Mousetrap

Michael Kadish
9/2/99

While in Britain, with my friends, I went to go see the play Mousetrap. The longest running play in Britain, at over 30 years, it has run longer than Cats, on Broadway, and The Fantastiks Off-Broadway, making it the longest running show in English speaking theater. It had a great effect on me. It bothered me just how pathetic it was. It was not a matter of simply the overacting, but the storyline, the play itself, bothered me.

I have never liked the idea of shelling out large amounts to see a straight play. If I do, I would expect to get a full impact of emotions. I would pay to see something that I found truly hysterical, say, The Compleat Works of Wilm. Shakespeare Abridged which is what I wanted to see, or something that truly scared me, aroused me, deeply moved me, or impressed me. However, if something is just light entertainment, without musical numbers or the like, I'd rather see a cheaper production, or read the book. In this case, I spent 22.5 pounds to get annoyed.

It was a large impact to realize that entire appeal of the mystery of this story was that a murderer whistled "Three Blind Mice" when he killed. This led to a question of which one of the actors was the murderer/whistler. To be fair, it was not completely obvious who the murderer was. There were five suspects, the husband, the upper class guest, the young guest, the mysterious visitor, or the policeman, and there were appropriate red herrings to make you change your guesses through the duration of the play.

At the end of the play, the actors come out and tell you not to reveal the secret ending. Let me save you twenty-two and a half quid, by telling you that the policeman did it. The policeman wasn't really a policeman, he was really this escaped psychotic killer who was looking for revenge. I didn't hear a single surprised voice during the realization scene.

In the course of the story, collected characters left in a snowed-in hotel, one character, the judge, is killed, and the audience finds out who it was. It was a lame story in my opinion, not Agatha Christie's best, but what bothered me, to this day, was that after the "policeman" confesses, and is apprehended, the "upper-class" guest responds, "Oh yes I knew he wasn't a real policeman...I'm a real policeman." That line is then treated as a joke. The play then hurries up to the ending. The fact that this lady died was ignored.

I couldn't see why this didn't bother people, who treat it as a cute story, without any horrors. There was a policeman in the house who does not seem to care. This Englishman, the typical stout persona, who sucks in his jaw as he speaks, simply said, "Oh, I knew he wasn't a policeman." He just let her die. It was her fault, if they had apprehended this man, claiming to have been a policeman, from the start, the judge would not have been killed.

I have seen movies where people die as a joke. I liked Titus Andronicus. I laughed when Susan died on "Seinfeld." I've watched Pulp Fiction, or other movies that are plain bloodbaths. They didn't disturb me in this way. The fact though, that this character could have saved another, didn't, and nobody noticed, that is what bothered me about the play.