Mousetrap snaps open in Dublin

IMAGINE being gifted the royalties of the world’s longest running play on your ninth birthday.

When Mathew Prichard was given The Mousetrap by his grandmother, Agatha Christie, nobody could predict it would be such a huge success. The touring production of the classic whodunit comes to the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre this week (Jun 25-29). As Prichard says, his grandmother thought the play “might have a nice little run of a year and a half”. She had no idea that she was handing on this incredible institution which celebrated 60 years on London’s West End last November.

In the cosy bar of St Martin’s Theatre in London’s West Street, where the resident production of the play is performed, Prichard, Christie’s only grandchild, says that his inheritance “has been liberating to an extent. Over the course of its history, it has achieved an awful lot, apart from being just about money.”