Verdict is an interesting one, which deals with a lot of difficult topics, not least being the apparently cold-blooded "mercy killing" of a seriously disabled woman. I can't help but feel like this must have come from either a personal incident or a news report. Unusually for these plays the backstory is a lot less personal and developed than the characters in previous plays have been, instead seeming more coldly factual. In part perhaps that's because the leading man in the play, husband to the victim, is supposed to have limited interpersonal skills which are focussed mainly in a rather naive set of personal morals and ideals. But the other characters feel starkly two-dimensional, in a way that would make sense if they were lifted from a reported story. Alternatively if it is related to something that happened to someone Christie knew, she may have wanted to keep the characters a little bit bland to avoid identifying people.
I found myself uncomfortably relating to a lot of the facets of the situation in the story. I've been through a period of chronic illness, but I'm also all too familiar with the subsequent problem of not understanding why people won't believe the truth. The twists in the story are pretty much entirely dark and depressing, and the very close of the last scene feels almost jarring in bringing just a sniff of hope that not every single person left alive is going to have an unhappy ending. Perhaps that's something that would come across more smoothly in performance, but as it is I almost feel like leaving the whole thing as a tragedy would do more justice to the story than the ending as it stands.
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