Chilling tension in a confined space
The English countryside, 1950s.
A young couple in love throws themselves into entrepreneurship and opens a boarding house in an inherited mansion. Just as they have welcomed the first guests, the police arrive to warn everyone: the next victim of the London murderer is in the mansion.
Then a snowstorm surrounds the place and the guests are trapped in the mansion.
“There will be psychological tension in a space from which there is no escape,” says Miika Muranen, the director of Mousetrap.
The Mousetrap is a classic thriller written by Agatha Christie, which premiered in 1952. Christie had estimated that there would be enough spectators for perhaps eight months, but The Mousetrap turned out to be an audience magnet and the longest-running play.
In the autumn of 2022, the play celebrated its 70th anniversary, during which it had been performed almost 29,000 times in London alone to ten million spectators.
“The mousetrap is so well-known that it can be considered the Hamlet of suspense plays or the Sound of Music,” Muranen says.
He suggests that the reason for the popularity is Agatha Christie’s reputation as an unsurpassed master of suspense and, on the other hand, that the play shows that Christie lives up to her reputation. The viewers are skilfully misled and the outcome is difficult to guess.
Building psychological tension
Muranen thinks that The Mousetrap is often shown as a quintessentially English feel-good detective novel that can be smiled at in the audience.
In the Helsinki City Theatre’s version, however, Muranen wants to find the person behind the stereotypical characters and work with the actors to find out how to make the characters as psychologically complex as possible.
“There are funny lines written in the play, but our intention is not to twist the characters into comics, but to make the people as deep and real as possible, so that the audience believes in the characters and feels like they are involved in the events of the manor.”
Together with the design team, Muranen has wanted to create a visually elevated world where everything looks as good as possible from the outside. “When terrible things start to happen, the exterior starts to deteriorate. The characters are not necessarily what they have pretended to be.”
Muranen also has experience of making suspense plays as an actor, which he trained as a director after graduating. In his graduation project at the Theatre Academy at the Seinäjoki City Theatre, Muranen played a murderer in a thriller.
“As an actor, it was great to experience the reactions brought by the excitement from the audience on stage. And with that experience, I also know the challenges that this genre has. Being serious can easily lead to unintentional comedy, and it is important to laugh away those moments in rehearsals so that the tormenting nature of the story is true for both the actor and the viewer in the performance situation,” Muranen says.
As the director of Mousetrap, he is fascinated by the fact that viewers must be able to be fooled so that the murderer is not revealed too early. In a detective story, the same mathematical precision is needed to build suspense as in farces to create comedy.
“It’s a wonderful challenge to see how to create an atmosphere of mystery, cause tension and get the viewer to believe even the wrong things,” Muranen says.
Escape from everyday life
Muranen admits that he is a big consumer of detective stories and says that there must have been one murder before going to bed. Based on the supply of streaming services and the popularity of detective novels, Muranen is not alone in his preferences.
“Maybe now that the world situation is so chaotic, people get satisfaction when something is decided and solved,” he thinks.
According to Muranen, you can experience even more excitement at the theatre than at home. In scary places, you can’t go to the fridge, pet the cat or look at your phone.
“The situation is much more authentic when you are locked in the same space. But the viewer doesn’t have to worry that The Mousetrap is brutal. We are not playing with horror elements here,” Muranen assures.
He believes that the fact that the events take place in England in the 1950s also distances him appropriately.
“When we move in a world of the past, where not everything can be solved immediately with the help of mobile phones and DNA tests, there is not a single element of everyday realism involved.”
On the contrary, Muranen promises that the performance will be a perfect escape from everyday life.
“This is a great detective story in a closed space, where the viewer gets to experience chilling suspense and at the same time solve a crime and play the Miss Marple or Hercule Poiro of their own life.
Text by Ida Henritius.