Agatha Christie. Towards Zero in The Mousetrap and Other Plays (1978)

     Agatha Christie. Towards Zero in The Mousetrap and Other Plays (1978) Adapted from the novel of the same name, the play moves briskly through the plot. The characters are well enough defined for good actors to give them credibility, even though their speech is not well-differentiated (Christie’s dialogue is true to class, but only vaguely evokes the individual). The stage directions are for a director, not a reader, and so they interfere; I have a hard time with “moves above table,” etc.
     Apparently amateur drama groups love Christie plays, and one can see why. They are “stagey”, though usually not in the bad sense of that word. Christie liked dramatic endings to scenes; she loves to drop the curtain on a plot point. Even the endings depend on a few lines of dialogue and action in the last two minutes or so. Her plays don’t wind down, they end with a bang. I don’t especially like a play that has a punch line, but many people do. Her plays for the most part are box office successes. Christie also likes realistic sets, “natural” props, and so on, and takes great care in describing them. In other words, they are the kinds of plays that people who like a good story will enjoy; but I doubt I would like them much; they are weak theatre. I can’t imagine these plays working on a bare stage, but it might be fun to try. As for the stories themselves: the scripts make it even clearer that Christie had a strong sentimental streak in her. These plays are romantic love stories with crime as the spoiler of true love’s deserved happiness.
     It’s also clear that she had an essentially dramatic imagination. Her novels rely a great deal on dialogue. This makes transposition into video easy, and often the video does a better job of presenting the story than Christie’s prose does. Or so it seems to me.
     I skimmed a couple of the other plays, but didn’t find them attractive reading. ** (2003)