Originally written in 1891 by Oscar Wilde as a part of his collection of darkly comic short mystery stories in Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories, the play at the New Theatre in Cardiff is a funny adaptation.
Starring kids TV dude Gary Wilmot, along with Lee Mead, the guy that won the Any Dream Will Do, Jason and His Technicoloured Dreamcoat, Andrew Lloyd Webber suck up fest. In spite of their origins, they both did a pretty good job of entertaining the audience, but the sad thing is that I went to see the matinee performance on a sunny Saturday afternoon, so I was surrounded by pensioners. The ones that sat next to me for a bit at the start (before moving to find new seats after the curtain raised) managed to bury me under their Primark bags.
The play follows the life of Lord Arthur Savile (Mead), a Victorian aristocrat whose deliriously happy life and marriage plans are thrown off track by the warning premonition of him committing a murder by chiromantist (palm reader) Mr. Septimus R. Podgers (Wilmot). Buying in to the vision he decides that he must take the matter into his own hands and get the dead out of the way before his marriage to Sybil Merton (Louisa Clein) to make sure that it could never be she that would bear the brunt of his murderous future.
With a sack-full of corny, cliched tongue-in-cheek, the cast brings the larger than life story and characters to life effectively and manage to turn the regret of missed sunshine pensioner bag attacks into a cool afternoon.
3.3/5
