Mousetrap ProductionsThe current cast of “The Mousetrap” at the St. Martin’s Theater in London.
LONDON — It was a dark and stormy afternoon when I ventured into the old building with the twisting staircases, on one of those London side streets that always seems to be in different places when you look for them. Oh, I knew what I was in for: screams, gunshots, a whistling psychopath, fraught minutes in the dark and rigid postures of fear. But I hadn’t come to St. Martin’s Theater to be frightened or even stimulated. I was there for comfort.
Well, that and the chance to pay my respects to a woman who had given me bountiful comfort since my childhood: Agatha Christie, whose play “The Mousetrap” was just about to begin its 24,655th performance. Hundreds of thousands before me, starting before I was born, had followed this same path, making a cheerful pilgrimage to a mecca of sanitary murder.
The house was hardly full on this Tuesday afternoon. But there were 90 or so schoolchildren in attendance, many of whom I was told were seeing their first play. I heard several foreign languages (including American, of course) being spoken by the adults seated near me. More than at any point in my career as a theater critic, going to a play felt like being part of a field trip to a historic site.
“The Mousetrap” was something I had never sought out in the past. I knew it was there – the longest-running play in modern history (it opened in 1952) – in the way that I knew Big Ben and the Tower of London were there. But now that the show was coming up on its diamond anniversary – as is, may I remind you, the reign of a certain pigeon-shaped monarch – I felt it was time to make a courtesy call, and see how the old girl was holding up.
Mousetrap ProductionsRichard Attenborough and Sheila Sim in the original 1952 production of “The Mousetrap” in London.
I mean the play, not the queen, though parallels between the two are encouraged by the management. The program includes a large picture of a be-gowned and be-pearled Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh standing on the grand but shabby country-house set of “The Mousetrap” on the occasion of its 50th anniversary in 2002. And many of the values that “The Mousetrap” would seem to embody are not unlike those associated with the Queen herself: perseverance, stately coziness and equanimity in the face of disaster. (Coincidentally, the corpse of a murdered woman was discovered earlier this month on the Queen’s Sandringham estate, which might be said to give Her Majesty a certain Christie-esque nimbus these days.)
Those are values celebrated for allowing the British home front to get through World War II and its bleak aftermath of rationing and making do. “The Mousetrap” (originally a BBC radio play, written, it is said, at the request of Queen Mary) is set in that period, and makes frequent allusion to hard times. The young, newly married Mollie and Giles Ralston have enterprisingly set up a paying guest establishment at Monkswell Manor, an old pile Mollie inherited from an aunt. They have no servants and little capital, but they do have pluck.
Which it turns out will be sorely tested, as it emerges that one of their five guests (or perhaps even Giles or Mollie) is a homicidal maniac. This is especially inconvenient given that raging snowstorm outside and the cut telephone wires. And that all of them have aspects of their past they have tried to keep safely buried. Their credo, more than one of them says, is to forget what’s done and face the future. But can they?
Allow me to detour here for a second. “The Mousetrap” was the second play I saw in London this week. The first was “Grief,” a new drama at the National Theater written and directed by the prolific Mike Leigh, a fine playwright who is better known as a filmmaker (“Secrets and Lies,” “Vera Drake,” “Another Year”). “Grief” too is set in postwar England, and it too deals with archetypally British people reluctant to deal with the nastiness that lurks beneath a calm and well-appointed exterior.
Though the title is “Grief” the word for what most of the characters experience here would these days be “depression.” It afflicts all the members of the small suburban household headed by a middle-aged war widow and her bachelor brother (Lesley Manville and Sam Kelly, both superb).
Making do, muddling through, carrying on, keeping your chin up, minding your manners – these are words to live by for this family (which also includes an exceptionally sullen 15-year-old daughter, memorably played by Ruby Bentall). Yet abiding by these directives fails to prevent its members from quietly and irrevocably falling apart. At the end of the play’s intermission-less two hours, you felt a fog of hopelessness had enfolded the entire audience. It took a few seconds of silence for anyone to muster the energy to applaud.
So you can see how “The Mousetrap” was the perfect afternoon-after antidote. I have a long personal history with Christie. The first adult book I ever read, at 7 or 8, was “Death on the Nile.” And though in my snobbish teens I put her away with other childish things, I rediscovered her in my 20s, when I was spending a lot of time in European airports, where her books were usually available in English. Now an Agatha Christie mystery (and I’ve read them all several times – even the horrible Tommy and Tuppence ones) is one of the first things I reach for in moments of high anxiety.
Associated Press Agatha Christie in 1956.
For these books are marvelous tranquilizers, as they transform violent death and temporarily upended lives into an engrossing parlor game. The characters are just real enough to engage your attention but not so real that you feel for them. I don’t even care whodunit. What I like is the prevailing neatness and symmetry of it all.
And “The Mousetrap” translates that appeal into theater humbly and straightforwardly. There are many moments of exposition that might be tedious in another context. But there’s contentment in hearing, for the third or fourth time, the itemized list of who was where when the murder occurred. Let’s see. Major Metcalfe in the cellar, Mrs. Ralston in the kitchen, Mr. Paravicini in the drawing room. … Oh, bliss, it’s a living Clue board.
The current cast, directed by Geoff Bullen, is variable. But they are all just exaggerated enough to avoid being entirely three-dimensional. And several of the ensemble members are exactly what’s asked for, especially Georgina Sutcliffe as the pale and pretty lady of the house and Marcel Bruneau as the young police sergeant who comes to call, on skis no less. (Richard Attenborough played the role in the original West End production.)
So, yes, “The Mousetrap” creaks, but old houses do; that’s part of their charm. And if I was a tad restless during the first act, I grinned through most of the second. When a cast member (the one who played the murderer) stepped forward during the curtain call and begged us not to reveal the ending of “The Mousetrap,” I felt an involuntary shiver. Not the kind that suggests someone walking over your grave, but the sort that comes (even if you try to resist it) when people sing “Auld Lang Syne” on New Year’s Eve, or another royal bride walks down the aisle of Westminster Abbey.
The producers of “The Mousetrap” recently announced that they have licensed 60 productions worldwide, and that for the first time the show will tour Britain. Meanwhile the London production is booking — according to the city’s TimeOut magazine — “until doomsday.” According to the factoid-filled program for the show, if everyone who had seen it stood in line, the queue would reach to Nairobi.
I’m assuming that line must have included some of you at some point. Any thoughts on the immortality of Miss Christie’s mystery?