Entertaining Murder – Upstairs at the Gatehouse, London

Book, Music, Lyrics and Director: Chris Burgess

Earlier this year, the Criminal Cases Review Commission ruled that the case of Edith Thompson, a woman who was hanged in 1923 for her part in her husband’s murder, did not meet the requirements for a royal pardon.

There are many questions about the case, which became a cause célèbre at the time. While the perpetrator, Freddy Bywaters, was Edith’s lover, there was little evidence that he had colluded with her. The case rested on a stack of love letters Edith had written to Bywaters, the contents of which scandalised in an era before the 1920s became the Roaring Twenties. By modern standards, the letters should have been ruled inadmissible, and the judge would not repeatedly intercede on behalf of the prosecution.

But while the skewed events may not have been deemed exceptional enough to warrant a pardon over 100 years later, it is material for Chris Burgess’s musical, which seeks to retell the story of both the crime and the trial. The conceit for his musical presentation is that we are being presented with a live episode of a true crime podcast. As a framing device, it adds little beyond affording Sue Kelvin’s character to act as narrator and allowing the actors to sit behind lecterns with the score in front of them for much of the proceedings.

Burgess’s music tends toward the sombre, as one might expect from the subject matter; this is a score that is looking to the gravitas of Sondheim’s Assassins, or perhaps the scene-setting in Sweeney Todd, for inspiration. And while there is much to commend this approach, if it were to last for the whole evening, and if the actors remained fixed to their lecterns, the charms of the play would quickly dissipate.

Thankfully, we also get re-enactments of various events, giving the evening a sense of a semi-staged chamber concert. We first witness the killing of Percy (Alex Cosgriff), knifed in the street while Daisy Snelson’s Edith looks on in shock; it skips back in time to reveal Dominic Sullivan’s interpretation of Freddy, and how his affair with Edith started.

Lighter moments creep in, with elements of Charleston and Tango dances enlivening proceedings. It’s not quite glamorising crime and celebrity in the way Chicago does, but it’s clearly another influence that Entertaining Murder wears on its sleeve.

But while that latter musical (and Maurine Dallas Watkins’s play of the same name, upon which it was based) uses fictionalised characters to sidestep questions of accuracy, Burgess is keen to root his work in historical fact. Kelvin frequently informs us that characters’ monologues are taken from historical records. And while that’s admirable, it also serves to highlight the segments that are pure conjecture, injecting emotion and intent where the factual record is ambiguous at best.

If anything, such moments are the best elements of the piece, and with the musical direction of Isaac Adni’s solo piano accompaniment, there is much to enjoy in such scenes. But the narrative conceit of the podcast narrator hampers proceedings, allowing the book to tell us facts that might have been better shown.

There is also the sense from Burgess’s book that we should consider the affair to be more ambiguous than he is presenting. At the end of Act I, we are urged to spend the interval musing whether Edith was guilty or not, but there is not enough meat to chew on for any such discussion. Some other avenues go under-explored, such as suggestions that Edith was castigated in part because she was a working woman rather than a housewife.

As a result, there is the sensation that the case in Entertaining Murder plays out exactly as one would expect. Snelson, in particular, brings her character to life, certainly, and the musical highlights how the case of Edith Thompson could possibly have scandalised and entertained 1920s London. But while the show does justify its title, 2020s London might need a little bit more than this production ultimately offers.

Continues until 1 December 2024