Midsomer Murders: The Killings at Badger’s Drift Review – The TV Police Adaptation Is Sometimes Deadly | stage

forBritish touring theater at the moment is often a case of watching TV detectives. Inspector Morse: House of Ghosts is in Sheffield this week, and Hercule Poirot in Death on the Nile arrives in Northampton next week, with both shows remaining on the road until the spring. DSI Roy Grace and DI John Rebus investigated the deaths live last year.

The latest TV cop to be let out of the box is DCI Barnaby who has occupied ITV primetime for 28 years in Midsomer Murders, an age that residents of the neighboring Hampshire village here often need a lot of luck to reach.

Writer-director Jay Unsworth begins with the first of Caroline Graham’s original novels, The Killings at Badger’s Drift, which also began the TV franchise in 1997. A horticulturist is found dead in her kitchen, prompting Barnaby to overturn the local GP’s senility sentence after interviewing the village’s eccentrics. On television, all of Britain’s showbiz stars inhabit a single oddball, but three of Unsworth’s main cast of seven entertainers play a trio of suspects/victims, entertainingly swapping costumes and sex.

All the screen cops recently introduced to the theater have at some point filled ITV’s mid-evening slots, which is important to the tunes of these theatrical nights. The murder rate in downtown America in the Mediterranean English countryside was partly because another killing was a good way to bridge the trade gap. Unsworth uses time lapse sensibly to achieve the same ending and provides great enjoyment with the stage equivalent of easy TV cutting, with actors sliding onto trucks and Julie LeGrand at one point playing two characters almost simultaneously.

While Midsomer Murders is essentially harmless entertainment, there was a scandal and a production reboot in 2011 when a producer suggested the series was offering viewers an escape from multiculturalism. Unsworth seems to quietly acknowledge this when DS Troy, played by British-Filipino actor James Bradwell, who does a valiant job in an underwritten part, has some more trouble from Badger’s Drift fanatics.

Daniel Casey, following John Nettles and Neil Dudgeon as TV’s Barnabys, gamely copes with being the straight man between the smarts and the stupids. Overall, the adaptation is loving to its source material, and occasionally fatalistic, as in a reference to how Barnaby’s annual evaluation with the police chief is going, given the body count on his patch. Another bold touch is verbal. The words ‘constable’, in the subjunctive sense, and ‘Picasso’, in the artistic sense (the paintings are central to the subplot), are delivered in ways that would put ITV in front of the regulator.

Unsworth resorts to jokes more than TV shows – particularly in conveying the English countryside with mannerisms from Greek tragedy – perhaps boldly exploring a new kind of murder panto. But since crime stories and bizarre cross-dressing comedies are British theatre’s staple formats, this could be the route to a financial kill. If you haven’t seen the TV series, just book a ticket over your dead body, but for fans of the show, there will be great fun on tour in the UK and Ireland, which fittingly will last until around the middle of next summer.