To get the standard info out of the way first, Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap is famous for having the world’s longest single production run, opening at the Ambassadors Theatre in 1952 and playing uninterrupted (despite a move next door to its current location at St. Martin’s Theatre in 1974—though they never missed a performance, so the initial run wasn’t actually interrupted) apart from a brief hiatus due to Covid. That incredible performance run alone makes Christie’s play one of the most significant pieces of theatre in the world. But apart from that, it’s a genuinely enjoyable play in itself. The current director is Philip Franks.

Christie’s The Mousetrap is a murder-mystery set in a smallish guest house slightly outside London in 1952. The Ralstons, Mollie and Giles, have just opened the guest house, and they’re joined by a range of guests, including the eccentric and flighty Christopher Wren, the domineering and severe Mrs. Boyle, the helpful Major Metcalf, the androgynous Miss Casewell, and—the unexpected guest—the suspicious foreigner Mr. Paravicini. When Mollie receives a phone call from the police telling them a Detective Sergeant Trotter is on the way, the Ralstons are confused about what they’ve done. However, Trotter—who arrives on skis because the house has been cut off by a blizzard—informs them that it’s “more a matter of police protection.” Someone in the house is going to be murdered. Trotter tries to gather clues, but the occupants of the house are generally reluctant to actually give him the information he needs. And then one of them dies. The second half is devoted to Trotter trying to solve the murder and prevent another one, and the plot thickens…

I was actually somewhat concerned going into this performance because I directed a production of The Mousetrap for Sock & Buskin, my community theatre, and my actors and crew did an amazing job. On the one hand, I was worried that my view of this world-famous professional production would be colored by my affinity for how we had put on Christie’s play, and that I would be overly critical of this performance merely because of how invested I was in ours. At the same time, I worried that I would have seen the play so many times in rehearsals and in our performance that I wouldn’t really be able to enjoy this one.

Thankfully, I was wrong on both counts.

Mostly.

I did genuinely enjoy this performance, and for the most part I thought the acting and production choices did really work for me. Though I know the script well enough that I could identify places where the cast/production dropped or added material, and there were a few tricky scenes that I compared unfavorably with our production.

One thing that struck me was that the cast or the production actually changed some of the words, and I’d be very interested to know whether those changes were ad libbed by the actors or whether the production has specifically chosen to add or remove them. Some it makes sense to change. For instance, when Mollie (Lucy Doyle) is speculating that the killer could have been a prisoner of war, in the script she says, “a prisoner of the Japs perhaps,” but this performance dropped that. Now, in 1952, it’s unlikely that many British people would have batted an eye at that, but today is would likely raise some eyebrows. It is not necessarily a slur, but it’s also not that far off one—and in our S&B performance we did discuss cutting that word, but ultimately our licensing agreement prevented us choosing to cut language. However, I could see why a production would, on an institutional level, choose to forego a word that hasn’t aged well. On the other hand, there were instances where alterations did not seem purposeful necessarily. Like Paravicini’s (Lorenzo Martelli) line “You English are a funny people.” I don’t know that it added anything meaningful that wasn’t already clear about Paravicini’s character—though it did get a laugh. From a theatre production perspective, I wonder whether these are standard changes or whether there is some degree of ad libbing allowed for the actors, since after all they are playing the same role night after night, and that can get quite boring I imagine.

My other concern had been about preferring our production choices to those of the St. Martin’s performance. There were a few instances where this was the case, but for the most part it was different without being better or worse. One place I really did think we surpassed the professionals was when Casewell (Elyssia Roe) has a brief breakdown while being questioned by Trotter (Sam Stafford). In our production we had a really hard time navigating what was going on in this scene and why, because it’s such an odd departure from the rest of Casewell’s behavior, and it seemingly comes out of nowhere. For my money, Haley Libran, who acted the role in our S&B production, pulled off that breakdown in a way that felt more natural and purposeful.