Murder by Magic

Magic shows are supposed to end with the assistant waving from a box. Instead, the landlady of the pub ends up crushed by one. That is what happens to Hannah Altman, and the illusionist on stage, the famous Gideon Latimer, has a lot of explaining to do. Rachel Cuperman, Sally Griffiths and Caroline Graham wrote it, and Charlie Palmer directed, and they make the most of a premise that sits somewhere between theatrical and awful.

Barnaby and Nelson have to work out whether the box fell by accident or design, and the pub becomes the second stage of the show. The suspects gather around the Latimers: Amanda Burton's Carole, and the Soanes, Jack Shepherd's Magnus and Deborah Findlay's Lorna. Joe Absolom's Luke Altman is the dead woman's family, which puts him in the awkward position of grieving while everyone else sizes him up. Fraser Ayres' Theo Bainbridge and Noma Dumezweni's Ailsa Probert keep the audience guessing. Everyone agrees on the sequence of events, which makes the disagreement about everything else more telling. The trick is finding out who was standing where when the box came down.

The Perspex box is a brilliant piece of staging. Everyone in the room saw the same thing, and everyone remembers it differently, which is a fair description of how these cases usually go. The trick, as ever, is that the murder isn't the illusion. The illusion is the excuse.

Fiona Dolman's Sarah and Tamzin Malleson's Kate Wilding keep the edges of the story warm, and the whole thing carries the slightly dusty glamour of a travelling show that has been on the road too long. The audience at these shows never quite believes what it sees, and the police end up feeling the same way.

But it's a fun one, with a death you won't forget in a hurry.