This genre has not completely disappeared: its descendent is today’s leaner, more agile stage thriller which takes many of  the conventions of melodrama and fills out the tale with some real meat and sinew - even some recognisable human beings.

The basic psychology behind the melodrama was crude Manicheanism (the struggle between the Good and the Bad) or, at its richest, a bubbling psychology of the Humours. But between the heyday of melodrama and the emergence of the modern thriller came Freud, Jung, Adler and the other pioneers of modernist psychology, whose theories were merrily plundered by playwrights and directors to bulk up the credibility of the thriller’s characters.

At its best - and it can be quite good - the modern thriller relies on the bizarre twists and turns of the human mind as much as ingenious plot twists to engage us and then deliver its punch.  As a result, the stage thriller remains one of the more popular forms of non-musical theatre, and staging one can often bulk up a theatre company’s box office receipts nicely.

Marcus Lloyd’s Dead Certain is a psychological thriller that plays on the relationship between theatre or literature and the mystery form itself. In that regard, it follows in the rich traditions of such giants of the genre as Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth, Ira Levin’s Deathtrap, or Tudor Gate’s Who’s Afraid of ‘Agatha’ Christie?. While young Lloyd’s first foray into thriller terrain is no match for at least the first two of these, it is a praiseworthy effort that displays Lloyd’s still developing skills at dialogue, plot and characterisation.

Dead Certain, which opened in 1999, brings Michael, a narcissistic actor of modest talents, to the home of Elizabeth, a paraplegic fascinated with the theatre world. Elizabeth has apparently written a play, and she engages Michael to help her doctor the script simply by taking it through a rigorous first read and early rehearsal process. (For his assistance in sculpting the script, Michael has been promised 400 pounds, not a bad night’s work for a mediocre thespian.) However, as the reading gets rolling, we discover that there is something much more bizarre afoot: the script seems to mirror Michael’s own life, from his birth all the way up to his arrival at Elizabeth’s home. As that arrival was punctuated by Michael’s mysteriously cutting his hand and bleeding generously from the small cut, the weirdness slides clearly into the region of the sinister.  

The reading itself, with rudimentary acting out of stage action, becomes the spine of this thriller. Early on, Elizabeth prompts Michael by telling him that her play’s three themes are “freedom, empowerment and identity’. Before long, we find out that these themes likewise fuel the twisting trajectory of Dead Certain.

Of that first theme, the play-within-the-play’s use of not only Michael’s past but also his short-term future raises the perennial question of free will versus determinism. In the first act, Elizabeth declares her belief that all accidents can be avoided, as everything is caused by somebody and everything we do should be significant. This seed bears bitter fruit in Act 2 when we discover that it was Michael’s casual cruelty (he laughed in her face when asked for his autograph after a performance) that ultimately led to the Elizabeth’s crippling traffic accident.

The theme of empowerment seeps into some key questions of the play, such as what one can purchase with money (in this case, Elizabeth has seemingly bought a chunk of Michael’s soul), and punishment. This last point is strengthened when Elizabeth makes the hapless actor repeat, literally under the gun, that the main purpose of punishment is to re-empower victims so that they can begin to feel better about themselves. In punishing the man she blames for the loss of her ability to use her legs, Elizabeth hopes to re-empower herself and so compensate for that loss.

And, finally, the question of identity spins this way and that as the cat-and-mouse machinations of the plot progress. During the early stages of the play-reading, Michael plays the character ‘Mike‘, who’s playing Mick in the play-within-the-play-within-the-play; Elizabeth reads Liz, who’s reading the part of Liza in that inner core of the make-believe. But who is this Elizabeth anyway, who is Michael, and what roles do they really play in each other’s less-than-satisfying lives?

In this Escape Theatre presentation, director Samantha Scott-Blackhall and actors Beatrice Chia and Mark Waite teamed up nicely to give Lloyd’s script a commendable rendering on the Singapore Rep’s stage.

Scott-Blackhall showed a good grasp of the bristly material and ably went about giving it shape and substance. Her staging was clean, efficient, well-paced and well-balanced. In other words, just about everything that a good stage thriller requires.

Not that I do not have a few quibbles here. To wit: This production commenced with the actors reciting their lines in the dark, the lines being delivered in echo. (The combination of these two factors made it difficult, in fact, to catch the first exchanges, an unfortunate effect.)

Director Scott-Blackhall and sound designer Darren Ng did come up with some interesting small effects. For instance, during the interval, an eerie, echoised version of songs from West Side Story played. (West Side Story was the show where Elizabeth fatefully tried and failed to get Mike’s autograph.) It’s just a shame that the faulty echoing dialogue that opened (and closed) the show hurt our understanding the text at those key points.

Not long after the opening, Mark Waite upstaged himself slightly a number of times, conversing with his back turned to the audience. And these were moments when we needed to see - and not only hear - this character starting to reveal himself in a most strange situation.

Also, when Michel started reading the sensual stage directions involving the two characters in the play-with-the-play, Chia’s Elizabeth reacted a little too quickly to the arousing suggestions. As these things happen, that haste diminished rather than enhanced the scene’s erotic tension.

By way of contrast, this hasty arousal was soon followed by a moment where Mike grabs the tailor’s dummy’s tit and then kisses its truncated neck. This latter bit, carried out perfunctorily by Mike, was nicely comical here, a tribute both to actor and director.

Actually, both actors here turned in solid, workmanlike performances in bringing Dead Certain to life. (Sorry about the gender-specific adjective there, Beatrice Chia.) Waite offered a sharply contoured Mike. He proved particularly good when in high dudgeon; with his grinding features and easy petulance, Waite is quite effective at that register. He also added a telling little fillip to this transformation as Mike’s idiom and grammar turned more deeply Cockney at such moments.

Beatrice Chia was perhaps even better as Elizabeth. Chia used her face well once again; for instance, when repeatedly showing (us, not him) the lady’s coquettish subterfuge. And though confined throughout to her wheelchair, Chia makes the most out of the physical dimensions of the role. For instance, she holds her legs in the wheelchair as would one who has lost the use of those limbs: helpless appendages.

However, neither Chia nor Waite plumbed the darkest depths of their characters, exploring all the quirks of the pair. Playwright Lloyd, not yet fully accomplished in this genre, leaves a number of unanswered questions scattered about. For instance, why was Elizabeth so obsessed with Michael, even before her accident? Why does she nurture this death wish? What deep character flaw led Michael to treat her autograph request so nastily? Why does he keep going along with the game?

As Lloyd left these matters invitingly open, it fell to the two actors to fill in questions like this and deliver a thoroughly gripping, powerful show. Instead, they clung to the prickly surfaces and gave us an enjoyable, well-worked production. Hey, that’s not bad, but it could have been more. And more is what we would dearly like to see from this two seasoned performers.

Director Scott-Blackhall designed the set herself, a somewhat Spartan arrangement wherein the living room of this (apparently) independently well-to-do woman was evoked through a stack of butcher-block shelves, the tailor’s dummy, a desk, a humdrum drinks cart, and posters of hit musicals. (One of which, Blood Brothers by Willy Russell was a clever bit of insider publicity for Escape’s follow-on production, Russell’s Shirley Valentine.)

As noted above, the technical aspects of the show were not always spot-on. Aside from the opening echoes, the production evidenced some problems with the lighting. A number of times, as Waite moved and took a new position, shadows fell across his face. Truth is, I am not sure if this was intentional or just faulty staging; at times, the shadows seemed to underscore Michael’s tremulous state, at other times, the effect came off as simply gratuitous, overdone.

If I had to guess, I would bet it was faulty tech. In a production whose staging was generally so clean and well-balanced, it is hard to imagine the director would traffic with the gratuitous.

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