The mousetrap

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St. Martin's Theater, London (2002)

The Mousetrap ( English The Mousetrap ) is a play by Agatha Christie . It was performed daily in London's West End from 1952 to 2020 , making it the longest-running play in the world.

Emergence

The Mousetrap was originally not as a play, but as radio - radio drama designed. The then Queen Mother Mary , known as Queen Mary, was asked in an interview in 1947 what she would like for her birthday if she could choose freely. She replied: "A play of Agatha Christie" ("A play by Agatha Christie"). Agatha Christie then wrote the radio play Three Blind Mice (German three blind mice ) in her honor. The twenty-minute radio play was broadcast on May 26, 1947, Queen Mary's 80th birthday, on the BBC . The title refers to a well-known English nursery rhyme sung by the murderer in this play.

Agatha Christie later turned the radio play into a short crime novel and then into a two-act play. After completing the work, she found that there was already a play called Three blind mice . The renamed name The Mousetrap is a loan from Shakespeare and comes from the third act of Hamlet , in which a theater group performs a "play in a play". Hamlet replied to Claudius' question which piece was being played, "The mouse-trap". In fact, the piece is called The Murder of Gonzago ; With his words, Hamlet alludes to the trap he sets Claudius by confronting him with his actions through the imagination. The idea to use this quote as a title came from Christie's son-in-law Anthony Hicks, the second husband of her daughter Rosalind.

She gave the rights to the mousetrap to her then seven-year-old grandson Mathew Prichard for her birthday. All of the income from the piece went to her grandson during her lifetime.

premiere

Agatha Christie chose Peter Saunders as producers who just her play The Hollow (dt. The Owl's Nest ) was successfully brought to the stage. Saunders subsequently became a close friend, and he was responsible not only for the success of the Mousetrap , but also for many other Christie performances in the future. For his autobiography The Mousetrap Man , Agatha Christie later wrote the foreword .

Saunders managed to win Richard Attenborough for the role of Sergeant Trotter and his wife Sheila Sim as Mollie Ralston . The renowned theater director Peter Cotes took over the direction. The world premiere took place in Nottingham in October 1952 ; it was an honorable, but not exceptional, success. Agatha Christie then revised the script again and reduced the comedy in favor of tension. She assumed the mousetrap had a good chance of running for eight months.

The premiere in London's West End took place on November 25, 1952 at the New Ambassadors Theater and received mostly good reviews. In the first three months the theater was sold out.

action

The plot follows the pattern of a classic Whodunit . Mollie Ralston has inherited the old Monkswell Manor and is opening a guest house with her husband Giles . As they prepare, they hear on the radio of the murder of Maureen Lyons , which happened in London, and the description of the perpetrator who was seen at the scene. Four guests have announced themselves for the opening - the young, somewhat strange architecture student Christopher Wren, the stern old-young Mrs. Boyle, the aloof Miss Casewell and the retired officer Major Metcalf. During the night, Mr. Paravicini overturns his car in a snowdrift and also finds shelter in the pension. The weather continues to deteriorate, soon the roads are no longer passable and the house is completely cut off from the outside world. Mollie Ralston receives a call from Superintendent Hogben announcing that one of his cops will soon be arriving at the boarding house, without explaining why. In fact, Sergeant Trotter managed to get through to the trapped on skis. Shortly after his arrival, the phone line is also dead.

Trotter informs those trapped that the address of the guesthouse has been found in the notebook of the fugitive murderer of Maureen Lyon. They also found the note “Three blind mice” and a note stuck to the corpse with the inscription “That was the first”. He suspects that the killer is already in the house. He also reveals Maureen Lyon's true identity: her real name is Maureen Stanning and was only recently released from prison because she mistreated three children, the Corrigan siblings, and even one child, who had been entrusted to her during the war on the nearby Longridge Farm negligently let die.

It soon turns out that Mrs. Boyle, as a member of the military service at the time, assigned the three children to the Stanning family. Shortly afterwards she is found strangled in the library. The search for the perpetrator is difficult. The two surviving Corrigan children, a boy and a girl, have meanwhile grown up and nobody knows what they are called and what they look like today, their father is also a possible perpetrator. This puts all guests under suspicion equally, including the Ralstons, who both secretly drove to London independently on the day of the first murder. Trotter decides to reenact the behavior of all witnesses at the time of the murder with reversed roles in order to track down a false statement. When everyone has returned to their starting position, one of them suddenly finds himself alone with the murderer in a room.

resolution

After each performance, the audience is asked not to reveal the solution. The press also adheres to this agreement. From Winston Churchill is known that he guessed the offender already in the break.

Major Metcalf is actually an undercover cop. He suspected Trotter from the start and hid his skis so he couldn't escape. He also got a clue about Trotter's true identity from Miss Casewell.

Miss Casewell is Trotter's sister. She lived in Mallorca for a long time before returning to England. She was looking for her brother but had no intention of murder.

The Ralstons are both innocent. They went on secret trips to London to buy each other's wedding anniversary gifts. As the former teacher of the three children, Mollie would be Trotter's next victim. At that time she received a cry for help from the children, but was unable to respond because of an illness.

Christopher Wren actually tried to hide, but not from the police, but from the army he had recently deserted from. He had given his name incorrectly, based on the famous architect Christopher Wren .

The killer is Sergeant Trotter. He was the oldest of the three battered Corrigan children and only pretended to be a police officer to get into the house. He played the call, then cut the phone line himself.

Mr. Paravicini is a classic red herring . He avoided the questions because he was trading on the black market .

characters

In order of appearance:

  • Mollie Ralston
  • Giles Ralston
  • Christopher Wren
  • Mrs. Boyle
  • Major Metcalf
  • Miss Casewell
  • Mr. Paravicini
  • Detective Sergeant Trotter

The mousetrap is an eight-person play, the killer's first victim, Maureen Lyon , does not appear in the play. The short thriller differs from the play in a few points: Mollie and Giles are not called Ralston, but Davis by last name, Maureen Lyon's real name is Gregg and not Stanning. The figure of Miss Casewell does not appear at all. In addition, Mollie Ralston was the children's teacher in the play; in the crime thriller it was her older sister who the murderer mistook her for.

Performances

The Mousetrap opened on November 25, 1952 at the New Ambassadors Theater, where it ran for 21 years until it seamlessly moved to the neighboring St. Martin's Theater on March 25, 1974, without missing a single performance. St. Martin's Theater was built by the same architect in the same style as the Ambassadors and has a slightly larger capacity. The complete set and props were taken over and only replaced for the first time in June 1999, keeping the original style. The only prop that was carried over from the original 1952 backdrop to the new stage design is the clock on the mantelpiece. The set was also replaced without missing a single performance. Only in the context of the theater closings during the Covid 19 pandemic was there an interruption in play operations after 28,201 performances.

By order of Agatha Christie, the Mousetrap can not be played on Broadway until six months after the end of the performance in London , the same rule applies to Australia . In Canada, however, the Mousetrap was performed at the Toronto Truck Theater in Toronto from August 19, 1977 to January 17, 2004 . With a duration of 26 years and over 9,000 performances, it also holds the record in Canada as the play with the longest running time. Overall, the play was performed in 44 countries and translated into 24 languages. At the Berlin Kriminal Theater , Wolfgang Rumpf's staging has already achieved over 1,350 performances (as of January 2020). In Solothurn, Switzerland, there is even a theater named after the famous play. In Germany, an amateur theater was founded in Reutlingen in 1991, which was named "Theater Mausefalle" because of the play performed first.

Peter Saunders sold the film rights early on to a small company called Romulus-Film. However, they are subject to the same restriction, so filming will only be possible after the West End performances have ended. A trick in this regard is the staging in the Wiener Kammerspiele, in which the entire play is brought to the stage in the aesthetics of a black and white film.

Numbers and records

A counter that counts all performances since the premiere.

With a running time of over 68 years and 28201 performances (as of March 15, 2020), the Mausefalle is the longest running play in the world. On November 18, 2012, the 25,000. Performance takes place. The play broke the British record on April 12, 1958. The actor David Raven was Major Metcalf 4,575 times in a row between July 22, 1957 and November 23, 1968 and is thus in the Guinness Book of Records . Since Raven's death, the eight-person line-up has been changed annually on the instructions of Peter Saunders. By the 50th anniversary in 2002, 350 actors and 187 second casts had taken part. Nancy Seabrooke was an understudy for 15 years and 6,240 performances, also setting a record; she was only used 72 times.

Agatha Christie blamed ninety percent luck and the fact that the piece had something of everything for the success. She herself considered Witness for the Prosecution (German witness for the prosecution ) to be her best piece. But Peter Saunders also had a large share in the success thanks to his marketing skills. So he always selected very small theaters for the performances, the New Ambassadors has only 457 seats, the St. Martin's with 550 seats only marginally more. Since 1958 he has held so-called "Mousetrap parties" every year in the Savoy Hotel in London to celebrate the piece's birthday, and has kept it in the headlines. The performance ban on American Broadway and Australia also ensures the visit of tourists from both countries. Christie's husband Max Mallowan noted in his memoirs that the mousetrap has become just as important for tourists as Buckingham Palace and the Tower .

Oddities

  • In 1958, Die Mausefalle hit the headlines because two inmates fled during Act II of a performance in London's Wormwood Scrubs Prison.

expenditure

  • Die Mausefalle and other cases , translated by Pieke Biermann, Fischer-TB 17726, Frankfurt am Main 2012, ISBN 978-3-596-17726-4 .

Audio books

Film adaptations

Radio plays

  • Die Fuchsjagd - A radio play adaptation of the Bayerischer Rundfunk by Willy Purucker from 1958, with a playing time of 70'45 minutes. The first broadcast took place on June 15, 1958.

It spoke:

The music was composed by Joachim Faber and directed by Willy Purucker.

CD edition: Der Hörverlag 2011 (In the Agatha Christie collection : Four radio plays )

Because the children's song of the Three Little Mice is not common in Germany, the well-known song Fox, you stole the goose , was used, which then led to the changed title of the radio play.

Web links

Commons : The Mousetrap  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ thisistheatre.com , quote from Peter Saunders
  2. ↑ Christie: An Autobiography , p. 531.
  3. ↑ Gripenberg: Agatha Christie . P. 109
  4. ↑ History of Theater Mausefalle Solothurn, Switzerland ( Memento of the original from April 7, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.mausefalle.ch
  5. ↑ It all began on March 2, 1991. In: Chronicle. Association Theater Mausefalle e. V., accessed on October 3, 2017 .
  6. ↑ "Mousetrap" with irony as bait. In: DiePresse.com. December 20, 2013, accessed January 7, 2018 .
  7. ↑ Sam Marsden: Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap celebrates its 60th anniversary with star-studded show . In The Telegraph of November 18, 2012.
  8. ^ The Mousetrap - The History ( Memento of the original from October 31, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on the homepage of St. Martin's Theater @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.vpsmvaudsav.co.uk
  9. ^ Biography of Nancy Seabrooke in the IMDb
  10. ↑ Christie: An Autobiography , p. 532
  11. ^ Peter Roberts: The Indestructible Mousetrap . Wiener Zeitung
  12. ↑ Mallowan: Mallowan's Memoirs . London, 1977, p. 218
  13. ↑ Gripenberg: Agatha Christie . P. 114