Few plays have a history quite as mysterious or as long as The Mousetrap. Agatha Christie's legendary murder mystery has been keeping audiences on the edge of their seats for more than seven decades, with 30,000 performances and counting. So, whatdunnit?

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From Three Blind Mice to The Mousetrap

Before we cast a magnifying glass on this epic success story, let's go back to 1947, when Agatha Christie wrote a short radio play called Three Blind Mice as a birthday present for Queen Mary.

Broadcast on 30 May, the story was partly inspired by the real-life case of Dennis O'Neill, a young boy who died after suffering abuse while in foster care. Christie later transformed the story for the stage, but there was already a problem: Three Blind Mice had been used as the title of an earlier West End play. Thus, The Mousetrap was born!

The play made its stage debut at the Theatre Royal in Nottingham on 6 October 1952, directed by Peter Cotes. After touring several theatres across the UK, including stops in Oxford, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Leeds and Birmingham, it finally arrived in London on 25 November 1952 at the Ambassadors Theatre, with Richard Attenborough playing Detective Sergeant Trotter and his wife, Sheila Sim, as Mollie Ralston... but nobody could have guessed just how long the case would remain open.

The longest-running play in the world

Christie herself certainly didn't expect The Mousetrap to become a household name. Producer Peter Saunders predicted that it might run for 14 months, while Christie apparently thought even eight months would be optimistic!

In September 1957, The Mousetrap became the longest-running straight play in West End history. Its milestone performances soon began piling up: 1,000 in 1955, 5,000 in 1964, 10,000 in 1976, and so on.

By 2022, more than 10 million people had seen the production in London alone.

Everyone's A Suspect

What exactly has kept audiences coming back for more?

The Mousetrap is set in Monkswell Manor, an isolated guesthouse cut off from the outside world by a snowstorm. Its collection of guests quickly becomes considerably less cosy when a murder takes place. Suddenly, everyone is under suspicion.

There's Mollie and Giles Ralston, the young couple running the guesthouse; Christopher Wren, an eccentric and mysterious young man; Mrs Boyle; retired Major Metcalf; Miss Casewell; the suspicious Mr Paravicini; and Detective Sergeant Trotter, who arrives to investigate. Of course, the accusations fly as quickly as a suspect changes their story. It's classic Christie, and a formula that never goes out of style.

The Infamous Twist

It's a twist so worth keeping under wraps that, at the end of every performance, audiences are asked not to reveal the identity of the murderer to anyone outside the theatre. It's one of the most famous traditions in theatre.

Christie herself was famously unhappy when the endings of her works were revealed in reviews, so keeping the killer's identity under lock and key has always been an important part of the experience. So if you know whodunnit, don't say a word!

No sign of closing the case

More than 70 years after its debut, The Mousetrap remains one of theatre's greatest mysteries.

Its secret formula isn't particularly complicated: lock a group of suspicious characters in one location, throw in a murder, scatter a few clues and red herrings, and let the audience play detective.

But perhaps the real trick is that audiences still want to solve it. The Mousetrap has proved that a good mystery never gets old.

So, are you clever enough to catch the killer? There's only one way to find out!