Review: The Incident Room at St Albans' Abbey Theatre

But while the music, dress and projection shots might remind older members of the audience at the Abbey Theatre of a gentler time, that could not be further from the truth.

For The Incident Room is set in Millgarth Police Station from 1977 to 1981 when the hunt was on for the Yorkshire Ripper.

And there is no shirking the brutality of the attacks and killings or the bone-weariness and toll the hunt took on the police trying to nab the Ripper.

The Incident Room, by Olivia Hirst and David Byrne, is an ambitious play for an amateur dramatic group to stage and the Company of Ten rises to the challenge very effectively.

The Incident Room is at the Abbey Theatre in St Albans until Saturday (Image: The Abbey Theatre)

It is played out on a clever set with the office of George Oldfield, the man at the heart of the hunt for the Ripper, alongside that of the main incident room.

That allows the characters to move easily between the two, from an incident room increasingly piled high with boxes of evidence to the lone bottle of scotch on Oldfield’s desk.

Director Tina Swain, whose links with Manchester at the time meant she was well aware of both the fear and the anger of women placed under curfew, handles the production with skill.

She highlights one of the main issues, the way women on the team were regarded as almost incidental and subject to patronising by their male colleagues.

At the same time they accepted their role in the system despite the toll it took on their professional and personal lives. How times have changed.

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Andy Mills as Oldfield dominates the stage whenever he appears – if that was how he was in real life, perhaps that was why women never got much of a look in.

And his scenes with Pete McEntee as Manchester cop Jack Ridgway were top notch as the two men sparred.

Katy Robinson in the pivotal role of Megan Winterburn, the sergeant at the heart of the play, was perfectly understated from her dowdy clothes to calming voice.

Her relationship with ‘posh boy’ cop Dick Holland (Roger Bartlett) was well played out as was that with Abbe Waghorn’s Maureen Long, one of the Ripper’s victims who survived.

But there were a few occasions when she and other female members of the cast did not project their voices sufficiently to communicate what they were saying to the audience.

That aside, it was a good evening’s entertainment, signaled by the enthusiastic applause that greeted the cast at the finale.

The Incident Room runs until this Saturday (4) and tickets can be obtained at www.abbeytheatre.co.uk.