Many theater companies produce a version of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol at this time of the year. It’s always a popular moneymaker. If you can’t get through the season without it, the Fox always brings in the Nebraska Theatre Caravan’s version, drenched in Dickensian flavor. The theater department at Lindenwood University in St. Charles has staged Scrooge and company for years and Hawthorne Players in Florissant will be doing their version this weekend.
So our major theater company, the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, doesn’t need to satisfy the local hunger for Christmas ghosts and winsome crippled boys. Sometimes they do find a play that has something to do with Christmas, like A Christmas Story four years ago. Often they’ll stage a musical, something bright and cheery for the holiday season.
So I’m not quite sure how the Rep’s current offering, Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, fits that bill. It certainly is popular. It’s been running nonstop in London since it opened in 1952, and it’s been repeated all over the world many times since.
And the setting is appropriately wintery. A blizzard has isolated Monkswell Manor, the mansion that young Mollie Ralston has inherited and is restoring as a guesthouse with her husband Giles. Agatha Christie’s setting must always be remote and isolated, and someone always cuts the phone line. But I don’t know about the ‘bright and cheery’ part. You might not want to take very young children to this tale of murder and child abuse. However, Christie does write crisp and amusing dialogue, though she can get a little tedious when she’s spinning out one of her red herrings, with which The Mousetrap is well-stuffed. And looking back afterward, you do doubt the logic of some of those herrings. But they are amusing along the way.
So are the eccentric guests at Monkswell Manor, like the manic young Christopher Wren or the mysterious Mr. Paravicini, who wears too much makeup, or the thoroughly irritating Mrs. Boyle, who finds so much fault with everything and everyone that you wouldn’t mind if the murderer, if indeed one is lurking about, got rid of her.
Because everyone at Monkswell Manor has something in their past or present that makes them a suspect. Thus is it ever with Agatha Christie. And the pleasure in her plays, for those who find it a pleasure, comes in trying to figure out who the murderer is before she reveals it. Which you cannot do, because she always withholds a crucial piece of information until the end.
An undercurrent of real existential angst lurks beneath even the most amusing Christie story. As Mollie says in The Mousetrap, “Everybody’s a stranger.” Everyone is suspect and we can never really know or trust anyone, including ourselves.
Director Paul Mason Barnes and the cast at the Rep share all the pleasures and thrills and shortcomings of Christie with the audience. John Ezell has created another of his marvelously detailed sets, and his program essay about the origin of the nursery song that the killer whistles, ‘Three Blind Mice,’ is another joy. Rusty Wandall’s sound design and Peter E. Sargent’s lights add to the thrills, and Dorothy Marshall Englis’s costumes capture that British post-war tweedy, tailored look.
It’s not Christmas, but you can have a merry murder at the Rep’s The Mousetrap.
By Bob Wilcox
Photo by Jerry Naunheim Jr.
Pictured: William Connell as Giles, Ellen Adair as Mollie in The Mousetrap