A Stab in the Dark

Ten guests are summoned to a remote island for a reunion. Their host, Helmut Kinderland, is found murdered — and everyone assembled has a reason to have done it. What begins as a country-house parlour game curdles into something colder: the guests, it emerges, were adopted for their rare blood types, and the man who took them in was never a father at all.

Structured around the seven deadly sins — each guest embodies a vice, and only the three virtuous survive — the play is an open homage to Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None and the comic ensemble mysteries Clue and Murder by Death, shot through with Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death. Slapstick, wordplay and graphic horror sit side by side; Hush, Little Baby recurs until it stops sounding like a lullaby.

The play premiered at Higher Ground as part of the 2008 Adelaide Fringe under director Toni Main, and was revived eight years later in Delton, Michigan, directed by Renae Feldpausch — a rare second life for an Australian Fringe work.

Together with Once Upon a Midnight, this play formed the body of work for which Alex received the Independent Arts Foundation Literature Award.