Dial M for Murder
Clackamas Repertory Theatre — September 20th, 2025
Osterman Theatre – Oregon City, Oregon
Adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher, Directed by Karlyn Love
From the original by Frederick Knott
Before anyone spoke, two coats hung together by the door: Margot’s cream coat and Maxine’s black one.
They were a small detail in the carefully designed London flat of Clackamas Repertory Theatre’s Dial M for Murder, but they immediately suggested a relationship the men in the room did not fully see—or did not want to acknowledge. Golden drapes and a tufted sofa gave the set the warmth of a comfortable home, while the doorways and shadowed corners suggested that the room could become a trap at any moment.
First Impressions
Holding the bright, razor-edged program before the matinee began, I expected a clever classic thriller. I did not expect the production to make Margot Wendice and Maxine Hadley’s relationship feel like its emotional center.
Why This Production Stands Out
Jeffrey Hatcher’s adaptation retains the tense mechanics that have made Dial M for Murder endure: the blackmail, the carefully arranged crime, the questions of what each character knows and when. But in this production, directed by Karlyn Love, the suspense was not only about whether Tony Wendice’s plan would succeed. It was also about whether Margot and Maxine could be seen clearly in a world that had given Tony every reason to believe he could control the story.
A note in director Karlyn Love’s playbill letter stayed with me. She wrote about the enduring appeal of mysteries: their promise that the guilty will be punished and the innocent will go free, even though life does not always offer such tidy justice. That idea gave the production an extra charge. Beneath the familiar machinery of a murder mystery was a question of who gets believed, who gets protected, and who is allowed to name the truth of their own life.
Margot & Maxine
Ariel Puls’s Margot carried much of that tension. She was caught in a respectable but unhappy marriage to Tony, while her real connection was with Maxine. Puls made Margot sympathetic without making her passive. You could feel both the caution required of her and the life that became possible when she was with Maxine.
Kelsey Glasser’s Maxine, a murder-mystery writer, brought a worldly confidence to the role. The two women’s affection was present from the beginning, but it was never treated as a spectacle or a twist added merely to update an old play. It was simply part of who they were.
The Cast Connections
The cast also carried a few enjoyable echoes from other local productions I had seen.
Tom Walton, who played Tony, and Mark Schwahn, who played Inspector Hubbard, had recently appeared three months ago as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in Clackamas Repertory’s Sherlock Holmes and the Precarious Position. Back in March, Walton, Schwahn, and Puls had all appeared in Lakewood Theatre Company’s Noises Off.
Seeing them again in Dial M for Murder made their shift in tone especially satisfying. In Noises Off, they had helped create a farce of slamming doors, missed cues, and mounting comic chaos. Here, the same general world of doors and rooms had become dangerous. A London flat that might once have been built for comic timing became a place of surveillance, betrayal, and carefully concealed motives.
That is one of the pleasures of following regional theatre over time. Actors return in entirely different roles, and familiar faces make each new production feel connected to the larger theatre community around it.
For all of Dial M for Murder’s clever plotting, the image that has stayed with me is still the simplest one: the two coats by the door.
Margot’s cream coat. Maxine’s black coat.
They quietly announced a relationship before the story could fully name it. And by the end of the matinee, that relationship—not the murder, and not even the mechanics of Tony’s plan—had become the heart of the play.
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