Murdered to Death

Synopsis

Agatha Christie spoof set in a country house In the 1930s. Will the murderer be unmasked first? When Mildred, owner of the house, is murdered, an assorted cast of weird and wonderful characters assembles. There's the hopeless police inspector, the various suspects including the English colonel with the prerequisite stiff upper lip, his long-suffering wife, Pierre the shady art dealer, Bunting the butler.. And then things are complicated by the arrival on the scene of the local amateur sleuth who seems to attract murder wherever she goes..

Our Review:

Anne Morley-Priestman - 15 June 2010

Making fun of murder has quite a substantial theatrical pedigree. Peter Gordon’s Murdered to Death – the temptation is to pronounce the first word of the title with three syllables in full dramatic mode – spoofs all those elements common to the English whodunit tradition.

So we have the inept police inspector, his put-upon assistant, a retired army officer and his at-the-end-of-her-tether wife, a butler with a taste for his employers’ cellar contents, the village spinster, a country-house owner and her niece as well as a stagey Frenchman and a supercilious socialite. All gathered in a drawing-room towards the end of the 1930s.

Shots are fired. Characters are killed off. Mysteries unravel faster than Miss Maple’s knitting. Motives flit from person to person. And, of course, the inspector gets the right man in the end. Or does he? Giles Watling’s direction takes its time with the initial scene-setting as Mildred ([Éri...

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