January 2007
Lucky Play Review
Monday, January 01, 2007 by Charles Vance

by Mark Edwards

Spotlight Publications

ISBN: 1 904930 82 4

(3m 1f) Rights: Spotlight Publications, 259 The Moorings Dalgety Bay Fife KY11 9GX Tel: 01383 825737 Email: enquiries@spotlightpublications.com

There can be no doubt that the murder, on 7th November 1974, of Sandra Rivett, the nanny to the children of Lord and Lady Lucan, was one of the most sensational murder mysteries, which was to bring the world of Agatha Christie into real life. There were innumerable versions of the whys and wherefores of what was to prove an insoluble mystery.

On the night in question, Lucan’s wife Vedronica Mingham ran into the Plumbers Arms in Belgravia, screaming that her husband had killed their children’s nanny. The real life massive police investigation was itself instigated by Lady Lucan’s hysterical accusations against her husband, as she staggered into the public house, herself battered and beaten from an attack on herself that she laid at her husband’s door. Within an hour of the murder, Lucan and quite simply, vanished, never to be found in the ensuing 32 years.

Playwright Mark Edwards has created a remarkable, totally fictional, scenario, wherein Lord Lucan fled to Africa following the murder, of which he was popularly conceived to be the murderer. A year after his disappearance, in this fascinating play, he arranges for a freelance journalist, unaware of whom he is to meet, to fly out to Africa for a secret rendezvous.

The result is a fascinating and theatrically thrilling play set, on the one part in 1975, in a small apartment in a town in central Africa and on the other in 1972 until 1974 at the Lucan residence at 46 Lower Belgrave Road in London.