Preview: And Then There Were None, Gielgud Theatre, London
Whodunit with a dark heart
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Your support makes all the difference.Set in 1938, Christie's thriller follows a group of 10 strangers at a hotel on an isolated island, who are whittled down one by one in a series of murders. As always with Christie, one should expect the unexpected. The first surprise is that this is a detective story without a detective.
For Pimlott, this omission makes the play all the more thrilling: "It's a sort of Huis Clos [the Jean-Paul Sartre play that contains the famous line, "Hell is other people"], they're all locked together with their demons, which they are forced to confront. It's very witty and sharp, very unsentimental, but because there's no Poirot, no Miss Marple, there's no comfort zone. There's no feeling of security, of 'We'll be all right. At the end, we'll be summoned to the library and told what's happened'."
Pimlott describes the play as "a morality tale... a little meditation on the nature of justice and human wickedness". It is this universality which allows the period piece to be resurrected for a 21st-century audience. "It's from a 2005 perspective. We're not trying to create some museum piece, but it's crucial that it is set in this period," says Pimlott. Christie wrote her own stage version in 1942; Kevin Elyot's new adaptation is "very faithful to the original" while using modern techniques.
Pimlott hopes to change perceptions of Christie herself: "There is nothing nostalgic about her. She always wrote about the England of her time. We tend to sugar-coat her with a kind of nostalgia which isn't there in the books - they're much more trenchant, satirical and sharp-eyed than we give her credit for."
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