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Preview by Lizzie Guilfoyle
IT HAS now been confirmed that the Agatha Christie thriller,
And Then There Were None, will open on October
25, 2005 (previews from October 14) at the Gielgud Theatre in
London's West End.
Gemma Jones whose previous stage credits include Cabaret,
The Winter's Tale, The Master Builder, Dance of Death and
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, will play Emily Brent.
Jones has also appeared on screen - in Wilde, Sense and
Sensibility, The Winslow Boy and the Bridget Jones and
Harry Potter films.
And Tara Fitzgerald will take on the role of Vera Claythorne.
Equally at home on stage and in film, her many credits include
Antigone, Our Song, Hamlet (opposite Ralph Fiennes),
A Doll's House and Clouds (theatre); and Brassed
Off, I Capture the Castle, Sirens and The Tenant of Wildfell
Hall (film).
Also confirmed in the cast are Richard Johnson and Graham Crowden.
Previously Posted: Although dates and venue
have yet to be confirmed, Agatha Christie's thriller, And
Then There Were None (previously entitled Ten Little
Indians) will be revived in London's West End this coming
October.
For this production, playwright Kevin Elyot draws exclusively
from the original 1939 novel as opposed to Christie's own stage
version or subsequent screen adaptations.
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Many will already be familiar with
the story - And Then There Were None remains Christie's
best-selling individual title in the UK - of ten strangers, apparently
with nothing in common, who are lured to an exclusive island mansion
by the mysterious UN Owen.
Over dinner, a voice on a gramophone record accuses each guest
of harbouring a guilty and terrible secret. Later that same evening,
one of the party is found murdered. And that, as the title suggests,
is just the beginning......
Over the past five years, Chorion, which owns the rights to the
Christie estate, has successfully relaunched two of her other
works, Marple and Poirot, bringing them in line
with the 21st century - in much the same way as Shakespeare has
been reinvented for successive generations.
This new adaptation of And Then There Were None is the
first theatrical piece to be given the treatment. It follows a
four-year moratorium on any stage productions - with the exception
of The Mousetrap, which is not controlled by Chorion
- while the work was developed.
Christie's contribution to literature is phenominal. She wrote
80 novels (an average of two every year for most of her life),
short story collections, 19 plays, six romance novels (under the
name of Mary Westmacott), two books of poetry, a children's book
and two autobiographical works.
Even now, almost 30 years after her death in 1976, she remains
the world's most popular novelist. And with the total sales of
books now registering two billion, she is outranked only by Shakespeare
and The Bible.
Her other work, The Mousetrap, has an equally impressive
statistic. Now in its 53rd year, it's the world's longest-running
play.
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