All rise: Agatha Christie’s ‘Witness for the Prosecution’ is a study in audience gullibility

If it feels as though there’s been a bit of an Agatha Christie revival in recent years, it’s probably because of a spate of Kenneth Branagh movies in which the English actor-director inserted himself into the role of Hercule Poirot and nimbly solved a series of murders on the Orient Express, on the Nile, and most recently in Venice.

Those films are of course all based on Christie’s novels and upon the Belgian detective who is probably her best-known literary creation, an unflappable solver of crimes who is as smart as he is witty.

Christie’s stage plays have also made their mark. The Mousetrap, marketed as an edge-of-your-seat murder mystery designed to keep audiences guessing, famously acquired a reputation as the world’s longest-running theatrical show. From its opening on London’s West End in 1952, it ran continuously until 16 March 2020, stopped only by the pandemic’s shutdown of theatres. It reopened in May 2021 and may well go on forever.

Witness for the Prosecution, which Christie adapted for the stage from her own 1925 short story, Traitor’s Hands, opened in London in 1953. The following year, she became the first female playwright to have three plays running simultaneously on the West End – the third being Spider’s Web.

Spoof whodunnit movie

In 2022, The Mousetrap became the subject of a spoof whodunnit movie, See How They Run, about a killer trying to prevent Christie’s play from being turned into a movie. Which is all very meta. The Mousetrap has never been adapted for the screen. 

Witness for the Prosecution, meanwhile, was in 1957 already adapted into an excellent Oscar-nominated film helmed by the great Billy Wilder. It stars Marlene Dietrich and, despite the potentially grisly subject matter, actually plays out as a delightful, often hilarious black comedy, one that does a fine job of shining a light on Christie’s macabre sense of humour.   

Under oath – Peter Terry, Dianne Simpson and Mike Huff in 'Witness for the Prosecution'. (Photo: Keaton Ditchfield)

Given the proliferation of courtroom dramas since the fifties, not to mention the obsession with true crime stories in recent years, it’s perhaps difficult to imagine that there could be much worth latching on to in an old play set in an English courtroom, especially one whose twisty plot and unexpected outcome has already been on the big screen.

The great surprise, though, as Alan Swerdlow’s current production of Witness for the Prosecution proves, is just how easily Christie’s plot still manages to hook the audience in. Despite all the TV crime shows and movies centred on murder, it is still possible to be left wondering who did what to whom – and why. 

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It’s not merely a “whodunnit”, though, but a carefully contrived examination of prejudices, role reversals, and expectations turned inside out. Christie’s cleverness is not simply to show us how she unpacks the details of a crime, but to kind of lull the audience into assuming that they know better, to make us think we have the plot in hand only to then rip the rug out from under us, show us just how wily her characters really are, and perhaps prove that we in fact know absolutely nothing.

Or, at least, demonstrate how gullible and how human we really are.

The plot itself seems so breathtakingly simple. A wealthy widow has been murdered and the accused man, Leonard Vole, is not only handsome and extraordinarily naïve, but so charmingly and effortlessly convincing that all our attention shifts swiftly to the play’s two heavyweight characters: the accused man’s Austrian wife and the barrister who, having been won over entirely by Leonard’s presumed innocence, agrees to defend him.

Matthew Lotter and Dianne Simpson in 'Witness for the Prosecution'. (Photo: Keaton Ditchfield)

While there are some fairly long-winded speeches filling in the backstory details, the main action revolves around what happens in court, specifically the mysterious decision by Leonard’s wife, Romaine, to turn against her husband and become the titular witness for the prosecution. 

As Sir Wilfred, Leonard’s bewildered barrister, points out, Romaine is “a remarkable woman”. She is indeed confounding.

Real flair

It is one thing for Christie to tantalise us with the intricacies of courtroom protocol and to charm us with the cleverness and wit of Sir Wilfred, and to have us watch as he takes each of the witnesses apart, disassembling their testimony. But her real flair is for planting a seed of doubt, for hooking us with the knowledge that something is off and that there’s a big twist coming. 

Where director Alan Swerdlow has done a remarkable job is in assembling a cast of very believable and engaging character actors.

The casting of fresh-faced Brett Krüger as the suspect, Leonard Vole, is especially clever. He puts on such intense puppy dog charm, throws himself so completely at the mercy of the court (and the audience), that you feel yourself hoping against hope, even with all the odds stacked against him, that he will be acquitted.

Graham Hopkins and Sharon Spiegel-Wagner in 'Witness for the Prosecution'. (Photo: Keaton Ditchfield)

Of course, he’s up against a very crafty, highly duplicitous woman: Romaine. And as Leonard’s cool, calm, foreign wife, actress Sharon Spiegel-Wagner has a wonderful time. A vixen with a big reveal up her sleeve, she goes all out to earn the audience’s contempt as a shifty, unreliable woman who is as cunning as Leonard is naïve.

Excellent, too, is Graham Hopkins as Sir Wilfred. A very serious, extremely smart, and presumably impossible-to-trick barrister, you kind of assume he’s the courtroom version of Hercule Poirot, impossible that anything would get past him. It’s because we trust him as much as we do that we allow ourselves to be bamboozled. 

Christie’s genius

That is Christie’s genius: she keeps her audience guessing right up until the very end, planting clues and imparting evidence, but doing so in a such a way that even with the facts right there in front of us, we’re victims of our own gullibility. Aware that the courtroom is nothing but another kind of theatre, Christie shrewdly constructed this play to take advantage of our capacity to be deceived. 

And that’s where the entertainment lies, in being shown just how far off the mark you are when that customary dramatic twist is delivered, leaving you stunned by the author’s very modern sense of justice.

The final moments, although executed with a slight hamminess, are all about Christie’s cleverness, the ruthlessness of her pen.

Because the truth that’s finally revealed is really a demonstration of the author’s ability to make you believe in a fiction. And isn’t that the whole point of a play? To make a perfectly reasonable audience believe in something that is entirely made up. DM

Witness for the Prosecution is playing at Theatre on the Bay until 10 August.  Tickets available on WebTickets.

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