Plenty to enjoy, but detective tale becomes tiresome

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This article was published 24/10/2009 (6195 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The old adage asserts that behind every successful man is a woman.

For Lord Peter Wimsey, the sleuthing star of Dorothy L. Sayers’ murder mystery Strong Poison, his silent partners in crime-fighting are a coterie called the cattery, a discreet steno pool of forgotten females of 1930s English society always willing to catch a thief or a killer.

Call them Peter’s angels. Wimsey gets all the glory while these publicly invisible yet surprisingly resourceful spinsters do all the dirty undercover work for their foppish, white-gloved boss.

In the entertaining Canadian première of the stage adaptation of Strong Poison, which opened the Manitoba Theatre Centre’s 2009-10 season Thursday night, the monocled mystery-monger is almost upstaged by his amenable minions. In an eleventh-hour flourish of deductive reasoning, Wimsey grandly cracks the case of who poisoned author Philip Boyes with arsenic, saving the wrongly accused Harriet Vane from the gallows.

The disclosure of "whodunit" after 150 minutes of Wimsey et al. clue-hunting proved anticlimactic. It was hard to care given the little information provided about the hapless victim by Sayers and her American adaptor Frances Limoncelli. (Some of the suspense also leaks out from the knowledge Wimsey and Vane team up in future Sayers detective books.)

Wimsey is obsessed by the Boyes case after going "goupy" over Vane, a Sayers alter ego. Vane is a successful mystery writer who lived unmarried with Boyes. If she could be a person of inadequate morals given her past living arrangements, the upper crust is convinced she also could be a killer. The gallant Wimsey promises to save the day by solving the crime and rushing her from the prisoner’s dock to the altar to marry her.

Greg Ellwand makes a mostly winning Wimsey: confident, flamboyant and stylish. The Torontonian struggled with his lines opening night, probably due to the speed with which he was required to deliver them. His charm was best displayed in his first meeting with Vane, the woman of his dreams, as he sat nervously like a lovelorn schoolboy with his hands between his knees.

Far more fun and diverting were the rich secondary characters, fully realized by a crack cast of local actors under the direction of Steven Schipper. His wife, Terri Cherniack, plays numerous colourful roles including the ever-game Miss Climpson, the queen of the cattery and the Moneypenny to Wimsey’s James Bond. Cherniack’s bohemian rhapsody as Nina Kropoty and her spirited Climpson part in the seance scene are highlights.

Stefanie Wiens, previously seen in ensemble roles, steps to the centre of the MTC stage as the law office infiltrator Miss Murchinson and performs a show-stopping scene climbing a tall bank of safety deposit boxes that brings to mind the physical comic genius of Carol Burnett. Marina Stephenson Kerr, David Warburton, Matt Kippen (unrecognizable as Mr. Pond) and Gordon Tanner all play multiple characters that are always worthy of audience attention and admiration.

Miriam Smith makes the most of portraying the emotionally reserved Harriet Vane, a symbol of the modern woman paying for her much-frowned-upon independent, free-loving lifestyle.

There is plenty to enjoy about Sayers’ 1930 potboiler, including designer Judith Bowden’s endlessly eye-catching costumes and her surprisingly versatile sets. But a case can be made that all the dogged detective work is guilty of being tiresome and murdering sustained interest in Strong Poison.

kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca