Agatha Christie’s Love From A Stranger, directed by Lucy Bailey, will be coming to Milton Keynes Theatre from Tuesday (July 3).
Be careful who you wish for…
A whirlwind romance with a handsome and charming stranger sweeps Cecily Harrington off her feet and she recklessly abandons her old life to settle in the remote and blissful surroundings of a country cottage.
However, her newfound love is not all that he seems…
Electric with suspense and with a shocking twist, this edge-of-your-seat, rarely seen thriller by the UK’s greatest crime writer is rediscovered in a brand new production by Lucy Bailey designed by Mike Britton.
To research the work, and find her way around the labyrinth of psychopathy, Lucy immersed herself in the grizzliest literature and the most gruesome films and TV dramas.
“The way Agatha Christie explores the mind of someone who has the capacity to deceive is truly exciting,” she says. “She must have done so much reading about it. I don’t know how she did it.”
So how did she do it? “She was incredibly interested in people,” says James Prichard, Christie's great-grandson.
“If she was in a restaurant she would be listening to every conversation around her. She has an incredibly unfair reputation for creating cardboard cut-out characters. She realised what makes people tick. She explored it to the extremes. In her view all of us could really be a murderer. What she’s exploring is what tips people to that point.
“I refer to her as a genius because I think she was one. We’ve got recordings of her dictating the books. It’s like an audiobook. She could speak these books fully formed from her head without pausing, without making mistakes.”
In other words, she was the Mozart of murder. But with this gripping drama she keeps audiences guessing. Bailey’s prediction is that “audiences go to the pub talking about it.”
Love From a Stranger is not a whodunit, but a whodunwhat.
To book tickets click here
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