Ava Oran and Reed Campbell (Photo by Doug Engalla)
Reviewed by Joel Beers
The Group Rep
Through Nov. 1
Lloyd Pedersen and Reed Campbell (Photo by Doug Engalla)
Lloyd Pedersen and Reed Campbell (Photo by Doug Engalla)
Agatha Christie knew that a good murder mystery needs more than a corpse. The Group Rep’s Spider’s Websupplies the body but lets too much of the mystery slip away.
There is still plenty that works in this production of Christie’s 1954 play, one of the few of the English writer’s voluminous works written directly for the stage. There is choice character acting and a familiar Christie gallery of wry inspectors, comic eccentrics, smooth-talking houseguests and respectable people who may not be quite as respectable as they seem.
According to AgathaChristie.com, it is a “conscious parody of the detective thriller.” That parody lies largely in a plot that reels off an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink mélange of murder, a dead body, astute police inspectors, drug addicts, invisible ink, hidden doorways, disappearing bodies and, of course, port snifting.
And, like any legit murder mystery, there are plenty of suspects. But there’s one problem: the staging appears to settle the question of who did it long before Christie does.
At the story’s center is Clarissa Hailsham-Brown, the imaginative wife of a British diplomat who appears to occupy a low rung on that ladder. She prefers the country to London and also seems a little bored, hence her proclivity for making up stories, a habit that has taught those around her to discount much of what she says.
Then things get really real: She nearly trips over a body in the drawing room.
With her husband expected back with an important political guest, Clarissa recruits several people in the house to help get rid of the corpse before the police arrive. Naturally, the police arrive anyway, and soon almost everyone has a motive, a secret or some reason to look suspicious.
Unlike Christie mysteries built around the cerebral Poirot or the unassuming brilliance of Miss Marple, Spider’s Web has no master sleuth patiently assembling the clues. Clarissa is the driving force, pushing the play closer to drawing-room farce: less cool deduction, more frantic improvisation, deception and damage control.
Directed by Mareli Mitchel-Shields, the production generally fares better as comedy than as a satisfying whodunit.
Nearly everyone in the cast seems to be having fun with Christie’s gallery of types, ranging from dotty eccentrics and suspiciously smooth charmers to poker-faced representatives of law and order. Ava Oren is particularly good as Clarissa, giving her the right mix of quick-wittedness, theatricality and mounting desperation as the lies pile up. Carol Kaufman also gets plenty of comic mileage out of Mildred Peake, the wonderfully eccentric gardener who keeps popping up like an especially persistent weed.
But Spider’s Web is still a whodunit. And a whodunit has to make us wonder who done it.
That’s where this production gets into trouble.
A crucial bit of staging early on appears to point so directly at one character that there seems little reason to suspect anyone else. We are apparently supposed to consider the possibility that another character is standing behind the killer at a key moment, but the staging does nothing to suggest that. What we see seems pretty clear.
That becomes an issue in the second act, when suspicion starts bouncing from one character to another. In a good whodunit, each new revelation should make us rethink what we’ve seen, and the final turn should feel both surprising and somehow inevitable. Here, the staging has pointed us so firmly in one direction that the eventual reveal doesn’t land as a clever reversal so much as something insufficiently prepared for.
By then, the shifting suspicions feel less like suspense than delay.
That doesn’t make Spider’s Web a dud. Christie gives it more comedy than some of her darker mysteries, and the Group Rep gets ample mileage out of its oddballs and Clarissa’s increasingly frantic attempts to keep her stories straight.
But comedy can only carry a whodunit so far. If the audience thinks it already knows who did it, all those other suspects start to feel less like possibilities than people killing time until the reveal.
Lonny Chapman Theatre, 10900 Burbank Blvd., North Hollywood. Fri. & Sat., 8 pm, Sun. 2 pm. www.thegrouprep.com. Runtime: approximately 2 hours and 15 minutes with an intermission.
