Theatre: The Mousetrap is back!
RETURN OF THE MOUSETRAP
St Martin’s Theatre from 23rd October
Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, which opened in 1952, is very old. Nearly as old as I am.
After a Covid-induced break, it’s returning, thank God, to St Martin’s Theatre in the West End on 23rd October. It’s now totted up more than 27,500 performances.
Its return takes me back thirty years. That’s when I acted the part of ingénue Mollie Ralston, first played by Sheila Sim in 1952. Mollie’s husband, Giles Ralston, was played by Sim’s real-life husband, film heart-throb Richard Attenborough.
The Mousetrap is Cluedo on stage. Ill-assorted, unpleasant characters are thrown together – against their will, by a snowfall – in a creepy guesthouse. Their emotional lives are laid bare to the audience, and there ensues murder most foul. My character, Mollie, is an innocent, with a husband scarcely more knowing than her. Together they mismanage Monkwell Manor, the grim guesthouse.
My Mousetrap stage husband, Giles Ralston, was played by a handsome American, David Evans.
One night I noticed that David looked most peculiar. His face was beetroot-red and looked as though it was boiling over. In our key scene together, I was busy accusing him of scuttling off to London, evidenced by my finding a copy of the London Evening Standard in his pocket.
As I threw the newspaper down onto the table, shouting, ‘I KNOW you are lying!’ a weeping David cradled himself into the plaster mantelpiece and started declaiming speeches from Hamlet, crying out for his imaginary lost love, Helena Bonham Carter, who had once played Ophelia.
David was very evidently raving, poor chap. With no choice, I left him whimpering on stage, and dashed into the wings, softly crying, ‘HELP!’
The company manager should have responded by bringing the curtain down on proceedings. Instead, he flapped his long arms, said ‘Don’t bother me now!’ and disappeared into Dressing Room Number One – where Pamela Lane, former first wife of playwright John Osborne, was always waiting with a chilled bottle of Chardonnay.
Her character had already met an untimely end; so she spent the second half joyfully inebriated.
Now in despair, I called my elderly
friend the late Paul Imbusch from his second-floor room. Paul was always bad-tempered before the show but, by now, his foul mood had dissipated and he was game to have fun. He relished his role as The Mousetrap’s red herring, Mr Paravicini. Our verbal spats were loud, and apologies came in the shape of cream cakes and port – good for the throat, of course.
On that night, Paul and I invented some extraordinary dialogue, until the curtain was finally brought down.
David, meanwhile, had said goodnight to a very surprised stage-door lady, picked up his car and driven to Wormwood Scrubs prison, where he left the vehicle and wandered the streets.
He was found, incarcerated and given electric-shock treatment – and returned to The Mousetrap exactly one month later, as though nothing had happened.
The tedious, under-written part of the Major was played by Nicholas Smith, well known for his role as Mr Rumbold in Are You Being Served?
Nicholas had a very big belly and a passion for taking his clothes off. He wandered among the dressing rooms between the shows on matinée days in only his underpants. He was a lovely chap but, when almost nude, was not a pretty sight.
When he came to my tiny third-floor dressing room, Paul told him, ‘Stop playing with Madeline while you are in a state of undress!’
Cheryl Kennedy is a beautiful and very gifted actress. Her performance as complex Miss Casewell was subtle and understated. Off-stage, she is a devoted wife and mother with a gloriously
waspish mother-in-law, the late actress Kathleen Byron.
Cheryl and I had adjoining doll’s-house-sized dressing rooms. The poor chap with all the lines, who played the policeman, was at the end of our corridor.
They both used to scurry home the moment it was curtain-down. But I am an oddity and loved to stay awhile and just imbibe the atmosphere of the quiet theatre. I enjoyed the peace without all the jolly chat. A great way to wind down.
One day, I was very, very bad. I locked poor Cheryl in her dressing room. Not for long, I promise – and afterwards we embraced and laughed a lot. On my shelves still is a brilliant book, Women at War, that Cheryl gave me on our last day together in The Mousetrap.
Yes, it was a very good year.