The Mousetrap Reviews
The short version
The compliment this play attracts is about how it is built. From 1952 onwards, the reviews that praise it praise the plotting, and the ones that criticise it go after the characters. Audiences have gone anyway for seventy-four years.
If you want a clever mystery played straight, the reviews back you up. If you want the best-written play in London, they do not.
What critics agreed on in 1952
The construction. Even the unimpressed admired how the thing was built. The Times called the plot "elaborately skilful" and the characters "nicely assorted, individually labelled and readily identified."
The suspense. John Barber in the Daily Express singled out "the atmosphere of shuddering suspense."
Where they split
The Manchester Guardian was the least impressed: "a middling piece", with "less in it than meets the eye ... Coincidence is stretched unreasonably" and characters "built entirely of clichés."
J. C. Trewin in the Illustrated London News made the point that still holds: your opinion depends on whether you guess it. Those who did not, he thought, would call the play "preposterous and over-burdened."
And the Bradford Observer called the whole thing, describing one of Christie's "most ingenious detective plays" and predicting that "this play should run for a long time in the metropolis."
When it came back in 2021
The show closed on 16 March 2020 and reopened on 17 May 2021, the earliest date permitted after the break for Covd. The reviews that followed were the first full round in decades.
- Dominic Cavendish, The Telegraph: he "loved every sympathy- and suspicion-shifting minute of it."
- Quentin Letts, The Times: "delicious archaic details include baked apples, ration books, a coked-up boiler and stockings from Gibraltar."
- Patrick Marmion, Daily Mail: "if you don't mind paying £20-£100 a head for that, it is reassuringly silly fun."
- WhatsOnStage: "absence makes the heart grow fonder ... aided by a cast clearly revelling in the fact that they get to aid real spectators."
Where it stands now
Time Out gives it three stars, calling the mystery a "neat puzzler" built with "uncanny precision". Official Theatre calls it "living theatrical history" and "still well worth watching".
Both halves of that are true and you should book on both. It is a well-made mystery and a piece of history. It is not a great play, and it has never claimed to be.
Should you go?
Yes if you enjoy guessing, you like period detail, or you want to have seen the famous one. No if you are after the strongest writing on in London that week.
The Mousetrap tickets has the schedule, prices and seat advice, and our St Martin's Theatre guide goes through the seating plan level by level.
A note on the ending
We do not print it, and neither did the critics. The cast ask the audience at the curtain not to pass it on, and Christie objected to reviews giving her plots away. Seventy-four years later it has largely held.