Inspector Morse: House of Ghosts, Edinburgh review: 'unsatisfying'

Inspector Morse: House of Ghosts, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★

Perhaps playing Inspector Morse while not being John Thaw ought to be an arrestable offence; not quite murder, of course, but inevitably doing some violence to the memory of a television drama series so perfectly realised that it has become something of a national treasure.

So it’s perhaps not surprising that Tom Chambers’s performance as Morse, in this new stage spin-off, has a slightly furtive and agonised quality, as he tries and generally fails to capture the famously complex and intense inner life of the Oxford-based police detective, who first appeared in Colin Dexter’s novels in 1972.

Morse: House Of Ghosts is set in 1987, and began life as a 2017 radio play written by the late Edinburgh playwright Alma Cullen for director Marilyn Imrie. In a creaky, old-fashioned style - with plenty of scenery rolled on and off stage - Anthony Banks’s stage production re-tells the complex story of the death of a young professional actress on stage during a performance of Hamlet, and of how that death links back to events 25 years earlier, when Morse and several members of the company - including the bullying director, Lawrence - were students together in Oxford.

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There are plenty of moments to enjoy, as a second violent death shatters the company. Tachia Newall has fun playing Morse’s sidekick Lewis as a cheerful folk philosopher, while Jason Done’s suitably ghastly Lawrence is a perfect monster of egotism.

There’s something unsatisfying, though, about he fact that from start to finish, Morse seems even more baffled by the case than we are; so that in the end, the guilty parties simply start to confess, while Morse looks on aghast. It’s fun, but it’s not the wise, wily and sorrowful Morse we’ve come to love; and despite a few blasts of the familiar and beautiful television theme tune, it’s hard to feel that the spirit of Morse is truly with us, in this house of ghosts.

Inspector Morse: House of Ghosts is at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, until 7 March; His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, 24-28 March; and Theatre Royal, Glasgow, 31 March-4 April.

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