Claustrophic, intense study of a marriage in trouble - All at Sea is on at Scarborough's Stephen Joseph Theatre
You could not make it up. In 2002, former British schoolteacher and prison officer John Darwin, of Seaton Carew, Hartlepool, rowed his canoe out to sea and faked his own death so he could collect the insurance money.
He was aided and abetted by his wife Anne, who told their two children their father had drowned, Johnhid in the family home until the money came through. The couple collected £250,000 and disappeared.
Five years later, John walked into a London police station, a man seemingly back from the dead, claiming he had amnesia. It transpired the couple had been living in Panama.
They were prosecuted for fraud and were both jailed: he got six years and three months and she got six years and six months, three months more than her husband. Oh, the irony.
Books, fiction and non-fiction, and TV drama series The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe, have been based on this strange but true story.
What else is there to say? Let’s raise the curtain on All at Sea, a co-production with Newcastle’s Live Theatre, which is on at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough.
Phil Corbitt and Sarah Belcher are directed by Maria Crocker in the new play by Alison Carr, whose previous plays Caterpillar and The Last Quiz Night on Earth have both been seen at the Stephen Joseph.
Corbitt and Belcher play Colin and Deborah, a couple with spiralling debt, a sky-high mortgage and seemingly nowhere to turn. Then Colin comes up with the idea of faking his own death in a canoeing accident in the North Sea for an insurance payout … so far, so familiar.
Though Carr’s piece clearly draws inspiration from the real-life John and Anne Darwin, it uses the canoe incident merely as its ‘jumping off point’. From there it weaves it’s own tangled web of lies, deceit and secrecy.
More than a re-telling of ‘canoe man’, it is a study in the disintegration of a marriage and an examination of the power-play of a couple in extremis.