This article is taken from the March 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

---

From arsenic and old lace to The Man who Came to Dinner, the haplessness of polite people confronting wickedness in a domestic setting is a staple of farce. In the hands of Steven Moffat, co-creator with Mark Gatiss of the BBC’s Sherlock, the tradition has a new addition in The Unfriend, which is a welcome arrival from Chichester festival at London’s Criterion.

It’s a while since the subterranean theatre at Piccadilly has had a success after hosting the long-running hits, The Thirty-Nine Steps and The Comedy About a Bank Robbery. A location which is tourist-central and run as an independent theatre trust means that it needs to nail an audience of visitors and regulars alike to thrive.

London’s Criterion needs to nail an audience of visitors and regulars alike to thrive

That is a harder combination than it sounds — especially so at a time when the stage too often divides between hefty political consciousness-raising and forgettable juke box musicals. Commercial imperatives are also tough, with a premium on small casts and single-space settings to spare the margins.

The Unfriend manages to breathe nicely within these parameters, as the spousal combo of Amanda Abbington (Sherlock’s savvy Mary) and Reece Shearsmith as Debbie and Peter are befriended by brash Elsa Jean Krakowski (Frances Barber) on a cruise ship and make the mistake of handing over their email.

Elsa is a serial killer, this much is clear from the start and the clues, in the manner of Sherlock, are apparent if we choose to look for them as she references the transience of life and a trail of unfortunately departed spouses.

The central joke is that Peter is also a bit of a zombie, surviving on twitchy reliance on his mobile phone and addiction to reading the Guardian, so that he can get angry about something every morning. In the tradition of the virtuoso Alan Ayckbourn, superficial similarities belie character differences, revealed under unexpected tests.

Debbie is more opportunistic and fast-moving than her awkward husband, but both, in the way of the well-mannered, resentful Brits, hide behind evasive courtesies and say “Yes,” when they really mean “Please God, no.”

Elsa duly arrives at the couple’s West London home with several Vuitton suitcases (lugging a century’s worth of transatlantic caricature) and exuding riotous sexuality, charm and threat.

Elsa is a serial killer, this much is clear from the start and the clues

Unfortunately, she then proves a great hit — standing up to the irritating and inquisitive neighbour (Michael Simkins). “You’re a bit passive aggressive, aren’t you?” she says — and luring surly teenagers out of their bedrooms, not least by proving more effectively murderous at computer shooter games than the couple’s adolescent son.

Simkins is brilliantly annoying as an interloper, always half-apologising and semi-upbraiding. “You’re a very busy man,” he wheedles, while analysing the family’s sporadic wine indulgences in the way of the Acacia Avenue Stasi, timing the clatter of their bottle recycling.

In the hands of Moffat’s sly script and Mark Gatiss’s helter-skelter direction, the edge of unreality and panic accumulates. Having failed to stop Elsa from settling in, the couple find her pretty useful in breaking the humdrum patterns of domesticity and frustration. She is, as Debbie reflects, “a very likeable serial killer”. Their only problem, in the topsy- turvy way of successful farce, is how to enjoy the refreshing benefits of presence, but stop her killing again.

Simkins is brilliantly annoying as an interloper, always half-apologising and semi-upbraiding

Kudos to Frances Barber, who has a ball as a bawdy American-writ-large, flouncing her way through the action in outlet-store designer labels and horrifying Peter by luxuriating in her Donald Trump indulgence: “Sure I’d do him.” Finally challenged on the number of corpses she has left behind, her deadpan retort is, “I’m just saying, they were all vaccinated.” In terms of repartee, Moff at’s script could have done with more of these stand-out lines and the physical farce, while accomplished, is too thinly stretched to bear comparison with the great Michal Frayn or Richard Bean at their most side-splitting. Too great a reliance on bowel-and-toilet jokes is a sign of scenes running thin on content.

Yet, The Unfriend lurks tantalisingly on the line between the normal and the terrible and explores how closely good and evil can live in cosy accommodation. When Debbie finally plucks-up the guest after a visit from a policeman, it is not because she has rediscovered her moral fibre, but the result of pique that her guest has lavished compliments on the rest of the family in increasingly grisly metaphors — “I could mash you all up and eat you” — but missed Debbie out of the obsequies.

Elsa never really denies her crimes, assuming she thinks they are crimes at all. There’s one nicely appalling spectre of Moriarty’s amoral logic, when she reasons that humankind is not “unimprovable” and some inconvenient humans could do with a sporadic cull. Given this devotion to her chilling craft, it would be a surprise if someone did not end the play in a stiffer condition than they started it. We might even feel that they had it coming. Which, I suppose, bears out Elsa’s point.