Review: Good fun as we join TV's Roy Grace on his holiday from hell

Read Peter James' novella Wish You Were Dead – a book which stands outside his run of Roy Grace novels set in Brighton – and you pretty soon hear it crying out to be made into a stage thriller.

And it gets its wish in this thoroughly enjoyable, creepily creaky romp – a chance for some hammy acting, some fine acting, guns, dodgy suits of armour, eerie towers and someone fiendishly being kept prisoner we’ve no idea where.

The setting is the tumbledown French chateau which completely freaked out Peter James and his wife on holiday a few years ago. They were convinced they were going to get murdered, and it is that sense of threat that James poured into his recreation of it in the novella.

And charitably he decides to pack Detective Superintendent Grace, his wife Cleo and their baby son Noah off there on holiday– a rare and fascinating chance to see Grace away from Brighton where he’s generally cracking crime. It’s a different side to Grace we see. It works well in the novella and it works well here too as the couple, baby in tow, turn up with an American babysitter – and the puzzle of where her partner’s disappeared to.

There’s something implausible about the whole set-up, not least the rather wonkily-accented mistress of the house. And then the play stops for an overlong interval. At less than two hours all in, surely the right thing for the play would have been to let it run straight through. The impact would have been so much the stronger.

Even so, the arrival of Clive Mantle as the villain of the piece in the second half certainly wellies it up. He’s the perfect baddie, strutting, threatening and taunting – half of a great double act of infamy with…. well, I had better not say, but you can probably guess who I am talking about.

And then it all comes tumbling out. A tall tale of revenge for the scoundrel that Grace had put away years and years earlier. His family want their own kind of warped justice, and they are going to take it… very violently. It twists and it turns, and George Rainsford grows nicely as our Grace as the night wears on, increasingly resourceful and indeed persuasive, fortunately when he needs to be most. It’s a good fun evening which cracks along – and would have done so all the more effectively without that interval.