Entertaining thriller starts Coliseum’s season

RESERVOIR hacks: Andrew Cullimore as Anderson (on the floor) and Steven Pinder as Bruhl face-off in “Deathtrap”

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Coliseum, Oldham
A NEW season opens for the Coliseum and brings with it some interesting choices, not least of them this Seventies black comedy by Ira Levin.

Levin’s work you will certainly have seen, even if you don’t know his name.

He was the writer of novels, screenplays and stage dramas from “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Stepford Wives” to “The Boys from Brazil” and “Sliver”.

But his career was also wildly inconsistent: this play remains the longest-running thriller on Broadway with almost 1,800 performances; his next play closed on opening night.

You can see why this one was so popular; it’s a lively mix of murderous thoughts and audience-foxing twists which, if you haven’t seen it before, really are rather good.

I can’t really explain much plot, but it starts with our playwright receiving a manuscript from an aspiring thriller-writer that is better than anything he has produced in years. Can he claim it as his own? Only a wife with scruples and his hitherto honest character stand in the way. But as we discover, that’s only the half of it.

Kevin Shaw’s lively production has one stand-out piece of casting: Steven Pinder as down-on-his-inspiration playwright Sydney Bruhl.

The one-time Max Farnham in “Brookside” now has just the right combination of energy and mature, slightly-dissolute looks to play a man who was once the toast of Broadway and is now a relative has-been. Though as we discover, he’s not quite the has-been we might have thought.

Along the way, Levin gives Bruhl some choice lines and throwaway comments that keep the dialogue — and the story — bubbling.

Opposite him, Andrew Cullimore as pupil-writer Clifford Anderson is youthful and confident but suffers from the problem of the rest of the play: after Bruhl, Levin seemed to lose interest in the other characters.

Helen Kay has only cliches as Bruhl’s wife; Roberta Kerr is a figure of fun as the medium who works out the truth, and Russell Richardson as the lawyer is mainly there to be told the plot, so members of the audience who haven’t been paying attention can keep up.

All the really interesting stuff in the play happens in act one, and after the interval the story writes itself into a bit of a dead-end. No matter, for the preceding couple of hours more than makes up for it.