Something Wicked

With a Cluedo-style house plan underfoot and three sisters preparing for their mother's funeral, the stage is set for an unconventional murder mystery. It appears that the challenge is not to guess who, but rather where and how. The answer, when is comes, is unexpected.

'The curse of the Crowes' is how the dead woman liked to explain the various misfortunes of her daughters, but it's fair to say that she added plenty of fuel to the fire. Now it appears that her offspring have been driven to the ultimate act of revenge.

Something Wicked was initially devised last year as an Arches New Work Commission, and has been re-written and re-cast for this new tour. There's certainly much to enjoy, but the play doesn't seem entirely sure what it wants to be - on one hand there's gleefully dark comedy, tongue-in-cheek audience participation and supernatural spell-casting, but on the other there's more sober talk of guilt and betrayal, and the very grim reality of the unseen mother's fate.

The opening - in which the sisters list in detail the contents of their now-empty family home - is richly evocative, and cleverly littered with red herrings. The following scenes of merciless bickering contain some dynamite dialogue, with the wonderful Angela Darcy bagging most of the best lines. Expectations are raised, but the conclusion is disappointing and unclear.

Are Louise, Anna and Katherine really witches, or just a very, very bad influence on each other? Should we care about them, laugh at them, or be scared of them? For the most part Something Wicked is a funny, lively production, and there's much here to admire, but it doesn't quite deliver.