David Tristram is one of the UK's most popular and performed comedy playwrights. On average, one of his 29 published comedies is being performed somewhere in the world every single day. Like Alan Ayckbourn he writes plays that are well suited to amateur productions, usually requiring a single simple set. We first discovered David Tristram at one of our first visits to TADS, our local amateur theatre group in Toddington, in 2009 when we saw the gloriously silly murder mystery 'Inspector Drake and the Black Widow' (reviewed here in April 2009). On Saturday we were back at TADS for their latest David Tristram production, 'Ghost Writer' - a haunting comedy thriller. Like a contemporary version of Noel Coward's 'Blithe Spirit', playwright Edward (Rory White) is visited by the ghost of his dead wife Ruby (Jude Stacy) who tells him they need to find out which of the other actors in their company murdered her. Ruby persuades Edward to use Hamlet's 'play within the play' technique to try to reveal the guilty party. David Sachon's production brilliantly handles the required comic timing and crosstalk scenes (where only Edward can see or hear Ruby's ghost and everyone else assumes his comments to her are meant for them). The cast of six are all very impressive, with Andrew Naish's bright orange wig almost stealing the show. And the references to, and quotes from, 'Hamlet' are cleverly used. A very entertaining and enjoyable farce, excellently performed.
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