The Mousetrap Tickets

Mousetrap is officially the longest running play in the world, marking it's 60th anniversary on 18th November 2012 with a gala performance featuring among others, Hugh Bonneville from TV's Downton Abbey to mark the occasion.

The current producer of the play, Sir Stephen Waley-Cohen, describes the origins of the play: "All those years ago, long before I was involved, the BBC asked the late Queen Mary what she would like for an 80th birthday present and apparently she said I'd like a new Agatha Christie. So Agatha Christie wrote a short 30 minute radio play called Three Blind Mice. It was so good that her producer Peter Saunders said to her 'let's turn that into a proper stage play' and she expanded it and made what had been 30 minutes into a two hour, two act stage play. They had to change the name because there had just been a not very successful theatrical production called Three Blind Mice and somebody suggested calling it 'The Mousetrap'."

Actor Tim Dewberry, who played Giles Ralston, owner of the guesthouse where the action takes place admits to not being fully aware of the heritgage of the play when he took on his role in the cast. "Oh no, I wasn't. I was completely ignorant when I went into it but it was very interesting to go into such a long running show and to come into contact with its audience I guess because it has quite a following."

Producer Sir Stephen Waley-Cohen believes the winning formula which has prevented the Mousetrap from getting stale is frequent rotation. "Firstly we change the cast every year, we have a new director every two or three years and our director and all of us work very much with the company to make sure they don't get bored doing it and we don't get bored doing it, because every cast is a bit different."

"There's now only one person involved who has been there since the start and that's Matthew Prichard, Agatha Christie's grandson who rather famously was given the play for a ninth birthday present. She had no idea that it was going to be the success it is and he always says he was more interested in the bicycle."

The Mousetrap marks 60 continuous years on the London stage on the 18th November 2012 with a gala performance. Sir Stephen Waley-Cohen, Producer said: "Well we're marking the 60th anniversary in about three different ways, the most obviously exciting is this gala performance with eight stars playing the eight roles for one performance only with a day and a half's rehearsal. So they will be reading the script but they will be in costume and will be moving about and they have been rehearsing hard all day and I'm told they were extremely good thank goodness. So that's the most exciting thing we're doing and we're doing it in aid of The Mousetrap's own charity, Mousetrap Theatre Projects, which takes about 12,000 disadvantaged young people to the best of West End theatre every year who wouldn't get there if we didn't help them to do it. So that's the most exciting and most immediate thing, but we've also licensed 60 productions of it around the world and we've embarked on the first ever UK tour which is a 60 week tour which we are now 10 weeks into."

The Mousetrap has been successfully licensed around the world. Producer, Sir Stephen Waley-Cohen, believes the play has travelled well. "I suppose and only gone to see mostly English language productions, but I can tell you that it works extremely well in America. I saw it in Philadelphia where it broke the theatre's record for a play, I saw it in Johannesburg where it did the same, I saw it in Sydney where it was a huge success and I've seen it in China. In fact we've just had a Chinese language performance on a Sunday night in London which was a tremendous success with the Chinese audience. I think it's about real people - of course it's a whoddunit and of course they're not in depth studies of people, but I think it seems to travel well, it's been performed in fifty different languages and the companies who perform it keep on doing it so I guess that their audiences are having a good time just as our audiences in London are obviously having a good time."