‘A Subtle Sense of Evil’: The Mousetrap at 70

Photo by Matt Crockett

As the world’s longest-running play chalks up yet another milestone, what is the enduring legacy of Agatha Christie’s masterpiece—and what it might offer modern-day audiences:?

It’s customary, when writing about Agatha Christie, to quote one of her main detractors: the American critic Edmund Wilson. “Her writing is of a mawkishness and banality which seem to me literally impossible to read,” he loftily proclaimed in a famous 1944 article. “There is no need to bore ourselves with this rubbish.” 

You can hear Wilson’s frustration pouring off the page, like a man angrily swatting a wasp that refuses to die. His irritation was no doubt due to the fact that the general public, far from finding Christie “impossible to read”, was buying her books by the million, and would continue to do so.

Indeed, just eight years after Wilson wrote his diatribe, a new Christie stage play made its debut at the Ambassadors Theatre in London’s West End. Despite lukewarm reviews—and Christie’s own prediction that it would run for “eight months perhaps”—this modest little murder mystery rapidly became a theatrical phenomenon, taking Christie’s already incredible success into the stratosphere.

The basic facts of The Mousetrap are still astonishing. Five years after its opening night, it had become the longest-running play in the West End. Seven years on, it had racked up 5,000 performances, with actors Mysie Monte (12 years as Mrs Boyle) and David Raven (11 years as Major Metcalf) also breaking records. By the time Christie died in 1976, it had already earned £3 million—a nice little nest egg for her grandson Matthew, to whom she had gifted the rights.

Quite what Edmund Wilson (who passed away just as The Mousetrap was approaching its 8,000th performance) made of all this has sadly gone unrecorded.

________________

I’m standing outside St Martin’s Theatre in London’s West End, where The Mousetrap—after a quick switch from the Ambassadors Theatre next door—has played continuously since 1974, aside from a short Covid-induced break.

The tourists that boost The Mousetrap’s revenues year in and year out are much in evidence today, posing for selfies and chattering excitedly about today’s performance. Given that it’s an extremely hot and muggy Tuesday afternoon, the turnout is impressive.

“Are you here for the show?” asks a friendly American lady.

“Yes, I am,” I reply. “But I’m interviewing the cast first.”

“Oh, how thrilling!”

The producer arrives and ushers me inside. The fixtures and fittings of St Martin’s evoke a powerful sense of nostalgia. Being taken to see The Mousetrap as a breathless 12-year-old remains one of my most vivid childhood memories. I had discovered Agatha Christie through my grandmother the previous summer and had quickly devoured her novels. Like most devotees, I felt I was wise to her tricks by now, but I still remember the shocked gasp from the audience at the play’s finale, bamboozled (as I was) by the Queen of Crime.

As we enter the auditorium, I’m confronted by a scene rather similar to that denouement: the actors sat around in a circle, awaiting my questions. It’s now a tradition that the whole cast of The Mousetrap changes every six months, and this group has already chalked up 68 performances together. From their easy camaraderie, however, you suspect that they wouldn’t mind continuing for longer, if not quite to the extent of Mysie Monte and David Raven. In particular, they seem delighted to be part of theatrical history.

“Lots of people I knew never cared about anything I'd done before,” says Eleanor McLoughlin, (aka Mollie Ralston) with a smile. “But when they heard I was in The Mousetrap, they were all like, ‘This is amazing!’ They were genuinely thrilled.”

“It’s sometimes seen as a rite of passage,” agrees Kate Cresswell, who understudies Mollie Ralston and Miss Casewell. “There’s a feeling that you’ve got to be in The Mousetrap at some point if you want to be an actor. You got to come through these buildings, you’ve got to step onto this stage. Even if none of them have.”

I mention the number of tourists outside, which comes as no surprise.

“It’s rather like Madame Tussauds: something you need to do if you’re in London,” points out Ravi Aujla, who plays Major Metcalf. “That said, when it reopened after the Covid lockdown, there wasn't a lot of tourism around, but it was still packing in the audiences night after night. So it isn’t just a tourist destination; it has huge local significance.”

This perception of The Mousetrap as part of our history makes sense if you consider what was happening in the world when the play first appeared. In October 1952, the Queen had been on the throne for a mere eight months, while Stalin would cling on for another four in Moscow. Britain had just successfully tested its first nuclear weapon, making it the third nuclear power, even though the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya pointed instead towards its imperial decline.

Winston Churchill, meanwhile, was still in Downing Street (not leaving for nearly three more years), and the following month Dwight D. Eisenhower would take up residence in the White House. On the cultural side, the previous summer had seen the publication in English of Anne Frank’s diary and, significantly, the first edition of the NME—a harbinger of the pop-music revolution to come.

It’s also likely that attendees of The Mousetrap would have traipsed to the theatre through a thick ‘pea soup’ smog—of the kind that would kill around 12,000 people just two months later, ushering in the Clean Air Act of 1956.

All of which goes to explain The Mousetrap’s status as a historical touchstone, tied to collective memories of bombed-out cities, rationing and suet pudding. What’s harder to understand is why this simple two-act thriller continues to grip audiences in an era of theatrical extravaganzas such as Hamilton and Les Misérables.

“I think it’s because she writes really good characters,” offers Matthew While, who portrays the flamboyant Mr Paravicini. “It’s like this delightful chocolate box full of surprises. People like Mollie or Christopher Wren have genuine emotional depth and fascinating backstories.”

People don’t generally praise Agatha Christie’s emotional depth, I suggest.

“Well, I think that’s one of the biggest misconceptions about her,” Eleanor interjects. “There’s this idea that she's formulaic, but what she actually does is take a formula and inject it with nuance.”

This is very much the modus operandi in The Mousetrap—which, on a superficial level, gives us a cast of characters straight out of Cluedo.

There’s the naive young couple (Giles and Mollie), the frivolous young man (Christopher Wren), the irascible old spinster (Mrs Boyle), the ex-military gent (Metcalf), the ‘jolly hockey sticks’ woman (Miss Casewell) and the flamboyant foreigner (Mr Paravicini). There they are, all neatly assembled by the end of Scene 1, like pieces on a chess board—and we’re made to feel as if we have them sussed.

In fact, without indulging in spoilers, none of them develop in quite the way you’d expect. And you’re often blindsided by the emotional connections Christie manages to forge from such apparently simple material.

Paula, the stage manager, nods in agreement.

“A friend of mine who saw the show was desperate to find out what happened next. He was so wrapped up in the characters—they were completely real to him. There should be a sequel, really.”

________________

Lawrence Pears as Giles Ralston. Photo by Matt Crockett

Reactions such as this challenge the idea that Agatha Christie offers nothing to contemporary audiences—a difficult one to sustain anyway, given the volume of ticket sales every year. In fact, the ongoing success of The Mousetrap is proof that her appeal cascades down the generations, picking up new fans along the way.

“That’s absolutely true,” replies Matthew. “My daughters love reading Agatha Christie novels, for instance. They were super excited when I got the part.”

“When you see The Mousetrap, you become a member of the club,” Kate points out. “That’s the idea. You become a ‘partner in crime’, just like you did when you were 12. People then come back with their children and the process carries on repeating itself.”

Eleanor agrees: “My great-grandmother came, my grandmother came, and now my mother’s going to come. It’s also surprising how many Christie fans are hiding among your friends. She's got a real following—but it’s a quiet following.”

This idea of Agatha Christie fans as the literary equivalent of ‘shy Tories’ is an intriguing one. On one level, of course, it's a defensive reaction to the kind of assaults launched by the likes of Edmund Wilson: what self-respecting reader would dream of engaging with this outdated trash?

Christie herself was well aware of this snobbish perception of her work, and used it to her advantage. It’s amazing how often a seemingly lazy stereotype or plot device is deployed as a means of wrong-footing her readers. As her biographer Robert Barnard points out, she was a genius at using “the reader’s prejudices and preconceptions against him, as an instrument of his own deception”.

The historian Dominic Sandbrook elaborates further: “In one book a conservative businessman, whom Poirot lauds as the embodiment of ‘sanity and balance and stability and honest dealing’, actually turns out to be the murderer! And are the books really nothing but Tory middle-class fantasies? If so, how come Poirot is, of all things, a Belgian refugee—whom other characters, very foolishly, dismiss as a ‘bloody foreigner’ or a ‘funny little Frenchman’? And how come so many of the killers are members of the aspirational middle classes?”

Sandbrook also rightly lauds Christie’s “profoundly bleak sense of human nature, her voyeuristic fascination with the intimate details of other people’s emotional lives, her obsessions with greed, envy, jealousy and resentment,” none of which squares with her reputation as a literary lightweight.

That said, there’s a danger in allowing bookish highbrows to define the terms of the debate. As Barnard points out, a potboiler like The Murder of Roger Ackroyd “is not a failed Middlemarch, and nothing but confusion results from trying to judge it by the same criteria”. Those who do so, he says, are like a person “who prospects for gold in a coal field”.

When all said and done, Agatha Christie wrote thrillers, not Booker-Prize-winning novels. And it’s on those terms that The Mousetrap must ultimately stand or fall.

________________

Joelle Dyson as Mollie Ralston. Photo by Matt Crockett

With these thoughts in mind, I take my seat for the Tuesday afternoon matinee performance. There’s an anticipatory hum in the air, with people chattering excitedly as they file into the auditorium. The American lady I encountered earlier is just a few seats down from me, intently scanning a programme. The man next to me, spotting my notepad and pen, asks if I’m “one of those journalists”.

I nod and smile, hoping it’s a compliment.

Then, suddenly, the background music fades out. The audience quietens down as the lights dim and the curtain rises. After a 30-year gap, I’m back watching The Mousetrap, waves of nostalgia enveloping me once again. And as the play unfolds, the overwhelming sensation is one of relief. 

As a long-time Christie fan, I’ve sat through numerous adaptations that, to my mind, totally miss the point. One thinks of the recent big-screen versions of Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile—all-star vehicles operating at the level of broad pantomime. Then there’s the ‘dark’ and ‘gritty’ take on The ABC Murders starring John Malkovich, a handsome production that sadly didn’t contain a single moment of actual tension.

The assumption, in all of these, seems to be that Christie requires endless tinkering to remain relevant. Hence the emphasis on lavish set design, costumes and exaggerated performances, at the expense of plotting and suspense. But by amping up the focus on the unimportant, and turning down the volume on the absolutely vital, there’s the danger of turning Christie into everything her critics say she is: a purveyor of museum pieces.

The Mousetrap, on the other hand, pays Christie the compliment of taking her seriously. There are moments of comedy and camp, to be sure, particularly in the character of Paravicini, but always with sinister undertones (in the words of one reviewer, the play successfully conveys “a subtle sense of evil”). As a result, you feel you are experiencing the play much as it was experienced 70 years ago.

Of course, there are updates. The diverse (and uniformly splendid) cast is a notable contrast to the 1952 photos that adorn the play’s programme. The line “Terrible female, if she is a female” is wisely cut in half, and there’s rather less emphasis on the details of Mollie’s rationing-era meals. (“I was thinking of opening two tins of minced beef and cereal and a tin of peas, and mashing the potatoes. And there’s stewed figs and custard.”)

But these are sensible tweaks rather than seismic shifts. Plenty of period detail (such as Miss Casewell’s complaint that servants are “not very easy to get nowadays”, or Mrs Boyles acidic observation, “I gather you are a Socialist”) survives intact, and the impression is of a murder-mystery that’s been allowed to evolve naturally over the decades, rather than being bent out of shape. 

Best of all, the confines of the stage and the rigidity of the setting mean that it’s never stripped of its essential quality: that of the claustrophobic thriller.

In her autobiography, Christie, usually modest about her own work, praises the “good construction” of The Mousetrap, and it certainly reveals an author in complete control of her material. Knowing the solution in advance, I marvelled at her constant ability to bluff and double-bluff the audience, smuggling through the relevant information in a pile of red herrings. 

In Act 1, for example, a major clue in the form of dialogue is dangled right under our noses, but we dismiss it because of our attitude to the character. Other characters shift from sympathetic to unsympathetic and back again, teasing us as to their true motivations. And as the tension rises, and the sense of comic frivolity gives way to fear and desperation, you begin to notice the sweat breaking out on your palms.

At the play’s climax, I find myself watching audience members in anticipation, remembering the effect it had on me all those years ago. Sure enough, a startled murmur breaks out as the denouement unfolds, with some people actually recoiling in their seats. The electricity in the air is palpable—and it’s in that tiny moment that the secret of the play’s success is revealed.

As I troop out of the theatre with my fellow partners-in-crime, I imagine myself taking my own grandchildren along to the 100-anniversary show in 2052. This isn’t a fanciful notion. Earlier on, the cast had jokingly said they didn’t want to be the ones who “finished it off”. But, as I scan the faces of the departing audience—the young and the old all jabbering away happily—I feel confident that The Mousetrap will be delighting amateur sleuths for some time to come.

The Mousetrap is now on a nationwide tour to celebrate its 70th anniversary, which runs until November 2023. Visit here for dates and booking details.