This summer’s Colin McIntyre Classic Thrillers Season at the Theatre Royal hits the ground running with the opening production.
A young woman, Susy, beautiful – and completely blind – is left alone at the Notting Hill flat she shares with her photographer husband. During the following few hours she’s subjected to a tense and terrifying ordeal.
Three cheap crooks, two of them just out of prison, masquerading as police personnel, are searching for a haul of heroin. For a reason not yet known to us, it’s stashed somewhere in the flat, hidden in a child’s doll.
Wait until Dark (1966) is one of the two best and most successful thrillers written by Frederick Knott, the other one being Dial M for Murder (1952). Each of these plays is widely held to be a masterpiece.
Susy Henderson is done by Anna Mitcham in the stand-out performance. She convinces us that here is a woman who, despite a huge disability, is shrewd, brave and resourceful. She doesn’t have better hearing than a sighted person; but she deploys hers way more effectively than most.
Chris Sheridan (absent from the thrillers for the past three or four years) plays Mike, the most significant of the three bad boys. Sheridan gives his man a touch of humour in his nastiness.
But compared with a lot of Thrillers Season fare, which is unmistakably tongue-in- cheek, this one has a significant strand of seriousness running through it.
A 1967 open-plan kitchen/siting-room set is well observed and dressed by designer Sarah Wynne Kordas – that washing machine and fridge are straight out of the late fifties. And, what with all the phone calls coming in, as in all proper thrillers, the 706 telephone does a first-class job of work. In this particular production, Keith Tuttle’s lighting design is of special importance.
Karen Henson directs.
Wait Until Dark is at the Theatre Royal until Saturday, August 3. For tickets: 0115 989 5555, trch.co.uk.
