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September 20, 1943
- First performed at the Wimbledon Theatre on September 20, 1943, the play transferred to the St James's Theatre in London’s West End on November 17, 1943.
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The play is noteworthy for two reasons: it was the first Christie play to land in London’s West End and it was her only full length stage play to feature her famous sleuth, Hercule Poirot. Black Coffee was the beginning of Christie’s long career as a playwright going on to write over 20 stage plays.
- The Mousetrap
About Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap The Mousetrap began as...
- Black Coffee
Black Coffee was Agatha Christie’s first play script. It...
- The Mousetrap
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- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Characters
- Themes
- Style
- Historical Context
- Critical Overview
- Criticism
- Further Reading
Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie also wrote as Agatha Christie Mallowan and under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. Christie was born September 15, 1890, in the seaside resort town of Torquay, Devon. She was educated at home by her mother until age sixteen and later studied piano and voice in Paris. Christie was an avid reader who knew by the time she wa...
Act One, scene i
The play opens with a radio account of a woman murdered in London. Mollie and Giles have just opened a small guest house and inn with property that Mollie has inherited from her aunt. The action begins on their first day of business and with their first guests. Christopher Wren is the first guest to arrive. He is enthusiastic about the house and praises both the style and decor. Mrs. Boyle is the second guest to arrive, and she arrives complaining that a taxi did not meet her at the train (al...
Act One, scene ii
This scene takes place the next afternoon. Mrs. Boyle is still complaining, but Major Metcalf is happy with the excellent breakfast and lunch and tells her so. Mrs. Boyle is writing a letter and Major Metcalf is reading when Wren enters and quickly exits again to seek quiet in the library. Soon after, Miss Casewell enters and turns the radio up loudly enough to force Mrs. Boyle out of the room. Wren again enters claiming to have fled Mrs. Boyle in the library. Wren and Miss Casewell talk, and...
Act Two
Trotter is interrogating all present. Everyone claims to have been alone; no one saw anyone else as they responded to Mollie’s cries for help. All their alibis sound slightly suspicious. Both Mollie and Giles are suspicious of one another because both hid the fact that they were in London the previous day. Trotter talks to Mollie alone and asks her about how well she knows her husband and about her knowledge of the abused children. Trotter tries to make Mollie think that Giles could be the su...
Mrs. Boyle
Mrs. Boyle is a large imposing woman in a bad temper; she complains about everything. She is disapproving of every effort that Mollie and Giles produce to make her comfortable. She surveys everything with displeasure and looks at her surroundings disapprovingly. Mrs. Boyle was a magistrate
MEDIA ADAPTATIONS
1. Although a number of Christie’s plays and novels have been adapted for film and television and even by other playwrights, The Mousetrap has never been adapted in any other format. Although the play is based on a radio script (Three Blind Mice, broadcast by the BBC) there is no tape of that broadcast known to exist. Students wishing to explore Christie’s work on film might consider Public Broadcasting’s series Mystery,which has adapted several of the Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple mysteries...
Miss Casewell
Miss Casewell is described as a young woman who is masculine in appearance and with a masculine voice. She claims not to have lived in England for some years, since she was twelve to thirteen years of age, but she is mysterious about where she does live. Mollie thinks Miss Casewell peculiar, and Giles doubts she is a woman. Wren and Miss Casewell talk, and she lets slip that she had a poor, deprived childhood too awful to think about. The audience learns in the final scene that Miss Casewell...
The Mousetrapbegins with the murder of a mysterious woman in London. The action takes place in a guest house thirty miles from London where a house full of suspects have gathered and where a second murder is about to be committed.
The Mousetrapis a two-act play written in the mystery genre. The play employs a remote, isolated location in which a group of suspicious people have gathered. It becomes readily apparent that some are not who they seem to be and that most have something they are hiding.
Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap opens in theatres during a period marked by post-World War IIrebuilding, a new monarchy, food shortages, and the threat of communism. The giddiness that greeted the end of the war has been replaced by the realities of rebuilding the country. Whole sections of the nation have been destroyed in the bombings of the war,...
When Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap opened in London’s West End on November 25, 1952, few theatre-goers anticipated that the play would become a fixture for the next half-century. The Times of London review of the play’s opening at the Ambassadors Theatre noted that “the piece admirably fulfills the special requirements of the theatre.” That is, t...
Sheri Metzger
Metzger is a Ph.D. with an extensive background teaching drama. In this essay she assesses critical response to Christie’s play and praises the writer’s dramatic skills. J. C. Trewin remarked in Agatha Christie: First Lady of Crime that it often astonishes critics and theatre reviewers that after so many years on the London stage The Mousetrap“can still be acted before audiences with no idea of its development or climax.” Not only critics but audiences have kept die secret of die whodonit and...
WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
1. Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound (1968) is one of several parodies of The Mousetrap. Stoppard employs many of the familiar Christie elements of the mystery play: the setting, the plot, the country house. And like Christie, Stoppard relies up an unexpected plot twist to keep the audience guessing. 2. The evolution of the mystery play is evident in Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth(1970). Shaffer relies on illusion to replace the central themes of victim, murderer, and detective. Rather than s...
John Wren-Lewis
In this excerpt, Wren-Lewis discusses Christie ‘s record-breaking play and offers some theories on the secret of its success. Wren-Lewis is a critic for various publications and a lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. The longest-running play in human history is now well into its forty-first year on the London stage. Agatha Christie’s detective-thriller The Mousetrap, which celebrated the fortieth anniversary of its opening on November 25th la...
Blain, Virginia, Isobel Grundy, and Patricia Clements, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English, Yale UniversityPress, 1990, pp. 207-8. Carlson, Marvin.“Is There a Real Inspector Hound? Mousetraps, Deathtraps, and the Disappearing Detective” in Modern Drama,Vol. 36, no. 3, September, 1993, pp. 431-42. Fitzgibbon, Russell H. The Agat...
Nov 10, 2023 · The first Agatha Christie story to be performed on stage was ‘Alibi’ – adapted by Michael Morton and based on ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’. It opened at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London on May 15th, 1928.
Sep 15, 2023 · The first Agatha Christie story to be performed on stage was Alibi – adapted by Michael Morton and based on The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It opened at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London on May 15, 1928.
The Mousetrap is a murder mystery play by Agatha Christie. The play opened in London's West End in 1952 and ran continuously until 16 March 2020, when the stage performances had to be temporarily discontinued during the COVID-19 pandemic. It then re-opened on 17 May 2021.
Hercule Poirot first appeared on stage in 1928 in Alibi, Michael Morton’s adaptation of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. 4. Christie’s first published play was Black Coffee, described by Christie as “a conventional spy thriller,” and starring Hercule Poirot as he solves the case of a poisoned physicist. 5.
Agatha Christie had a great love of horse racing and on 17th August 1966 “The Mousetrap Challenge Cup” was inaugurated. It was run at Devon and Exeter Races and Agatha presented the trophy to the first winner. The race continued to be run each year until 1991.
