Thrill Me

I am delighted to direct this wonderful cast for the premiere of David Foley’s Deadly Murder. It is good to see a talented young writer produce a new thriller that owes as much to Sex And The City as it does to Agatha Christie.

In the USA and Britain over the past few decades television has reinvented the thriller in the cop and detective show. Angela Lansbury recreated Miss Marple as Jessica Fletcher in Murder She Wrote and from Cagney And Lacey to Law And Order all police shows come down to the basic premises of the thriller.

The popularity of the TV thriller has led to a decline in the number of stage thrillers but it is onstage that the thriller is at it most potent. Only on stage, can the pressures of time and place, that are necessary to creating tension, be truly realised.

And like all theatrical genres the thriller needs constant reinvention to reflect the world around it. It is remarkable that more than 50 years after it opened Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap is still playing in London’s West End, but, today, it looks like a museum piece – the theatrical conventions of half a century ago now preserved in aspic. There is no way that The Mousetrap could be updated: if one character had a mobile phone the play would be over in minutes.

David Foley has brought the thriller into the modern age. This play is set in New York in the present day. Here, he manages to create a picture of a woman alone in a dangerous corner – I hope you enjoy her predicament!

Julian Woolford