Was it Colonel Mustard with a candlestick in the library? Cluedo show makes a game of murder

2 hours ago 1

CLUEDO ★★½
Playhouse, QPAC, until February 1

It’s hard to go wrong with cosy crime at the moment – just ask Richard Osman’s accountant – and crime doesn’t get much cosier than the guess-the-killer boardgame Cluedo (or Clue, as it’s known in the US).

This 2017 stage adaptation, which has toured the US, is based on the 1985 film, which flopped with critics and audiences but continues to enjoy a second life as a cult favourite.

Laurence Boxhall (Reverend Green), David James (Professor Plum), Adam Murphy (Colonel Mustard), Grant Piro (Wadsworth), Rachael Beck (Mrs White), Genevieve Lemon (Mrs Peacock) and Olivia Deeble (Miss Scarlett).

The movie was written and directed by Jonathan Lynn, co-writer of evergreen British sitcom Yes Minister, and you can only assume with Cluedo he was using the side of his brain that comes up with Bernard’s wilfully bad jokes rather than the one responsible for Sir Humphrey’s sparkling repartee.

The play version commencing its Australian tour in Brisbane at least gets to showcase polished comedic performances and some precision stagecraft. Luke Joslin directs physical comedy with panache, and both James Browne’s 1940s costumes and his modular set (channelling the neo-gothic mansion in the boardgame) never fail to please the eye.

Adam Murphy (Colonel Mustard) and Olivia Deeble (Miss Scarlett) in Cluedo.

The characters are of course heightened game pieces: military duffer Colonel Mustard (Adam Murphy); flighty dowager Mrs Peacock (Genevieve Lemon); disreputable doctor Professor Plum (David James); black widow Mrs White (Rachael Beck); licentious Miss Scarlett (Olivia Deeble) and lily-livered Reverend Green (Laurence Boxhall).

On a dark and stormy night they’re summoned to an English country house for dinner with a side serving of murder. But the fare owes more to Benny Hill than to Agatha Christie. Saucy French maids, gay jokes, nudges and winks abound; motives and logic are thinner on the ground.

The late playwright Tom Stoppard turned down the offer to write the film, and the script’s adaptors (Sandy Rustin, Hunter Foster and Eric Price) could have done with some of Stoppard’s skill at homage, pastiche and plotting. Indeed, there’s barely any plot here at all, and little of the satisfaction of puzzle pieces slotting together. But there is a lot of shouting, and a lot of hammy music cues, which amuses at first, but swiftly gets tiring.

Happily, Cluedo picks up steam towards the end of its fast-paced 90 minutes, with a couple of very funny deaths and a multiple-ending ending that turns the silliness up to 11.

It’s here that Grant Piro, playing the manipulative butler Wadsworth, gets a bravura monologue recapping everything that has happened that reaches awe-inspiring heights of absurdity.

It’s a show in which, in one way at least, the butler really did it.

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