Best known for its 1954 Hitchcock treatment starring Grace Kelly, Dial M for Murder is an iconic number that many will be familiar with. Retired tennis player Tony Wendice knows that his wife Sheila is having an affair, but rather than getting too worked up about it he decides that this gives him some splendid moral leeway to murder her for her inheritance. So he spends a year laying down the pieces of his devious stratagem, dapper as ever in his day job as ‘professional husband’, until there’s just one thing left to do – pick up the phone and dial her death sentence.

But what he hears down the line on the fateful night isn’t exactly what he had in mind. Blast! It’s all gone wrong, and now he’s going to have to be extra devilishly clever to clear up the mess he’s made. But with Inspector Hubbard on the prowl, can he continue to be so insouciant?

This is a genre piece written over 50 years ago, and it goes without saying that the genre’s moved on somewhat since then. M would rather stand for mentally unstable – or how about mutilation? – in contemporary crime drama, and Dial M for Murder, in all its earnest attention to suspense, feels quaintly amicable by today’s standards. Besides, everyone’s seen and talked about the Hitchcock; the very phrase Dial M for… has a sort of proverbial ring to it. This is a play with vintage, and what it means to us now is something very different from what it would have meant to its contemporary audiences. You can’t just pull it off the shelf and say ‘here you go.’

Thankfully, director Lucy Bailey knows this and has rather spectacularly played up the kitsch in this production by West Yorkshire Playhouse. She’s painted the set lipstick-red with a danger-red telephone as its centrepiece. A viscous sense of malice oozes seductively from the stage throughout, with heartbeat and tinnitus sound effects punctuating some of the more wicked moments, and a revolve constantly turning the set – sometimes imperceptibly slowly – to shift and distort our perspective à la Hitchcock. The effects used in the climactic murder scene sent me into orbit.

With the whole murder plot explained by the plotter in the opening act of the play, and with no twists in the pipeline to speak of, Dial M for Murder is never a guessing game. So when the inspector turns up in the second half smelling something dastardly in the air, we find ourselves idly waiting for the penny to drop, privy as we already are to the mystery. The play’s writer (Frederick Knott) is going through the painstaking ritual of restoring justice to the world in line with the genre’s stipulations, and frankly the plot gets pretty dull at this stage.

But Dial M for Murder is all about suspense, about building tension, and the reason why we’re forewarned about the murder at the beginning to the detriment of mystery is so that we can nervously anticipate it. It’s an exercise in form, and one which West Yorkshire Playhouse pulls off tremendously well, with suave acting, innovative stagecraft and a playful direction that fondly celebrates a loved classic with a great sense of fun.

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