What does an Agatha Christie virgin expect from her first visit to an Agatha Christie play? A real whodunnit with bodies in the library? Lots of screaming and false alarms until the final truth is uncovered? In fact, there is a tongue-in-cheek reference to a former case with a body in the library and there are false trials, but in the end, the play comes down to love and loss. The Agatha Christie story has been rewritten for the stage by Rachel Wagstaff and she brings out the humanity of the characters involved. These are no puppets on strings but people who have experienced all the emotions of love and fear and loss. She also injects quite a bit of humour into the play.

It is difficult to write about a whodunnit without giving away, well, who done it. The first scene is an introduction to all the characters as they move furniture around the stage and then we settle on poor Miss Marple with her ankle bandaged. The scene quickly moves to a large house which has been bought by a glamorous film star who arrives surrounded by her devoted entourage including her besotted husband. The first death happens very quickly then, a person who seems not important to the plot – only right at the end do you realise what she did that precipitated her murder. What happened at that party is told again and again in flashbacks as we see through the eyes of each beholder what they saw.

The plot unfolds, murders happen, and false trails are laid, but it also becomes clear how deep emotions run. Marina, the glamorous star of course with her oh-so-complicated life, but also Miss Marple with her relationship with the Chief Inspector, her confession of a love lost during the war. Cyril Leigh keeps appearing and asking to talk to the Chief Inspector and the CI always brushes him off. It would seem right to assume that Cyril saw something important: in fact, all he wants to say is how much he loved the wife he has lost.

The cast of eleven is delightfully led by Susie Blake as Miss Marple who holds the stage with her calm presence (she is almost always on stage). She is the one who, at the end, talks of the Tennyson poem, the Lady of Shalott, from whence comes the title of the play. The Lady of Shalott is cursed and condemned to sit weaving, facing away from the world for her whole life: all she can see of the world she can see in her mirror. One day she sees Sir Lancelot arrive in all his splendour and she realises what she is missing by having her back to the world. She turns around, the mirror cracks and she knows she is doomed to die:

Out flew the web and floated wide;

This production is also, by chance, a fitting tribute to one of the great, late Miss Marples on screen, Angela Lansbury.