Should Have Been Wilder
Double Indemnity (Richmond and National Tour) - Guest Review by Dr Terror
The time will come when every single motion picture ever made will have been turned into a play. I look forward with curiosity to The Searchers, Airport '75 and Porky's II: The Next Day getting this treatment. I suspect all three would be failures. But you can bet your bottom dollar they'd be better than this.
My suspicions started when I bought the programme for something apparently called 'Mischa Barton in Double Indemnity' though why she'd want to admit it is beyond me. The programme contained no article about anything at all. There was certainly no mention of the Billy Wilder movie, now seen as a classic of atmospheric film noir. Perhaps the people who cobbled this together were keen not to invite any comparison.
Mischa was ALL RIGHT, I suppose. Ciaran Owens as Walter Huff, the male lead, was really irritating and Martin Marquez as Keyes, the 'old hand at this game', tried hard but stumbled over his lines. I spent ages trying to work out what the set was supposed to represent and prayed for the first act to hurry up and finish.
Double Indemnity is an American insurance policy which pays out twice its face value if someone insured under it dies of one or more specific causes. That was a very boring sentence, wasn't it? Let's face it, a play about insurance policies is unlikely to have got off to the best of starts, however much half-hearted dry ice fog you try to waft in. Here, the endless discussion of policies and their payouts becomes little short of excruciating.
I considered leaving at the interval but instead listened to the couple sitting next to me talking about someone else's piles. This was better than the entire first act.
Things did pick up very slightly in the second, but by then it was too late. When a comedy fails to get a laugh, it's dead in the water and the same is true, as here, when a thriller fails to thrill. May I suggest that the next film this team adapts for the stage is The Martian. Here the lack of atmosphere might be an advantage.