Sydney Reviews

Heavens to Murgatroyd, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a mysterious affair of style.

Director and production designer, Ali Bendall, gazed into her Christie ball, and foresaw a set of monumental curtains, drapes that conjure the period of the piece and also facilitate fluid scene changes, reveals and conceals.

These curtains are coloured green, symbolic of the plays setting, the green and pleasant land of King’s Abbot, and aid in the transition from warm and cosy indoors to woodsy outdoor locations.

Peter David Allison makes a splendid Hercule Poirot, a strutting popinjay in bowler, cane and trademark moustache, with a nose for the details of human behaviour and the little grey cells that have put many a murderer inside little grey cells.

Nathan Moss as Dr. Sheppard is excellent, an accidental Watson to Poirot’s Sherlock Holmes, with an addiction to the newfangled dictaphone.

Roslyn Hicks as his sister, Caroline, the font of all village knowledge, is an unabashed scene stealer, a kinetically energised gossip with crack-fire delivery and on-target timing.

Peter Hoekstra-Bass plays the butler, Parker, the obligatory country estate murder mystery trope, with an adroit drollery.

Eight other actors present stock characters of the genre – housekeepers, secretaries, ingenues, big game hunters, and plodding coppers – including a delightful cameo from company veteran, Rod Stewart, credited in the programme as Special Agent.

Playwright Philip Grecian earns plaudits for his adaptation of Agatha Christie’s novel of the same name, a locked door mystery and the plotting of the perfect murder, infused with a charming wit, a classic whodunit with a period country house, a cast of equally suspect characters, an apparently unfathomable murder and a surprise solution.

Costuming by Susan Carveth and Lighting by Cian Byrne keep the production visually interesting until curtain call where it’s curtains for the culprit, an ignominious end for an unusual suspect.