With such a melodramatic title, it was a nice surprise to read Joe Dickinson's short play about Jack the Ripper, and to laugh out loud at some very funny comedy.
Phillip and Polly Poole are servants to Dr. Edward Winslow, covering their high education with common English accents whenever others are around. Phillip is obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, and fancies himself an amateur sleuth. Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren consults with Dr. Winslow about some prostitute murders in Whitechapel, and the Pooles are on the case.
This was a stage play (first performed in 1986 in Dallas' Pocket Sandwich Theatre), and Dickinson seems to have put a lot of work not only into his plot, but his characters. They are often funny because of certain characteristics, not because of convenient quips and jokes that could have been delivered by anyone. Warren keeps getting another officer's name wrong, and isn't very bright when it comes to whodunit. While Poole is enamored with the world's greatest detective, he quickly finds out a magnifying glass and deer hunter's cap do not make a crime solver. One supporting character is learning to read with cookbooks, randomly blurting out ingredients and baking instructions. We have suffragette Ernestine, decades before today's woke culture, arguing that a woman can be just as effective a murderer as a man. While a couple of the characters were confusing, I was still entertained by them, and thought about what a fun production this would have been.
Some of the scenes, especially the climax, require a lot of stage effects that were probably very difficult to pull off. We never learn the murderer's identity until the end, but there are some scenes involving "the Boogeyman" and satanism that explain a possible motive but drag down the pace. Dickinson very cleverly wrote three different endings with three different killers, and which killer would be portrayed at the performance was random, making for some nervous actors and actresses who had to remember new lines instantaneously. All three endings are similar, appropriate, and very droll. With some tweaking, this would make a very humorous little film.
This is a rare copy of the play, I am the only one or two people to own it on a couple of reading sites I am a part of, and it is nothing like I expected. I finished it in just two days, and while my stage acting years are long behind me, this would have been a blast to do. (* * * *) out of five stars
