Lord Arthur Savileʼs Crime Arthur, learning that he is doomed

to commit a murder, feels he has a duty to his fiancée to get the murder out of the way before the wedding. There have been any number of plays and films based on Oscar Wilde’s short story and I have yet to see one that has succeeded. Wilde always said murder was a mistake because one should never do anything that one couldn’t talk about at the dinner table. Trevor Baxter’s adaptation and Christopher Luscombe’s production fail completely to capture either the style or the tone of the original. Lee Mead seems to be practising his elocution and says all his lines on the same note without any variety. In between scenes he is lumbered with having to quote bits from The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Some jolly Victorian music hall songs would have been more enjoyable. The rest of the cast is uniformly bad, confusing shouting with acting. The laboriously emphatic delivery of a lot of poor epigrams, some genuine, most pastiche, makes the evening heavy going.