A Small Mind At The Theatre

I have to confess that I am a huge fan of the little mysteries of Agatha Christie, however, I also confess that I have read very few of the novels. My love comes from the various screen versions, growing up through the eighties, there was always the comfort of a good old fun little murder going on, that Joan Hickson, aka Miss Marple (random fact, Hickson played the cottage maid in the original 1937 film version of this play) or David Suchet, aka Hercule Poirot, would breeze into the middle of, and by the end of the hour or so, have cornered the guilty party in front of an assortment of all very potential suspects. They are frivolous in theory, but pull them apart (as fellow reviewing blogger The Real Chrisparkle is want to do in his Agatha Christie Challenge) and you realise that you the reader/viewer are observing a cleverly created spiders web of intrigue, where on closer inspection, all the threads lead to the big, bad, murderous spider at its centre. Love from a Stranger a...

After over a month away from the theatre I was keen to get back to my seat in the stalls for the new season at Royal & Derngate. Also what better than the sixty plus year running The Mousetrap by crime superstar Agatha Christie (I am a fan)? This was surely the most perfect way to begin this new run towards the winter months? Alas it was not. March this year on this blog, I very dared write a rather critical review (for me) of Jesus Christ Superstar. At the time I was wary of writing it, as I was just a relative newcomer to this theatre lark and felt that perhaps it wasn't quite my place to be too critical. I wrote it anyway and little me got whacked on Twitter by a group involved in that production ( details here ) and by that process they created a monster. I settled on the fact that now I had every right as a paying audience member to call a spade a spade. Fortunately until The Mousetrap, I hadn't needed to be very critical. The Mousetrap is indeed typical Agatha Chr...