Cultural Dessert

The TADS Theatre Group’s performance of the gloriously silly ‘Inspector Drake and the Black Widow’ by David Tristram (reviewed here in April 2009) was one of my picks of the year for 2009. I was delighted to discover that Joe Butcher’s wonderful performance as Inspector Drake won him the NODA ‘Best Actor in a Play 2009’ award – extremely well-deserved. But I was even more delighted to see that Joe and Kevin Birkett were to reprise their roles as the Inspector and his dim-witted Sergeant in David Tristram’s sequel ‘Inspector Drake and the Perfekt Crime’. So last Friday we made the short journey to the tiny TADS Theatre in Toddington for another evening of excellent mockery of the murder mystery. It was a brilliant send-up of the genre, incorporating slapstick, visual gags, word-play and with “more twists in it than, well, a really twisty thing” – all excellently performed by a great amateur cast.