While the Light Lasts

AFTERWORD

‘The Actress’ was first published in the Novel Magazine in May 1923 as ‘A Trap for the Unwary’, the title under which it was re-published in the booklet issued in 1990 to mark the centenary of Christie’s birth.

This story illustrates Christie’s great skill at taking a particular plot device and presenting it again, perhaps in the same form but from a different perspective or with subtle but significant variations to conceal it from the reader. The simple piece of legerdemain in ‘The Actress’ appears in several other stories, most obviously in the intriguing Miss Marple story ‘The Affair at the Bungalow’, collected in The Thirteen Problems (1932), and in the Poirot novel Evil Under the Sun (1941).

This story reminds us that Christie is also one of Britain’s most successful playwrights, even though her first play—which she described as ‘an enormously gloomy play which, if my memory serves me correct, was about incest’—was never performed. Her own favourite was Witness for the Prosecution (1953) but the most famous is undoubtedly The Mousetrap (1952), which is still running in London after nearly 50 years. While the plot of The Mousetrap centres on a murderer’s ability to deceive his potential victims, it depends as a piece of theatre on Christie’s awareness of how people in an audience respond to what they see and hear and her supreme ability to manipulate what they then understand to be happening. After The Mousetrap opened in London, the reviewer in The Times commented that ‘the piece admirably fulfils the special requirements of the theatre’ and, as anyone who has been associated with the play or has studied it carefully knows well, there is a secret to its success, or rather to the success of why so few are able to foresee its astounding denouement.