MURDERERS
MURDERERS, Ensemble Theatre Kirribilli, October 8-November 20, 2010. Photos: Natalie Boog
RIDDLE CAY gated retirement community may be in Florida but it clearly has much in common with the high security aged environments so loved by Dame Edna Everage: get an oldie through these gates and you can throw away the key and start spending the inheritance.
Under American playwright Jeffrey Hatcher’s acerbic gaze it becomes a challenging subject for satire and comedy, particularly atthe Ensemble where the traditional audience demographic is heading towards such habitats at warp speed. Nevertheless, it offers an instantly interesting premise for the audience when three actors walk on stage and announce: “I am a murderer”. Usually you’re offered clues, red herrings and a few dead bodies before reaching that point, but not with Murderers.
Director Mark Kilmurry has assembled a perfect cast then offered them a safe environment in which to show what they can do. The result is absorbing storytelling with laughter, food for thought, more laughter, more thought snacks and finally, some uncomfortable home truths – couched in laughter – to mull over on the way home.
In the form of sequential monologues, the play opens in one of the Riddle Cay luxury villas. Here Richard Sydenham as Gerald Halverson, a decent enough sort, lives with his ailing new wife. She’s a lot older than he because she’s actually his girlfriend’s mother. He’s been persuaded to marry her so the younger pair can inherit mother’s estate, free of taxes, when she succumbs to galloping kidney failure. It doesn’t exactly work out as planned and it’s unlikely you’ll guess the outcome; it is startling however.
Nancye Hayes follows as Lucy Stickler, one of Riddle Cay’s nicer residents who tells of the arrival of an old girlfriend who once had an affair with her husband and is a notorious man-eater. What Lucy decides to do is no secret, given she’s already announced she is a murderer; how she accomplishes it is another matter and again, you’ll never guess.
Sydenham and Hayes are star turns in any company, but it must be said that Zoé Carides is the final act and the showstealer. She is such an under-rated and under-used actor and it’s a delight to see her strutting her stuff in such style (so soon after an equally compelling performance in Kate Gaul’s The Seagull). As Riddle Cay Village Administrator, Minka Lupino, Carides first of all tells her audience that she really doesn’t like the term “serial killer”; then how much she admires famous murder-mystery writer JG Garland (who’s apparently written such deathless tomes as Murder With The Lunts and other celebrations of homicide on the Great White Way).
All in all, Murderers is a black-hearted, light-hearted 90 minutes of grim fairy tales that should put the wind up any chancer who’s thinking of trying to get their paws on an inheritance before time.
