Coda: The Twentieth-Century English Crime Play — A View from 2015

Abstract

This study has sketched the development of the English crime play between 1900 and 2000; the present chapter, however, will consider to what extent the general observations made above may be validated by the present state of English crime drama. I will also discuss whether the crime play is an exclusively twentieth-century phenomenon or whether it is still alive today. I do not propose to discuss the last 15 years in detail, however, but will present a snapshot view from 2015. At the time of writing, four crime plays are running in the London West End, on which my study has focused: The Mousetrap at the St. Martin’s, The Play That Goes Wrong at the Duchess, The 39 Steps at the Criterion and The Nether at the Duke of York’s. The Mousetrap represents the twentieth-century crime play in a fossilized state, having turned into a tourist attraction, almost a London landmark. In this case, the characteristic ephemeral quality of live theatre has become extinguished and The Mousetrap arguably has proved John Russell Taylor’s dictum quoted in Chapter 8 wrong according to which an architectural metaphor for drama is misleading since theatre is a temporal art form. The Play That Goes Wrong by Mischief Theatre Company started off on the fringe and consecutively won best comedy in the whatsonstage awards. It is a play based on the principle of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off and the mechanicals’ play in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: an inept amateur dramatic company performs a 1920s’ murder mystery.