Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Cast: Lyndsey Marshal, Jonah Hauer-King, Bronagh Waugh, Rory Fleck Byrne, Jack Deam, Wai Ali, Stanley Townsend, Colin Farrell, Crystal Clarke, Katherine Kingsley, Daniel Gosling, Mark Lambert, Walles Hamonde, Liran Nathan, Waleed Elgadi, James Staddon, Emma Darlow.
It is perhaps in keeping with another moment of her life, that the time after her divorce from her first husband, Colonel Archibald Christie, should also be shrouded in a little mystery and intrigue, and regardless of the truth of the matter, there is always a little fun to be had in a slight alternative history which adds to the alure and grandness of Agatha Christie’s overall powerful and driven persona.
Such remains the insight into the human condition, even after almost half a century after her death, that it is only natural, if not conventional, to want to understand what drove the Queen of British crime fiction to write, to find the missing pieces of the puzzle to which her own autobiography and subsequent writings omit or gloss over. The power of the cloak that hides the author’s personal life whilst providing sustenance for the creative word to be expressed in plain sight, is a conjuring trick masked by sorrow and elevated by brilliance; a sense to which Agatha Christie cannot be denied as owning completely.
An alternative history should never get in the way of the facts, especially when they can give the fans a moment to bask in a brilliant mind deducing in the same analytical manner that befits her most famous creations, Hercule Poirot and Miss Jean Marple, and one that goes someway to offering an explanation of her time in Iraq after her divorce.
Agatha and the Curse of Ishtar may well be the product of imagination, but like all voluntary climbs into the world of ‘what if?’, it is one that captures the narrative and the precision of the story perfectly. Thrust into a world that would go on to inform some of her greatest creations finest moments, Agatha Christie is embroiled in a plot that asks for sacrifices, a moment in history which saw Britain exploit its influence in the Middle East and the reveal of time has further proved this countries determination to cause havoc in the name of advancement, even if it means people have to die and history itself is lost.
With a great performance by Lyndsey Marshal as the future Dame Agatha and with a script that holds up well against the writer’s own perceptive imagination and plot pacing, Agatha and the Curse of Ishtar is a unique companion piece into which the fan can admire the woman without having to forget the charm and pull of her books which made her to this day one of the finest writer’s to utilise English language and add to the British obsession of murder.
Alternative history is a temptation to which we cannot avoid if we wish to pursue and the acknowledge the truth.
Ian D. Hall