by The curtain falls on every performance The mousetrapthe longest-running play in the world, applauding audience members are asked not to reveal the secret solution to the murder mystery.
However, this autumn a new element of intrigue has been added to the plot of Agatha Christie’s enduring hit, which premiered at the Theater Royal in Nottingham in 1952.
The new twist came back in 1997 when an eager 11-year-old student decided to stage his own production in the auditorium of his school in Windsor. And only now does the final act take place.
“Suddenly I started reading Agatha Christie and I was already obsessed with the theater so I bought a collection of her plays and copied pages of the script,” said Alasdair Buchan, now 37. “I really wanted to do it, but I don’t think so “My teachers in the small choir school, which is attached to the castle’s St. George’s Chapel, were particularly enthusiastic.”
The show went on anyway, for one night only, with a cast of 11-year-old boys including Buchan, who also directed.
Buchan and the cast also traveled to the capital to watch the real professional production a few days before their own performance. After the London show they met the stars at the stage door. Each boy received an autograph and promised to send him the program he created.
History does not record how the Windsor school play ended, but a few weeks later the headmaster received an unexpected and stern “cease and desist” letter from the London producers’ lawyers. There was a threat of future action over the students’ recent production.
“I was called to the principal and I was terribly worried,” Buchan said.
“My school managed to smooth things over at the time and luckily I wasn’t blacklisted by the producers.”
In fact, Buchan will now join the West End cast of The mousetrap at St. Martin’s Theater in the role of Mr. Paravicini, the mysterious foreign stranger.
Buchan will perform nine shows a week for six months. “Funnily enough, I remembered the lines I read once when I was reading through the script before the audition. Since I had also directed it, whole passages of dialogue came back and I was amazed at how much of the structure I still knew.”
In Buchan’s school production, the eight boys played all the characters. “It was a mixed school, but we boarders were boys. So my brother played the role of Miss Casewell.”
The schoolboys had been accompanied to the West End show by Buchan’s mother. “My own experience with stage doors is that there is usually no one there unless you have a certain celebrity in the cast. For example, it was manic when I was in it Richard II with Martin Freeman, but mostly it’s pretty dead.
“So I can imagine the actors in 1997 were quite surprised to find eight teenage boys holding out our messy A4 scripts for them to sign.”
Some Jobsworth employees clearly saw our scheme and went out with a legal letter demanding royalties and asking how much money we had made
Alasdair Buchan
Buchan later sent in the colorful program he had put together for his show. “Some Jobsworth employees then saw it clearly and sent out a serious legal letter demanding royalties and asking how much money we had made.”
By Christie’s death in 1976 The mousetrap had earned more than £3 million. However, she had previously given the copyright to her nine-year-old grandson Mathew Prichard for his birthday. He later founded the Colwinston Charitable Trust in 1995 to use royalties to support arts charities, particularly in Wales. The show is now managed by Mousetrap Productions.
Buchan, co-founder of the online theater initiative ReadThrough during the 2021 pandemic lockdown, remembers often being bored at school because he believed he was not as musical as other students. Rises for him The mousetrap was an escape. “When I think back on it, I am amazed at the tremendous work we all did on it,” he said.
“And it was a success as far as we managed from start to finish. There [were] Certainly guys who didn’t know their lines and in the end we lost track a little.
“I remember standing in the wings trying to improve the acting by yelling at my brother, ‘Cry!’ Cry!’ Otherwise I was a pretty nice brother.”
