Friends please accept this, the only intimation. On Friday, October 29 th, in the “Personal” column, among the Articles for Sale or Wanted and the frenzied appeals for domestic help, was the following singular announcement: A murder has been announced and will take place on Friday, October 29, at Little Paddocks, at 6:30.
It is this fertile imagination which has won her unstinted and consistent praise throughout her career.Įvery Friday morning to practically every house in the village of Chipping Cleghorn a copy of the North Benham News and Chipping Cleghorn Gazette was delivered by Johnnie Butt from Mr. For the fiftieth time she leaves us breathless with admiration for her incomparable adroitness and ingenuity. And it raises a number of questions, about survival and identity that set it apart from lesser whodunnits.With this outstanding detective story, Agatha Christie celebrates her jubilee as a writer. 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. 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 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. 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. 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). 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.
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. The death in Agatha Christie’s A Murder is Announced, is, as the title suggests, punctual, and utterly mystifying.
0 kommentar(er)
