Locomotive for Murder: The Improvised Whodunnit comes to Crawley

It offers a fully improvised murder mystery where the audience must help solve the case. There will be outrageous accents. There will be larger-than-life characters. There will be “thrills, spills and good old-fashioned kills” – all taking place in The Hawth’s woodland amphitheatre. Through audience suggestions and stories, Pinch Punch are promising to create a unique, one-of-a-kind, never-to-be-repeated whodunnit. A cast of four suspects will board a train, though not everyone will survive the journey. Thankfully, on board is a world-famous detective, ready to jump to action and solve the case.

Angela Eyton, one of the company, said: “At the very start of the show the detective will ask the audience lots of different questions and from those questions the actors will start to form their different characters. We never know what the audience is going to say. We just never know who is going to turn up on the train until the very moment that we get those suggestions. And it is just so varied. The detective will help to steer things so that we don't get suggestions that we've done before. We want to do different things every night and it's just amazing what people will come up with. We never know who's going to be killed because it's the audience that decides that and we never know who's going to be the murderer. There is a ticketing mix-up and the tickets contain the information and only the person who gets a certain ticket knows they are the murderer.

“We formed as a company at the end of 2019 which was not great timing, as you can imagine! We didn't start touring this particular show until 2021. We had the odd touring date around but this is our fullest year for touring. It's incredible really how it has developed. We were just a group of people that got together because we wanted to improvise. We loved improvisation and we just wanted to do more of it. At the end of 2019 we had our first show which was an improvised panto and we were getting very excited and then as you know the obvious happened. We went online during the pandemic and we managed to get some commissions so we were able to carry on and that was great. But improvising online and improvising in real life are really, really different things. You can only do so much on Zoom because there is a delay and you're thinking ‘Has this other person finished speaking?’ So it was lovely to get back together and specially improvising together because you can just respond so much more quickly and so much more directly to what other people are doing.”

Age recommendation: 12 and up. Tickets priced £16.50, child: £10.50 from the box office on 01293 553636 and hawth.co.uk.