Julie Barns reviews Murder at the Bowlo by ImproMafia and Anywhere Festival

It’s 1987. I know this because I am enthusiastically greeted at the door to the Rural Party Fundraiser by an effervescent admin assistant whose dress style has been heavily influenced by Madonna. So begins a night of fun, mystery, perms and poison. Murder at the Bowlo is a ‘How to Host a Murder’ party dialled up to eleven. Come prepared to mingle with the actors, eavesdrop on conversations or directly grill suspects to sort the clues from the red herrings and help the local constabulary uncover who could have committed such a heinous crime!

Appropriately set in the function space of the Salisbury Community Sports Centre, the entire cast of ImproMafia expertly work the room with ease, ensuring the audience has total buy-in to the unfolding drama, encouraging everyone to speculate on who the murderer could be. Everything from their 1980s fashion and the political and cultural references of the time, to the background noise of the Community Centre patrons knocking back a few cold beers while listening to the dulcet tones of the bingo caller, ensured that the very serious business of raising much needed political party funds and finding a murderer was laced with humour, small country town intrigue and a genuinely fun atmosphere. Expect to find familiar characters at the Rural Party Fundraiser – dodgy rural political aspirants, a three-time award winning small business owner, an accurately portrayed highly strung rural secondary school English teacher, a smooth talking piano bar/bowls club circuit singer in a Don Johnson styled jacket, and a cop whose approach to work is lackadaisical, but who loves a yarn laced with gossip. Occasional arguments or terse interactions between the characters are interspersed throughout the evening’s proceedings, driving the narrative forward to keep up a healthy pace and providing the audience with more information to add to their character profiling in an effort to uncover a killer.

If you enjoy a murder mystery, good old country town hospitality (and by hospitality we all know this means gossip and drama!) and hold a fondness for the ‘80s, jump online www.anywhere.is grab some tickets for yourself and your friends, then head on down to the Salisbury Community Sports Club for a solid evening of fun. Come prepared with a cheque book to loosen the tongues of the suspects under the guise of political party donations, and keep your eyes and ears open! Highly recommended!

*note: bribery is not endorsed by this reviewer 😉