Dark thriller at Playhouse

Nottingham Playhouse Theatre Company and New Perspectives present the world premiere of John Harvey's Darkness, Darkness, running from September 30-October 15.

Directed by Jack McNamara, this is Harvey’s own adaptation of his best-selling book, featuring Nottingham detective Charlie Resnick, and forms part of the theatre’s Sweet Vengeance season.

The work, which brings Harvey’s most famous creation, detective Charlie Resnick, to the stage for the very first time, will star David Fleeshman as the jazz loving sleuth.

This marks his welcome return to the Nottingham Playhouse stage having appeared at the theatre in Steven Berkoff’s Ritual in Blood in 2001 and in Greg Doran’s production of Waiting for Godot in 1982.

The Playhouse’s Sweet Vengeance season comprises a series of works that explore the themes of revenge, justice and resentments buried deep.

Darkness Darkness, set in present day Nottingham, is the most recent of the Charlie Resnick novels, It tells the story of Resnick, on the verge of retirement, when DI Catherine Njoroge convinces him to take on one more case following the discovery of the body of Jenny Hardwick, a young woman who disappeared during the bitterly-fought Miners’ Strike 30 years earlier.

As Resnick and Njoroge’s investigation unfolds, old wounds sustained on the Nottinghamshire picket lines are re-opened and memories of broken relationships resurface.

Resnick, too, must confront the ghosts of his past and guilt for his own role in policing the strike.

This tense, contemporary crime thriller is a poignant and compelling tale of a modern day Britain scarred by its recent past, of fractured communities trying to heal and of the painful process of laying ghosts to rest.

Writer John Harvey said: “It was the excitement of the then newly opened Nottingham Playhouse that first brought me to the city in the mid-60s; the prospect of seeing one of my Resnick novels dramatised on that same stage so many years later is truly exciting and a perfect way of squaring the circle.”

Tickets to see Darkness, Darkness at Nottingham Playhouse are £8-£32.

You can call the box office on 0115 9419419 or you can go to www.nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk

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