Showing @ King’s Theatre, Edinburgh until Sat 16 Feb

Agatha Christie’s proliferance as an author is undoubted, her Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple series’ still pulling their weight amongst a litany of contemporary crime novelists. Move away from these characters however and her infamy dwindles. Based on her novel Five Little Pigs, Go Back For Murder directed by Joe Harmston lacks the gentle and wise central character who glues the subplots together.

After discovering that her mother died in prison whilst serving a sentence for her father’s murder, Caroline Crale (Sophie Ward) enlists the help of the impressionable lawyer Justin Fogg (Ben Nealon) to clear her mother’s name. Fogg and Crale turn over the old facts, meet with those who were present at the scene and begin asking suspicious questions about a case everybody thought cold.

As with most of Christie’s work there’s lots of exposition familiarising you with essential background information. However, due to Caroline’s unfamiliarity with the past, the entire first half is a series of poorly disguised and tedious dialogues imparting the specifics of the case onto her (and you), giving the play a condescending feel. This means that rather than being drawn into the mystery of “whodunit” we are playing catch up with the facts while trying to assess each character we meet. The information heavy narrative is made more unbearable by the static nature of the staging; Harmston includes an interesting use of levels but the almost mechanical lines of movement around the stage soon becomes monotonous.

The characters are more like caricatures as they melodramatically yelp, growl and purr through the performance, combining this with the limits of the staging and it’s difficult to attain any meaningful character analysis. But the biggest problem is that the crime has already happened, what’s being presented is just people talking about it. While the process of looking into people’s histories to discover secret motives or hidden revelations may work in literature, Harmston hasn’t made the action engaging enough for it to be successful on the stage.

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