Theatre
MADC
Manoel Theatre

As far as whodunits go, what could be more quintessentially English than the classic locked room/ house scenario of a country murder mystery? Agatha Christie’s The Mouse Trap, whose origins as a radio play are traceable to 1947, based on the real death of a young boy in foster care with a farmer’s family in 1945, was first written into a short story called Three Blind Mice (as yet unpublished in the UK) and later into her famous 1952 West End play.

Now in its 60th year of playing consecutively to large audiences, the honour of having one production outside of the West End, other than the touring performance, has been given to the MADC in their first Manoel Theatre production of the season.

Directed by Polly March, Christie’s script follows her nursery rhyme series of whodunits based on the concept of twisting the innocence of childhood rhymes into the grotesque macabre death scenes inspired by their words.

Called The Mousetrap after The Murder of Ganzago – the play-within-a-play which Hamlet describes to Claudio as a “mousetrap” to catch out his father’s murderer – Pierre Portelli’s lavish set was highly detailed and historically accurate, creating the perfect setting for the Ralstons’ country guest house which, it turns out in the end, has been booked by certain individuals as a clever means to catch a “mouse” and, to mix a metaphor, rat them out.

Jo Caruana’s Mollie Ralston was a perfect example of the typical, immaculately made-up 1950s good wife – she did the chores in a twinset and skirt and cooked dinner with an apron thrown over her immaculate new-look dress.

Caruana managed to be sweet and charming, and enunciated her lines in that rather clipped, slightly high-pitched and distinctively 1950s tone that well-brought-up young women at the time tended to have.

It was a performance that was well matched by Stefan Cachia Zammit’s Giles – Mollie’s husband, who was trying to reconcile his society’s expected role as head of the household with the reality of his love for his wife and the practicality of sharing the workload when running a guest house.

The dynamic between these two was clear, as was the eccentricity of their oldest and most cantankerous guest, Mrs Boyle, played by a great Sue Scantelbury whose timing was spot on, as was her disdainful demeanour towards the running of the house and her distaste for some of the other guests.

Another of the Ralstons’ eccentric guests was Malcolm Galea’s Christopher Wren. He is an insecure and rather odd young man professing to be an architecture student with an interest in cooking, antiques and Mollie – a fact which does not go unnoticed by Giles and leads to a few altercations and accusations when the entire house is declared to be on lock-down by Sergeant Trotter, played by a very poised and alert Jean-Marc Cafà.

When the enterprising Sergeant Trotter skis up to the snow-bound house to investigate the possibility that a dangerous murderer might be after a guest or two at Monkswell Manor, after having already killed another woman in London, the final three guests have already assembled.

Polite and unobtrusive Major Metcalf, played by newcomer Toby von Brockdorff in a pleasant, understated manner, Chiara Hyzler’s no-nonsense Miss Casewell and Manuel Cauchi’s flamboyant but incredibly perceptive Signor Paravicini are all brought together with the other guests and hosts in a situation where one ends up dead and one of the remaining six is a killer, and the rest fear for their lives and regard their fellow housemates with suspicion.

Already buzzing with the news of such a sensational murder in broad daylight from having read the papers and listened to the radio, the guests’ nerves become gradually frayed by the harsh weather and isolating storm, as they speculate as to who the killer in their midst might be.

Hyzler’s performance as Mollie’s feminist opposite in 1950s women’s lib was accurate and strong, with a softer edge towards the end, while Cauchi’s Paravicini was enigmatic, confident and collected.

The ensemble made the most of what I feel is a rather weak set-piece script, despite its 60-year popularity and surprising plot twist at the end, when the murderer is revealed.

March made very wise casting choices and brought together a solid, experienced cast for a successful period piece that illustrates George Orwell’s criticism of modern whodunits in his 1946 essay, Decline of the English Murder.

“One examines the murders which have given the greatest amount of pleasure to the British public, the murders whose story is known in its general outline to almost everyone and have been made into novels and rehashed over and over again by the Sunday papers. One finds a fairly strong family resemblance running through the greater number of them.”

This clichéd familiarity, the comfort of a recognisable plot with a clever twist at the end, which requires a member of the cast to ask the audience not to reveal the identity of the murderer after they leave the theatre, is what makes The Mousetrap watchable to an audience out for an evening of pleasant and surprisingly arresting but uncomplicated entertainment.