Only love traitors and murders in the building? Visit The Mousetrap, says the bold new director of West End perennial | stage

Audiences left thirsting for more suspense after the Celebrity Traitors finale should visit the final murder mystery, The Mousetrap, the director of the new film has suggested.

Ola Ince has taken charge of Agatha Christie’s Invincible, the world’s longest-running play, which has entered its 73rd year in London’s West End. The director, who is known for her powerful approach to Shakespeare, said Christie’s drama, about a group of strangers dropped into a remote guesthouse with a killer on the loose, is “more exciting” than she ever imagined.

“In life, we all imagine ourselves as detectives,” Ince said. “It creates characters that are so nuanced and strange that you want to get to know them and discover the whodunit. They’re full of intrigue and mischief, and also funny and exciting. Shows like The Traitors and Only Murders in the Building are very popular right now. This is the original for people who want to see the real deal.”

Ince, 36, said that when she directs a classic play like “Othello,” “Romeo and Juliet” or Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” all of which she submitted for Shakespeare’s Globe, “what I struggle with is tradition and what you inherit from the show. This feels similar — this show is older than me and the audience really feels like they know exactly what it is. I’m coming in and I don’t take it for granted. Before I worked on the show, I thought I knew exactly what kind of evening it was.” It was.

I discovered, instead, that Christie was a brilliant and perhaps overlooked commentator on the class structure of the postwar period. “With John Osbourne, everyone talked about how radical it was to have working-class people on stage doing ordinary things like ironing [in Look Back in Anger, which premiered in London a few years after The Mousetrap]. But at the top of the first scene of Act II, I got… [proprietor of the guesthouse] Molly Ralston is hovering. That was pretty radical too! It is easy to forget that they comment on the changes that occur hierarchically. The upper classes are declining and there is a need for justice… The play says a lot about injustice and the change that needs to happen.”

When The Mousetrap opened in 1952, the West End cast included Richard Attenborough as the detective alongside the actor’s wife, Sheila Sim, as Molly. The first director was Peter Coates. Later directors included David Turner who worked on the show in various capacities for 30 years. Ince took over from Philip Franks. The Mousetrap also has a supervising art director, Denise Selvey, who played Miss Caswell in 1994 and 2001.

A new cast begins performances under Ince’s direction Monday night. Among the changes Ince made to “enhance what was already there” was sound design by Max Perement to “enhance the psychology and suspense of the play”. Accordingly, the production has new speakers, the furniture has been rearranged and Ince has returned to Christie’s original manuscript and author’s notes. The director of the new film said that striking a balance between comics and seriousness is one of the main challenges.

The Mousetrap was overwhelmingly directed by men although Phyllida Lloyd organized a 60th anniversary gala. “She’s my stage mom,” Ince said with a laugh. Ince was the International Associate Director of the Tina Turner musical which Lloyd directed in the West End. “We had some nice conversations about the mousetrap.”

The show has recorded more than 30,000 performances since its premiere, and its run was only temporarily halted due to the Corona virus. Like many of Christie’s novels, in which offensive language about gender and race has been removed for sensitive readers, the text has been revised over the years. “I’ve come up with a version of the play that omits some of the more offensive language, some of the old-fashioned sexism,” Ince said. “But at the same time I’m wary of erasing too much because it was true at the time.” “I don’t want to offend the audience, but if you make everyone a bit clean, you avoid someone being a bitch and that’s interesting – or that could be a red herring. You have to be careful not to make it all a bit bland.”

Since 2017, Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution has been shown in the courtroom inside County Hall in London. But people still classify Christie primarily as a novelist, Ince said. “I would love for people to celebrate her more as a playwright.” At times, during The Mousetrap’s extraordinary run, it was the only play written by a female playwright in the West End. She’s still in the minority now even though Kate Trefry has had huge success with Stranger Things: The First Shadow and Suzie Miller’s Inter Alia coming soon. “I think there are peaks and troughs when it feels like the world is a little spicier because there is more diversity,” Ince said. “Then it kind of dissipates because they only did it for a season. It’s amazing that Agatha has been so strong for so long but it’s sad that we still haven’t really achieved anything.” [greater equality] Now – or do it in a shuffle and a pat.

Mousetrap producer Brian Fenty said he was “thrilled” to have Ince direct the show, which has been running at St Martin’s Theater since 1974 (it was previously shown at the adjacent Ambassadors Theatre). “Ola is a force of nature – a director who understands what it means to be an agent of history and a challenger of complacency. Her creative instinct is first-rate, and her interest and love of Agatha Christie’s world is as encouraging as it is inspiring.”