one4review | On 02, Sep 2026

Things don’t get much more quintessentially English than Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series with their four plucky mystery-solving pre-teens and equally plucky dog roaming unsupervised around the countryside solving mysteries and consuming lashings of various picnic foods. And, conversely, things don’t get much more quintessentially American than film noir detectives, with their hard drinking, hard smoking and hard-boiled protagonists perpetually pursuing the wrong woman into a whole heap of trouble. So, what do you get when you mix them together? A lot of laughs and a Simply Beastly Murder.

A now grown-up Dick Kirrin (Alistair Mackay) has shed his boyish persona and English accent in favour of becoming your standard American private eye and, predictably has fallen into a whole heap of trouble. Our story begins with Dick (or Richard, as he prefers to be called now for obvious reasons) discovers that his on-again off-again girlfriend has been stabbed in her sister’s dressing room at a seedy nightclub. With nowhere else to turn to, he calls in his sister Anne (Rachel E. Thorn) to help investigate and discovers she’s completely unchanged from her childhood self, still full of pluck, stiff upper lip, and clipped PR consonants. The two mismatched siblings must navigate around the gritty world of underground bars, nightclubs, and, thrillingly, jewel thefts, to solve this murder, but is Anne ready to face a world outside her childhood of endless summers?

When blending genres like this there are a few different ways to go and A Simply Beastly Murder chooses to have the plot be a very accurate, if not particularly original, pastiche of a hard-boiled detective story, with most of the humour arising from the juxtaposition of the utterly out-of-place Anne being there rather than making the situations they’re in the joke. Thorn, who wrote the play, does a frankly masterful job here, with skilful ability to mimic the voice of both genres. While the noir side of the story takes itself maybe a little seriously, it doesn’t mean that the actors on stage can’t have fun with how it’s presented with various tricks to get around the limited cast, including voice work provided by Alistair McGowan and there’s plenty of laughs to be had there too.

If I had one minor critique it would be that the balance feels a little off in the blending of genres – this is predominantly a comedy film noir rather than a comedy Famous Five, with all the other members missing (and Timmy the dog explicitly dead which is played for laughs but made sentimental old me a little sad). Thorn clearly had a lot more fun with the pithy one-liners of Dick’s Private Dick internal narration than doing too much with the celebrated quintet’s lashings of tinned pineapple and ginger beer. No word on Julian or George, but it was nice to see someone take Anne, who is inarguably the worst served character in Blyton’s books, and make her dynamic and interesting rather than just reliably domestic.

This is a very tightly written story, with some great acting and fun and engaging ideas. Thorn is clearly a very confident comic voice and is definitely one to watch.

****1/2
Reviewed by Tom
Pleasance Dome