Game-changer for theatre that will keep you on the edge of your seat
What a Carve Up!
The timing of this star-studded online adaptation of Jonathan Coe’s breakthrough 1994 satirical thriller is spot on, in all kinds of ways. It speaks to the current moment, even as it rewinds past the 1991 invasion of Iraq to the Eighties and the rapacious heyday of Thatcherism (and further back still, to the inglorious aftermath of Suez).
Its handling, frame by frame, of narrative suspense answers the postmodern collage effects of Coe’s prose while keeping you on the edge of your seat. More broadly, just as theatre is forced back into hibernation with a new lockdown, it arrives with a technical and artistic bravura that bodes well for the sector’s ability to reinvent itself. This doesn’t just look like a plucky digital divertissement, it looks like a game-changer.
The creative ambition of Henry Filloux-bennett, the artistic director of the Lawrence Batley, Huddersfield – and that of his collaborators, including director Tamara Harvey and a team from The Barn, Cirencester, with support from The New Wolsey, Ipswich – is tremendous.
The production sharply and smartly tilts between exposition and enigma, silliness and deadly seriousness. And there are fullbodied performances nestling amid a ream of archival and mood-setting material (including clips from the 1961 comedy-horror film starring Sid James and Kenneth Connor that gives the story its title and centres on a country-house killing spree that
inspires the grand-guignol comeuppance for the leading scions of Coe’s odious Winshaw family).
Enlarging the chronological frame, Filloux-bennett creates a personable narrator in the shape of Alfred Enoch’s conversationally playful, unassuming Raymond Owen. The latter has turned DIY detective, sifting the evidence of that fateful night of January 16 1991 when six people were bumped off at remote Winshaw Towers.
Raymond shares what he has dug up 30 years on, stopping and replaying the material as he sees fit.
A prime source of repeat-play is a 2020 TV interview conducted with Josephine Winshaw-eaves, whose mother was among the victims; the ghastliness of the murdered Rightwing tabloid hack has passed down the line to this breezily callous vlogger and influencer. (There’s high-definition work from Fiona Button as the bristling toff, and Tamzin Outhwaite as her bemused interviewer.)
She even bats away the idea the family was responsible for Dominic Cummings, who it is claimed interned
with (fictitious, of course) political grandee Henry Winshaw. Henry’s dastardly methodology was to bury bad news by topping it with something “outrageous”.
As much as we’re on the hunt for clues, then, we’re joining the dots on Coe’s spruced-up state-of-the-nation accusation about the long lethal arms of the grasping establishment.
Whether or not you agree with the political diagnosis (which takes in the pandemic), there’s ample food for thought. And a feast of celebrity in the ancillary roles. Griff Rhys Jones voices a police investigator, Stephen Fry a purring publisher, Derek Jacobi a detective.
Netflix itself would have a task commanding such a Who’s Who, and it’s quite fun deducing who-said-it as you watch. It was produced for just £20,000 and costs a mere £12 to watch – an affordable way to fend off lockdown blues and help our bludgeoned theatre into the bargain.