Saw this the Thursday matinee before last, and thought that Whodunnit 3 (Railroad Murder) is better written and funnier than Whodunnit 1 (Old Dark House Murder - I missed Whodunnit 2).
Particularly funny were the musical bits and the character comedy of the shouty showoff, Ciaran Dowd's magician character, Zoltano.
Obviously, the principal comic tension is seeing how the special guest Inspector gets on, and we had Hugh Bonneville, who enthusiastically embraced his improvisational acting training by saying yes to everything thrown at him.
He suited the part and was very funny.
Some spoilers follow. . .
When Bonneville was revealed, two women leaped to their feet screaming in ecstacy. Bonneville drolly suggested they were his mother and sister lol.
As Bonneville is more obviously a Hastings type than a Poirot type, what followed appeared to be Hastings on an undercover mission disguised as Poirot, adopting a cod French accent when supposed to be undercover, then received pronunciation as his big reveal of his true identity.
Watching Bonneville gamely trying to mimic a dance number to a very well-known song (can't say which, in case any other Inspector reads this lol), and almost managing it, being only a fraction of a second delayed, was a great laugh.
A use of projections for a credit sequence, and to simulate a moving train, evoked Jamie Lloyd while proving surprisingly dynamic for the typically staid Park Theatre space.
In one sequence, Bonneville was left alone to fill some serious time, with the choice of whether to elaborate on the plot or to engage in something else diverting, and he chose the latter, because presumably the plot was too baffling for him lol.
So he told a rather spooky twist on a joke about actors, in which three dogs stumble on a valley of bones, one owned by an actor, one by an architect, one by a mathematician.
The mathematician's dog lined the bones up, the architect's dog built a tower of bones, and the actor's dog ate all the bones, f--ked the other two dogs and asked for some time off. Big laughs ensued.
In the main cast, along with Ciaran Dowd, who went as big as Henry Lewis of Mischief Theatre in all his choices, I really liked Molly Barton, who always maintained a diabolical commitment to the mischief of her characters.
After a very funny (musical) denouement, Bonneville was very grateful to the other actors who had made him feel so welcome, and who he plainly had enjoyed working with, and he revealed that he had performed with a massive hangover lol.
In his interview, he affirmed the value of always saying yes in improv, and said he got his love of acting by dressing up in his mother's wardrobe full of frocks, which came from a time living in Alexandria, Egypt, and he told how he would write and act in plays wearing them as a child lol. When asked about Paddington, he promised that Antonio Banderas had done some great work in the next one.
During the auction, a lady paid £1,500 for a champagne meet and greet, which Bonneville referred to as "hair of the dog," though surprisingly she was not one of the two ladies (falsely) identified as his mother and sister lol.
All in all, 4 stars of great fun in a good cause.
