The Mousetrap is to the West End Theatre what the ravens are to the Tower of London. Its disappearance could impoverish us.
The Financial Times
Agatha Christie’s murder mystery The Mousetrap originated as a thirty-minute radio play entitled Three Blind Mice, the nursery rhyme that is the theme song of a murderer who plans to kill three victims. The drama was commissioned by the BBC at the request of Queen Mary after the corporation enquired what she would like to hear for her eightieth birthday in 1947. Her Royal Highness replied that she would like nothing better than to listen to a play by Agatha Christie, and the delighted author set about creating a classic ‘whodunnit’ – that would later develop into a theatrical tour de force and become the world’s longest running play – by choosing a plot based on a real-life case.
Two years earlier, Agatha had been deeply moved by a horrific case resulting in the brutal death of a young boy, Dennis O’Neill, at Bank Farm, near Minsterley, Shropshire. Dennis and his younger brother Terrence had been maltreated by their foster parents, Reginald and Esther Gough. Terrence O’Neill testified that the boys were usually fed drinks of tea and only three slices of bread and butter each per day. They stole whatever they could from the pantry to supplement their diet and would even suck milk from the teats of the farm cows. Every night both boys were routinely given a severe thrashing with a stick on their hands and legs, sometimes receiving up to 100 blows each before the sadistic farmer made them say their prayers. On 19 March 1945, the jury deliberated for only twenty minutes before finding that the twelveyear-old had been beaten to death after his tormentor tied him to a bench in the kitchen of his farmhouse as punishment for eating a swede. Reginald Gough was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to six years in prison, while Esther Gough, who had been terrified for her own safety at the hands of her husband, was jailed for six months on charges of neglect.
Agatha wondered how the trauma of such a childhood would affect a survivor in later life and developed the character of a similarly abused child whose ordeal leads him to grow up seeking revenge. When the play was expanded into The Mousetrap and opened at London’s Ambassadors Theatre on 25 November 1952, the author thought that it might run for six months at most; a view shared by the editor of the 1953 Theatre Annual, who gallantly chose not to disclose the identity of the killer:
Suffice to say the interest is held and everyone appears more or less guilty until the most unlikely character in the cast is caught red-handed when about to commit the third murder. In case the play is still running when this appears in print we forebear to mention the name!
During the first 700 performances of the phenomenal run, the pivotal role of Detective Sergeant Trotter, the policemen who arrives at a snowbound guesthouse to warn the visitors that there is a killer amongst them, was played by Richard Attenborough. Tragically, his long and distinguished career was not matched by the talented actor who immediately succeeded him in the part: Patric Doonan. He took over the role in August 1954 before leaving three years later to appear in All Kinds of Men, a new American play at the Arts Theatre by Alex Samuels. However, his next venture at the St Martin’s Theatre in February 1958, appearing in Anthony Pelissiere’s drama Roseland, proved disastrous and closed after only three nights as the implausible plot brought howls of derision from the audience. Although the reviewer from The Times was full of praise for his performance, writing: ‘Patric Doonan is excellent as the business-like ex-convict’, a month later the body of the thirty-one-year-old was found in a gas-filled room at his home in Chelsea. Letters found at the scene indicated that he intended to take his own life and at the subsequent inquest, the coroner found that suicide was the cause of death. Despite becoming recently engaged to actress Ann Firbank, the dead man’s brother, actor Tony Doonan, told the coroner that Patric had become rather depressed as ‘his show had collapsed on him’. The actor’s name lives on in a song by rock singer Morrissey, ‘Now My Heart is Full’.
In March 1959, the cast from the Ambassadors Theatre found themselves involved at the scene of a real investigation. Using sets built by the prisoners, they agreed to put on a special Sunday performance of The Mousetrap for 300 inmates at Wormwood Scrubs, but as the play was reaching its thrilling climax in the final act, the alarm was sounded when warders suddenly discovered that two members of the captive audience were missing. A hue and cry ensued when it was realised that David Gooding and John Meyers, both serving three-year sentences for theft, had slipped away from the show unnoticed. The convicts made good their escape and were on the run for several weeks before they were recaptured.