Kings Theatre,
Edinburgh
3 stars
There can't be many
Agatha Christie pot-boilers that feature pre-show music by the
Beatles. Yet this late period whodunnit revived here by director Joe
Harmston's Official Agatha Christie Company is as groovy as when
Hammer revived Dracula in swinging London. Blessed with a holy
trinity of female leads, it's hard not to warm to such unabashed
hokum.
First performed in 1960
but re-set here to1968, Christie's adaptation of her novel, Five
Little Pigs, follows the tenacious travails of Carla Le Marchant, the
twenty-something daughter of Caroline Crale. Caroline died in prison
after being convicted twenty years before of the murder of her artist
and serial adulterer husband, Amyas. Carla breezes from lawyer's
office to drawing room and fancy restaurant looking for clues,
quizzing her father's mistress, the family maid, her mother's sister
and two very different brothers both in love with her mother. Once
gathered in the family pile, all involved role-play the past to
unravel a more ambiguous past.
This makes it necessary
for the cast to play their younger selves, while Sophie Ward carries
things as both mother and daughter. Where as Carla she sports a Judy
Geeson bob and a Mondrian-patterned mini-dress, as Caroline she's a
more demure post-war English rose. As Amyas' one-time muse, Elsa,
Lysette Anthony is a drop-dead little madam on the make, while Liza
Goddard's Miss Williams remains impeccably ageless.
With each scene
punctuated by what sounds like a jazzy mash-up of Roy Orbison's
Pretty Woman and Dave Brubeck's Unsquare Dance, this is as hip as
Christie gets. While hardly barricade-storming, Carla's final
lead-taking embrace with her lawyer sidekick nevertheless points to a
bright feminist future.
The Herald, February 14th 2013
ends
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