Fine line between ham and eccentric

Photo: Mark Douet

STEPHEN Billington as the suspect and Gemma Atkins his mistress in "Not Dead Enough."

NOT DEAD ENOUGH

Opera House, Manchester, to Saturday

SOMETIMES you wonder why they bother. I mean, Peter James writes the pretty successful novels, carefully structures an intricate and relatively believable plot, builds strong characters with strengths and fears, puts them in the middle of murder and mayhem and watches them go...

Then someone turns them into stage plays with all the finesse of a sledgehammer; strips away almost all the character and boils down the carefully-laid plot so much that Brighton starts to resemble Victorian Whitechapel and approaches the murder rate of Midsommer.

Then they fill the cast with TV faces and wannabes who really have little chance to build anything real and resort to quirks and gestures instead.

The result is almost always awful, as it is here.

It shouldn't be, for James writes successful books and characters that grab ­- principally his head sleuth, Det Sup Roy Grace. It's the necessary skid between page and stage that's the problem. Do this story for TV and you would get something in the "Prime Suspect" vein; do it for the stage and you see how ridiculous it can be.

Perhaps if James had written a stage drama in the first place it might have had a chance, but adapter Shaun McKenna ­- this is his third James adaptation ­- ruthlessly excises too much.

The plot revolves around a suspect's (Stephen Billington) assertion that when his wife was murdered at home in Brighton he was away in London. Grace (Bill Ward) doesn't believe him, but has a nagging feeling his protests seem real. When the man's girlfriend is also murdered, and Grace finds a link to his own missing first wife and a previous murder suspect, red herrings fly thick and fast.

All this we could accept if the performances were as serious as the subject. But while minor characters are functional at best, and while first-time pro Laura Whitmore and Stephen Billington work hard and diligently, former "Emmerdale" and "Corrie" man Bill Ward as Grace seems to follow Benedict Cumberbatch's "Sherlock" handbook. Eccentric isn't the word for it; neither is "hammy".

It's in-between, with lines delivered so vigorously you might think he's auditioning for the next Jason Bourne movie, but with so much ridiculous pointing you wonder if his next job will actually be modelling for shop mannequins.