Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap
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On the day Agatha Christie died in 1976, London theaters dimmed their lights for an hour in a show of esteem for her. While best known as the top-selling novelist of all time, Christie also set a record for the longest running stage production. The play she predicted would last 8 months, The Mousetrap, opened in 1952 and is now in its 8th decade on the London stage.
How did it happen that the woman known for her detective fiction also wrote a play that has smashed theater records? |
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Christie's interest in the theater started when she was a child. In her autobiography Christie reports that she went with her sister and brother, both a decade older than her, to the local theater “practically every week.” As a teenager she wrote a play before she wrote fiction. In later years, when she lived in and around London, she frequently attended plays. Her letters to her husband Max during WWII are full of details about productions and performers.
Christie once said, “I find that writing plays is much more fun than writing books." Nevertheless, she penned six dozen novels, 66 of which are mysteries. Of the twenty plays she wrote, her favorite was Witness for the Prosecution. Most critics agree that Witness is her best play, but The Mousetrap is the one setting records. Its setting is a snowbound country guesthouse, where the lodgers and owners are trapped with a murderer in their midst—familiar Christie territory. |
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A real crime, “ripped from the headlines,” inspired the plot of The Mousetrap and a real crime occurred during one performance. When the play was presented at Wormwood Scrubs Prison in 1959, two inmates escaped during the exciting second act. The guards were apparently too engrossed in the performance to notice the prisoners fleeing. |
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When Christie licensed The Mousetrap for production, she specified that no film version could be made of it until the play’s London run was over. Though you won’t see a movie of it anytime soon, the play is often staged in school, community, and repertory theaters. If you’re lucky, you can attend one of those productions near where you live. And if you’re really lucky, you’ll see the play in the same small London theater where it has been performed since the middle of the last century.
To find out why the play has endured for so long, read my article in Crime Reads . |
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