Theatre Review: Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None

Even the defenders of The Mousetrap, which has been filling a London theatre for 52 years, admit that its artistic merits, if any, have long been eclipsed by its status as an institution. It will continue, perhaps even should its audience mutate into another species, but can Agatha Christie survive as a writer who still have something to say to the modern world?

Her fiercely protective estate had put a moratorium on theatre productions of her work, in an attempt to “freshen them up”, so when And Then There Were None, in a new adaptation by Kevin Elyot, opened at the Gielgud it was not just this production, but the whole theatrical future of Christie, that was at stake.

The play is still reasonably true to the original tale of a party of ten people who are, morally if not legally, murderers, summoned to an isolated island to meet their just desserts – well except of course that the old title, Ten Little Niggers has long been sentenced to death. Rogers, the butler, keeps a lower-class stiff upper lip as he continues to minister to 10 guests invited to the house party by the mysteriously absent hosts, within minutes of learning of the death of his wife, and the stage is filled with crusty military types, proper spinster ladies and all of the other inhabitants of an ideal English village circa 1920.



In the first Act, this makes the play, to put it kindly, weak. It is not the fault of John Ramm, who plays the butler, that this is a character who makes little sense today. Even the harshest employer would surely allow at least a few hours of bereavement leave, and no husband would put down the poker face so clearly, or if he did suspicion about the cause of his wife’s death would very quickly descend. And that the audience should laugh when he refers to moving into a guest bedroom rather than sleeping beside his wife’s body is only a reflection of the awkwardness.

Having ten characters of broadly the same type all on stage at the same time, stepping forward in turn to set their personal scene, does not great drama make. Distinguishing the Flashman-like cad Lombard (Anthony Howell) from the slightly slimy doctor Anthony Marston (Sam Crane), the hanging judge Justice Wargrave (Richard Johnson) from the harrumphing General Macarthur (Graham Crowden) is far from easy, and the actors cannot be blamed. The only stand-outs are the two women, by virtue of their gender, and the bumbling detective Albert Blore (David Ross), by virtue of his eyepatch.

The star of the first act is the impressive, no-expensive-spared, set. Much use is made a stage machinery as an entire dining table swoops back and forth, deckchairs swish on stage; the overall impression of Jazz-age opulence is beautifully maintained.

The first histrionic death, that of the foppish, pathologically self-centred man about town Armstrong (Richard Clothier) features the already famous projectile vomit. It is amusing rather than stomach-turning; I couldn’t help but wonder if they ran a class in this at theatre school, and if he measures his performance by length of projection? A tragedy this is not, and entertaining death is a tough trick to pull off. Then a couple more of the soldiers are quickly dispatched off stage.

It is only when the numbers are halved, in the second Act, that there is real dramatic intensity and tension, and individual characters and their interactions start to make sense. The fundamentalist spinster Emily Brent (Gemma Jones) breaking down with the guilt of having sentenced a young servant to death for getting pregnant has clear modern echoes today, and her descent into near-madness and death is gripping.

And Tara FitzGerald as Vera Claythorne, the sports mistress who as a governess sent a young charge to his death, has a muscular nervousness that grabs attention. Her eventual liaison with the cad Lombard has some real spark of attraction. (Although surely it would have been better to send them off stage for the consummation, which here is mechanical and awkward.)

And if you don’t know the ending or, like I suspect many, had forgotten it, well it is both surprising and yet psychologically real. But will most of the likely audience care? I suspect not. Just as a Christie novel can be guaranteed to provide a predictable, unchallenging, comfortable read for an hour-long train journey or a quiet evening by the fire with the port, then this will attract a theatre audience unlikely to be looking for psychological insight or challenging thought. And there’s nothing wrong with that. You can’t always dine on cordon blue; sometimes macaroni cheese just hits the spot. And this is classy, tasty, highly digestible macaroni cheese.

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Links: Reviews – Guardian, and Online Review. An interview with the director, Steven Pimlott. The book and its theatrical and film history. (This link also has a copy of the poem that inspired the title.) The theatre.