Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Cast: Steven France, Karl Howman, Bruno Langley, Elizabeth Power, Bob Saul, Graham Seed, Jemma Walker, Clare Wilkie.
It all starts with a radio announcement in which a murder has been announced…The Mousetrap is perhaps the most eagerly awaited plays to come to Liverpool for a long time. Unless people have been able to see down in the heart of London’s theatre land at any point in the last 60 years and with a waiting list longer than it took to write it for the then Queen Mary’s 80th Birthday that means the vast majority of the population in the country still have not had the pleasure, then the Agatha Christie play remains a huge pull of the theatre goers heart strings as it celebrates its diamond jubilee going round the country.
It is also the one play where you are sworn to secrecy, upon pain of seeing all your prized Agatha Christie novels taken away from you and locked in a small room and guarded by a small perfectly attired Belgian, of never revealing the actual murderer. The air of excitement this can generate in an audience member’s mind is almost palpable, the feeling of being finally let into Agatha Christie’s second greatest secret is one to savour.
No one will ever be able to work out fully what was going on in Ms. Christie’s life when she disappeared from public view for a few short days but as the period piece, and it is very much a drama set in its time, gets under way and the snow starts to fall outside the window hemming the players all inside the house, the tension starts to rise and the antagonism between those trapped by design intensifies, there is no doubt that Ms Christie set out to thrill and entertain in the best way possible and even though the play is rather framed by its post war sentiments, it nevertheless remains just as exciting.
For the most part the cast were on exemplary form but some of the dialogue, even for the period and writing seemed somehow out of place, a turn here or there and it could have descended into a pastiche of its self but thankfully it stayed on the straight and narrow and as close as it dared to be without going into the appalling cliché ridden errors that hindered the big budget films of Peter Ustinov’s time.
As a piece of theatre, The Mousetrap was well worth anybody’s time and patience in waiting for this classic to be performed away from London. Perhaps now though it can also get the big screen treatment that it fully deserves.
Ian D. Hall