Well start as you mean to go on... so, Constant Reader, the first posting of 2006 is to tell you I have FINALLY been to the theatre this year: it took me long enuff!
Tonight Owen and I went to see AND THEN THERE WERE NONE at the Gielgud Theatre - and what a fun night it is! I was worried it would be a standard Agatha Christie stage transfer with the attendant whiff of the warhorse but luckily the book had been given a bit of a buff-up by the excellent Kevin Elyot - whose own plays tend to be about the past haunting the present - and it now cracks along at a brisk pace tinged with a mordant wit.
You know the deal... eight guests are tricked into attending a gathering on an island off the south coast by an unknown person claiming to be a friend of a friend only to find no host just two servants hired for the night. After dinner a record is played and a voice informs them they have been gathered together as the ten all share one thing in common.. they were all implicated in the death of someone in the past but have never been actually accused of the crime. Then one by one they start being murdered...
Christie's rattling good yarn is delivered intact with no happy ending as has been the case in film adaptations, surprisingly what it doesn't have is any real sense of suspense... one sits and waits to see which one will be killed, usually offstage. But it makes for a fun night out helped by Elyot's script and some fine performances from Gemma Jones as the rigidly moralistic Miss Brent, David Ross' bluff ex-CID policeman, Graham Crowden's world-weary General and the always dependable John Ramm as Rogers, the butler who after the death of his wife still feels the need to almost apologise for the need to move to one of the guest rooms, the smallest of course. Surprisingly the show has not found an audience and is closing next week after a run of nearly three months.
Hey-ho.
You know the deal... eight guests are tricked into attending a gathering on an island off the south coast by an unknown person claiming to be a friend of a friend only to find no host just two servants hired for the night. After dinner a record is played and a voice informs them they have been gathered together as the ten all share one thing in common.. they were all implicated in the death of someone in the past but have never been actually accused of the crime. Then one by one they start being murdered...
Christie's rattling good yarn is delivered intact with no happy ending as has been the case in film adaptations, surprisingly what it doesn't have is any real sense of suspense... one sits and waits to see which one will be killed, usually offstage. But it makes for a fun night out helped by Elyot's script and some fine performances from Gemma Jones as the rigidly moralistic Miss Brent, David Ross' bluff ex-CID policeman, Graham Crowden's world-weary General and the always dependable John Ramm as Rogers, the butler who after the death of his wife still feels the need to almost apologise for the need to move to one of the guest rooms, the smallest of course. Surprisingly the show has not found an audience and is closing next week after a run of nearly three months.
Hey-ho.
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