The Unexpected Guest

Published Wednesday 7 February 2007 at 17:30 by John Thaxter

Joe Harmston first staged this audacious whodunnit for the Agatha Christie festival six years ago, and it follows his acclaimed touring revival of The Hollow, about sudden death interrupting a jolly weekend house party.

No happy gathering this time - the action begins on a foggy night in a gloomy house, a setting barely suggested by Simon Scullion’s arc of blinds cutting off our view of the outside world. And it gets straight down to serious business as Starkwedder, the unexpected guest of the title, enters through the French windows to discover the corpse of Richard Warwick slumped in a wheelchair with the dead man’s wife Laura pointing a pistol at him.

A tall, attractive figure in Tracey Childs’ elegant performance, Laura confesses to shooting her husband. But Simon MacCorkindale as the brusque Starkwedder, touched by her plight, formulates a plan to save her neck with a cleverly contrived red herring to mislead the police.

But this being Christie, the cops, Frazer Hines and Gary Richards, are soon faced with a houseful of suspects, each prepared to confess to the crime, from Virginia Stride’s matriarch in funereal grey to Dean Gaffney’s dotty youth, not to mention Mark Wynter’s nervy Liberal politician, plus Eugene Washington’s blackmailing valet.

By the start of the second act Christie aficionados will have garnered enough information to suss out the denouement, if not the neat way it unravels. But having seen the 1958 premiere production, I regret that the essential French windows are now hidden offstage, while PC Plod is a plainclothes detective instead of a uniformed strong arm of the law.