Day 42: The Hollow, by Agatha Christie (Day 41 was spent travelling and not much else)

Attempting to get back on track in time for the new year, today's play was The Hollow. More little twists in this one than the previous Christie plays, and a lot of obvious nods to genre clichés before turning them aside and going in a different direction - the victim didn't die instantly, the name he cried out in his death throes wasn't the killer, the butler was accused but didn't do it... and so on. I continue to find her style wonderfully easy to read and follow. Once again there was a huge amount of detail put into describing the set, but the entirety of the action remains in that one place and everything listed is eventually required by at least a couple of lines of dialogue during the course of the story.

Once again, Christie has written in complex and interesting backstories for all of the characters, some of them clearly designed to be red herrings to the mystery. On in particular - an apparently "conviniently timed" proposal turns out to be genuinely meant rather than a handy cover story as the other characters suspect. Yet another cliché twisted.

There are a couple of characters who would appeal to me to play, in particular Midge and Gerda, who seem to have far deeper characters than almost anyone else on stage even notices in them. Playing with those layers is always interesting, and while it's reasonably common to see those deeper motivations shared with the audience but not the other characters, here there's a lot of depth revealed very late on which explains earlier actions, so playing the character would require having that extra layer hidden under the surface all the way through, maybe showing in the way certain lines are said or a meaningful glance, there to see if you know what to look for but not so obvious that the reveal is lost.