Trust director Lucy Bailey – a mistress of gore – to locate a genuinely violent play amid Alan Ayckbourn’s cosy oeuvre. Two sisters separated since childhood – Annabel (Susan Wooldridge)
and Miriam (Sarah Woodward) – are reunited following the death of their father. But as they gather on the crumbling tennis court of their family home, their father’s former carer, Alice (Mossie Smith), arrives, maintaining that he was killed by Miriam and demanding money to keep hush. But might
there be a cheaper way of ensuring her silence?
‘Snake in the Grass’ is no edgier or less predictable than the average Saturday teatime TV potboiler, but a degree of mediocrity is par for the course with minor Ayckbourn plays and this is a mostly quality production.
Wooldridge and Woodward do a good job of mining the bittersweet lyricism from the shifting power play between the two siblings; veteran designer William Dudley does not disappoint with his sultry, spooky set; and though things get progressively sillier as the death toll rises, Bailey’s West End chops really come into their own for some gleefully lurid action scenes.