“A Mental Kink”: Agatha Christie’s Zero Sum Game

Most of Agatha Christie’s Towards Zero is a perfect paragon of the British whodunit. In the first act, eight Brits assemble in the drawing room of Lady Tressilian’s (Michele Schultz) seaside manor perched atop a cliff in (according to the Playbill) Cornall (not Cornwall), United Kingdom in the summer of 1956. Apparently, the elderly woman has hosted annual seasonal gatherings of – relatives or friends (along with a household helper, Mary Aldin, portrayed with the right touch of annoyed servitude by Katyana Rocker-Cook) – at Gull’s Point of her guests for decades; for some, since childhood. However, this year’s get-together is fraught with tension.

Athletic Neville Strange (Christopher Franciosa), the epitome of an upper class Englishman, attends with his new, young wife Kay Strange (Kristin Towers-Rowles) and with his recently divorced ex-wife, Audrey Strange (Holly Sidell). This causes tempers to flare, especially Kay’s, who jealously observes how solicitous her husband seems to be of his former wife. Adding to this combustible mix is the reappearance of Thomas Royde (Jeremy Schaye), a former habitue of Tressilian’s shindigs, who hankers after Audrey and is making a return engagement to the meet-ups after having worked for seven years at a rubber plantation in what’s called “Malaya” (now Malaysia). Murder most foul rocks the supposedly genteel gathering.

Based on her 1944 novel, Christie adapted Towards Zero into a play in 1956 with Gerald Verner. Act I is, for the most part, a by-the-numbers murder mystery. Aficionados of this genre are likely to find the plot and acting to be absolutely spot on (even if only two of the thesps actually hail from the U.K.). Those who are not fans of the form may find this production to be creaky and dull.

However, after the intermission, things pick up as Superintendent Battle (David Hunt Stafford, who is also Theatre 40’s Artistic/Managing Director, depicts this veteran of five Christie novels) and his sidekick Inspector Leach (played by Hisato Masuyama, who was born in Japan and has his character speak in a thick Scottish accent) enter to find out, well, whodunit? Following genre conventions, there is the obligatory scene when Battle and Leach grill the suspects in ye olde drawing room, and finally deduce who they believe committed the crime.

But then Towards Zero heads off towards terra infirma, to an unknown destination, with ingenuous plot twists I didn’t see coming that threw me for a loop. Battle and Mathew Treves (John Combs, who recently costarred in Theatre 40’s One Moment of Freedom), an 80-ish solicitor and longtime friend of Lady Tressilian, crack the case to apprehend the real culprit. There are some onstage fisticuffs, but in keeping with those refined British manners, no handcuffs, let alone pistols, are ever deployed (unlike in our Yankee Doodle Dandy shoot-’em-ups).

Agatha Christie was a shrewd observer of human psychology. I don’t know what she intended in 1944 when Towards Zero was first published, but by 1956, the British Empire was in steep decline, and the Suez Crisis took place that year. The play may be a critique of the imperial mindset of what Noël Coward called “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” as the sun finally set on the empire that the sun was never supposed to go down upon. This may be the “mental kink” that Battle suspects the murderer has.

Craig Hissong skillfully directs his ensemble, some of who are bewigged by hair/makeup designer Judi Lewin and garbed in period attire by costume designer Michael Mullin, who also plays Ted Latimer, a would-be rival to Neville sniffing around after the young, attractive Kay. Jeff G. Rack’s set design imbues the stage with the appropriate sense of the ideal English drawing room.

There are the usual red herrings in the first act to throw theatergoers off of the scent, but Act II has more twists and turns than the road to Hana. They are really delicious, keeping audience members guessing, and make seeing this murder mystery worthwhile and jolly good fun, an enjoyable zero sum game of wits and twits. Tally-ho!

Towards Zero is being presented Thursdays through Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 2:00 p.m. through October 22 at Theatre Forty, 241 S. Moreno Drive, in the Mary Levin Cutler Theatre (same venue, new name), Beverly Hills, CA 90212. The venue is on the campus of Beverly Hills High School. Free parking is available in the garage. Ticket info: (310)364-3606; http://theatre40.org.