The Crime Tsar - Tapa dura

Police Chief Constable Tom Shackleton is ambitious to reach the top of his profession, but no one is more ambitious for his future than his wife. Jenni Shackleton looks every inch the consort to a powerful man. Striking and groomed to gleam in any crowd, she is connected through her own job in journalism to the right people to further Tom's career - or so she thinks. She is also unscrupulous: Jenni Shackleton will stop at nothing to get what she wants. Next door and down on her luck is Lucy, whose husband Gary is physically failing with MS, so that she finds it necessary to act as housekeeper to Jenni, formerly just a friend but now also an employer, who somehow can't help patronising Lucy for wielding the household duster. What Jenni is too vain to see is that her comparatively frumpish housekeeper friend has everything that her husband actually finds desirable in a woman. In Jenni's view of her horizon, the only blot is Tom's natural rival, Geoff Carter, a man with just too much Oxbridge polish and connection with the government to allow her to sleep well at night. But as Jenni soon discovers, there is a drug for everything. Threads of classical tragedy run through this modern drama of power, cunning sex and ambition. Nichola McAuliffe directs it all with style, skill and at a thunderous pace.

Nichola McAuliffe is a television and stage actress. She lives in London.