Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
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by Agatha Christie, directed by Marcia Kash
Theatre Aquarius, Dofasco Centre, Hamilton
September 21-October 6, 2018
Clarissa: “But this is real life!”
Those in the mood to see an old-fashioned murder mystery play in a stylish, well-acted production need look no further than Spider’s Web currently playing at Theatre Aquarius. Spider’s Web was written by Agatha Christie but unlike some of Christie’s more famous plays like And Then There Were None (1943), Spider’s Web has the advantage of not being as well known or so often adapted so that there is the likelihood most of the audience will be seeing the story for the first time and therefore will really be hanging on every clue to solve the murder.
When Spider’s Web appeared in 1954, Agatha Christie became the first, and to this day the only, female playwright to have three plays running simultaneously in London’s West End, the other two being The Mousetrap (1952) and Witness for the Prosecution (1953). Though all three are murder mysteries, they are remarkably different from each other. The Mousetrap, of course, is the archetypal country house murder mystery. Witness for the Prosecution takes the form of a trial. And Spider’s Web is the only one of the three to emphasize humour as much as fright and Christie gives its genre as a “comedy thriller”.
Thus, Spider’s Web shows Christie in quite a different light than most will be used to. The story is unusually playful and self-aware. It includes a wide range of hokey-but-fun features of old-fashioned murder mysteries – impersonation, a secret passage, a hidden drawer, invisible ink – but these are presented with the full knowledge that they are hokey-but-fun. When Clarissa the central character is questioned by Inspector Lord about the mysterious goings-on at Copplestone Court, she exclaims, “That’s like something out of detective fiction. But this is real life!” This line gets one of the biggest laughs of the evening and is a sure sign that Christie has been playing with the Pirandello-like truth-versus-fiction paradox throughout the play.
The play introduces the notion of game-playing right from the start. Clarissa Hailsham-Brown (Mairi Babb) has set the men staying at Copplestone Court to two tasks. Justice of the Peace Hugo Birch (Anthony Bekenn) and high-ranking civil servant Sir Rowland Delahaye (Robin Ward) are trying to judge the best of three ports through blind tasting test. Meanwhile, young Jeremy Warrender (Mike Shara) has tried to beat the record for running a certain distance and back that Clarissa says was set by a previous guest. Both are tricks Clarissa is playing on them.
As we soon discover, Clarissa, the bored but devoted wife of a diplomat Henry Hailsham-Brown (Douglas E. Hughes), has an overactive imagination. She tells everyone that she amuses herself on her many days alone in her country house by playing a game she calls “Supposing”. All of her plots for “Supposing” involve thrilling discoveries such as “Supposing I were to discover a body here in the library”. Soon enough that imaginary circumstance will actually happen.
When the men of the house are out at the club, Clarissa is paid a visit by Oliver Costello (Jeremy Legat), the new husband of her husband’s first wife. He claims he has come because his wife wants her former husband to increase his payments to her and worse, she wants to have custody of her and Hailsham-Brown’s child Pippa (Caroline Toal). Clarissa is totally opposed to this because Pippa’s mother is known to be a drug addict and Pippa doesn’t want to leave. Therefore, when Costello is discovered dead in the library and Pippa claims she killed him, Clarissa enlists the reluctant help of Birch, Delahaye and Warrender to concoct a fiction that will protect Pippa and shift blame for the murder to a mysterious intruder.
When Inspector Lord arrives, tipped off by an unknown caller, he questions Clarissa and she proceeds to give three different accounts of what happened. In accordance with the story’s truth-versus-fiction paradox, it happens that the story Lord is least willing to believe is the closest to the truth and the one he does believe is one of Clarissa’s wilder fabrications. (This situation was prefigured by the false port tasting game at the start of the play.) How the Inspector, Clarissa and the other guests will manage to untangle the webs of lies before another murder happens provides both the humour and the thrills that drive the rest of the plot.
Fans of Christie will know that many of her stories depend on key information that she deliberately withholds from the reader until the dénouement. Spider’s Web is different. Clarissa’s nosey gardener Miss Peake (Valerie Boyle) says, “It’s remarkable what people don’t see that’s right in front of their noses”. That’s exactly how the plot works in this play. Christie builds up a series of inconsistencies in what her characters say and do that we notice only fleetingly. If we had the leisure to collect our thoughts, Christie gives us enough information that we could actually solve the murder ourselves. Yet, the story moves on so quickly we never have the chance.
The trick in directing a “comedy thriller” is to set a tone that lies exactly halfway between the two genres. Marcia Kash, an expert at directing farces such as One for the Pot for Drayton Entertainment in 2017 or See How They Run for Theatre Aquarius in 2012, accomplishes this task perfectly. As in a farce, what is where when and who knows what when are of the upmost theatrical importance, but here Kash makes this feel both like a mystery and like part of a game. She subtly signals the importance of all the passing inconsistencies so that watching the play sets us racing to put together a giant puzzle before those on stage solve it for us.
Kash has chosen an excellent cast. Five of the eleven actors (Bannerman, Bekenn, Hughes, Millard and Shara) are veterans of the Shaw Festival so that the play has the elegant feel of the mystery plays the Shaw used to stage regularly until 2002. In fact, it’s no exaggeration to say that if you wish to recapture the assured mood that the Shaw Festival used to have, you will find it more prominent in Spider’s Web than in any shows now playing in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Patrick Clark’s stylish, detailed set and costumes will also remind audiences of a time when the Shaw was less reliant on projections for impressive effects.
Mairi Babb is an ideal choice for Clarissa. She brings out both the character’s pertness and inclination to fantasy, but can modulate her manner believably into the more serious emotions of anger, fear and care. Peter Millard makes what could be the stale role of Inspector Lord so multilayered that you wish he had his own television series. Millard make Lord behave so politely and precisely that the depth of his cynicism is hidden until he slowly informs the person he has interrogated that he hasn’t believed a single word they have spoken. In large part the play is structured as a battle of wits between Clarissa and Lord, with each determined to assert what the most likely course of events really was when neither of them are in full possession of the facts.
Besides Inspector Lord the play features four middle-aged to elderly male characters, but Kash insures that the actors keep them all quite distinct. Guy Bannerman plays the butler Elgin as a man a bit rough around the edges suggesting a less than savoury past. Robin Ward easily makes Delahaye the calmest and most elegant of the four. Anthony Bekenn distinguishes Birch from Delahaye as more a follower than a leader and less of an independent thinker. Hughes gives a sympathetic portrait of Clarissa’s husband Henry even though Henry is not as formal as Delahaye and is so engrossed in his job that he seems to neglect his wife. Russell Roberts is a genial presence as the comically taciturn Constable Jones.
Among the younger actors, Jeremy Legat instantly makes an appropriately negative impression as the slimy Oliver Costello. In contrast, Mike Shara is robust and likeable as Jeremy Warrender though we do have to wonder about the propriety of his flirting with Clarissa in her husband’s absence. Caroline Toal makes a believable pre-teen who is both overly trusting and overly fearful.
Of all the cast, however, it is Valerie Boyle as the resident gardener Miss Peake, who repeated steals the show. Boyle plays Peake as delightfully batty and shamelessly inquisitive. The ending of Act 1 when her preoccupation with solving the murder inadvertently ruins the careful fiction Clarissa has established is hilarious and nervous-making at once – exactly as a comedy thriller should be.
The fact that Spider’s Web is so highly theatrical and so fully plays with the truth-versus-fiction paradox is probably the reason is has been so seldom adapted to other media. The home for this consciously stagey murder mystery is on the stage. Lovers of murder mysteries should therefore take advantage of Theatre Aquarius’s imaginative programming of this Christie rarity and see the Queen of Crime in a lighter and unusually self-satirical mood.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Mike Ahara, Robin Ward, Mairi Babb and Valerie Boyle; Robin Ward, Caroline Toal, Mairi Babb and Mike Shara; Peter Millard, Robin Ward, Mairi Babb, Anthony Bekenn and Russell Roberts. ©2018 Banko Media.
For tickets, visit https://theatreaquarius.org
2018-09-25
Spider's Web