Five suspects in a country house? A brilliant painter poisoned? A long-buried secret, and the taint of guilt by association spilling down the years? It must be Our Lady of crime, Agatha Christie. And indeed it is - Go Back For Murder was adapted by Christie herself, and is being performed at the Playhouse this week by The Official Agatha Christie Theatre Company.
The staging was superb - slick and turning a necessity into a feature. The first half could have been awfully static, as it's a series of conversations in drawing rooms. Here the scene changes were done by spare cast members acting servants in the half light, while heroine Carla Crale (Sophie Ward) acted a sort of wordless monologue inter-scene. Having your eye drawn to two scenes at once (a classic Christie technique) worked well and the efficient, almost choreographed, changes created rooms of character with minimal switching of props, keeping the pace of the production up. Understudy Morag Sims even stole some of the limelight.
The cast play themselves in 1968 (beautiful Mondian-esque Mary Quant dress and all) and their 20-year younger selves. This worked surprisingly well though the necessity of someone who could pass for 14 perhaps explained why Angela Warren the lady adventurer (Georgia Neville) didn't look more weatherbeaten and eccentric. Liza Goddard was effortlessly watchable, while Gary Mavers invested the victim with suitable single-mindedness - an unapologetic rake. Lysette Anthony's legs were almost a character in their own right and helped make her a believable muse.
It's always difficult to pin down the essence on a novel on the stage, so we lost some of the scrutiny of the Blake brothers as suspects, and more importantly a decent explanation of why Carla Crale falls for her lawyer so quickly. It looked like Christie might have been expecting an old and forgetful audience, there being a few of the "You mean when my brother, the sea captain, sent me that parcel in Act 1" style of remark. But no matter - the evening flew by, testament to the strength of the storytelling.
As an experiment (by accident) I had seen a production of this play before while my companion had not, and knowing whodunnit did not ruin it at all. In fact, if you know the identity of the malefactor you can watch the poison being administered to the drink, if you know where to look... But with all the suspects gathered in the garden room there is plenty else going on to distract you. Dame Agatha would have approved.