The Mirror Crack'd
There was much to enjoy in Rachel Wagstaff’s adaptation of Agatha Christie’s classic novel. Susie Blake was excellent as Miss Marple, the plot was pleasingly convoluted yet neatly resolved, and there were some genuine laughs along the way. What a shame it had to be viewed through the prism of Philip Frank's pedestrian direction.
Theatre Royal
Agatha Christie liked to have fun with her characters, frequently imposing restrictions on them – perhaps she enjoyed the authorial challenge of doing so. In The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side Miss Marple has strained her ankle and is therefore immobile. The mystery she solves is therefore largely a cerebral one, piecing together the solution to a problem from the fragmentary and unreliable recollections of others. It makes for a diverting read, but presents all sorts of practical problems for someone attempting a dramatization. In fairness, these were challenges that Rachel Wagstaff's adaptation tackled successfully, yet this was nonetheless a somewhat workmanlike walk through of a plot that could have been a fascinating reworking of a classic text.
The fault certainly wasn't the cast. Susie Blake was excellent as Miss Marple, making perfect sense of an elderly woman using guile and sensitivity to winkle the truth from her unsuspecting interviewees. Joe McFadden, despite his prominent billing, had very little to do as the film director Jason Rudd, but carried out his limited duties effectively. Sophie Ward struggled to make an impact with the enigmatic Marina Gregg, the plot demanding that she remain somewhat unknowable. Both Mara Allen and Veronica Roberts demonstrated great comic timing, frequently stealing the scenes they were in. Best of all, however, were the exchanges between Miss Marple and Chief Inspector Craddock, for which Oliver Boot should be singled out. Exploiting Wagstaff's adaptation at its strongest, Blake and Boot had great fun, and all the best lines, poking at the preposterous central premise that Marple's intrusive involvement would be allowed by a police officer. Both author and actors got the tone just right - negotiating the fine line between respecting the source material and pointing out its foibles.
In other respects, there was much to enjoy in Wagstaff's text. Considerable liberties had been taken with the narrative in order to squeeze it on to the stage, but nothing that betrayed the Christie's novel. Tentative injections of social commentary were introduced without overt virtue signalling, and the big reveal (of which we shall not speak) was packaged in a way that had interesting things to say about preconceptions - both those of the characters and the audience. The plot was pleasingly convoluted, yet neatly resolved, and Wagtaff did a decent job of breaking up and enlivening what was an awful lot of telling, rather than showing. What a shame, therefore, that all that hard work was viewed through the prism of Philip Frank's pedestrian direction.
To be fair to Frank's, he had his work cut out. The central dramatic device had Miss Marple and Chief Inspector Craddock talk through the case, with the characters involved act out vignettes of that which was being discussed. It was a clever way to avoid endless exposition, but was tricky to stage coherently. Frank's unimaginative solution was to have them pop up in Marple's front room. Try, as the actors did, to breathe life into these scenes, they struggled and deserved better and cleverer solutions to an admittedly difficult issue. Matters weren't helped by Adrian Linford's dreary design, which amounted to a revolving corridor, offering up a choice between big and small windows, inexplicably framed in distracting theatrical haze. Minimalism is fine for the likes of Chekov or Ibsen, or even Shakespeare, but Christie is about a jolly night out. A show at the Theatre Royal should surely be a proper show, with a set that confounds and delights, notwithstanding the practical problems of doing so. There were moments of stagecraft – a near death experience from the skies being particularly effective – but for the most part this felt like a competent repertory production that had one eye on how quickly the show could be packed up and moved on.
