Wish You Were Dead – Grand Theatre, Leeds

Writer: Peter James

Adaptor: Shaun McKenna

Director: Jonathan O’Boyle

The difficulty with thrillers like this is determining how far they are meant to be funny. There were times during Clive Mantle’s turn as a gang boss – all over-the-top East End accent, menacing laughs and pointing a gun at all and sundry – when the feeling crept over this reviewer to relax, go with the flow and enjoy this nonsense. Mantle, let it be said, gives full value in a furniture-chewing sort of way.

Peter James tells in the programme how he and his family spent a night in a bizarre French chateau which provided the impulse for this novella, as it originally was. Roy Grace takes a holiday from the crime-solving that James usually writes of and arrives at the Chateau-sur-L’Eveque with his wife, baby and nanny in a horrendous rain storm. No one is there to answer except the lowering Madame L’Eveque whose contempt for the English couple lifts when she turns to the baby. The mysterious knockings are explained as the old Vicomte getting impatient for attention. Further worries come in the delayed arrival of Jack, a police colleague and friend of Kaitlynn, the American nanny, and repeated failures to make contact with him.

Gradually it dawns on the travellers that, like the guests inThe Mousetrap, they are totally isolated from the world: the rain teems down and there is no phone signal, no Wi-Fi and so on. For much of the first half the main shocks to the system owe more to design and effects than to script and actors: lights flicker and go out, ominous music swells and, best of all, there is Michael Holt’s gloomily menacing set which fits in stairs and bedrooms – and a mysterious room somewhere in the chateau.

Then Clive Mantle throws off his disguise as the Vicomte and is revealed as Curtis who crossed swords with Grace 20 years before and who lost his son in prison as a result. Madame L’Eveque is revealed as his daughter-in-law and now they have their chance of revenge, having set the whole thing up with elaborate precision. From then on the mystery is by what ingenious device Grace will contrive to come out alive.

Shaun McKenna’s adaptation and Jonathan O’Boyle’s direction seem content to leave the central characters as rather two-dimensional: George Rainsford’s calm Grace, Katie McGlynn’s strident Cleo Grace and Gemma Stroyan’s dutiful Kaitlynn. The villains come out most strongly, not only Mantle’s tour de forceof over-acting, but Rebecca McKinnis, sliding easily from the stern and dignified Madame L’Eveque to the embittered East Ender. Even Callum Sheridan-Lee, as Curtis’ other son, puts in a neat just-like-dad cameo.

The safe assumption is that the novella adds insight into the inner workings of the mind of Grace in particular and generally offers a much more nuanced version of events… but this is not the novella!

Runs until 6th May 2023, then continues touring.