Laughs and thrills meet in Eastbourne's Murder By Misadventure

Phil will be directing the last of the three: “Murder By Misadventure is quite a contemporary thriller. It is set at the end of the 80s before mobile phones came along and destroyed a lot of plots! It is a play that was written in the 90s but it is not done an awful lot. It has got a quite a particular set. You have to have a balcony with a working patio door. That's part of the conceit and it is quite tricky to build. It's got to be very robust. It is not something you can fake. It is quite a quirky thing but it is also quite a quirky play. It is not linear in the tradition of a lot of traditional murder mysteries, and I think that's one of the reasons I'm enjoying it so much.

“It's about a pair of writing partners who write for the BBC and ITV and they have been successful. They have written murder mysteries and so on but one of the writers, Harry, is getting a bit jaded by the partnership and he is thinking about going solo. The younger writer is a hopeless alcoholic but he is the creative genius in the partnership and he definitely doesn't want to end the partnership. Paul, the younger one, has come up with a fantastic new plot idea but Harry has broken the news to him that he wants to break off the partnership and doesn't want to do the new plot. And then for various reasons that fabulous new plot becomes the plot of the play we are watching including a very original way of murdering someone.

“The play is very contemporary which makes it very accessible and somehow more real. People know the attitudes, and I think that helps people sit back and relax and enjoy getting wrapped up in it.

“Music is very important from my directing point of view and also the atmosphere is very important. You've got to get the jump points. You have to be one step ahead of the audience all the time and you have to know how to structure it. Pace really matters. You need to start steady, speed up a bit and then stop, and it is the stops that the audience remembers. And you've got to keep the audience interested; you’ve got to know when to explain and then you've got to know when you want them not to understand what is going on.”

Phil and Ben have been coming to Eastbourne for three summers now: “We have worked a bit with various other plays here but for the last three years we've done three plays in six weeks with 11 performances each and gradually the audience builds. It's really great. We get the residents coming in and we also get a lot of holidaymakers.”

To an extent it is a throw-back to the good old-fashioned days of rep with cross-casting. The first play had a cast of seven, the second play eight and then there are four in the third. Some of the actors will do all three plays, some will do two and one is just doing one of them.

“It is tricky. The casting adds another problem because you’ve got to think of three plays that can work together and you've also got to make sure that you've got versatile actors who can work across all of them if you need them to.”