Pick of the bunch from a very strong thriller season
A PARTICULARLY strong Colin McIntyre Classic Thriller Season ends with Shock from Brian (The Avengers) Clemens. It's saying a lot but this is surely the best of the five. Frankenstein might have been the one best qualified to be a stand-alone production, but Shock is the most suspenseful and unpredictable. Right up to the closing seconds you're wondering whodunit.
A group of people have been invited down for the weekend to the country home of Maggie Miller (Sarah Wynne Kordas) to celebrate her birthday. But when they arrive she's not there. Has she been helped out of this life? And, if so, who's done the helping out?
Maggie has been a sexual predator with a penchant for other people's partners so it turns out that everyone has a motive for foul play. Before we find out the answer we have to cope with a clutch of bogus clues, a body or two and a lot of scary moments.
Opinion among seasoned frock-watchers in the audience will differ, but outfit of the week has to be the massively becoming uniform worn by Jo Castleton as air hostess Ann Marsh – this is the sixties/seventies so the spoilsports were yet to come up with the idea of recruiting "stewards" strictly on grounds of ability.
All the characters are played with commendable flare; for instance, airline pilot Terry Dexter (Jeremy Lloyd Thomas) with his weakness for alcohol. But Karen Henson, as Jenny Rayner, the neurotic and childless wife with a wandering husband, is outstanding.
And it all happens on a splendidly realised cottage set. It comes complete with a scandalously well-used drinks cabinet, this time stuck on the end of the draining board.
Alan Geary (Nottingham Post)
A PARTICULARLY strong Colin McIntyre Classic Thriller Season ends with Shock from Brian (The Avengers) Clemens. It's saying a lot but this is surely the best of the five. Frankenstein might have been the one best qualified to be a stand-alone production, but Shock is the most suspenseful and unpredictable. Right up to the closing seconds you're wondering whodunit.
A group of people have been invited down for the weekend to the country home of Maggie Miller (Sarah Wynne Kordas) to celebrate her birthday. But when they arrive she's not there. Has she been helped out of this life? And, if so, who's done the helping out?
Maggie has been a sexual predator with a penchant for other people's partners so it turns out that everyone has a motive for foul play. Before we find out the answer we have to cope with a clutch of bogus clues, a body or two and a lot of scary moments.
Opinion among seasoned frock-watchers in the audience will differ, but outfit of the week has to be the massively becoming uniform worn by Jo Castleton as air hostess Ann Marsh – this is the sixties/seventies so the spoilsports were yet to come up with the idea of recruiting "stewards" strictly on grounds of ability.
All the characters are played with commendable flare; for instance, airline pilot Terry Dexter (Jeremy Lloyd Thomas) with his weakness for alcohol. But Karen Henson, as Jenny Rayner, the neurotic and childless wife with a wandering husband, is outstanding.
And it all happens on a splendidly realised cottage set. It comes complete with a scandalously well-used drinks cabinet, this time stuck on the end of the draining board.
Alan Geary (Nottingham Post)