Alibi, An Agatha Christie Story

The second I hear that something related to Agatha Christie is coming up, I get excited.  I love Agatha Christie.  I remember my grandmother giving me her entire collection of books when I was a kid.  I enjoyed mystery novels, and was at a higher reading level than most nine or ten year olds.  I devoured those books.  Getting that stack of books from my grandmother and reading them all is a treasured memory.  So when I was at the Bristol Riverside Theatre to see In the Heights, I was very excited to see the next show was Alibi, An Agatha Christie Story.

I’m coming to love that little theatre.  It’s got a good feel to it.  I definitely felt that when we walked in.  The set was really gorgeous.  It was simple, but definitely fitting for an Agatha Christie story.  And even though the play was long (over three hours!), I was ready to sit down and enjoy a good mystery.  Agatha Christie always writes a good mystery.  She even got the Doctor a few times (once, actually.  And that’s a Doctor Who, joke, for those of you who are wondering what that meant).

Honestly, I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting.  First of all, three hours is a long time for a play, especially one that starts at eight.  I was up at 6:10 in the morning and had a full day at work, so I really needed a play that was going to keep me awake.  I will say, that for as much as I enjoyed what I was watching, what was happening could have been accomplished in half the time and I would have enjoyed it even more.  I definitely did not want to blink and miss anything, but it was a little much for me.  Knowing how this play was adapted, and as someone who writes both novels and plays, I do understand the want and need to stay true to source material.  It’s tricky, especially when you truly love the source material, but there’s a lot of thought and work that goes into it.

But truly, like any Agatha Christie mystery, we were kept on the edges of our seats trying to figure out who the murderer was.  She was a master of her craft, and just when you think you know who it is, you realize you have absolutely no clue who it is.  Poirot is an iconic character as far as I’m concerned, and he strung us along so well.  Ben Lloyd, who played the character, did a great job embodying him.  I really enjoyed his portrayal of the character any Christie fan knows.  I loved seeing on his face that he knew exactly what was going on, that everything was making sense to him, even if it wasn’t making sense to any of the rest of the characters…or the audience, for that matter.

That was something super interesting about this show that you don’t usually see with plays.  People in the audience, especially around us, didn’t know who the murderer was!  We didn’t know who the murderer was!  And during intermission, people in the audience were talking with each other about it.  Sure, it’s normal to talk about the play you’re seeing during intermission, but with this, people were theorizing together.  It was really cool to hear people talking to each other about who they think did it.  Trust me, that’s not normal audience talk…it was something so unique to seeing a mystery show, which I’ve never really seen before.  And it was an experience that I thought was really phenomenal.

The acting was really wonderful.  I loved the way the leads worked together…they were a lot of fun to watch.  I think the ensemble was a little large and not entirely necessary, but it was still fun watching everything that was going on.  The set, costumes, and props were fun and simple…very reminiscent of Christie’s era.  Being transported like that was really lovely.  It’s always nice when show runners don’t feel the need to get crazy and extravagant with these things.  Between the simplicity of these things and the acting, the story is told very nicely.

Obviously, I’m not going to give away the ending of Alibi, but I will promise you…you won’t see it coming.  Every bit of that show was a great setup for a twist ending, something Christie is famous for, of course.  The actors delivered it to us, and the character that was the murderer embraced that so well.  They did a phenomenal job with being discovered and reacting in the best possible way.  I definitely did enjoy the ending, and how the actors all played it out.  Yes, the show was rather long, but we got a very good telling of an Agatha Christie tale.  There was a bit of everything in Alibi, and in the end, it was all delivered well.