The Mirror Crack'd - The Mill at Sonning ★★★

As the heat of the summer turns to the crisp, cool mornings of the autumn, and the leaves on the trees along the banks of the River Thames by Sonning start to bronze in the fading sunlight, another dimming star is rising within the theatre space at The Mill. Writer Rachel Wagstaff (Birdsong, The Girl on the Train, Death Comes to Pemberley) has adapted Agatha Christie’s ruminative novel ‘The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side‘ into a Hollywood-themed cosy murder mystery with a passing nod to grief and its consequences. With a script centred around events that occur during a glittering soiree held by an American film star in rural England in July 1962, what can this new adaptation of a very familiar story bring to the party? Well, we are treated to flashbacks, misdirection, a fleeting exploration of human nature and a good, old conundrum at the centre of it all.

The character introductions start with an incapacitated Miss Jane Marple sitting in her armchair centre stage, unable to answer her ringing phone. She has employed Cherry Baker, who lives on the new housing estate beside the quaint village of St Mary Mead, to help her around the house.

When Cherry arrives shortly after the missed call, all flustered and breathy, Marple intuits that something must have happened at the event held at Gossington Hall the previous evening. With the arrival at the house by Chief Inspector Dermot Craddock, who also happens to call Miss Marple his aunt, and thereafter her close friend Dolly Bantry, we quickly understand that the village is also home to Marina Gregg, an American movie star who has quit Hollywood for a quieter life away from the flash guns and film fanatics. She has recently bought Gossington Hall from Dolly and hosted a party there last night to introduce herself to the village notables.

Through a series of flashbacks and testimonies, Marple (and the audience) learn that there has been a fatal poisoning during that party and there are many suspects. Auntie Jane has a pedigree in solving murders, and it’s obvious that Craddock will need to call on her understanding of human nature to help him find the killer. Together, with much hobbling around the set, they visit the key players to hear their version of events. We learn of the devotion of employees, the unwitting actions of a fan and the consequences of decisions made in the past.

Eventually Marple works it out using her acute observation skills, and the perpetrator and their motive are revealed to us all.

Director Jonathan O’Boyle has two strong female leads to work with in this production, and The Mill must be delighted to have secured both Liza Goddard (The Croft, Noises Off, Murder in the Dark) and Sara Crowe (Private Lives, Calendar Girls, Acorn Antiques: The Musical) on this occasion.

However, O’Boyle and Wagstaff have given us a faltering, curiously downbeat Marple and a surprisingly unglamorous and remorseful film star, which seems to miss the main themes of the original book. We get little sense of the famous sleuthing spinster in this piece. We don’t feel the magnetism of Marina nor anything of her supposed egocentricity. Meanwhile, the rest of the company have been left to deliver their own entertaining, often very big, characterisations of their Christie/Wagstaff’s parts.

Highly experienced Goddard, as Miss Marple, heads the cast list and is the big draw to this production. She has been acting for six decades and brings a sensitivity and quiet reflection to her part. Dressed down in a cardigan and comfortable shoes, as expected of any unmarried elderly woman, her well-seasoned Miss Marple is more observant and lighter than expected; almost too restrained given the puzzle before her.

Olivier Award-winning Crowe takes the role of Ms Gregg, but her lines (and dress) don’t allow her to display the fabulously glamorous, self-centred film star she is playing. Instead, this rather ordinary version of the once-famous star is played as a vacant victim of circumstance and opportunity. James Mack‘s Chief Inspector is suitably confused, vain and one step behind in all his thoughts and actions, but it is Annie Wensak‘s Dolly that brings the show alive. Wensak’s characterisation of Marple’s delightfully dotty friend is both physically funny and engaging. Gregg’s assertive and protective film director husband is taken on by Jordan Taffe-Watson with a great deal of enthusiasm, whilst a passionate Martin Razpopov and coolly efficient Lydia Kirton portray the star’s devoted butler and assistant respectively. Village stalwarts Mr and Mrs Leigh are performed by an exuberant Jane Quinn and quietly supportive Paul Kemble. The cast is completed with soon-to-graduate Elysia Showan as a jittery Cherry Baker and Saskia Strallen as the nascent American film actor cum party gatecrasher with a secret, Lola Brewster.

Set designer Michael Holt has been associated with many successful productions in the past, but this one felt dull and gloomy. The backdrop of dark grey walls and staircase, together with mahogany furniture, remained in place throughout, and trips between Marple’s house and Gossington Hall did not contrast enough, as they were only conveyed with the moving of chairs and pictures. The most glamorous thing about the party was the colour of the cocktails. It is Jamie Platt’s lighting design that helps us understand the flashbacks properly.

This prosaic adaptation glosses over Christie’s original and highly symbolic storyline, making little exploration of how lives can fracture along fault lines and barely offering reflections about female ageing within the shifting, image-obsessed society of the early Sixties. Wagstaff and O’Boyle have given us instead a decent whodunnit with a pacey plot underpinned with some good acting. When all is said and done, this show is a polite, old-fashioned closed-circle murder mystery, well delivered by its cast, wrapped up with judgement about human failings. The Mill gives us a little escapism as the nights draw in: a nice meal, a bit of murder, and a puzzle concluded.