Superintendent Roy Grace is back in a brand-new Peter James stage adaptation and world premiere of the bestselling Picture You Dead, which has opened to rave reviews from critics and audiences alike.
Starring 2024’s multiple award-winning actor Peter Ash (Coronation Street, War Horse), Fiona Wade, who starred this year in 2:22 A Ghost Story, following 12 years in Emmerdale, and with Casualty’s George Rainsford (Call the Midwife, 2:22 A Ghost Story) returning as DSI Roy Grace.
With a total of 20 Sunday Times bestsellers to his name and the television series GRACE now a huge hit on ITV, Picture You Dead, the seventh and brand-new thrilling stage adaptation, cements Peter James’ Grace series as the most successful modern-day crime stage franchise since Agatha Christie.
Back home in Brighton, DSI Grace investigates a cold case that leads him to the secretive world of fine art, but beneath the respectable veneer lurks a dark underworld of deception and murder.
When one unsuspecting couple unearth a potentially priceless masterpiece, they discover that their dream find is about to turn into their worst nightmare, and only Grace can stop them from paying the ultimate price.
‘The best of the Peter James stage adaptations I’ve seen’
Southern Daily Echo
★★★★★
‘A thrilling investigation that had me on the edge of my seat’
Fairy Powered Productions
’It’s dead good. So do go!’
Born Again Swindonian
★★★★
‘A gripping mystery that keeps the audience guessing until the very end’
Broadway World
‘Brilliant…a fiendishly enjoyable night out’
Sussex World
Age Guidance: 13+
Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes (including interval)
Content warning: This performance may include flashing lights, loud sounds including gunshots and depictions of criminal activity and violence.
Excellent production , very enjoyable , well acted , great set and some good twists.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A suspenseful and sometimes humorous look at the devious world of art theft
Picture you Dead – the latest of Peter James’s books to become a stage play – has more than a grain of truth behind it. With Roy Grace (again played by George Rainsford) back now on the South Coast of England (his previous tale took him to France for a break), this tale of artwork forgery is based on real events. A meeting took place in 2015 between Peter James, Graham Bartlett (a former Commander of Brighton and Hove Police) and David Henty, a former forger of passports who was only caught when the Passport Office noticed he had mis-spelled some key words like Majesty (Magesty!!). A prison sentence followed which saw him move on from forging passports to reproducing famous paintings, for which there is enormous market. This forms the basis of Picture You Dead.
When the Kiplings, a financially struggling couple played by Fiona Wade and Ben Cutler, buy an old painting at a car boot sale because they like the frame, they discover that it contains a hidden second painting which has been covered over with some horrible artwork. With the help of another forger-gone-straight, Dave Hegarty (Peter Ash) who created his own fake Blue Plaque, they manage to reveal the original painting which is then featured on an Antiques Roadshow/Fake or Fortune-type programme fronted by a hilarious Oliver De Souza (Adam Morris) who reveals its true value… From then on, the story is one of corrupt art dealers and associates (played by Nicholas Maude and Jodie Steele), bluff and double bluff, greed, lies, murder and the modern concept of deep fake, imitations which can be indistinguishable from the original.
The set has been cleverly designed to simultaneously allow 4 different locations – the Kiplings’ flat on the left, Hegarty’s art studio and the art collector’s premises on the right and, front of stage, the area where Grace and his sidekick Bella Moy (Gemma Stroyan) discuss how things are going with Moy inexplicably appearing with a pack of Maltesers at one point!
As with his other plays, the individual scenes are joined together by music, just as they would be on TV. One thing they have which the TV version does not have, however, is humour – there were some genuinely laugh-out-loud moments in the play in spite of, or because of, its rather macabre content (particularly the injuries inflicted on Archie Goff (Mark Oxtoby) who makes a rather surprising appearance in the second half…
They say that Crime doesn’t pay – in the world of high art and centuries old paintings being forged for large sums of money, there must be a few who are making their fortune even if, in this case, everyone loses out except the very final purchaser of the painting…