On the case in Murder Village

After sold-out seasons across Australia, the team behind the award-winning Murder Village series returns to Perth Fringe World in 2026 for more hilarious, improvised murder escapades! Boasting a team of homegrown comedy talent and a fresh new sleuth and venue, Murder Village: An Improvised Whodunnit will play at The Theatre at Liberty from Wednesday, February 4, to Sunday, February 15, with tickets on sale now. BEC WELDON sat down with producer and performer David Massingham to hear all about the show.

Hey David, thanks for chatting with us! The Murder Village team are returning to the Perth Fringe with a whole new show for 2026! What do you have in store for audiences this year?

We are so thrilled to be back—Perth audiences are always so enthusiastic!

2026 is Murder Village’s ten-year anniversary year, and given that last year’s Perth run was our biggest season ever, we’ve decided to up the ante. This time, Murder Village is playing in the 260-seat Liberty Theatre bang in the middle of the CBD, and we have brought along a new sleuth to solve these 10 new mysteries. Monsieur Aragon Pewter, the famed French—not Belgian—detective, is played by Lliam Amor, one of the country’s most experienced and loved improvisers. Let’s see if we can stump him with some particularly fiendish whodunnits!

Murder Village has almost 250 performances to its name—an awesome achievement! Take us back to the beginning—how did Murder Village come to be, and what initially drew you to this format of improvised storytelling, particularly with the underlying detective/murder angle?

Murder Village started out in Brisbane as an offshoot from another improvised whodunnit format I developed while living there. As a kid I had cultivated a taste for murder mysteries, particularly Agatha Christie books. I wanted Murder Village to feel like a Christie mystery set in the archetypal rural English village populated by all the nefarious character types you would expect—retired colonels, vicars, tea shop owners and so on.

The key was to give our audiences the chance to vote for who would live and who would die—meaning that they would have a huge say in how the plot plays out. However, since the vote was via a blind ballot, audiences would still be able to go through all the fun of trying to work out who the killer was. Which is what a good mystery is all about!

Just like the last two Fringe Worlds, you have a fantastic cast back for this year’s shows. Tell us about the crew!

This season sees some of the best improv talent from around the country mixing it up with some of Perth’s homegrown talent. The aforementioned Lliam Amor leads the national contingent, joined by our improvising musician Jaron Why, returning favourite from our 2023 run Amy Moule, and Mr iSelect himself, Jason Geary.

Originally hailing from Perth, Louisa Fitzhardinge is joining us for the full run, and we have the amazing Perthonality quartet of Esther Longhurst, Shane Adamczak, Amy Mathews and Wyatt Nixon-Lloyd joining us for a few shows each across the season.

With so many shows under your belt, how do you feel that the company and premise of the show have developed and expanded or changed since 2016? What lessons have you learned over the course of the production that you’ve put into practice?

While we have a really seasoned crew and a road-tested show format, I am always amazed how varied and flexible this show and this genre are. You want to make sure you are hitting all the fun tropes of the whodunnit genre—the murders, the motives, the red herrings and the denouement—but the very nature of improvisation means that we have some truly unpredictable stories and laughs.

Your show pays homage to and draws inspiration from the world and writings of Agatha Christie. What is it about that golden age of murder and detective fiction that still captures audience and artist imaginations?

Whodunnits are always in vogue! Agatha Christie is forever being adapted for television and the movies. Even at this moment, the new Benoit Blanc mystery Wake Up Dead Man is playing in the cinemas and topping the Netflix streaming charts. I think it is because whodunnits offer a puzzle to solve, and they encourage active viewing. The mystery fan is trying to crack the case along with the detective, and the genre encourages the creator to play fair with the audience.

There’s also a cosy quality to murder mysteries, oddly, or at least there is for the sub-genre that we are playing in. It may deal in death and violence, but it does so through sly humour, gentle wit and the hint of something nasty behind the tweed suits, garden parties and tea cosies.

Improvisation is so dependent on an actor’s ability to make connections and find humour entirely on their feet. How do you keep that improv muscle alive and get into that headspace or flow state before stepping onto the stage?

We have an array of both sensible and very silly exercises we go through right before we head on. The Murder Village crew might look quite odd if you were a fly on the wall during a warmup. That said, those exercises are all about building connection between each other, building inspiration, and emptying—and opening—the mind.

One of the other great ways to get set for the show is to start it early—I’m always out with the audience, in character, as they come into the theatre! I promise your readers that that is as much audience interaction as there is with our shows, but it’s a fun way to get the mystery vibe going while warming myself up.

Each show features a new mystery made up on the spot, with audience suggestions and votes—with such an interactive show, you must have some particularly memorable audience contributions!

Absolutely! Before the show starts, the audience fills in an online form with suggestions for the weapon and the tell-tale clue. There have been some colourful potential weapons, including unexploded landmines, falling pianos and taxidermy bears. One of last year’s shows in Perth involved a man suffocating to death inside a sealed suit of armour.

I think my favourite to date was murder by printing press, which involved one of our performers miming getting squished through the press while the killer screamed in horror at their own actions.

While I can imagine that improvisation keeps things fairly new each night, how do you keep the characters and the show format itself feeling fresh and exciting for your performers after such an impressive span of shows?

It’s all about relationships. We come up with the suspect characters in advance, but the relationships between them are completely improvised—and that’s where the surprise and the invention are at their strongest. The trick is to stay open to anything and to ensure that we are focusing on the back and forth between each character. That’s the heart of any mystery.

On top of that, we have a little rule for ourselves that once a character is dead in a state, they cannot return—which ensures that we are always coming up with new character ideas!

Thanks so much again for chatting with us. For a final thought, I’d love to hear about a particular show that you’re most proud of, or one that you enjoyed the most, to give our audience a taste for what’s to come!

I don’t know if I have one overall favourite—but a show that stands out from our 2025 Perth Fringe World run featured the opening of a new cinema in Murder Village, heralded by the arrival in town of an American movie star. Someone in the audience gave the terrific suggestion of Dead Horse Bonanza as the name of the film the star was promoting, and that inspired a whole host of over-the-top sequences. Let’s just say that there were a lot of mimed equine deaths that evening!

Murder Village: An Improvised Whodunnit hits The Theatre at Liberty from Wednesday, February 4, to Sunday, February 15, 2026. Tickets are on sale now from fringeworld.com.au