Boy whose Mousetrap show at school led to legal threat joins West End cast | Agatha Christie

While the curtain falls on every performance of The Mousetrapthe world’s longest-running play, applauding audiences are urged not to continue revealing the secret solution to the murder mystery.

This autumn, however, a new element of intrigue has been added to the plot of Agatha Christie’s enduring hit, which first premiered at Nottingham’s Theater Royal in 1952.

The new twist came in 1997, when an enthusiastic eleven-year-old schoolboy decided to stage his own production in his Windsor school hall. And only now is the final act played.

“I suddenly started reading Agatha Christie and I was already obsessed with theatre, so I bought a collection of her plays and copied pages from the script,” says Alasdair Buchan, now 37. “I really wanted to do it. but I don’t think my teachers at the small choir school attached to the castle’s St. George’s Chapel were terribly enthusiastic about it.’

The show went on anyway, for one night only, with a cast of 11-year-old boys, including Buchan, who also directed.

Buchan and the cast also traveled to the capital to watch the real professional production a few days before their own performance. After the London show, they met the stars at the stage door. Each boy got an autograph and they promised to send them the program they created.

History does not record how the Windsor school play went down, but a few weeks later the director received an unexpected and stern ‘cease and desist’ letter from the London producers’ lawyers. It threatened future action because of the students’ recent staging.

“I was called to the principal’s office and I was terribly concerned,” Buchan said.

“At the time, my school managed to smooth things over and luckily I wasn’t blacklisted by the producers.”

Buchan will now even join the West End cast The Mousetrap at St Martin’s Theater in the role of Mr Paravicini, the mysterious foreign stranger.

Buchan will be on stage nine shows a week for six months. “Funnily enough, when I read through the script before the audition, I remembered the lines I once had. Moreover, because I had directed the film, entire passages of dialogue came back and I was surprised at how much I remembered of the structure.”

In Buchan’s school production the eight boys played all the characters. “It was a mixed school, but we boarders were boys. So my brother played the character of Miss Casewell.

The schoolboys were accompanied by Buchan’s mother to see the West End show. “My own experience with stage doors is that there is usually no one there unless you have a certain celebrity in the cast. For example, it was manic when I was inside Richard II with Martin Freeman, but mostly it’s pretty dead.

“So I imagine the actors in 1997 were quite surprised to see eight little boys holding up our messy A4 scripts to sign.”

Buchan later submitted the colorful program he created for his show. “Some Jobsworth then saw it clearly and a serious legal letter went out, demanding royalties and asking how much money we had made.”

Due to Christie’s death in 1976, The Mousetrap had earned over £3 million. But she had previously given the copyright to her nine-year-old grandson, Mathew Prichard, as a birthday present. He later set up the Col winston Charitable Trust in 1995 to use the royalties to support arts charities, mainly in Wales. The show is now run by Mousetrap Productions.

Buchan, who co-founded the online theater initiative ‘ReadThrough’ during the 2021 pandemic lockdown, remembers often being bored at school, thinking he was not as musical as other students. For him: editing The Mousetrap was an escape. “When I think back, I’m amazed at the sheer amount of work we all put into it,” he said.

“And it was a success, as far as how we got from start to finish. There were definitely guys who didn’t know their lines and we lost the plot a bit at the end.

“I remember standing in the wings trying to improve the acting by shouting at my brother, ‘Cry! Scream!’ Otherwise I was quite a nice brother.”