Pitlochry Festival Theatre, in repertory, 2006

Chimneys at Pitlochry Festival Theatre.

THERE MUST be a whodunit to be written about the journey taken by Agatha Christie’s ‘Chimneys’ to reach the stage. What skulduggery led to its cancellation before the first night in 1931? What double-dealing led to its neglect for the rest of the century? Who was the mysterious figure who sent a copy of the script to a theatre in Canada in the 1990s? Why did it get its European premiere in a theatre in a small Perthshire village?

If that’s not enough to mull over, there are twists and turns aplenty in the play itself. Imagine if Keifer Sutherland’s 24 had been set in the interwar years and you’ll get a sense of the complex political machinations that threaten to undermine the civility of the inevitable country house (realised on an imposing set by designer Adrian Rees, all ancient oak beams and shadowy corners).

Where Sutherland’s special agent Jack Bauer has to contend with international terrorists undermining the president, Christie’s Superintendent Battle has to figure out why the royal family of a Balkan state is under threat and what it has to do with a secretive syndicate that wants to exploit the country’s oil reserves.

Whether intentionally or not, Christie catches the mood of turbulence preceding the Second World War, as royal dynasties fell and old empires lost their grip. Her collection of stereotypical foreigners – such as the humourless eastern European valet with big boots, dagger and accent as heavy as his thick black cape – would come across as the work of a patronising racist were it not for our knowledge that history was to give her untrustworthy foreigners the last laugh. The reign of her English toffs was about to end.

Director John Durnin seems to recognise this by framing the play with sound effects: at the start we hear radio broadcasts reporting the unrest of the 1930s and, in the closing moments, we hear an ominous gunshot, signalling the end of an era. Durnin would need to do more to turn Christie’s thriller into a satire of an old order hanging on to its colonial ways while the world changed around it, but he plants the seeds of an idea.

The actors, meanwhile, perform the convoluted story as if their lives depended on it. There are several strong performances, notably from Darrell Brockis as Anthony Cade, the hero with a murky past, who generates real sexual chemistry with Flora Berkeley’s equally enigmatic Virginia Revel.

It’s an insubstantial entertainment that culminates in a cluttered denouement as Christie desperately ties up all the loose ends, but there’s an old-fashioned pleasure to be had in playing the writer’s guessing game.

© Mark Fisher, 2006

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• Pitlochry Festival Theatre