INTERVIEW - Shane Richie (The Perfect Murder)

INTERVIEW - SHANE RICHIE ('Victor')

Being one half of soap super-couple Kat and Alfie Moon may currently be his most iconic calling, but veteran entertainer Shane Richie has been many things to many people over the course of his multi decade-spanning career. Actor, singer, comedian and presenter, Richie’s eclectic career seems at once both entirely befitting but also somehow at odds with his warm, affable and down-to-Earth cockney charm. 

Chatting to him over telephone to discuss his latest venture - a stage adaptation of Peter James best-selling thriller The Perfect Murder - he instantly comes across as both warm and likeable. It is an early evening in March, and he has just finished a matinee performance of the show in Cambridge. Although we have never spoken before, he is immediately exuberant and spirited, audibly enthused about a show he has already been starring in for 8 weeks, and one gets the feeling the conversation that follows would be much the same were we sat together as friends down our 'local'. There’s no trace of showbiz artifice or PR-approved soundbites that so often flood chats such as this, but instead a laid-back yet earnest appraisal of the thriller he’s starring in, including an excitement for some of it’s unexpected charms.

“As dark as it sounds, it’s a black comedy. At times it’s laugh-out-loud!

It’s like laughing at a funeral - when you’re there and you’re going “Please, I don’t want to laugh… this is so macabre!”, but you find yourself laughing out of embarrassment and at the sheer horror of something. 

And that’s what The Perfect Murder kind of brings to the stage.”

It’s something of an unexpected angle then, perhaps, for this new touring production of the hugely successful thriller, judging by the title of the show alone. However, Richie is quick to clarify that it isn’t all laughs and lightness, and there is plenty on offer for the fans of a decent gasp or two. 

“I’d love to sit here and tell you certain scenes where the audience just go “Oh my god I can’t believe this is happening”… but it would give it away!”

Richie with co-star Jessie Wallace in 'The Perfect Murder'

Based on the aforementioned James novel, The Perfect Murder follows the lives of disillusioned married couple Joan and Victor, whom Richie explains are a fair few degrees of separation from the tumultuous but ultimately loving union of Eastenders’ Kat and Alfie:

“We kind of pick them up 20 years into their marriage, and Victor, my character, is visiting a prostitute on a regular basis. His heart’s kind of in the wrong place, and he’s been wanting to get out of this relationship with his wife for some years,  which we find as the play goes on.

She keeps pushing him and pushing him and they’re constantly rowing to the point where he’s on the verge of committing ‘the perfect murder’.

As a member of the audience, you’re sat there just saying “Why don’t you just walk away from each other?”, but for some reason they just can’t.”

It’s a compelling yet familiar dynamic, and one which Richie feels some members of the audience will likely find empathy in.

“They’re just stuck in this rut. Sometimes it happens - most couples can recognise it, sometimes you get out of the rut... though most people don’t have aspirations to kill their partner!”

"They're just stuck in this rut. Most couples

can recognise it, sometimes you get out of

the rut... though most people don't have

aspirations to kill their partner!"

Many may jokingly beg to differ, but in seriousness it's an intriguing yet heavy concept, and it compelled me to enquire further about how he and Wallace went about approaching the source material. Both Shane and Alfie alike present as endearing, likeable figures, and amidst the soapland mayhem there has been plenty of levity to Kat and Alfie, so was there a balancing act in figuring out how dark or funny to play the show?

“There’s several ways you could play it, funnily enough. You could play it for the laughs, and it’s still a funny play, but me and Jessie sat down right at the beginning and decide to play against the laughs.

We said “Let’s play it for the drama”, so the audience are drawn in by the drama and laughing more at the darkness of it.

And that was the appeal. There’s an old saying ‘Never Burlesque Burlesque’, which means if there’s a joke there, let the audience find it, you don’t really need to crowbar it in, and it means a lot of the humour comes from the honesty of the piece. Especially in the relationship between Victor and Joan.”

Richie has played Alfie Moon alongside Wallace in BBC's 'Eastenders' since 2002

And having gone from working together full-time on Eastenders to spending their current break from the show back together on-stage, had the pair reached the stage where life was imitating life... where they ready to murder one another for real?

“Oh, I wanted to kill her when I met her 14 years ago, don’t you worry about that!”

We both laugh, there’s nothing passive aggressive or ironic here. 

“No, we do have a lot of fun… me and Jessie have so much history, we know each other very well.

We are like husband and wife half the bloody time!”

But what of the shift from television to theatre? Soap operas and dramas such as Eastenders have a notoriously rapid turn-around period, which is famously not the easiest or most comfortable environment for an actor tackling weighty, emotional beats. Nevertheless, it’s a form not without its merits, as Richie explains:

“You have very little rehearsal time. Something like Eastenders, sometimes you can do up to 20 scenes a day. You’ve got have your emotions at your fingertips - you could do a scene where someone’s dying in your arms in the morning and then in the afternoon you’re throwing a party!

"Something like Eastenders, you can do up to 20

scenes a day... you could do a scene where someone's

dying in your arms in the morning and then in the

afternoon you're throwing a party!"

So you kind of have to have your wits about you as an actor, but if you get it wrong, you stop and do it again. So there is that. That pressure is taken away from you.

Now with theatre, unlike television, you sit down half an hour before the show and get your head round everything because there’s a lot to put across to the audience in the space of 2 hours. 

And if you get it wrong, it’s there for the whole audience to see. And I enjoy that.

How long I’d want to keep doing it for, this has been nine weeks - that’s enough for me now! If I do something else it’ll probably be next year, but I’m quite happy to go back to television again and have the luxury of taking that weight off of my shoulder.”

Pictured at the start of the 'The Perfect Murder' UK and Ireland Tour

And that very return is right around the corner - with Richie and Wallace both commencing photography in a few short weeks time over in Ireland for their upcoming Kat and Alfie spin-off, following on from their recent departure from Albert Square. It’s not unknown for the BBC to commission spin-offs of it’s flagship soap, but according to Richie this latest departure for the Moons is shaping up to be a very different beast indeed…

“It’s so far removed from Eastenders. It’s a whole new universe that Kat and Alfie really don’t belong in, and that’s the drama. We turn up in the first episode about 10 minutes into it, where this small fishing community have got this awful dark secret that they’ve kept covered for 30 years. I remember reading it and as a member of the audience I’d be wishing them to turn around, to not let Kat and Alfie go into this village.

It does have a lot of heart and a lot of warmth, but it’s very dark as well. I can’t tell you too much, but it’s an incredible journey for Kat and Alfie. And you see another side of them, which is difficult to do in Eastenders because it’s such an ensemble piece but this is really a vehicle for Kat and Alfie.

It’s a bit like The Wicker Man meets Broadchurch.”

Tiptoeing between the light and dark, the humorous and the horrifying, between the openness of the stage and the manic scheduling of the television set, it’s a testimony to Richie’s earnestness as an actor and range as a performer that he seems equally comfortable and capable with such dichotomies of creativity. And with more than a glimmer of likeable ‘cheeky chappy’ Alfie seeping in throughout our conversation, I end our chat intrigued and genuinely compelled to see his descent into darkness in both the final leg of their already acclaimed run of The Perfect Murder and the foreboding promise of what awaits in the ominous yet ambitious sounding ‘Enders spin-off ‘Red Water’ **.

** - Working Title

The Perfect Murder runs at the Coventry Belgrade Theatre from Tuesday 29th March to Saturday 2nd April 2016.

CLICK HERE for more information on the show's run at the Belgrade and to book your tickets!
Alternatively, call the Belgrade Box Office direct on 024 76555 3055 now to book your tickets!

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