‘Drunk Women Solving Crime’ sees the podcast namesake come to life on stage.
It does, kind of, what it says on the tin.
Hannah George, Catie Wilkins and Taylor Glenn plus a guest panellist sit and solve true crime cases…with the help of some alcoholic beverages. After all, you might as well inject some light-heartedness as you begin to unpick death.
The show at London’s Leicester Square Theatre was the culmination of their tour which has included cities like Birmingham, Bristol and Leeds, and featured Scottish comedian Arabella Weir. She proved to be the icing on the cake with her humour and banter.
Their case for the evening was to try to get to the bottom of the death of James Maybrick.
In April, 1889, he became ill and died the following month. His wife Florence was accused of poisoning him with arsenic and sentenced to life in imprisonment.
So, the $64,000 question is, did she really do it? And so all the twists and turns begin.
Unravelling the whodunnit was the best part of the show and it turns out there were many surprise revelations to this case.
If you haven’t heard of James Maybrick, then the surprising titbit of information is that he then became one of the most plausible Jack the Ripper suspects due to several key pieces of information coming to light after his death.
The quartet provided plenty of laughs as they went through all the possibilities over how James Maybrick met his death.
Once the crime of the past is solved the panel move onto a crime of the present. An audience member comes on stage to tell all about how they’ve been wronged.
Although they didn’t say how this person was picked - perhaps it was through their growing followers on social media - but something about it felt staged and a bit disingenuous.
And that wasn’t the only thing that didn’t feel real. The premise of the show is that the panel is drunk but it appeared that didn’t apply to any of them in this show. At best, tipsy, might be more of an appropriate word, but even that didn’t extend to all of them.
‘Drunk Women Solving Crime’ is a bit of a good laugh - it promises a lot but doesn’t really deliver what it said it would.
Review: Sunita Jaswal