Talk to me!

Scott K. Ratner is no stranger to the blog—last year, I reviewed his wonderful play Kill a Better Mousetrap, a play in which he tackles the curse of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap and how the play refuses to go away. Ratner is a very intelligent fellow who has an excellent appreciation for the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, and as a result, the play was an excellent satire and homage to the Queen of Crime (when it could easily have turned spiteful in the wrong hands). Now, Ratner is back with All Talking! All Singing! All Murder!!!, a three act play which has plenty of fun with the conventions of the Golden Age mystery.

What is ATASAM about? Well, it’s a very traditional mystery, in which an incredibly annoying gossip columnist, Cornelia Cram, manages to make enemies left and right and then drops dead. She has been stabbed in the back, and Inspector Roscoe Tennant comes down to investigate the crime. But with so many motives and secrets, who could have done it?

They do but jest...

Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap has attained a level of fame by setting a record as the longest-running play in theatre history. The story is a fairly routine one, with an isolated circle of suspects and murder (of course). It’s an expansion of the 1948 short story Three Blind Mice and premiered in 1952, and it hasn’t run out of steam since.

But in Scott K. Ratner’s play Kill a Better Mousetrap, Miles Edward Merbinau argues that it’s one of Christie’s worst efforts—“all the superficial trappings of a great Christie work, with none of the ingenuity,” he says. Personally, I’ve never seen a production of The Mousetrap, but my impression from reading the script was that it was an agreeably silly little play with a few nice touches of ingenuity.