Cluedo 2: The Next Chapter
Theatre Royal Bath ★★★✩✩
THE great farce teams, Brian Rix and Co at the Whitehall, and Tom Walls and Ralph Lynn at the Aldwych theatres, didn’t come together overnight and spent many hours working on comic business before they could turn even the most lightweight of scripts into a fun-filled evening.
The team that director Mark Bell, best known for his work on The Play that Goes Wrong, has assembled have all the ingredients to draw all the comedy out of the script by Bafta-winning writers Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran.
As yet, however, they are still more a group of individual actors creating well known Cluedo characters, rather than a smooth running team of farceurs.
They work the clever business that has been created to take the story from one scene to another with the slickness you would expect from a group of experienced actors like Strictly Come Dancing winner Ellie Leach as Miss Scarlett, Casualty and Heartbeat’s James Durr as Colonel Mustard, Hannah Boyce as Mrs Peacock, Dawn Buckland as Mrs White, Edward Howells as Professor Plum, Jack Bennett as Wadsworth the Butler, and Gabriel Paul as Reverend Green.
Those extra pieces of comic business that develop between characters are still in short supply at this early stage of a long nationwide tour that lasts until November.
The production makes full use of David Farley’s intricate designs, and movement director Anna Healey, manipulating the cast with the skill of a master puppeteer, is already looking as smooth as silk.
Once the cast stop looking like puppets on a string, performing each action and delivering each line in a more relaxed manner, rather than painting the characters as if painting by numbers, the comedy and entertainment level will rise by several hundred percent.
As it is there is a great deal to enjoy in this spoof mystery, and I defy even the most enthusiastic follower of detective yarns, with full knowledge of the characters in Cluedo to work out the ending. And with that amount of acting talent on stage it is sure to be sooner rather than later before this band of well-drawn individual characters turns into a welloiled team of farcical comedy players.
» Cluedo 2: The Next Chapter appears at the Theatre Royal Bath until Saturday. To book tickets visit