"And Then There Were None". Wycombe Swan Theatre

What do you get if you mix An Inspector Calls with Agatha Christie? The answer is And Then There Were None, a play in which an apparently respectable bunch of British society stalwarts are forced to confront their own wrongdoings by a mysterious agent of vengeance. As in Priestley’s play, they aren’t guilty under the law of the land: it’s moral justice that gets them in the end.

This being Christie, the social justice element is of minimal importance. What really matters to Dame Agatha is the web of mystery, motive and misdirection that dictates the action. In her hands, plot is so all-consuming that it billows up like expanding foam, leaving her characters mere ciphers whose personalities exist purely to explain their roles in the unfolding puzzle.

It shouldn’t work. But it does. Every time.

Like a sharpened knife, Christie does one thing. But she does it so well that her stories have captured our imaginations for almost a century now. And Then There Were None is her best-selling book. It’s sold over a hundred million copies. If you exclude biblical texts and Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book, that places it fourth in the all-time popularity list, just behind Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Le Petit Prince, and A Tale of Two Cities.

The action is located in the very place where Christie wrote the book itself: Burgh Island, a mile off the Devon Coast. Cut off by raging seas, and without access to telephones, the ten ‘soldier boys’ invited for the weekend by a mysterious Mr Owen gradually get whittled down in number, while the audience desperately tries to guess whodunnit. It is the ultimate English Country House Murder Mystery. The suspense was heightened during my own visit by the fact that all the people in my party of four turned out to have visited Burgh Island themselves at different times over the last thirty years. We almost felt like the invitees on stage. But we survived.

Lucy Bailey’s production is dotted with original and atmospheric ideas. There’s an opening, echo-laden, audio-only section of the characters reading out their invitations, which sets a suitably mysterious tone. There are haunting sequences where the ghosts of the past stand accusingly behind their ‘murderers’. There is a wild moment when all the survivors break into cathartic dance. There is an intriguing nod to same-sex relationships which would have been beyond the pale when this play first launched. Mike Britton’s set and Chris Davey’s lighting work together gorgeously to create a backdrop of sunsets, stormy skies and sunny afternoons.

But in order to draw the audience fully into the action this play needs to make it crystal clear who everyone is and what skeletons lie in their cupboards. And during the opening act we were playing catch-up: half watching the play unfold, and half thinking, Hang on, is he the one who abandoned his troops? Or is she the one who threw her servant out on the street? Ten is a lot of people to get to know in just a few minutes. Front-loading all that information is a challenge for any production. In the novel, of course, you can flick back a few pages and check the details. But Christie declined to come up with a dramatic solution when writing her script. There may be no way round this problem, but as a result the production only really gets moving once a few cadavers are festooning the house, and the number of the living becomes manageable for us observers.

The cast members bring naturalness and believability to their roles. Given the outdated attitudes on display (such as the lives of ‘natives’ being less valuable than those of Englishmen) a degree of theatrical exaggeration might have brought them into sharper focus. Oliver Clayton crisply captures a touch of this as the unbearably posh Anthony Marston. And understudying for the injured Sophie Walter, Nicola May-Taylor as Vera Claythorne builds gradually to a truly tragic denouement. But the pick of the performers has to be Lucy Tregear, who imbues the role of Rogers the Butler with a sniffy superiority that is simultaneously hilarious and thoroughly convincing. Tregear brings a welcome comic dimension to a production that would benefit from more of the same. 

Despite these misgivings, the climax still succeeds in being shocking, violent and bleak. There’s no Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple here to twirl a moustache or sip a cup of tea in satisfaction at another case solved. The audience leaves, elated at Christie’s elegant trickery, but shocked at the outcome. Perhaps that’s what makes And Then There Were None so enduringly powerful: there’s no happy ending on offer. There’s just death. Enjoy.