Haven't a clue why the murder-mystery genre is as politically suspect as a Taliban TV repair man? Then writer/director David Leddy's one-man show On The Edge might just have the answer. A veritable high tea of murder most foul (and foreign), the piece takes all the country house clichés - the muddled old major, the bright young flapper, suspicious Johnny Foreigner, the cigar-puffing spinster/lesbian in golfing tweeds and everybody's favourite prime suspect, the butler - and puts them under a microscope of comedy pastiche with serious political undertones. "I started off wanting to look at something that would send up traditional notions of Englishness in the Miss Marple sense," says Leddy. "And the murder mystery seemed the perfect vehicle. The genre itself is so fixed and the same characters come up again and again. I started thinking

about the actual political implications of all of those things and what lies behind it." Looking at power and control - who's on the wrong end and why - Leddy's deconstructionist satire draws inspiration from Cluedo and Bartok's fairytale murder opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle, not to mention Victorian criminologists who represent the last word in authority to The Doctor, the amateur sleuth at the centre of the events. "He's spent years reading these Victorian criminologists and thinks he really knows his stuff. Whereas to the audience he's a bumbling fool spouting rubbish about the connection between genetics and criminality. And I wanted to take all of this and come up with a show that gave the audience a little nudge and made them think but ultimately was fun and entertaining and a good laugh."