In the meantime here is my review of an Agatha Christie play 'GO BACK FOR MURDER'
Who dunnit? Why do it? These are the questions on my mind as yet another Agatha Christie creaks into town care of the dedicated Agatha Christie Theatre Company devoted to presenting the late writer’s murder mysteries. Last year they brought us ‘Murder on the Nile’ which had the advantage of an exotic setting and a fair bit of on-stage mayhem. It also had a certain period stiff-upper-racist charm that amused rather than offended and there was a genuine guessing game wondering which toff was the killer.
This year’s offering is of a different class. ‘Go Back for Murder’ playing at the Cambridge Arts Theatre Monday 4 – Saturday 9 March, has little to offer least of all a good murder. The setting is supposed to be Swinging London of 1968. We know this because the lead character, Carla Le Marchant, is wearing a Mary Quant mini dress and the Beatles are playing between scenes. But this is more Downton Abbey than Abbey Road. The nine characters in the play have all the clipped language and mannerisms of the 1940s (tops); this is a 60s world where no one has long hair and one has to apologise for mentioning the word ‘sexy’. That epithet applies to Elsa Greer, the one-time lover of the aforementioned Carla’s late husband, a womanizing artist who was painting his mistress on the day he pegged out. The murder was pinned on his seemingly jealous wife Caroline who was subsequently found guilty of the crime.
All this happened 20 years before and now Carla has (for reasons totally unclear) returned to try to clear her ma’s name. She is convinced that mummy (who committed suicide in prison) did not poison her philandering hubbie and is determined to assemble all those who witnessed his demise to discover the ‘real’ murderer.
The problem for the determined Carla is that two decades have passed since the foul deed but thanks to the convenient truth that Christie cares little for veracity, all potential poisoners gather in the spot where the murdered artist breathed his last. The first half of the play introduces each of the suspects in turn.
There is the dapper Philip Blake played by that favourite thesp Robert Duncan – was it really him? Or perhaps it was really good old Liza Goddard as a cantankerous governess (were there such in 1968?). Should suspicion fall on tomboy Angela who 20 years before was a mischievous imp who might well have tipped hemlock into the artist’s beer? And so it went on. Each character was introduced one by one amid a great welter of words with little or no action save some frisky scene changes. The acting throughout this static half was melodramatic and not a little hammy.
Luckily, the second act had a touch more life. Through clunky flashback we witness the events on the day that Carla’s unpleasant artist father was murdered. Though it takes an age to get there, the play comes to some sort of life within the last 20 minutes or so. We see the final minutes of the wayward and rather unpleasant artist from different viewpoints and we are in familiar Christie denouement territory with a fishy tank of red herrings thrown in. The final twist is really not much of a surprise and the whole thing ends on a note of such cheesiness that the audience giggled when it should not have.
It is an enduring mystery why anyone would want to resurrect stiff old plays like this one. It has funereal pace and we have to wait for well over an hour before a decent murder takes place. The language, mannerisms and declamatory acting seem like a throwback to a much earlier age and in the end one is left with a mystery: whodunit and why do it?
