Flames continues at the Waterloo East Theatre, London until 31 May.
Star rating: 1 star ★
Musicals based on original material are something of a rarity, with more and more producers choosing to play safe with adaptations of existing material. Stephen Dolginoff’s original thriller Flames may be the reason why.
Set in a spooky graveyard which seems to be a slice of Transylvania transplanted into north London, Abi Finley stars as Meredith, a woman whose fiancé Edmund died a year previously in mysterious circumstances. As she is comforted by his best friend – and her would-be suitor – Eric (David O’Mahony), she comes to believe that Edmund may not be dead after all. Could Bradley Clarkson’s mysterious stranger really be Edmund with a surgically reconstructed face, intent on implicating Eric?
For much of the first half of this one-act play, the absurd premise is played completely straight. Huge chunks of exposition are dumped onto the audience with all the subtlety of Garry Noakes’ lumpen direction. Dolginoff’s book is stuffed so full of cliché that one yearns for another balladic monologue to interrupt the tedium, only to find that its lyrics aren’t much better.
But it is when the two men in Meredith’s life start to tell their differing views of the ‘last’ day of Edmund’s life that Flames seems to try and become more of a satire on the genre. Unfortunately, it all too often has the impression of a trio of actors struggling to make the best of the formulaic absurdity than anything deliberately planned.
Such bursts of something better flash as brightly, and as briefly, as the frequent flashes of lightning and rumbling thunder that permeate Ali Hunter’s atmospheric lighting and sound design. A succession of increasingly outlandish twists and personality U-turns result in a conclusion to a murder mystery that is, at the very least, laugh-inducing. Whether that was the writer’s intention, though, is the biggest mystery at the heart of this piece.
Dolginoff has previously had success with Thrill Me, a musical that told the tale of the real-life killers Leopold and Loeb. With his attempt at telling an original story, though, Flames invites us not to ask who done it, but why.
Scott Matthewman
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