Murder, She Didn’t Write – Duchess Theatre, London

Creator: Degrees of Error

Director: Lizzy Skrzypiec

It’s nice when a review of a murder mystery stage play doesn’t have to worry about spoilers. For Degrees of Errors’ Murder, She Didn’t Write is a wholly improvised play, the only things guaranteed being that one of the five characters will be dead by the interval, and one of the others will be the murderer.

Exactly who will be the victim and who the culprit is established by “Jerkins”, an audience member randomly selected to be the assistant to director Lizze Skrzypiec’s detective/narrator, Agatha Crusty. Throughout the show’s opening scenes – which, on the night of review, involved a school trip to an ancient castle whose gardens featured an ever-growing cucumber – Skrzypiec is on hand to provoke the players into ever greater levels of absurdity. Is the Butler French? Make him a polyglot who must answer his master in various other languages. Is the school administrator frightened of the bus? Give her a fear of the internal combustion engine and have her towed behind on a cart.

It’s all as gloriously silly as one would expect, and even when jokes occasionally don’t land (an inevitability with such improv shows), the pace never falters. Live musical cues and blackouts when scenes aren’t going so well help steer the actors back to the silliness of their fabricated story.

Degrees of Errors’ company of actors (selected from a list of twelve credited performers) have some character hierarchies in place to begin with. The general structure of the piece (character introductions and tensions in Act I leading up to the murder, then a series of cut scenes and flashbacks in Act II leading up to the final reveal) ensures that the improv elements have a framework to which to adhere.

Justin Williams’s set evokes a sense of Pugin or William Morris, as befitting the 1930s setting, but it is in front of that where the genuine interest lies. This is an improv show that relies upon the corniness of what has become known as “cosy crime” – a subgenre of fiction to which Agatha Christie, memorialised with a framed photo on stage as well as in the detective’s name, most decidedly did not belong.

It’s all supremely silly, and buckets of fun. Murder, She Didn’t Write has had a long history at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. As it now heads out on a UK tour, it will provide multiple venues with the chance to laugh at the ridiculousness of a murder mystery concocted in front of our eyes.

Reviewed on 24 March 2025 and continues to tour