A fresher play is a departure from the norm of Cambridge theatre. It’s a chance for some new talent to try their hand at acting or comedy, usually to a smaller audience in familiar surroundings. If you’re looking for a high-brow, cerebral evening, you’re probably looking in the wrong place. With that in mind, Whodidit?, a farce by Neil Harrison, was the perfect choice for this  year’s fresher play at Churchill.

As a murder-mystery of 15 characters, played by 5 actors, the play gave the cast a chance to portray a wide range of character types in a very short space of time. Maeve Hannah, as the obligatory useless inspector, kept up a passable cockney accent for almost the entire play, only getting a break from it in her brief stint as the police constable. Accents were a major theme of this production in most of the roles. Stick a pin in a map of Eastern Europe and you’ll hit a country whose accent was the cause of a joke at some point, though that was in part due to three actors playing the same character, each with a slightly different take on whereabouts he was from. Imi Myers in particular had 5 distinct roles to play, and had a unique accent for each one which never seemed to falter.

The weakness of any fresher play is a limited pool of potential actors, and there’s invariably at least one who hasn’t had any experience before – if I’m being brutally honest, the acting wasn’t going to win any Oscars. That said, the necessary elements of a farce were carried well. Roland Turnell-Ritson executed an impressively rapid costume change while sprinting offstage, and Ted Hill’s exuberant performance as Young Danny (a character introduced purely to be killed off a few minutes later) was, in a word, hilarious. Aurimas Narkevicius had the smallest, but most pivotal, role as the prime suspect, and how he kept a straight face through the show is beyond me. Almost every line he spoke was for comic effect, enhanced by his masterful psychopathic gazes into the audience.

Was it perfect? No. The odd line was fumbled, the tech team missed a cue and left the actors waiting awkwardly for a doorbell, and a stick-on moustache refused to stay stuck. But a fresher play is not about perfection. It’s about having a good time, and this certainly was.

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