For the curtains to be split, just before a play starts, by a member of the production team, is never a good sign – usually meaning the star is ill, the set has got stuck or a world figure has died.

The Mousetrap
St Martin’s Theatre, London

Animal Farm
Royal & Derngate, Northampton

For the curtains to be split, just before a play starts, by a member of the production team, is never a good sign – usually meaning the star is ill, the set has got stuck or a world figure has died.
On Monday 17 May, 2021, though, the unexpected appearance of a denim-clad herald with a mic was met with whoops and cheers. It was Adam Spiegel, lamenting having become, on 16 March last year, the first producer to close The Mousetrap in the then 67 years since Agatha Christie’s mystery premiered in London. However, he now at least has the consolation of becoming the first producer to reopen the show and, moreover, as the first major post-pandemic production in the West End for 14 months.

With only socially distanced live theatre allowed (until at least 21 June), Spiegel has enterprisingly divided the week’s perform­ances between two casts, either of which will take over for 10 days if someone in the other cast is ill or isolating. A script written at the end of the reign of George VI and set among the English upper classes naturally has the characters keeping chilly distance from each other, so only a kiss has been cut to make the action Covid-compliant.

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