Romance. Tragedy. Primal Murder. The urge of revenge. This looks like a job for—
Well it isn’t Sherlock Holmes, that’s for sure! In a Christie? He would never!
Hercule Poirot, but of course! And ooh la la, ooh la la, ooh la la, does he have a case for you! Er— a show. Yes, that’s it! A show! Murder On The Orient Express, based on Agatha Christie’s novel of the same name and adapted to the stage by Ken Ludwig,
In
ancient Greek mythology, the shy artist Pygmalion expressed no interest in
women, but when he created a statue of Galatea so fair he fell in love with it,
he made sacrifices to the goddess Aphrodite to give him a woman as beautiful as
his sculpture. She does him one better by bringing the marble Galatea to life
as his reward. In 1912, master Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw used that metaphor
of taking the basest elements of the earth and sculpting them into a real lady
in a very literal sense in his masterpiece Pygmalion.
There’s a suggestion of gunpowder in the air, one small spark might set off an explosion upstairs in the Theatre Building this season at Cockpit in Court as they present what is quickly becoming an annual tradition of murder mystery on their stage. Agatha Christie’s Towards Zero is the latest play to fall victim to this yearly tradition and although there’s nary a gun in the show (not even so much as mentioned!),