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Trapped like mice

Rashmi Vasudeva is glad she took the bait and fell into ‘The Mousetrap’ at St Martin’s theatre in London.

Agatha Christie herself did not think too much about it. She never thought it would run for more than a few months. I had always agreed with her about the longest running play in history. The Mousetrap, I felt, was not Agatha Christie’s best work. But then, I had not been to St Martin’s theatre in London’s buzzing West End. I had not seen The Mousetrap ‘in the flesh’. Moreover, I had not heard, at the end of the play, one of the cast members boom: “In the tradition of the Mousetrap, keep the secret locked in your heart.” Oh! I was caught, quite neatly caught in the trap.

For a trap it is, that makes the Mousetrap click. The deception (read seduction) begins quite early, at the little winding turn you take to reach the theatre, in fact. A pretty cobbled road at the end of which is the somewhat crooked building of the St Martin’s theatre. A building that seems slightly embarrassed by its own grand interiors. In you go and you have stepped back 50 years. The atmosphere claws at you…you are convinced that this is the England of 1950s and quite easily believe that you are about to be lured into an old country manor. It is snowing outside and there is a murderer inside…

Agatha Christie used this age-worn technique of a set of strangers huddled together under the quaking fear that one of them is a murderer in several of her books. And Then There Were None is an example that jumps to the mind. She probably knew this too. Which is why she was amazed when the play ran continuously for 15 years from the time it was first staged on November 25, 1952. According to her biographers, after 15 years, she ceased to be amazed and began developing a kind of affection for this play, originally titled Three Blind Mice. (The title is a reflection of the morbidity she associated with nursery rhymes. Many books have lines from nursery rhymes as titles…A Catcher in the Rye, One Two, Buckle My Shoe, Hickory Dickory Dock, etc). Three Blind Mice was written originally as a radio play for the BBC as a ‘birthday present’ to the late Queen Mary.

Runaway success!

It later evolved into the present version and was renamed Mousetrap. The play has been translated into 24 languages and performed in 44 countries. As many as 318 actors have performed in successive productions. Actor David Raven who played the role of Major Metcalf for a record 4,575 performances, is in the Guinness Book of World Records, as is the play itself. A fan website tells us this interesting fact: If the shirts ironed for the cast are hung out, they will stretch to more than 93 miles and the amount of ice cream consumed by audiences will add up to a whopping 330 tonnes!

However, no mind-numbing statistics can explain why the Mousetrap has been so successful.

Lord Attenborough, a member of the original cast of 1952, when asked about the secret of the play’s success, had said: “If you wanted no live sex and no obvious violence, you went to see the Mousetrap.”

I think it is more than just ‘not wanting sex or violence’. It is the primordial thrill of the audience in a whodunit (though most people now surely must know whodunit!). The attraction is in the droll British humour of the dialogues, (nobody who has seen or read the play can forget the pansified Christopher Wren!). The joy is in the secret guessing games that you indulge in along with the actors at who hid the skis and who whistled the tune of ‘Three Blind Mice’.

A quotation hung outside the theatre has the answer, I think, to the mousetrap puzzle. It says the play is, “as vital to the West End as the ravens to the Tower of London.” A superstition from the time of Charles II claims that when there are no longer ravens in the Tower, the monarchy will perish.

For me, this was simply, a superb play and a trap I was glad I got caught in.