Theatre review: The Perfect Murder, King's Theatre, Edinburgh

PETER JAMES is the perfect master of the post-Thatcherite misanthropic murder mystery.
The Perfect MurderThe Perfect Murder
The Perfect Murder

The Perfect Murder | Rating: *** | King’s Theatre, Edinburgh

In his world of nasty, brutish and abruptly shortened lives, everyone is greedy, grasping and on the take - except his ideal English hero of a police detective, Roy Grace, whose only weakness is his penchant for consulting clairvoyants.

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The real saving grace of this latest show from the James stable, though, lies in its inky black humour, a suburban noir that perfectly matches the talents of the show’s twin stars, EastEnders favourites Shane Richie and Jessie Wallace. Richie plays Victor Smiley, an ordinary middle-ranking IT manager with a wife he hates, and an East European prostitute on the side. Wallace is his wife Joan, who - unbeknown to Victor - is nursing a homicidal rage against her husband fully as violent as his plans for her, while pursuing a red-hot affair with a fit young taxi driver called Don.

The scene is therefore set - quite literally, in Michael Holt’s two-storey stage design - for a daft but enjoyable domestic horror show, full of clashing murder plans and pseudo-supernatural shocks. If the show has a point, it has to do with its cleverly-engineered collision between the utterly ordinary (the suburban-house, the tired, bickering marriage) and the potential murderer in us all. And with strong support from Simona Armstrong as Kamila the call-girl, Richie and Wallace give us a pair of funny, well-judged performances, in which both blend the monstrous and the mediocre so deftly that when one of them finally emerges as the winner, it seems like an unnatural break in a story that should go on for ever - just like EastEnders itself.

• Until 5 March