BWW Reviews: Christie's SPIDER'S WEB Snares Oyster Mill Audiences

If you should go to England and visit a country home, avoid the drawing room at all costs. Drawing rooms are not rooms where art is created - they're more of a sitting room or parlor - but, if Agatha Christie is to be believed, they are the most hazardous location known to man. Forget the jungle, or a river full of crocodiles. If you're going to take on a dangerous location, sit in a country house drawing room. There's poison in your tea, or a gun in someone's pocket, or someone behind a curtain holding a knife, or... well, the ways to die in a drawing room are endless. And the places a body can be hidden once it's been dispatched in a drawing room are equally varied.

In the case of Christie's 1954 play SPIDER'S WEB, written by Christie for actress Margaret Lockwood and currently at Oyster Mill Playhouse and directed by Lois Heagy, drawing rooms are full of the most amazing things - rigged port-tasting contests, attempted assignations, desks with secret drawers, visits by suspected drug traffickers, autographs of Queen Victoria, secret doorways, and the mandatory dead body. No, country house visits aren't safe. Tear up that invitation immediately. You'd better visit Afghanistan instead, where it's quiet.

A country house needs, besides a drawing room, some special characters, and SPIDER'S WEB has them. There's the homeowner, who must have a title or be otherwise important - Henry Hailsham-Brown (Jim Clark) works for the Foreign Office. Then there's his wife, Clarissa (Aliza Bardfield), who holds down the fort, moves the plot, and is the source of most of this mystery's gentle comedy. There's a Rather Important Guest, Sir Rowland Delahaye (Nick Hughes), A Local Dignitary, Hugo Birch (Stephen F.J. Martin), and a Terribly Nice Young Man, Jeremy Warrender (Jedidiah Franklin). There's a Very Bad Sort, Oliver Costello (Jeremy Burkett), who's very bad indeed, and is, not surprisingly, also the corpse after his evil is displayed for the audience to see. There's also a teenage daughter, Pippa (Reagan Werner), a gardener (Kristin Post), and staff, and a smattering of detectives.

But the light shines on Clarissa Hailsham-Brown, a woman with the problem that her truths sound unbelievable and the things she invents sound more plausible than her reality. Unfortunately, she's not only not a writer, she's the one who finds Oliver Costello's body behind her drawing room sofa only shortly after he's threatened to take her husband's daughter Pippa back to her mother, whom he's recently married. Aliza Bardfield recently played in THE HOLLOW at Oyster Mill, where she clearly absorbed the lessons of playing a woman in the midst of a drawing room death. She's - for once - not the murderer (or, for Christie fans, murderess), but she's charmingly funny, and it's a pleasure to see her back on the Oyster Mill stage, where she's been up to her neck in death in the past. Bardfield is well able to hold a lead part, and to maintain a low-key comic roar at the same time.

Nick Hughes as Sir Rowland, who has a hand in solving the mystery, lives up to the part admirably, torn between doing the right thing and trying to cover for Clarissa. Martin's Birch is in the same boat helping his hostess, and Martin also has a tight rein on his part. The two are solid enough to support Bardfield and to make their characters sufficiently interesting for the audience to want to see more of them.

The two youngest cast members are Reagan Werner and Jedidiah Franklin. Werner's prior acting experience shows through when her Pippa becomes frightened of Costello - she reins in her fear, avoiding the easy tendency to overact her distress - and when she wanders in, less than half-awake, after being roused while on sleeping pills. Franklin holds his own, but his Warrender feels almost too bland, too tame. Yes, he's there to be the terribly nice young man who's visiting, but a bit more stage presence would make him feel slightly more natural.

Kristin Post's Miss Peake, the gardener, is the broad comic relief of the play, which is a comic mystery to begin with. The part is drawn comically, and because of that, slightly more restraint might make her seem a little less suddenly "over the top" when her big scenes come in the third act. On the other hand, you may never see broccoli the same way again.

SPIDER'S WEB is a mystery, yes, but it's equally comic, and it's all but a farce - the sheer number of doors and windows signals farce, but they're not quite as willy-nilly utilized as they might be in the wilder comic form. Heagy knows her way around a drawing room - she's directed more than one drawing-room piece before - and manages to keep the three acts paced fast enough to keep from dragging. Christie keeps enough twists in the script that you almost certainly won't have solved this one by the middle of the second act if you don't know it already. Although she does indulge in the comic-mystery convention of the disappearing body, she provides a twist on it that you won't have anticipated. (Don't try to guess. You can't.)

For Christie-lovers, mystery lovers, and comedy fans. Expect to laugh. If the port-tasting scene up front doesn't warn you what to expect from the rest of the show, nothing can. At Oyster Mill through February 9. Call 717-737-6768 or visit www.oystermill.com for tickets.

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