Resident Ensemble Players presents Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None

As this famous play opens, 10 strangers arrive one by one on Soldier Island via boat, each lured there by a letter ostensibly from a friend or former colleague. As the baffled guests disembark, Rogers, the ubiquitous British butler (M.A. Taylor), and his wife (Elizabeth Heflin) announce that the hosts, Mr. and Mrs. Owen, have been delayed and will arrive tomorrow. The Owens are unknown to any of the guests, who soon begin to compare their mysterious invitations.

An unseen voice (from a gramophone record in the next room) announces why they are there: each has killed someone, but their crimes were never brought to justice. As the stranded party hopes for rescue, amid a mounting storm and high seas, they slowly realize their plight and devise vain survival plans while suspecting one another. The title tells the outcome, but Christie seeds the play with the twists and red herrings that keep the suspense high and the audience engaged.

A dramaturgical delight

The REP company understands melodrama, and these actors portray Christie’s well-drawn stock characters with dramaturgical delight. As well as the aforementioned butler and maid, there’s a Harley Street doctor (Hassan El-Amin), a callow young man (Michael Gotch), the plodding detective (Lee E. Ernst), a soldier of fortune (Mic Matarrese), the pious spinster (Kathleen Pirkl Tague), a respected judge (Stephen Pelinski), a devious governess (Erin Partin), and an elderly general (Steve Tague). Each of the 10 characters dies in a manner predicted by a macabre poem hanging above the fireplace.

And Then There Were None is Christie’s own 1943 adaptation of her most famous (and differently titled) 1939 novel, the highest-selling crime work of all time. It’s a clockwork piece of intricate craftsmanship in the tradition of the well-made play, a style that focuses heavily on plot and dramatic momentum. But Christie adds her own touch, creating fascinatingly drawn characters, each of whom gets a reveal—a telling monologue that delves more deeply into their actions, motive, and character.

Because of its sinuous locked-room mystery plot, the author described this as her most difficult novel to write and felt it her best piece of literary craftsmanship. The show runs longer than most modern dramas (two-and-a-half hours), and at both of the intermissions (another theatrical throwback), I overheard audience members avidly trying to guess the solution.

Conventions and uncertainties

Set off the English coast (in Devon), the play unfolds in a single locale, a British drawing room. But this is not the moody manor-house atmosphere generally associated with this type of mystery. This is a trendy-for-the-time 1930s building, clearly described in the novel and obvious onstage. It’s a locale lacking the expected nooks or turrets or hidden rooms where a murderer might hide. The “moderne” atmosphere is ably rendered by Rick Martin (from an original design by Russell Metheny), with perfect mid-20th century furniture and a sweeping sky viewed through full-length windows.

That sky gives lighting designer Cat Wilson an ample visual palette, and she fills it with looming clouds and lighting flashes, though a sequence where lights go out is almost too dim to see the actors. Eileen Smitheimer’s sound design (with both music and sounds of the rising storm) has just the right foreboding quality, cleverly citing the aural tropes that cue what’s to come. Each character’s clothing (by Kim Krumm Sorenson) depicts their personality, and these actors inhabit their costumes with panache.

The overall success of this tricky period production is due to director Charles Fee, who perfectly captures both the work’s style and its substance. Though Christie is often regarded as a creator of cozy mysteries, if you look past her clever plotting and characterizations, the author depicts often-grim circumstances and thought-provoking situations. There are increasingly few certainties as this tale unspools, and Fee adeptly balances our satisfaction in recognizing the comfortable conventions of a period melodrama with the moral uncertainties that the author posits.

Is moral justice enough?

After the work’s premiere, Christie adapted her script to give the play a happier, less macabre ending, but most productions (like this one) use the original, grimmer version. In his director’s notes, as in his thoughtful direction, Fee asks us to consider if, “when legal justice fails, is moral justice ever enough?” and urges the audience to “leave your certainties behind.” This production of And Then There Were None can certainly be experienced as an enjoyable and finely crafted evening in the theater, but it also urges us to look deeper after the curtain falls—to ponder the morality of our society and the actions of those who create and inhabit it.

Know before you go: this performance includes themes of murder, manslaughter, and suicide, as well as gunshots, theatrical fog, and strobe lights.