When ‘Verdict’ gets rolling, it steams to the chilling end
Detective Insp. Ogden arrives just in time for Dundas Little Theatre’s production
Oh dear, you just know when a character in an Agatha Christie play says she wishes she were dead, you can get out the body bag.
“Verdict,” currently given a nicely staged production by Dundas Little Theatre, isn’t your typical Christie Whodunnit. It’s actually more of a “Will the Killer Get Caught” kind of play.
And that’s OK.
The journey toward Christie’s final chilling moments in this drama, despite the old gal’s occasional heavy-handed moralizing, is pretty much a fun trip.
We are in a combination librarysitting room setting in suburban London, circa the mid-1950s.
Panelled walls are lined with scholarly books and an ancient phonograph plays Rachmaninoff from some long- playing vintage LP. Crystal sherry decanters sit ready on a polished antique table and interesting folks in fine clothes perch and plunk onto straight-backed settees and worn looking chairs.
Like the furniture, they are an eclectic group.
There is Mrs. Roper, the nosy, filching char lady with the wrinkled stockings, hair wrapped in scruffy scarf, shoes beating a tattoo on faded rug floors. Played deliciously over-the-top by Dia Gupta Frid, she steals every scene she can, along with fistfuls of cigarettes and pack- ets of tea from her head-shaking employers.
There’s the ever so handsome Karl Hendryk, a professor with the righteous morality of a fool, and his querulous ailing wife, Anya, wast- ing away in her wheelchair from some incurable illness or other.
Played by Mike Wierenga and Ilene Elkaim, these two are perfect visions of a mature couple clinging onto a relationship that is loving, but has obviously lost its passion.
Before you can say watch out folks, lovely lissome Lisa Koletzky, a young physicist no less, played winningly by Rebecca Durrance-Hine, comes smartly in, in her handsome day frock from costume designers Sally Watson and Jane Snider. It doesn’t take longer than two minutes to know she has eyes for the good-looking professor.
Stuffy, but kind old Dr. Stoner, an upright George Thomas, arrives with his black bag and the special potion that keeps poor Anya alive. But, oh my, he cautions, she mustn’t take more than four drops. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
Then there’s the selfish, preening student, Helen Rollander, played by an over-the-top Jennifer Barclay. This brash young woman in her stylish, trendy togs, thinks she can buy anything she wants, perhaps even dutiful husband Karl Hendryk.
About the periphery lurks Alex Jacob Tessier’s Lester Cole, a vocally too timid, self-effacing student who is really one of Christie’s famous red herrings.
Add Sir William Rollander, a wellturned-out Nicholas Ruddick and Laurence Madden’s stand-about Detective Sgt. Pearce and you have almost the lot.
The best for last though. Late in the second act Gregory Flis’s booming, in-control, fast-paced, runthem-down, no-nonsense, completely believable Detective Insp. Ogden appears, straight out of the traditional Christie oeuvre.
The production, which has languished with an oh so plodding pace suddenly leaps into high gear and the play catches incendiary flame.
From here on, of course, it’s a rocket ride to the finish.
Christie provides plenty of her usual subterfuge, keeping us wondering who will pay when the lights finally dim for the fade out.
Her characters, as always, are a delightful potpourri of the times she is capturing. As usual, delightful Agatha paints an intriguing portrait of the foolishness of so many mortals and the unspeakable evil that can lurk inside a seemingly normal heart.
“Verdict” is a perfect antidote to plays that have personal agendas to force on playgoers. All there is here is a series of intriguing questions about lifetime principles.
The play asks what is right and how do we ever know what that is until we see the end results?
Christie asks how do you choose between speaking your mind and staying silent? And when you protect someone, can you sometimes seriously hurt someone else?
“Verdict” may not be the long run sensation of “The Mousetrap,” the play that has kept Dame Agatha’s reputation alive in London’s West End for 70 years, but it is a cracking good play, well cast and staged by director Peter Lloyd. Even when it talks too much and at too slow a pace, it still has plenty of interesting things to say.
Go have fun.