Stick with the Corpus, Christie

The curtain is up. The theater is dark. A woman screams. Someone eerily whistles Three Blind Mice. Pistol shots clap the air for the 3,745th time. Thus Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap moved into its tenth year in residence in London's Ambassadores Theater last week.

Mousetrap is the longest-running play in the history of the British theater, and has been since the day nearly five years ago when it passed the 2,238-performance record set by Oscar Asche's Chu-Chin-Chow, which opened in London in 1916. It has also surpassed Broadway's record-holding Life with Father by 521 performances.* The Mousetrap has become a prime attraction for British tourists down from the provinces, rivaling the Tower of London, and the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace.

As could be expected. The Mousetrap is a moderately awful play, not really in the same class with Christie's Witness for the Prosecution. Marooning its characters in an ancient manor house in a snowstorm, it festoons them with such stupendous lines as "By the time the snow has melted, a lot of things may have happened" and "There are six of you listening to me now --one of you is the killer."

Unsportingly, London's Sunday Dispatch revealed the identity of the killer in its review nine years ago. The producers feared that might kill off the play. Instead, the Dispatch itself folded. Mousetrap not only survived but expects to go on snapping for some time to come.

* The alltime world long-run record, however, is still held by the Los Angeles Theatre Mart's 1933 revival of The Drunkard, which closed in 1959 after 9,477 performances.

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