The Mousetrap: Secrets of the world’s longest-running play revealed

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Denise Silver, production manager of The Mousetrap

A man is buying a ticket for a tour of London’s historic institutions.

“It includes the Houses of Parliament, the Law Courts, the British Museum and The Mousetrap,” says the booking clerk.

So runs the punch line on a cartoon from over 40 years ago extolling even then the enduring place of this theatrical phenomenon in British culture.

By the time the curtain comes down on its two shows today, Agatha Christie’s murder mystery will have chalked up 27,120 performances and reached its 65th birthday.

Not bad for a play which Christie thought might run for eight months while its relatively optimistic original producer, Sir Peter Saunders, gave it 14.

The Mousetrap had its birth pangs. Three leading directors turned it down, and a fourth later withdrew. Reviews following the West End fi rst night on November 25, 1952, were mixed.

The Ambassadors Theatre was small, with a maximum capacity of 444, meaning that the show had to attract near enough full houses to be fi nancially viable. On its side were two star castings.

Film actress Sheila Sim was playing guest house owner Mollie with her husband Richard Attenborough – then less of a name than his wife – as the policeman.

Denise Silvey, who has been production supervisor on the whodunit for nine years as well as appearing in it in two separate casts, explains: “They signed ‘run of play’ contracts but they’d have been playing it forever if they’d been kept to that. They were on a 10 per cent profi t participation. Years later, those shares were sold and helped pay for the fi lm Gandhi.”

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A production of the play in 1994

Sir Stephen Waley-Cohen, who took over from Peter Saunders as producer in 1994, says: “In the early months of the show, there were such long queues for returns that an entrepreneur made a living renting them chairs.”

Sim left the show in July 1953 and Attenborough in August 1954. “After that, good jobbing actors were cast, not names,” says Silvey.

They weren’t needed: The Mousetrap was the name that pulled in audiences and continues to do so to this day, making it the longest running theatrical production in the world.

When it moved to the larger 550-seater St Martin’s Theatre next door in 1974, there was no break in performances so it kept its record. Ray Cooney, in 1965, Stephanie Cole, in 1968 and current EastEnders actor Eddie Eyre in 2016, went on to fi nd fame after appearing in The Mousetrap.

Silvey played the role of the “mannish” young woman, Miss Casewell in 1994 and again in 2001. “I was apprehensive but excited at joining a piece of history,” she says.

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Silvey at St Martin’s Theatre

“It was like stepping back in time. When I fi rst did it, the sound was run on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Seven years later a CD player was used and we went digital fi ve years ago. The voiceover from the radio is the original recording by Deryck Guyler from 1952.

“We’ve now taken the script back to the 1952 version. At one point, the play was done in ‘Christie time’, a random any time. We took out references to post-war rationing and replaced wireless licence with television licence to update it. Now the 1950s is seen as quite sexy.”

The clock on the mantelpiece is the sole survivor of the original props although a leather armchair was only pensioned off in 2004.

The set was changed in 1966 and then in 1999 – “when it was given a 30-year guarantee,” says Silvey, a clear pointer to expectations of continued longevity.

Unfortunately the “made in China” set, built for a 2010 staging in Shanghai by the West End company, was less robust.

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Agatha Christie with her grandson in 1955

Silvey was in the cast. “I was being interrogated by the policeman when I noticed a handle on the fi replace,” she recalls. “An actor had put it there when it fell off the door so the next actor trying to enter couldn’t get on stage. In the same performance the policeman climbed out of the window and the entire thing dropped off.

“We visited the drama school equivalent of Rada where they had busts of eminent writers. ‘What we really want is a bust of Agatha Christie,’ they said. ‘We don’t want Shakespeare’.

“The next year I went back to oversee a Chinese-language version. It was surreal, a version of a 1950s England which had never existed. There was a dance in it and they changed the ending.”

Sir Stephen recalls frostiness backstage in London. “We once had a Mollie and Giles [the leading characters], who grew to loathe each other. They wouldn’t talk off stage and couldn’t bring themselves to kiss in the opening scene. Somehow, they performed the dialogue beautifully.”

Silvey remembers being stranded alone on stage: “The other actor suddenly walked off. I was left plumping up cushions. Minutes felt like years until the actor returned. Apparently they were trying to ‘freshen things up’. Another time, the end of a gun which is brandished at one point, dropped off at my feet.

“Back then we were given mementoes – a tie with a mousetrap picture on for the men and a medallion for the women. But we still have a dinner every 10 years for surviving cast members at the Savoy. The doorman wouldn’t let Agatha in when she once arrived without her invitation.

“The 50th anniversary was huge. From my dressing room I could hear the screams from fans as the Attenboroughs arrived. At the end Richard came up and made the famous curtain speech asking the audience not to reveal the murderer.”

The cast may have been super nervous that night, says Sir Stephen. “The Queen and Prince Philip were there and the rest of the audience was made up of actors who’d been in the show.”

Other visitors over the years have ranged from Winston Churchill to Quentin Tarantino, who showed up just a few years ago. “He was delightful,” says Denise. “But we’re all certain that’s where he got the idea for his 2015 fi lm The Hateful Eight.”

In The Mousetrap, eight people, gather at a guest house in a blizzard – a “snow room” backstage blows snowfl akes over their coats – and are stalked by a murderer.

Tarantino’s movie has an octet arrive by stage coach in a snowstorm and murder ensues. One regular at the show is Mathew Prichard, now 74, who heads up the Christie estate. He is Agatha Christie’s grandson.

She gave him the rights to The Mousetrap for his ninth birthday. “I wasn’t ungrateful but what young boy wouldn’t be far more interested in his new bicycle?” he says.

“I really only became aware of the gift when I was 18. In my last summer at Eton, I was playing cricket for the school at Lord’s and afterwards the entire team along with my parents and grandparents went to The Mousetrap and on to The Ivy.

“When I was 21 I began collecting modern art, using my resources from The Mousetrap. Some years after my grandmother died I set up Colwinston Charitable Trust to channel some of the money into music and the visual arts in Wales, where I was brought up. I think my grandmother would be proud.”

He believes the success of The Mousetrap is simple: “It’s quite short, you can take the whole family and have a great evening.”