Wish You Were Dead – The Lowry
The line between amateur and professional theatre is a lot finer than many people realise. Sometimes it is the best am dram performances that remind one of this fact. Other times it is pro productions that feel second best. Wish You Were Dead is, sadly, an example of the latter.
This isn't the first of Peter James' bestselling Roy Grace stories to be adapted for the stage but, if the formula has worked well previously, it doesn't quite deliver here.
The show is very heavy on exposition, very light on character development. There are a fair few plot points and devices which would have probably been given ample time to develop in a novel but which feel thrown away, redundant or downright confusing in a two hour stage production.
These problems are then compounded by some lower grad...