Calling all those who like watching the detectives. For fans of Raymond Chandler’s thrillers, movies like “The Big Sleep,” and “Chinatown,” here’s a play you may enjoy. “Hardboiled: The Fall Of Sam Shadow” by the Rhum and Clay company is at the New Diorama in London.Sam Shadow is introduced as the archetypal gumshoe detective with a lot to prove. He is likely to stay up all night drinking bourbon and chasing women before a working day which could be anything from tracking down missing dogs to fighting gangsters. Dirty work but someone has to do it. There must be a good guy to catch the murders, he says. “It may as well be me.”Yes, lines like these are full of Sam- Spade type cliché. But they work because they are delivered as comic wisecracks, and because this story is unashamedly making something new by borrowing from just every trick in the crime fiction and film-noir book.You may have heard things like these before: “Maybe I love you, but I will get over it,” “of all the offices in the all the world…” (spot the “Casablanca” homage) or even the reference to Shadow being hardboiled after one too many hard knocks and heartbreaks. (In the program note, director Beth Flintoff quotes from “Ace in the Hole”: “I met a lot of hardboiled eggs in my life, but you – you’re 20 minutes.”)The story starts as Shadow meets a client who he thinks is called Scarlett Crawford and has a missing sister. She reveals she is no average dame and really Mrs. Addison – married to the sinister tycoon who runs the local electricity company. She wants Shadow to find her missing lover. Scarlett is beautiful and knows it. “My husband says I provoke him – do you find me provoking?” Faced with this ultimate femme fatale, Shadow’s tough-guy starts to crack. He gets on the trail of the missing man who is conveniently head of maintenance for Addison.There is a subtle plot building up here. There are constant brief references to power cuts by Addison’s company and yet its share price keeps going up, though it takes a while to see the relevance – with echoes of more recent scandals. The cocksure Shadow, nicely done by Julian Spooner, loses his composure as everyone turns out to be corrupt – not just the gangsters, the former bootleggers, and the politicians. Inevitably the cops tell our hero to mind his own business and then double-cross him.The cast of four has to double up on some roles and it is usually clear what is going on. Jess Mabel Jones does a great job as Scarlett (add a fur coat), Sam’s loyal sidekick/secretary Betty (big glasses) and a crazy receptionist (wonderfully ditzy voice.) While a few attempts at American accents are jarring, this doesn’t detract from the action which bowls along from Shadow’s office, seedy apartment blocks and more, with David Harris’s minimalist sets cleverly lit by Nick Flintoff.Matthew Wells (who starred with Spooner in “62 Squares”) and Christopher Harrisson play key parts in ladling out the entertaining clichés. One could predict a little police violence, a car chase, a skyscraper suicide scare and a smoky late-night bar scene coming right from the start. So what: As someone said, this is a case with more twists than a Chinese burn. Here’s looking at you, kid.“Hardboiled: The Fall of Sam Shadow” by the Rhum & Clay Theatre Company and Beth Flintoff, which previewed at the Watermill Theatre, is at New Diorama in Londonfrom February 9 through 27 February 2016. Information: http://newdiorama.com/
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