"It Could Be Any One Of Us"

Written by the master of comedy Alan Ayckbourn and directed by the talented and experienced Pat Stroud, IT COULD BE ANY ONE OF US is Harbour Theatre’s fourth season for 2008. An old dark house, a stormy night, a corpse, a number of suspects, a killer on the loose and a private sleuth hot on the trail. All the traditional ingredients for a good, old-fashioned edge-of-your-seat whodunit. Unfortunately, the sleuth in question has trouble even identifying the potential victim let alone the suspects. As far as he's concerned, it could be any one of them, really... In a remote and dilapidated country house, three siblings share an antagonistic life together with a problem teenager. All the siblings are artists who have failed to live up to their own, let alone anyone else’s, expectations. The older brother Mortimer (Peter Kirkwood) is a composer who has never realised his youthful potential, his sister Jocelyn (Nicola Bond) is a writer of thrillers who has never completed a novel and Brinton (John Forde) is a painter, who does not even let his family see his work. Jocelyn’s daughter Amy (Jade Craig) shares the house and seems determined to eat her way to happiness. When Jocelyn’s partner, Norris (Alan Kennedy) – an insurance investigator with aspirations to be a real detective – arrives home and interrupts a recital by Mortimer, a row breaks out in which Mortimer reveals he intends to disinherit the family and give the house to a former student, Wendy Jones (Francesca Meehan). Wendy visits the house and promptly survives three attempts on her life. A storm and the old house conspire to terrify Wendy and Norris, their terror compounded when Mortimer enters with a mortal blow to the head. With the police unwilling to take Norris’s claims of murder seriously, he attempts to solve the murder pinpointing three suspects. The astonishingly inept Norris’s investigations end with a traditional thriller denouement in which he reveals the killer. Of course, his investigations are completely wrong! Director Pat Stroud says “This, the 30th play from the pen of Alan Ayckbourn, conforms wickedly to almost all the conventions - preposterous plotting, slightly unreal, larger-than-life characters, even a stormy night with the wind rattling the latch. Almost everyone, even the amateur detective, has equal motivation and opportunity. In fact it's all so ingeniously balanced that the villain can vary from one performance to the next, depending on the turn of a card. And with Ayckbourn, you're never even quite sure who was the victim.” MATINEE: Sunday 7th September at 2.00pm Why not have a meal at Clancy’s right next door to the theatre before the show? Don’t forget to ask for your Harbour Theatre Meal Deal. What a great night out in Fremantle!