This week the West End takes entirely new looks at vintage work from the first half of the last century.
With both an old Agatha Christie novel and a 1930 play by Luigi Pirandello (unseen in the West End since 1934) being given contemporary make-overs, will these productions mark a return to theatrical favour and an expanding of the repertoires for which both are known?
Christie, of course, already has a substantial dramatic repertoire, most famously represented in the world’s longest-ever theatrical run of The Mousetrap that opened at the West End’s Ambassadors Theatre on November 25, 1952 and has been running ever since, though it transferred to the St Martin’s Theatre, literally next door, in 1974.
But this week sees the launch of a major new way of looking at her work through contemporary eyes and sensibilities, when playwright Kevin Elyot (who has previously adapted Christie’s Marple and Poirot books including Death on the Nile, A Body in the Library and Five Little Pigs for television) sees his new version of And Then There Were None open at the West End’s Gielgud Theatre tomorrow.
In the words of Mathew Prichard, Christie’s grandson and chairman of her estate says, “If Agatha Christie is to be as popular in the 21st-century as she was in the 20th, we have to be open-minded about interpreting stories in modern ways, much as Shakespeare is reinvented for successive generations.”
Elyot has duly turned not to Christie’s own stage version (last seen at the Duke of York’s in October 1987) but gone back to her original novel for his adaptation.
Meanwhile, for Pirandello’s Come tu mi vuoi (As You Desire Me), opening at the Playhouse on Thursday, Hugh Whitemore has provided the new translation for a production that stars Kristin Scott Thomas, Bob Hoskins and Margaret Tyzack.
