It’s certainly a major coup for an Indian events company to bring over, quite literally, the longest-running play in the world to an Indian stage. After tasting blood with Jeeves and Wooster in Perfect Nonsense and The Million-Dollar Quartet , Blank Slate India have now put together a five-day run of yet another vaunted West End production. Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap will play this week at the NCPA’s Jamshed Bhabha Theatre. True to its illustrious writer’s literary antecedents, it’s a murder mystery set in an old English manor, and has a twist ending which thankfully hasn’t passed into common knowledge (and one should refrain from the temptation to Google it).
Theatrical landmarks
Originally written as a 20-minute radio play for Queen Mary as an 80th birthday gift, the whodunit’s run in the West End is nearly as long as the reign of her granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth II. Since opening in November 1952, it has been staged more than 27,000 times, without a break that could be considered an interruption to the ‘initial run’ — although a venue change did occur in 1974, when it relocated from the Ambassadors Theatre to the St Martin’s Theatre next door, a expeditious move that took just a couple of days. Several of the other long running shows have been musicals — with both The Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables having notched up roughly 13,000 shows apiece at Broadway and the West End respectively. Closer home, where limited runs are the order of the day, Vastraharan ’s 5,000 shows almost pales in comparison unless placed in the context of a touring theatre system. Although many members of early cast notched up innings of several years with the production, The Mousetrap ’s cast changes annually, around the anniversary of the play’s opening each November.
For more number-crunching, here’s a quote from the official website, “During this phenomenal 66-year run there have been no fewer than 474 actors and actresses appearing in the play, 279 understudies, 142 miles of shirts have been ironed and over 500 tons of ice cream sold.” The play opens with the murder of a woman, played out in voiceover. At Monkswell Manor, which young couple Mollie and Giles Ralston run as as a guesthouse, guests, proprietors and strangers jostle for prime suspicion, and even a detective (not Christie regulars Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot) is not above par.
Woman in focus
In 1954, Christie became the first, and only to date, female playwright to have three plays running simultaneously in the West End with The Mousetrap , Witness for the Prosecution and Spider’s Web . However, her enduring success is the exception that proves the rule when it comes to gender parity for female playwrights in the UK. At any given point, The Mousetrap is frequently the only play by a woman running in the West End, and it was written more than 70 years ago. Women continue to be woefully underrepresented in almost all departments of theatre-making — from writers and directors to stage managers and technicians – so while it’s certainly heartening that Christie’s play continues full astern, much more needs to be done to restore the gender imbalance, or indeed all other kinds of skewed representation. This is a question that the theatre world is grappling with in India as well.
Copycats galore
In India, Christie’s renown is restricted to her literary output, and her books have never been out of print. There have been several cinematic adaptations, but her contributions have remained uncredited, as is de rigueur in rip-off land. For instance, Gumnaam is based on And Then There Were None , Dhund on The Unexpected Guest . Rituparno Ghosh’s Shubho Mahurat gave us Rakhee’s award-winning turn as a Bengali housewife standing in for Miss Marple from The Mirror Crack’d . Even The Mousetrap hasn’t been spared, having been made in Bengali as Chupi Chupi Aashey , a 1960 film directed by Premedra Mitra.
The Mousetrap stages from this evening at Jamshed Bhabha Theatre, NCPA, Nariman Point until December 9, for more details and prices check bookmyshow.com
