Killers

Ian Brady's recent mental health tribunal will have done wonders for Killers' publicity, the producers must have been thrilled. Because truthfully, publicity is the only thing Glenn Chandler's self-important play succeeds in achieving.

Taggart scribe Chandler has purchased bundles of letters from penpals of Brady, Dennis Nilsen and Peter Sutcliffe, and arranged them into a brooding three-hander. There are no revelations to be found in their ramblings; Brady is a narcissist, Nilsen a fantasist and Sutcliffe a feeble-minded epistolary philanderer. They enjoy their notoriety because it provides the only status still available to them.

There are three solid performances here, though Gareth Morrison's Yorkshire accent is poor, but they feel squandered on an arrangement of worthless tabloid fodder. The play has one trick – the sudden jolt of horror as a chink of darkness peeks out from behind a seemingly innocuous phrase, but it's an entirely uninteresting one.

Chandler doesn't hope to build empathy by revealing that Nilsen composes concertos, merely irony.

The play's instincts are ultimately reactionary, and like most reactionary instincts, inhumane. Not the slightest concern is shown for the victims either, and in fact one of the few sentences Chandler has written himself for this wrongly refers to three bodies removed from Saddleworth Moor before Brady's trial. One of those three, Edward Evans, was in fact found bled out in the spare room of Wardlebrook Avenue. It seems Brady isn't the only one who doesn't care where the bodies are buried.