We’ve all done it. You meet someone on holiday, you get on well enough, you swap email addresses and say you’ll stay in touch. Neither of you means it, and that’s fine. That’s how it works.
Peter and Debbie meet Elsa on a cruise. She’s a widow from Denver: loud, brash, a Trump supporter, and good company in small doses. A few months after they get home, she writes to say she’s coming to England and would love to stay with them.
Just before she arrives, Peter googles her. Elsa has had several husbands, and they’re all dead. Some people think she killed them.
So now there’s a possible murderer in the spare room, and Peter and Debbie have to work out how to keep themselves and their kids safe without doing anything as awkward as asking her to leave. They are, as Debbie puts it, dying of manners.
The Unfriend is by Steven Moffat, who wrote Sherlock and Doctor Who. It opened at Chichester in 2022 and then went into the West End, and it’s a proper British comedy of manners: two nice people who’d rather risk being poisoned than cause a fuss, a pair of teenagers who can’t see the problem, a nosy neighbour, and things getting steadily more out of hand. It’s very funny and more than a bit tense.
Southport Dramatic Club’s production is on at the Little Theatre on Hoghton Street from Friday 2 to Saturday 10 October.
Tickets
Book at the box office or online. Performance times, dates and availability are on our What’s On page.
