LincsOnline reviews St Peter’s Hill Players’ performance of Arsenic and Old Lace at Grantham’s Guildhall

St Peter’s Hill Players have followed up their hard-edged play The Thrill of Love with something completely different – a screwball comedy.

The Players hit the Guildhall Arts Centre stage for the first time last night (Thursday, October 10) with Arsenic and Old Lace, made familiar to many by the Cary Grant film version from the 1940s.

The play is a high-energy black comedy concerning murder, lots of murder! And Players newcomer Daniel Ferguson as theatre critic Mortimer Brewster could not have made better use of that energy with an impressive performance requiring a range of emotions, not least horror at the discovery of several dead bodies.

Mortimer proposes to his girlfriend Elaine, played by Rachel Armitage, and their relationship goes through some high and lows throughout the story as the realisation emerges that all is not as it seems in the Brewster household.

The bodies are found in the Brooklyn house of his aunts Abby and Martha, played by Lis Connor and Sharon Antony. They play two, seemingly innocent, religious old ladies who poison their male lodgers in an act of ‘mercy’ and they are played to a tee.

Two other murderous characters enter the play in the guise of Mortimer’s long-lost brother Jonathan and his mysterious doctor friend Dr Einstein, played by Paul Keenan and Andy Antony. Paul plays Mortimer’s brother as a Frankenstein-like monster complete with facial scars, having been operated on by Dr Einstein to change his appearance.

Andy’s performance is intriguing as he plays the doctor with the quiet and timid tones of the great Peter Lorre who played the character in the original film.

Arsenic and Old Lace continues tonight (Friday, October 10) at 7.30pm at the Guildhall Arts Centre in Grantham and tomorrow at 2.30pm. Tickets are available from the Guildhall box office at www.guildhallartscentre.com