@ King’s Theatre, Edinburgh, until Sat 6 Feb 2016
The death in Agatha Christie’s A Murder is Announced, is, as the title suggests, punctual, and utterly mystifying. From the way the impending murder of an unknown person is so casually advertised via a classified ad hidden in the back of an average local rag, to the moment a body hits the ground in an otherwise average drawing room, on an otherwise average Friday evening, the mystery only deepens.
There’s more than the hint of the impossible throughout Michael Lunney’s production; after all, who would be stupid enough to advertise a murder in a paper? But, in Christie’s quietly paranoid post-war England (the book was written in 1950, and Leslie Darbon’s stage adaptation wisely keeps it in the same decade) nothing, or more importantly, no one is as they seem.
This is perhaps the perfect place for Miss Marple (Judy Cornwell) to totter in and do what she does best: observe the chaos around her and periodically bother the weary Inspector Craddock (Tom Butcher). But, as always, the murder is only the start of the real story, and what lies behind the mysterious advertisement, and the killer’s motive soon crumble as a once welcoming house becomes the scene of intrigue, deception and a very dark secret.
While the show’s premise of murder by appointment (the advert states that it will take place at 6:30pm) is strong and the decision to set the entire play in one room makes it all the more claustrophobic, A Murder is Announced never quite hits the heights that it should. Designed to play to the laughs in the script, with characters like the troublesome maid, Mitzi (Lydia Piechowiak) providing regular moments of comic relief, the dependence on laughs often wears thin.
While the play’s reliance on comedy is something of a distraction, there are a number of rich and wonderful themes that add depth to this otherwise exciting tale of murder, greed and loss. And it raises a number of questions, about survival and identity that set it apart from lesser whodunnits.