REVIEW: Hammy Christie doesn't quite do Queen of Crime justice

The biggest violence in recent Agatha Christie adaptations has been the violence done to the Queen of Crime herself, particularly on TV.

Thank goodness this latest stage adaptation of And Then There Were None plays it all far straighter and takes far fewer liberties. Whether it quite captures the nerve-shredding original, though, is probably another matter.

Lucy Bailey, director of the superb Witness for the Prosecution, now in its sixth year in London, goes for something rather more stylised in set design here. In London, of course, she’s given a gift of a set for Christie’s great court-room drama to play out in. There’s really nothing more she needs do.

But here the table, the gauze, the minimal stylised set doesn’t conjure an awful lot of the lonely mansion on the isolated island we’re supposed to be in. Things aren’t then helped by a style of acting which is far too stagey and hammy – as if staginess and hammy-ness somehow capture the flavour and the period. They really don’t.

They are plenty of nice moments, but the overall approach prevents the characters from being truly believable which is, of course, precisely what chills in the Agatha Christie original. And then we get the shock of the ending – played suddenly with full-on graphic horror and certainly overstepping the mark. A young member of the audience near me was visibly upset.

The cast is Bob Barrett (Holby City, Propeller West End and UK Tour), Joseph Beattie (Hex and Silent Witness), Oliver Clayton (National Youth Theatre and The Play That Goes Wrong), Jeffery Kissoon (National Theatre and Complicite, Allelujah!), Andrew Lancel (National tours, West End and Coronation Street), Nicola May-Taylor (Rutherford And Son), Louise McNulty (Emmerdale), Katy Stephens (RSC, Globe and London’s Burning), Lucy Tregear (The Country Wife), Sophie Walter (The Girl On The Train), Matt Weyland (Witness For The Prosecution) and David Yelland (Poirot, Foyle’s War and The Crown) as Judge Wargrave.