The writer of The Mousetrap has become such a fixture in seasonal TV and theatre listings that the estate might rebrand her as Agatha Christmas. The Guildford Shakespeare Company – here moonlighting with England’s second most famous literary figure – enjoyably pays homage to this connection in The Housetrap, an interactive yuletide murder mystery set within a real 16th-century manor house.
West Horsley Place already has two showbiz connections: it was used as the location of the BBC series Ghosts, and it formerly belonged to the historian and broadcaster Bamber Gascoigne, founder host of University Challenge. Eleanor Murton, writer of The Housetrap, would do well on that show with a specialist subject of the tropes of classic crime fiction. Her script works in references to snowbound mansions, seances, lead piping, Mrs White, a butler who might have done it and the letter of the alphabet that you dial for murder.
Lady Amy Montague, rich young wife of spendthrift baronet Sir Robert, has been found dead at the foot of the grand staircase. Stair rods or homicide? If the latter, was it the near-bankrupt husband, one of his triplet wards of court, his mother the dowager duchess Elizabeth, or Fawkes the factotum?
Between scenes of the characters intriguing and bickering – resulting in at least one more corpse – the audience is divided into groups who, corralled by bellringing ushers, interrogate the suspects in various beautiful rooms, with the dowager duchess offering prosecco or lemonade. As in a sort of promenade Cluedo, we also examine evidence such as letters and diaries.
Director Natasha Rickman uses various visual and aural tricks to conjure multiple characters from a charming quartet of actors, performing twice a night to make the economics work. Daisy Tallulah Hargreaves slickly quick-switches between the three sisters, while Rosalind Blessed is imperious as a duchess clearly hoping for promotion to queen; Hayden Mampasi’s Sir Robert is so good at improvising lies he should consider Westminster; and Robert Maskell smartly samples generations of shifty fictional butlers.
It will please the playwright that, on the day I went, no one got anywhere near the ingenious solution, but it provides a very happy Christie Christmas.
• At West Horsley Place, Surrey, until 22 December
