kidding with such bitty, distracted performances? Whoever is to blame, a terrible deed has been done.

Seven patients, each representing a deadly sin, discover that their group therapist has been murdered, and they must make a choice: phone the police and allow the media to pore over their private, sinful secrets, or wait around and deduce who among themselves is the murderer. Unfortunately they choose the latter. In the course of their sleuthing they discover the therapist, Dr Bering, had not only been using them as source material for a new book, but that he had arrived at an eighth deadly sin.

To be fair to the actors, the script is banal. Clichéd lines emerge from even more clichéd characters, including a greedy property developer, a power-hungry politician, a jealous academic, a floozy waitress, and a stupid, fat Greek man. Each character reveals their particular neurosis in obvious first lines - this from a play whose programme announces, "Crucially, we [the audience] are allowed to think for ourselves".

This is the problem: we are not allowed to think for ourselves. We find out who the killer is before the interval. Fair enough then, perhaps we are supposed to reflect in the second half on why the character was compelled into such drastic action. Instead, the explanation is thrown in our face; indeed through various asides the murderer lets the audience know he knows we know. How can there be any mystery? And without mystery, we are left looking at our watches waiting for the play to finish.

The precept of the eighth sin is the only mystery, Sondheim and his co-writer George Furth suggesting that politics - "manipulation" - is the deadliest sin of all. Why? So the murderer is power-hungry, but then so are all the other characters. All but one is willing to overlook the murder to save their public face, so why single out power? Any attempt at social commentary collapses.

You can almost pity the poor actors forced to bring life to this mess. Almost. Alas, in the main they present themselves not as characters but as actors waiting for each other to say their lines, watching each other, at one point even turning toward and reacting as a group to one actor slightly before that actor says their line. Of their attempts at American accents, only the dumb Southern waitress, played by Chloe Potter, sounds consistent.

The director's decision to cast a play about greed in, of all places, 1980s New York only adds to the cliché. The set itself is split into two cluttered main rooms connected by a doorway, resulting in the entire cast shuffling back and forward between rooms en masse like a pack of tired tourists. Using Dr Bering's answer phone as a device to shed insight on what really happened would have been fine only we can't hear the machine for the sound of the patients bickering.

You are left feeling like you've sat through a bad TV movie, one you should have turned off after 5 minutes.

Ben O'Loughlin
22nd October 2002