Oscar Wilde's Lord Arthur Savile's Crime (Leeds Grand, 30/03/10)

I've just solved a mystery. Neither me nor Andrew had heard of Oscar Wilde's play, Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, a stage version of which we saw on Tuesday night. It turns out that it was a short story by Wilde, it was never a stage script by the famous wit. According to the programme, the play we saw was 'performed in a new and original version by Mr Trevor Baxter', and it's a credit to Mr Baxter that we had no idea that the script was not written by Wilde himself. 

Crime is a very funny farce/melodrama in which Lord Arthur has his palm read, is told he will commit murder, and so to protect his fiance from himself, he decides to pre-empt fate by killing an elderly family member first. There's really not much more to the plot than that, but of course nothing goes as smoothly as expected. The morality of the murders is never explored, as this breezy comedy is about the farce, and the sparkling dialogue shared by the small company of actors. 

Lee Mead, of Joseph and the Technicolour Dreamcoat fame, was Lord Arthur Savile, and he was just fine - better than I had expected, which was a good thing as he only seemed to spend about 10 mins off stage during the whole performance. The other names I recognised were Gary Wilmot as Mr Podgers the fortune-teller or chiromantist (a palm-reader, apparently), and Kate O'Mara as Lady Windermere (of Fan fame) - the latter was particularly fabulous - when told that she was in danger on land or sea, Lady Windermere hatches a plan to spend the foreseeable future in a hot air balloon, with Mr Podgers reading her palm via telescope! 

I liked the style of the show - it was presented as a play-within-a-play, with the set looking like a stage, place-cards announcing titles of scenes, and a violinist and pianist accompanying the on-set action all the way through. Occasionally the actors would break the 'fourth wall' and cue the violinist for a particularly arch line of dialogue, or as in the case of Lady Windermere, address her lines to the audience directly. The one fault in the production was the strange poetry that the characters recited at the front of stage during scene changes - I don't think they added anything, and were often drowned out by the violin or piano. That niggle aside, I had a great night at the theatre and had a much-needed laugh or several.