NO FUSSY POIROT TO SPOIL OUR FUN
The biggest mystery about Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap is how it’s STILL touring 70 years later. Maybe it’s because there’s…
I’ve often wondered how Agatha Christie’s best-known play is still attracting theatre audiences in London, and still touring successfully 70 years after it opened. I first saw The Mousetrap years ago and I went to this production sceptical about its ability to cope with modern theatrical style. But one of its great advantages is that there’s been no attempt to update it, which would rob it of its particular appeal.
There’s the common Christie setting: a large country house where an inexperienced married couple are trying to master the business of running a post-war guest house without staff.
There’s no TV, just a crackling radio, no mobile phones, and a dubious central heating system. The early intake of five guests appear to be a bunch of stereotypes. A radio announcement reveals that there’s a killer on the loose: police are delayed by heavy snow drifts.
But the characters are not total stereotypes. They are individuals deliberately concealing aspects of themselves. There’s the excessively camp art lover (Shaun McCourt) ‘an extremely peculiar man’ not quite the airhead he seems, the typical ex-army man (Todd Carty), the prissily critical older woman (Judith Rae) refusing
The Mousetrap Gaiety
Until May 18 ★★★★★
to accept the modern world, and the foreigner (Steven Elliot) who sounds a bit phoney.
It’s a carefully crafted whodunnit. After the first murder, the individual characteristics are slowly uncovered. The characters become suspicious of each other, interrogating and investigating, along with a policeman who has arrved after crossing huge snowdrifts using skis.
There’s no single person doing the interrogating and solving everything, but personalities are gradually exposed as suspicion, accusations and tempers rise.
They’re a much more interesting bunch than the predictable groups that crop up on TV. And above all the aggressive investigating policeman has no super powers of deduction that solve everything in a single get-together.
The set seems to replicate the original, giving a feeling of warmth and age surrounded by mistrust and doom.
Hollie Sullivan and Barnaby Jago make a suitably uncomfortable couple dealing with unexpected problems: Elliot obviously enjoys his stint as the supercilious suspect foreigner, and the hugely experienced Carty is the typical ex-army man.
There’s a whole boatload of red herrings served up interfering with your original presumptions before everything is finally sorted out. Not a masterpiece, but a surprisingly enjoyable evening without any fussy Poirot getting in the way.
Dancing to a different beat
Dublin Dance Festival, which opens this week, features three spectaculars at the Abbey. It’s goodbye to the days of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. These new shows are rugged reflections on life.
■ Botis Seva’s highly rated
BLKDOG (May 17-18) is described as ‘a brutal commentary on how today’s youth navigate a world’ that doesn’t work for them. It’s apparently ‘filled by the potent physicality of hip hop… revealing a viscous connection of how self-discovery can lead to selfdestruction’,
■ Carcaca (May 21-22) is by the Portuguese choreographer Marco da Silva Ferreira, who comes to Ireland for the first time to present his new production, a work ‘that wanders between past and present, folklore and urban culture’ in a ‘colourful and vibrant exploration of identity’.
■ Then Emma Martin/United Fall (May 24-25) presents her work on the Abbey stage for the first time with Night Dances, ‘an ode to the body and a visceral, sweaty love letter to dance in all its forms’. You’re promised ‘raucous choreography and rumbling bass’ that ‘reverbs in your belly and revels in fury, rebellion, hope and freedom’. It also apparently unleashes ‘the exhilaration of getting lost in your own rhythm, where nothing else matters, just the sweat and the groove’.
Booking at abbeytheatre.ie or dublindancefestival.ticketsolve. com
The Critic joins Wexford Operas
Wexford Festival Opera (Oct 18-Nov 2) opened booking this week.
The festival will have 70 events over 16 days. The three main operas include The Critic by Charles Villiers Stanford based on Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play of the same name.
The opera – a humorous take on the world of theatre, the people who inhabit it, and the importance theatricals place on their own work – was first performed in 1916.
It’s set on stage during the final rehearsals of a new operatic work. The original play has actors called Mr Puff, an author, and critics called Dangle and Sneer. Stanford and Sheridan were both born in Dublin, but made their careers in England.
See wexfordfestival.com