Peter James on theatre’s great sense of wonder and magic - Worthing dates

The tour started earlier this year at the Theatre Royal Brighton.

“When I was a kid my parents were big theatre-goers. We used to go regularly to the Theatre Royal Brighton. I would sit there as a nine-year-old and watch the curtain rise and I would dream that one day the curtain would be rising on something that I had written. It is a magic moment for me every time.”

There is also something very personal about the story of Wish You Were Dead which is based on Peter’s own holiday from hell a few years ago. George Rainsford will be Peter’s detective DSI Roy Grace in the piece, alongside Clive Mantle, who will star as Curtis. Leon Stewart will return to the role of DS Glenn Branson.

“George Rainsford is straight out of the last episode of Casualty and it's obviously hard for any actor to follow the amazing way that John Simm has taken ownership of Roy Grace on television but George is great. He's got a real energy to him and he's really spent a lot of time on the character.”

As Peter says, George will just need to put John Simm out of his head “completely and just go into detective detective mode but it's probably a little bit easier in that we're away on holiday in this story so Roy Grace is in perhaps a little bit more relaxed mode or for the start anyway, and he's got Katie McGlynn playing Cleo his wife and she is such a delight as well and they actually look like a couple together. And then we've got Clive Mantle as the villain of the piece and Clive is scary, I mean really scary. When he starts talking, he's nailed it. But it is also going to be a lot of fun. I really am happy with the whole way the production is going.

“The play called is Wish You Were Dead and it is slightly different in that Roy Grace takes his family to a lovely French chateau. They're planning a great week away from it all and what they don't realise is they are heading to the holiday from hell. Without too many spoilers, somebody from Roy’s past is out to get even with him. Wish You Were Dead was inspired by a hotel like my wife Lara and I stayed in about 80 miles south-west of Paris in 2018 and we genuinely thought we were going to get murdered. It was the scariest thing ever. We arrived in a thunderstorm at this elderly decrepit vast chateau with suits of armour in the hallway, animal heads everywhere and this very creepy old aristocrat who owned the place and his rather meek little wife. Our bedroom was extraordinary. There was a crucifix seven foot high in front of our bed. It was so creepy, a real sense of threat. We genuinely thought we were going to get murdered! We really did!”

Peter is, as always, relishing the additional danger of theatre itself. The first Grace on stage was around ten years ago: “Every time you watch Grace on TV it will obviously be exactly the same and every time you read the books it will be exactly the same unless a page falls out or something! But every time you do it on stage, it is completely different.”