Theatre review: Arts Club stages a top-tier murder-mystery template with Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap

From revealing performances to spot-on costumes and sets, this new production conjures all the atmosphere of the play’s old London home

By JOHn LUCAS

The cast of the Arts Club’s The Mousetrap. Photo by Moonrider Productions

The Arts Club Theatre Company presents The Mousetrap at the Granville Island Stage to August 10

SNOWED IN AT AN ENGLISH country guest house with no practical way to leave and no means of contacting the outside world, proprietors Mollie and Giles Ralston, their five guests, and a police detective must determine who among their number is a murderer—before the killer strikes again.

If that sounds like the basic plot of every whodunit you’ve ever seen, that’s no shade on The Mousetrap. The fact is, Agatha Christie’s play set a template for the murder-mystery genre. The longest-running West End show—and indeed the longest-running play in history—The Mousetrap made its London debut in 1952, recently hitting the astounding milestone of its thirty-thousandth performance there.

Hardly surprising, then, that the show has inspired its share of works that riff on or reference it, including Tom Stoppard’s 1968 play The Real Inspector Hound, the 2022 film See How They Run, and, closer to home, the Improv Centre’s Stage Fright: Murder at the Improv.

Can’t make it to London’s St. Martin's Theatre, where The Mousetrap has been running continuously since 1974? The Arts Club’s current mounting on Granville Island is the next best thing.

Just like everyone else who sees The Mousetrap, I am sworn to secrecy about the murderer’s identity, but what I can tell you is that everyone onstage in director Stephen Drover’s version absolutely kills it. In a good way.

One major standout is Zander Eke as Christopher Wren, a singularly odd young man whose mannerisms might earn him a designation as “neurospicy” in the parlance of the TikTok generation. Eke certainly plays him that way in a performance that, while at times hilarious, also reveals deeper pathos than even Christie herself might have intended. Christopher’s wildly unkempt hair practically gives a performance of its own too.

Ming Hudson and Zander Eke in The Mousetrap. Photo by Moonrider Productions

In the comparatively smaller role of Mrs. Boyle, Beatrice Zeilinger doesn’t get quite as much opportunity to find her character’s hidden depths, but she is absolutely masterful at conveying the haughtiness of a lodger so snobbish that she can’t even be bothered to be condescending.

As Mollie and Giles Ralston, the owners of Monkswell Manor, Ming Hudson and Jay Clift deftly navigate the couple’s growing distrust of each other. Stoking that division is Charlie Gallant as Detective Sergeant Trotter, whose off-kilter investigative methods somehow serve only to further complicate an already confounding puzzle.

This is a top-tier production in every way, not least because of Nancy Bryant’s costume designs, which evoke mid-20th-century England without being too on-the-nose about it. Anthony Santiago looks especially sharp in Major Metcalfe’s smart green suit, and I must know where Bryant sourced those socks.

Set designer Patrick Rizzotti brilliantly rose to the challenge of creating a convincing manor house that includes a dining room, a drawing room, multiple bedrooms, a kitchen, and a cellar—none of which are ever shown. All the audience sees is a sitting room with stairs and doors that lead to these implied spaces. The backdrop to it all is a grand set of windows that reveal a snowstorm that doesn’t let up until the end of the second act.

Other things happen at that point in the play as well, but I’m not allowed to tell you about any of them.

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