Theatre
Murder is Easy (Duke of York's)
An Inspector returns
Sheridan Morley
The Inspector looked up wearily from his desk in the West End station just off Shaftesbury Avenue; 'of course she's not dead,' he said, scanning the first-night list, 'dead cunning, more like. She lies low for a decade or so, nothing going on except the occasional centenary party for The Mousetrap and a Murder at the Vicarage somewhere like Watford or Windsor in a really bad week, full of old stars from Howard's Way or Howard's End, and then, just when you're least expecting it, there the old bat is, back at the Duke of York's.'
He turned up the collar of his trench- coat and began to walk slowly, reluctantly down towards St Martin's Lane. It had been a bad winter: Trelawny of the Wells everywhere you looked, snow on the way, and he would be 60 in another nine years. Teeth weren't feeling too good either, and he'd broken a bone in his foot for New Year's Eve. Almost 30 years on the review- ing game, he could remember Margaret Lockwood in Spider's Web and now here they were with another Agatha Christie stage premiere, Murder is Easy. The bloody woman had come back to get him, just as he knew she always would, ever since he had given away the name of the killer in The Mousetrap in the vain hope that its the- atre might in his lifetime get to be occupied by real actors and a real play once more.
Nothing else had changed much since 1950 either, reflected the Inspector as his eye wandered down the theatre listings: Deep Blue Sea at the Apollo, Importance of Being Earnest at the Aldwych, Ideal Hus- band at the Globe, Cyrano de Bergerac at the Haymarket, a George Gershwin at the Prince Edward and a Graham Greene at Wyndham's; say what you like about the Society of West End Managers, he thought, at least they don't start throwing new plays at you any too often.
Not like the fringe, he reflected; turn out there on a dark night in March and any- thing could happen. At least you know there can't be any unexpected twists in an Agatha, not when the curtain goes up and the funeral is already half over and there's Nigel Davenport setting out on a perfor- mance as Lord Whitfield which suggests that he's read the rest of the script 'once too often already. Then there are a couple of biddies who look like they graduated from the Athene Seyler Academy for Act- ing with the Chin circa 1923, plus a comic vicar, and a cast who were having on the first night understandable difficulty in recalling each other's names.
'All the same, there's something unnatu- ral about Ellsworthy.' It's the way he acts, I think, but then if you had to get involved with lines like 'How is she doctor?' Dead I think', then you'd go barking mad on stage by the interval too, noted the Inspector; at least he only had to sit there in the half- light of the stalls trying to work out who was who from the programme: could Peter Capaldi be Luke Fitzwilliam, or could Luke Fitzwilliam be Peter Capaldi, and if any of them are who they say they are, did they murder Lydia Horton and if so does it mat- ter, given the way she was acting in act one?
'You haven't a scintilla of proof: no, but there is just a chance of making it home for News at Ten, and when was the last time anyone used the word scintilla except in a Telegraph crossword? Mind you, that's where most of the rest of the dialogue seems to have been assembled, along with the plot. By intermission we had a couple of bodies to consider, but one was only the chauffeur so probably didn't count. There was also the possibility of a canary being strangled in childhood, not the childhood of the canary, you understand, but that of the putative yellow bird-throttler. Proust would have had a whole after-dinner bis- cuit out of that one, but all old Agatha ever manages is a vague disease for the mental state of people who go round throttling feathered creatures in the Home Counties.
Talking of Proustian memory-associa- tions, there is Charlotte Attenborough pot- tering around the clues and the corpses, a sharp reminder of her father's original appearance as the copper in The Mousetrap, a portrayal he later chose to abandon in favour of film-directing. All they need now is David to examine the tribal origins of people who strangle canaries and the whole family can take over the Christie Society for Mindless Necrophilia.
The Inspector turned up his coat collar again and went out into St Martin's Lane: it was snowing, and as he crossed Piccadilly Circus he could hear them starting on the finale of Robin of Sherwood. He shuddered, and went down into the underground.
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