Killer instincts

GEORGE Hetherington was courting and took his girlfriend Mary to the theatre in Newcastle as a special treat. They went to see an Agatha Christie play which was touring the regions before going into London’s West End.

Richard Attenborough and his real-life wife Sheila Sim were the stars.

The play was called The Mousetrap.

George and his now-wife Mary, from Durham, could have had no idea that more than 60 years later that play would stay be running in London.

Christie’s whodunit now holds the world record as the longest-running play in history.

When, after 2,239 performances it overtook Chu Chin Chow as the longest-running play in the world, Noel Coward, somewhat begrudgingly you might think, wrote to the author: “Much as it pains me, I really must congratulate you.”

To mark its 60th anniversary, the play is on a 60-date tour for the first time since 1952 while its in London continues at St Martin’s Theatre, where it moved in 1974 from the Ambassadors Theatre next door.

This is the first time The Mousetrap has been seen in the UK outside London since that tour when George, now 81, saw in 1952 at Newcastle Theatre Royal – the venue hosting the first appearance in the North-East next month on the 60th anniversary tour.

“It must have been one of the first dates on the tour,” says George, former head of music at Ferryhill School. “The thing I remember is that it wasn’t until about three seconds before the end that you knew who the murderer was. Now the play has become a cult.”

Not bad going for a whodunit, set in a snowedin country house, that began life as Three Blind Mice, a 30-minute radio play written for Queen Mary’s 80th birthday in 1947. The BBC asked the royal what she’d like in the special broadcast and she replied “an Agatha Christie play”. It was eventually enlarged into The Mousetrap, which is now as much as a tourist attraction in London as the Tower and Buckingham Palace.

The reviews haven’t always been kind. “The Mousetrap should be abolished by an Act of Parliament,” suggested one stage director.

But the play has proved critic-proof. There were fears than once star couple the Attenboroughs left the cast, the production would fail to attract audiences with a unknown cast. Far from it, the show thrived.

Christie herself once tried to explain its longlasting appeal. “It is the sort of play you can take anyone to, it is not really frightening. It is not really horrible. It is not really a farce, but it has a little bit of all those things and perhaps that satisfies different people.”

Could that really be the secret – that it has something for everyone which in the end makes it inoffensive rather than exciting. Seeing it for the first time last year, my initial reaction was that it wasn’t as bad as I had expected. It’s certainly better than those awful adaptations of her books such as Murder On The Nile that rep companies used to stage.

The London production plays it straight in the original 1950s setting on a solid set where a motley band of caricatures (rather than characters) arrive and behave mysteriously for a couple of hours. There are murders, much creeping around and everyone looks guilty.

I liked it as a piece of old-fashioned murder mystery theatre. The cast weren’t big names, or even middling names, but good reliable performers.

The touring production has the bonus of many familiar soap faces filling the roles.

One person with more reason than most to be grateful for The Mousetrap is Christie’s grandson Mathew Pritchard. She gave him the rights to The Mousetrap for his ninth birthday. “I do not, I’m afraid, remember much about the actual presentation (if there was one) and probably nobody realised until much later what a marvelous present it was,” he says.

“But it is perhaps worth remembering that my grandmother had been through many times when money was not so plentiful. It was therefore incredibly generous of her to give away such a play to her grandson, as in 1952 her books were only approaching the enormous success They have now become.

“It is also a mistake to think of her generosity only in terms of money. She loved giving pleasure to others – good food, a holiday, a present, or a birthday ode. She loved enjoying herself, and also to see others around her enjoying themselves.”

Young Mathew often had an exclusive preview of his grandmother’s latest literary work.

“Sometimes she used to read the new one to us in the summer down in Devonshire,” he recalls.

“She did so partly, I suspect, to test audience reaction, but partly to entertain us on the inevitable wet afternoons when, no doubt, I was rather difficult to amuse.”

He thinks she had a “love/fright” relationship with the theatre – finding the experience very wearing, but enjoying other people’s enthusiasm for her plays and finding it infectious.

“I went to The Mousetrap several times with her in varying company – family parties, girlfriends, and the Eton cricket team when I was captain in 1962. I would say we all enjoyed the play and my grandmother’s company in equal measure.

“But she was enthusiastic about other people’s plays as well, about archaeology, opera and perhaps, above all, about food. In short, she was an exciting person to be with because she always tried to look on the good side of things and people.

She always found something to enthuse about.”

When Pritchard took his own children, aged 12 and 11, to see The Mousetrap for the first time – the fourth generation of his family to see it – they enjoyed it tremendously, he reports. “They crossed off assiduously in their programmes those whom they thought couldn’t have done it.

The real culprit was excluded at an early stage.”

He also notes that someone else is responsible for the successor The Mousetrap, producer Peter Saunders. “I am sure it’s no exaggeration to say that many Agatha Christie plays would never have been written at all but for his judicious mixture of persuasion, encouragement, confidence and pleading,” says Pritchard.

“She adored it all, and certainly we all recognise what The Mousetrap owed to Peter in its early days. His confidence in it never wavered and it’s longevity is as much a tribute to his great partnership with my grandmother as to anything else.”

THE MOUSETRAP 60th ANNIVERSARY TOUR

Newcastle Theatre Royal: Feb 11 to 16. Box office 08448-112121 and online theatreroyal.co.uk

York Grand Opera House: May 6 to 11. Box office 0844-8713024 and online atgtickets.com/york

Darlington Civic Theatre: June 10 to 15. Box office 01325-486555 and online darlingtonarts.co.uk

Sunderland Empire: Oct 15 to 19. Box office 0844-871-3022 and online atgtickets.com/sunderland