Unfortunately, as is likely the case with any crime story which makes its way to the stage, any character introduced to the audience is likely to have a significant part to play in the rest of the show. Kellie’s reaction to being chloroformed was over the top, Max’s namedropping of the latest pop culture trends such as Bitcoin and World of Warcraft only betrays the age of the writer, and the resolution of the whodunnit looked like a cartoon episode of Scooby Doo, ending with a line not too dissimilar to “I would’ve gotten away with it if it weren’t for you meddling kids.” It’s devoid of any colour and obliterates any credibility, to the extent that some audience members were laughing by the play’s conclusion. This is death by dialogue, a slow-moving plot nudged along by several useful phone calls. When a team of police officers (led by James regular, Detective Superintendent Roy Grace) crack corny jokes, like comparing dung to IKEA meatballs, any hope that these are a serious group of detectives is decimated.
When the family arguments feel fake, there’s little reason to care about the trio and their financial difficulties. There’s wife Kellie with a drinking problem, on-the-nose responses to confrontation and a delivery worse than Hermes (Faye) and the cliché teenage son Max (Luke Ward-Wilkinson) with such a strong disinterest in anything other than himself that he forgets his Dad can’t hear him when he’s borrowed the youngster’s noise-cancelling headphones – a fact repeated several times during the first act that to call it foreshadowing would be putting it far too politely.
Woodyatt is Tom Bryce, a family man with an affinity for finger guns who decides to keep hold of a USB stick left on the passenger seat of a train and bring it home to his bland Brighton apartment (a dull design from Micheal Holt) and his family who also inhabit it. In any other scenario, it would be a damning indictment of an audience member’s morality, but on its final night at Bath’s Theatre Royal, it’s a shameful blot on Shaun McKenna as a writer. If there’s only one thing that the shoddy and mundane adaptation of Peter James’ Looking Good Dead – starring EastEnders‘ Adam Woodyatt and Emmerdale‘s Gaynor Faye – does right, then it’s making a story about a family caught up in the dark web look like a slapstick comedy.
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