The Unfriend

You’ve been brought up to have good manners but good manners aren’t always a good thing, especially when it means you’re too polite to ask a killer to quit your house. Pete and Debbie go on a cruise to celebrate their wedding anniversary, leaving their teenaged kids behind at home. While on board they meet Elsa, a widow from the USA who loves Donald Trump but seems okay. Then they make the fatal British mistake of saying, ‘let’s stay in touch’, something we often say but rarely mean. And things start to go horribly wrong. When Elsa turns up on their doorstep and they realise she’s deadly dangerous, will they drop the good manners and ask her to leave?

This is a fresh new dark comedy from the writer Steven Moffat and director Mark Gatiss, the award-winning duo who created the BBC’s Sherlock series. The Unfriend has already had a great start, scoring a smash hit run at the Chichester Festival Theatre, where it sold out. The audience reaction and reviews were so good it’s transferring to the West End. The Unfriend will be on stage in London for a strictly limited season at the Criterion Theatre from 15^th January to 16^th April 2023. The Unfriend stars Reece Shearsmith from TV’s Inside No. 9, Amanda Abbington who starred in Sherlock, and Frances Barber from the hit TV series Silk, plus Michael Simkins, Marcus Onilude, Gabriel Howell, and Maddie Holliday. It’s brilliant.