The mystery of The Mousetrap, I'll tell you right now, is that the play's been running in London's West End for 63 years nonstop, which makes it head-over-heels the most stupefying feat of theatrical triumph in the secular world. I am an unabashed Agatha Christie fan, having made it through all of her mystery novels in the last few years, and I'd never seen any of her plays onstage. So of course I was all-over giddy at the thought of Shotgun Players' production at their lovely Ashby Stage. As for who exactly dunnit, my lips are necessarily firmly sealed, so the pleasure of the ultimate reveal is preserved for you, through Jan. 17.
Why is the play called The Mousetrap? Because that's what Hamlet calls the play-within-Hamlet designed to "catch the conscience of the king" and reveal his father's murderer. The title thus legitimizes an otherwise cheap genre by lumping in Shakespeare. Perhaps Christie aims to catch the conscience of her audience, since her play does rather indict society-at-large for child abuse by creating a murderer who avenges a murdered child. I reckon this seriousness of theme and its universality "explain" the play's success, plus the fact it's powdered over with lashings of wit. Correctly played, one assumes, the comic relief contextualizes the grotesque and makes it bearable.
We are all as little mice to Agatha Christie (1890-1976), the world's most successful author, who built a publishing phenomenon on her ability to catch, hold, trick and torment readers' imaginations. Very like a cat. Agatha was 62 when she wrote The Mousetrap in 1952, having already perfected the mystery genre to international acclaim in over 40 unstoppably popular novels. By 1965, having written another 15, she announced she was "satisfied," although she still had 10 books in her. In 1968, Tom Stoppard's Real Inspector Hound threw some vintage Christie into a postmodern blender and blew her domain, the "traditional cozy," off the stage.
The post-Hound universe is filled to bursting with clever and not-so send-ups of the conventions that were Christie's stock-in-trade. Impossible to imagine, when watching one of these spoofs, that she had based her characters on people and places familiar to her. Incredible that such a place as an English country home ever existed, as a matter of course, and that one had servants and complained of their unreliability. The challenge for anyone undertaking The Mousetrap today, in the United States, is to find the style of the play, or invent one, that will transport us back in time to a snowed-in B&B, with a psychopath on the loose, we can believe in.
In their season devoted to plays written by women (for which, many thanks), betwixt Aphra Behn and Caryl Churchill, Shotgun has wisely stuck Agatha Christie in the holiday-season slot. It's a natural, abused children at Christmas. Director Patrick Dooley has overseen the building of an old-fashioned set with working doors and full staircase visible through the proverbial archway. So much work goes into getting this sort of thing right. The managing director assures me there was "working snow" at the first preview, although my view of it was blocked by overenthusiastic "frost treatment" on the windowpanes.
I confess I was childishly looking forward to seeing the illusion of snow falling through a window. In The Mousetrap, snow is an important character. No snow, no blocked roads, no closed circle, no field day for a psychopath. The snow needn't be realistic but must convincingly trap a seemingly random group of people. On such details does the play's thrill-o-meter rise or fall. Of course, only actors can make you believe it's cold outside, or that they are their character, or who their character really is when the mask falls. The meta-theater of Mousetrap is those masks falling, and the anxiety aroused by the volatility of identity.
There are so many layers to playing Christie, starting with the English accent. Most American actors expend so much energy being "English" there's nothing left over for character. Trish Mulholland is impeccable in this department, as the bilious Mrs. Boyle, and it's a pleasure to watch her remove her gloves. Nick Medina provides charm and a sense of the play's wit by speaking lines as if they were simply occurring to him. Miscast and misdirected, oblivious and overblown, Alex Rodriguez's Italian-Scottish-Swedish "accent" is more destructive of the evening's enjoyment than even Megan Trout's failure to be ingenuous. No, it's not perfect, but it's the fucking Mousetrap, so go.