A deathly dull serial killer stalks suburbia

The Unfriend (Minerva Theatre, Chichester) Verdict: No plot, Sherlock ★★★✩✩

The Father And The Assassin (Olivier, National Theatre, London) Verdict: Murder most jolly ★★★✩✩

THEY’VE assembled a television dream team down in Chichester for a new comedy by Doctor Who and Sherlock writer Steven Moffat. And Moffat’s co-writer on Sherlock, Mark Gatiss, directs a play that also stars Gatiss’s League Of Gentlemen colleague Reece Shearsmith. Not only that, the great stage actress Frances Barber adds theatrical heft of her own. ‘How fast can I book tickets?’ I hear you asking.

Well, if I were you, I’d pause before reaching for the plastic.

The Unfriend is about a suburban English couple who inadvertently invite an American serial killer (Barber) to stay in their home, after meeting her on a cruise.

Apparently based on a true story, it struck me as a paper-thin sitcom in which our charming murderess seems also to have done away with plot.

All that happens is that the couple (Shearsmith and Sherlock’s Amanda Abbington) feel too embarrassed to ask her to leave.

Comedies of procrastination can only go on so long before something must give. Only here, it doesn’t.

There are some good gags including Shearsmith’s quip that 20 years of marriage gives you a talent for telepathy, ‘only more hostile’.

Moffat religiously follows the comic rule of running a routine three times. One such trilogy includes the teenage son (a permanently aghast Gabriel Howell) failing to answer the phone. Although this may have the ring of truth for parents, the eventual punchline also has the ring of painful predictability. The show’s best feature is Barber, who turns her serial killer from Denver into a kind of bling, Midwest, female Donald Trump. She may fire off lines worthy of Bette Davis, but casting her here is like keeping a Rolls-Royce for popping to the shops. Abbington’s role is merely to reflect that discomfort, while Maddie Holliday brings familiar adolescent indignation as her daughter Rosie.

The action plays out on a show home set without a trace of personality. Yet I was astonished to find myself surrounded by people nearly popping with laughter. Now that, folks, was a mystery worthy of Sherlock.

■ WHAT larks it must have been to assassinate Mahatma Gandhi! That, at least, is the dubious tone struck by Anupama Chandrasekhar’s jolly drama at the National Theatre.

Because she is an Indian writer, few of us in the UK will feel willing or able to challenge her, but I suspect it’s a deliberately provocative gesture, designed to wake us from our reflex veneration of India’s founding father. Played by an endlessly chipper Shubham Saraf, Gandhi’s killer Nathuram Godse gives us a tour of his life, explaining why he did it, and teasing us for taking a prurient interest in him.

He relates how he was raised as a girl by parents who feared their male line was cursed. He went on to become a tailor’s assistant and fell under the spell of Hindu nationalist Vinayak Savarkar, who rejected pacifism and scoffed at Gandhi’s failure to resist partition of India and Pakistan.

At first enamoured of Paul Bazely’s tall, thin, urbane Gandhi, he gradually becomes a servile flunky to Sagar Arya’s surly Savarkar.

Indhu Rubasingham’s two-anda-half hour jaunt through half a century of Indian political history is always entertaining.

But I wonder how appropriate its tone really is.