Over My Dead Body (play)


Over My Dead Body is a comedy/thriller play, written by Michael Sutton and Anthony Fingleton, "suggested by" Robert L. Fish's 1968 novel The Murder League.
It opened at the Savoy Theatre, London on 20 February 1989 and ran until 19 August 1989, starring Donald Sinden as Trevor Foyle, June Whitfield as Dora Winslow, Frank Middlemass as Bartie Cruikshank, Marc Sinden as Simon Vale, Ken Wynne as Charters, with Paul Ridley, Chris Tranchell and William Sleigh, It was directed by Brian Murray.
An earlier draft played a limited engagement at the Hartman Theatre, Stamford, CT, in November, 1984. It starred Fritz Weaver, Tammy Grimes, Thomas Toner, William Preston, Mordecai Lawner, Stephen Newman, Richard Clarke and Walter Atamaniuk and was directed by Edwin Sherin.
An acting edition was published by Dramatists Play Service in 1998 and remains in print as of .

Overview

Over My Dead Body is a comedic homage to the detective stories of the 1920s and ’30s, but is more accurately classified as a comedy-thriller than a comedy-mystery. Unlike the traditional Agatha Christie-style "whodunit", the audience knows from the start the identities of the would-be murderers, and is taken step-by-step through their inept attempts to carry out their convoluted crime. The play thus falls into the subgenre of "inverted" detective story, characterized by being told from the viewpoint not of the detective but of the criminal, the emphasis being on the suspense of whether he/she/they will succeed and, if so, evade capture, rather than the surprise resulting from an unknown killer's unmasking. Other works in the "inverted" vein include Francis Ile's Malice Aforethought, Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal, Frederick Knott's Wait Until Dark, and numerous film and television works produced and/or directed by Alfred Hitchcock, such as Rope, Dial M for Murder, and Marnie.

Plot synopsis

Trevor Foyle, Dora Winslow, and Bartie Cruikshank are British mystery writers whose time has come and gone. Having watched their style of fiction—with its eccentric detectives, "impossible" murders, and least-likely suspects—dwindle in popularity and sales over the decades, they're resigned to living out their few remaining years in the reading room of the Murder League: a crime-writers' literary club of which they are the last surviving founders.
There, day after day, waited upon by the League's loyal butler Charters, the pompous Trevor rails against the decline in crime-writing standards, while the more philosophical Dora busies herself with her knitting, and ever-oblivious Bartie dozes in his easy chair, dreaming of murder plots long past.
Passing through the club, Simon Vale—a younger member who writes best-selling thrillers steeped in sex and gore—belittles the elder trio for their persistence in portraying murder as stylish, ingeniously contrived puzzles, rather than the brutal, bloody, frequently irrational thing it is in real life.
Stung by his words, the three older writers hypothesize what would happen should a real-life murder be committed as it is in their books, with outré touches and cryptic clues. Conceivably, it would spark a renaissance of "Golden Age" whodunits—perhaps even motivate people to buy their books again.
Fired with enthusiasm at the prospect, they resolve to turn their hypothesis into reality: instead of merely writing a fictional murder, they'll commit a real one!
Needless to say, they ultimately learn that arranging for someone to be found shot, stabbed and hanged in a room locked and barricaded from the inside is somewhat more difficult to accomplish in real life than on the printed page. Especially when the would-be murderers are considerably past their physical prime and, as it turns out, prone to queasiness when confronted with the necessity of having to inflict actual physical mayhem on a real, live human being.
With the aid of, among other diverse items, a bayonetted rifle, a Xanax-laced bottle of ketchup, a mace-wielding suit of armor, an ill-fitting red dress, a recalcitrant thumbtack, a convenient gust of wind, and an unsuspected fly in the ointment—the classic British detective story and our protagonists' reputations are ultimately rescued from a premature demise.

Allusions

Over My Dead Body alludes frequently to actual works of detective fiction, including:
Real-life crimes and criminals are also mentioned:

Discrepancies

The authors take a certain degree of artistic license with the setting of Over My Dead Body. Though the Murder League of the play is clearly patterned after the real-life Detection Club, an informal organization of British detective story writers founded in 1930, reality has been somewhat romanticized for the stage. The original never occupied permanent "gentlemen’s club" type rooms such as in the play—with aged servant, macabre memorabilia, and "excellent wine cellar"—but instead met at a variety of locales for its periodic get-togethers.
Liberties also appear to have been taken with the ages of the play’s protagonists. Though no specific year is given for the play's action, allusions to Xanax, Sylvester Stallone, and the phrase "get your rocks off" set it in the mid-1980s at the earliest. Yet Trevor and Bartie are described as being in their 70s, and Dora— though only characterized as being "of advanced years"—is clearly intended to be their contemporary.
This would not only put them in their teens at the time of the real-life Detection Club’s founding, but make them at least twenty years the junior of the youngest of its actual founding members, Anthony Berkeley. Even precocity, one presumes, has its limits.

Critical Reaction

Over My Dead Body received positive critical response in its pre-London try-out:
Its reception in London, however, was less than enthusiastic, the only genuine "rave" review coming from the Financial Times:
Over My Dead Body nevertheless enjoyed a 7-month run in London and has since received numerous non-professional stagings both in America and abroad, notably in Japan.
A review of a repertory production at the Asolo Theatre Company, Sarasota, Florida in 1997 declared:
In program notes for the same staging, the late, renowned detective author Stuart M. Kaminsky wrote: