Written by Melissa Docker and workshopped with the four main actors, Millthorpe’s Alvaro Marques, Bathurst’s Vince Melton and Blayney’s Paula Dell-McCumstie, the play integrates elements of traditional plays with a fair touch of the theatre restaurant thrown in.

With only four main characters in a murder mystery, the challenge was to keep the audience excited, enthralled and guessing.

“I started doing these in England and we were improvising these murder mysteries and what happened was we were given our parts, the plot that we had to improvise, and the red herrings and just went out and made it all up,” Ms Docker said,  “Then when I returned to Australia I saw people playing these host-a-murders in the Blue Mountains so I got a group of actors together and developed a script.”

That then led to Ms Docker developing a play on its own and the search for actors.

“What’s special about this play is that everyone there, including the audience, is in character,” Mr Melton said, “Everyone that’s here on the night is at the annual Agatha Christie convention, and they’re all sleuths that will have every opportunity to solve it.”

Although audience participation is regularly a part of theatre restaurant, in Death or Denial, that aspect is restrained.

“There is some audience participation, but not to the level of putting someone on the spot,” he said.

From the moment that guests turn up, the play effectively starts.

The actors will be mingling in character with everyone as they arrive, immediately transforming the Blayney Community Baptist Church into a whodunnit’s convention.

The concept of the play has proven to be exceptionally popular with the show in Blayney, catered for by Nellie Ryan’s, already having sold out. 

“It runs through dinner,” Mr Melton explains, “People come, they have a meal and it’s not like a play happens around them, it’s the convention and the problems that roll out as they go through, and develop through main course, and get bigger and bigger as we go along.”

Towards the end of the performance the audience will be able to guess who is the culprit, however Mr Melton says that the reveal will amaze.

“It’s amazing, and shocking.”