She keeps Christie’s script clear and punchy, including a fun undercurrent about the British establishment’s smug complacency. She constructs her plot like Vole’s barrister, Sir Wilfrid Robarts QC (a charismatic David Yelland), builds his case, before knocking over apparent ‘revelations’ like dominoes.īailey plays up the melodrama beautifully, in some scenes lighting the judge’s bench like something from a horror film, while punctuating mic-drop testimony with a thundering score. Few are as good as Christie at leading us down the garden path, expectations-wise. If the courtroom is a stage, this play is all about performance. Some audience members are even addressed as the jury. Big, austere and grand, it’s the perfect setting for the legal theatrics of Christie’s forensically precise plotting. Here, Lucy Bailey’s production has the gift of being in the main chamber of London County Hall. When Christie adapted her original story, she shifted the focus almost exclusively to the Old Bailey courtroom. ![]() He insists he’s innocent, but it all rests on the testimony of his wife, Romaine. ![]() Leonard Vole (a butter-wouldn’t-melt Jack McMullen) is on trial for murdering an older woman who has left everything to him in her will. Like most of Christie’s work, you can’t say much for fear of ruining the ending. In her lifetime, crime writer extraordinaire Agatha Christie wrote 16 plays and a massive 73 novels.Īpart from the immortal ‘Mousetrap’, ‘Witness for the Prosecution’ – which Christie adapted in 1953 from an earlier short story – is one of the most famous. It wasn’t all about Poirot’s little grey cells or Miss Marple solving murders at the vicarage.
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