"Say, old boy! Fancy a little dash to the theatre?" "Oh, what’s playing, old sport?" "Well, some delicious little morsel from the pen of the queen of crime." "What, Elizabeth?" "No! Agatha." "Oh, Agatha. Why didn’t you say? So it’s her latest, then?" "No, man! It’s as old as Methuselah. The oldest bloody play with the continuous bloody run in the history of the bloody world."
Yep, that’s right. Agatha Christie’s preserved-in-aspic, plummy little murder mystery The Mousetrap – which opened in London in 1952 and only closed during the Covid years – has finally managed to tiptoe its way to Melbourne with its finger on its lips, headed by a local cast and directed by our own dame of the theatre, Robyn Nevin. Just what you’ll make of it will depend on your fondness for time travel.
The setup is as hoary as the set. Mollie Ralston (Anna O’Byrne) and husband Giles (Alex Rathgeber) have turned the manor they’ve inherited from an old aunt into a guest house, and the play opens on the night their first guests arrive. They are, it’s fair to say, an odd bunch. There is Christopher Wren (Laurence Boxhall), who is an architect but not the famous one; there’s a matronly old woman, Mrs Boyle (Geraldine Turner); a stern military man, Major Metcalf (Adam Murphy); a haughty young woman, Miss Casewell (Charlotte Friels); and finally, not invited, a strange Italian gentleman of dubious pedigree, Mr Paravicini (Gerry Connolly).
Of course, not all of them are going to see the play through. The newsreader on the radio (surely it’s George Sanders, or someone doing an impeccable impression) informs us there’s been a murder in London, and that police are honing in on the killer. When the final piece of the puzzle turns up, Detective Sergeant Trotter (Tom Conroy), and tells the guests there are likely two more people in the killer’s sights, things start getting tense indeed.
The first act is frankly a bit of a slog. The characterisations are tart but so mannered they border on the parodic. Nevin encourages a lot of hamming, and while this is fun – particularly Boxhall’s twitchy, fey (and clearly gay) architect and Connolly’s outlandish, maniacal “continental” – it tends to push the work into the realm of satire, a mode in which Christie has no interest nor aptitude. It feels a lot like reading Raymond Chandler: the tropes he invented are so familiar the work begins to sound like a pastiche of itself. By the interval, audiences may be wondering what all the fuss was about.
Thankfully, everything improves in the second act. Those performances settle down, gain some earthiness and gravitas, and the stock nature of the setup develops some intriguing specificity. Christie’s uniquely British penchant for polite ghoulishness – a kind of gentle nod to the churning id under the surface of the impacted English character – gives the situation a slight whiff of prurience, a desire to see the whole conservative Empirical structure crumble. It doesn’t, of course: the killer is unmasked, the red herrings neatly explained, and the whole rickety world goes on. But for a moment, she suggests a change may be blowing through.
Most of the cast are made up of musical theatre veterans, perhaps because they are strong at playing broad-stroke types. O’Byrne is particularly good as the kind of thornless English rose you just want to crush, jittery and unstable, certainly suspicious. Rathgeber does a fine line as the repressed-British-gent-with-fascistic-tendencies. Murphy doesn’t put a foot wrong as Colonel Mustard (sorry, I mean Major Metcalf) and Friels is very impressive as the aloof but ultimately complex Miss Casewell. Conroy is outstanding as the harried detective who arrives on skis, fixedly determined to uncover all manner of faults, desperate to hold his nerve.
Nevin directs them all with good humour and precision, nailing the tone and pacing, and even allowing for some depth in the second act, some well-earned quietus. It’s eventually rollicking good fun, even if it feels like a ghost of another era. Of course, that’s how it would have felt to audiences at the time too: 1952 was the year Samuel Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot, and Brando’s electrifying turn in Kazan’s film adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire wowed audiences a year before. The Mousetrap was a blast from the past the day it opened, and virtually nothing about it has changed.
The Mousetrap plays at the Comedy Theatre until March 26, 2023. Find tickets and more information here.
