Dead Guilty – Theatre at the Tabard review

Charlotte Hunter (Julia) and Felicity Duncan (Margaret)

Dead Guilty, the latest offering from the in-house production team at the Tabard Theatre is a slow burn psychological thriller, centred around the painful rehabilitation of an injured road accident victim.

Julia, a graphic designer played by an impressive Charlotte Hunter who is on stage for most of the running time and around whom everything revolves.

At the opening, a disembodied coroner’s voice questions Julia about her recollections of the accident.

She was a passenger in a car driven by her art director boss, John and she remembers only that he made a “gasping sound” before collapsing at the wheel moments before the crash.

After that, we and she are in Julia’s home and we don’t get to leave until the end.

For Julia, the aftermath presents as many psychological challenges as physical; she has nightmares about causing the crash and is disturbed enough to warrant the attention of a counsellor, Anne, played with prim detachment and a tendency to censoriousness by Julia Faulkner.

It’s not clear exactly how welcome Anne’s attentions are as Julia struggles to regain  control of her life; indeed she admits to secretly getting fed up with Anne’s “half-baked mumbo jumbo”.

Freddie Webster (Gary) in the middle

There’s more down-to-earth help for Julia from a younger man, Gary (Freddie Webster), who she sees as “a little treasure” and “a Godsend”, he helps her with practical tasks from cleaning and shopping to taking care of her garden.

Jokingly, she calls him her “daily male” and is grateful for the support he offers. Early tension between Gary and Anne reveals a slightly sinister side to him: “She trusts me,” he says of Julia, “she doesn’t need anyone else”.

Enter Margaret, John’s widow, who has asked to meet Julia, an idea that Anne is quick to discourage but Julia agrees to anyway. Felicity Duncan’s Margaret is needy and awkward; nervous at first (“it’s so hard to talk and yet there’s so much to say”) but also desperate for connection with the last person to see her husband alive.

It’s around this point that it all starts to get a little creepy and we begin to feel Julia’s discomfort at all the attention she seems to be getting and perhaps understand her wish to just be left alone.

This revival of Richard Harris’s 1994 play has a lot of class.

The setting is an immaculate recreation of a mid-90’s SW6 home, an untidy but cosy place that looks lived in. It’s beautifully lit by Nat Green and there is a clever use of window views to suggest outdoor space into the street outside and into Julia’s garden at the back. The illusion of exterior space is in contrast to the slowly constricting atmosphere inside the home.

Julia Faulkner and Gary Webster

Harris’s carefully constructed script teases the audience and drops little clues here and there, taking its time but rewarding our attention as events unfold.

Nick Bromley’s direction manages the episodic nature of the play really well, keeping things flowing and highlighting the passage of time with confident skill.

This is a fine example of a mystery thriller where we only gradually get to know what’s going on and in the meantime are pulled in and held by the developing drama, powerless to intervene but hooked and unable to look away.

Dead Guilty plays to 27 June.

Book tickets: Dead Guilty

Simon Thomsett has worked in the professional theatre for a number of years. He started out as a stage manager and technician then became a venue director and producer, notably at the Hackney Empire, Fairfield Halls and most recently the New Victoria Theatre in Woking.

He now works as a consultant and on some small scale producing projects. He is a Chiswick resident and a passionate advocate for great theatre.