Fifty years ago Frederick Knott’s psychological thriller was staple fare in repertory theatres all over the country.

Weekly rep was an actor’s training ground, and when I worked in the professional theatre, we cut our teeth on plays such as this. One week you were the handsome villain, the next you struggled to get under the skin of Firs, the crumbling butler in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard - all in seven feverish days.

Naturally weekly rep is no more, but these actors are seasoned performers, and you know exactly where you are from the moment the red gauze travelling curtain in Mike Britton’s faintly unconvincing, revolving set, begins to reveal the London flat where the play is set at sometime during the mid-1950s.

Dial M For Murder is propelled by greed and deception with a marvellous twist at the end which leaves you mildly astonished at the lack of organisation in the crime squads of the fifties. But long before the denouement, we see a gripping tale unfold which concerns a tennis champ, Tony Wendice (Daniel Betts) looking for cash now his championship days are over – a problem which Andy Murray is unlikely to be concerned with today.

The play, directed with style (apart from the set) by Lucy Bailey, who uses a great musicscape, brings in Sheila Wendice (the excellent Kelly Hotten in a succession of stylish costumes) and her lover Max Halliday (played energetically  by Philip Cairns) who has written Mrs Wendice several compromising love letters, one of which has strayed into the hands of a blackmailer.

And so corrupt moral values including a planned murder, a lover who is betraying his best friend, the tennis champ who, in turn,  has an eye on his well-heeled wife’s estate, all allow the ooze of treachery to drift over us.

Christopher Timothy, as Inspector Hubbard, saves the day, as the kind of a pleasant chap possibly from a semi in Wimbledon with a nice wife, an allotment for Sundays and an Austin Seven in the garage. How he does it is deeply clever.

Another evening at Malvern not to be missed.

Runs until Saturday then opening at Birmingham Repertory Theatre on May 13.