Imagine author Matt Perkins sitting down to watch an episode of Wallander, only to find it's been taped over The Big Sleep. Scenes begin to flicker and intercut, until boom! a new genre is born: Scando-Noir.
Perkins obviously loves the noir genre and has worked in some pleasingly cynical jokes about acadaemia. It kept the audience (of which, by the way, 90% of the male members were bearded - is this the new student chic or merely among noir-lovers?) cheerfully amused. He's pretty well up on scandi-crime and also artist Edvard Munch. And he ties these neatly together, in one of the most bizarre and involved plots I've ever seen.
The storyline ranges through half a dozen countries (and their concomitant accents), taking in murder and thuggery by way of art fraud and people trafficking. Lars Sørken, professor and gentleman detective, uses people's body language in a complicated scheme to determine their motives. Essentially it's the inverse of blocking out a play: take the characters' final positions and work backwards to their state of mind. It's a promising, if involved, premise, and I desperately wanted it to work.
Great care has been taken over the marketing materials, including a newspaper, a castlist, and a plot synopsis (which proved vital). But the cast were still falling over the props, and had not factored the space taken up by an audience into their calculations. In short, I wasn't as impressed by the stage management dept, but on the other hand they had been given a bit of a beast of a job: one scene involves a man being dangled out of a very fast car. You really have to wonder whether the author had it in for his crew.
It's an unwieldy work in other ways too: it really needs half the number of scenes, of double the length. Too much chopping and changing breaks up the interactions between characters, so we don't get the development, and results in the most enormous amount of scenechanging. It might have been better to have areas of the stage left set up, so the characters could just move between them. Or do without, which is one of the things about student theatre at the BT I like best: because there's hardly any room to store props and scenery, it can simplify things, and focus all the energies on the play.
Dan Draper, as the lead, needed a more formidable tone. He needed to be recognisably older than the others - a fully fledged professor in a world of protegés. My favourite actor was Antti Laine. He was great, funny and recognisably different when swapping roles. Carolin Kreuzer as the detecting sidekick was a bit fast but very watchable. I just felt Perkins should have made his actors watch more noir in preparation. If you say your hero sounds just like Humphrey Bogart then really he should!
This is not a great play. But, and this is a big but, it's an ambitious debut. The BT stands for experimentation, and I'd rather see a noble attempt here than a big-budget playing-it-safe lacklustre tour any day.