YOU will remember the format for Peter Falk’s 30-year television series as dishevelled, serial-smoking, outwardly befuddled Los Angeles police detective Lieutenant Columbo.
Each seemingly oft repeated episode would open with the set-up, the murder and the culprit covering their tracks in too much haste, so we knew already whodunit. Then along came the cigar vapour trail of the crouched, diminutive Columbo, whose task was to work out howhedunnit.
And now, after all these years, here is just one more thing, Columbo’s first ever stage outing, which bears the familiar forever Seventies’ format but is set in 1968, an era before mobile phones and theatre warning signs saying smoking on stage was necessary for “authenticity”.
Why 1968? Prescription: Murder formed the television pilot that year, although it was originally written by series creators Richard Levinson and William Link as a play in 1961. Once you have seen through the smoke haze, it is a pretty thin piece of theatre, now built around American John Guerrasio’s exaggerated caricature of Falk’s Columbo and a typically creepy turn from former Coronation Street murderer Brian Capron (he played serial killer Richard Hillman).
Capron, crow-dark, austere and as devoid of humour as a shark, is back in the killing business as Dr Roy Flemming (CORRECT), a psychiatrist being driven insane by his possessive wife, Claire (Alexandra Boyd), whose refusal to divorce him blocks his path to a new life with one of his Hollywood patients, eye-candy blonde actress Susan Hudson (Elizabeth Lowe). Cue murder, executed by Capron with hammy humour.
The Times called this Middle Ground Theatre Company touring show a “top-notch mix of suspense and farce”, but Michael Lunney’s retro production is neither. Instead Prescription: Murder is laboured, obvious, over-played, blighted by wavering American accents (Guerrasio aside, of course) and lacklustre dialogue.
Just one more thing: Columbo should stub out his cigar one last time after this deadly dud.
Lieutenant Columbo in Prescription: Murder, Middle Ground Theatre Company, Harrogate Theatre, until Saturday, 7.30pm and 2.30pm Saturday matinee. Box office: 01423 502116 or harrogatetheatre.co.uk
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