Review: AND THEN THERE WERE NONE at Arrow Rock Lyceum Theatre

Arrow Rock Lyceum Theatre moves toward the end of its season with a handsome, patiently wound production of Agatha Christie's “And Then There Were None”. The strongest reason to make the drive is the company assembled on that island, and audiences beyond Arrow Rock will have another opportunity to see much of it when the production transfers to The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis in March 2027.

Robyne Parrish directs a mystery that takes its time laying the trap and becomes considerably more gripping once all ten guests are inside it.

The Lyceum itself opened in 1961 and is one of Missouri's oldest professional regional theatres. Founded in a former 1872 Gothic Revival Baptist church, it now operates an intimate 416-seat theatre and draws more than 33,000 patrons annually to a village roughly two hours from either Kansas City or St. Louis. It is a serious operation in an improbable place.

Christie adapted the play in 1943 from her 1939 novel. Ten strangers are summoned to a house on an island off the English coast. Their hosts are nowhere to be found. A storm cuts them off from the mainland, and a recorded voice accuses each guest of responsibility for a death for which they were never punished. Then, one by one, they begin to die.

Readers familiar with the novel should know that Christie gave the stage version a different ending. Whatever you think you are walking in on, the evening still has somewhere else to go.

The ensemble is the production's great strength, and several performances give the evening its spine.

Amanda Brooke Lerner's Emily Brent is the finest work on the stage. Brent is rigid, pious and utterly certain of her own moral standing, and the role could easily tempt an actor into letting the audience know that she understands the joke of the character. Lerner never does. She plays Brent's conviction as completely genuine. Her certainty becomes both armor and indictment, making her considerably more unsettling (and considerably funnier at moments) than a caricature would be.

Jeffrey C. Wolf brings a judge's composure to Sir Lawrence Wargrave and anchors every room he stands in. Wargrave keeps trying to impose order and procedure on a situation rapidly abandoning both, and Wolf makes that instinct feel less like strategy than temperament.

Tim Jones is excellent as Philip Lombard, the guest who seems most at ease with the increasingly dangerous circumstances around him. Jones gives that enjoyment a hard edge rather than a charming one. Lombard may be one of the most capable people in the house, but Jones never asks the audience to mistake capability for virtue.

James FitzGerald's General Mackenzie provides the evening's quietest surprise. His long account of what happened to his wife's lover first arrives as the rambling of an old man who may have lost the thread, and FitzGerald lets it wander exactly as far as it needs to before it lands. The scene is a reminder that suspense does not always require speed.

Di Zhu plays Vera Claythorne with a guarded quality that makes her unusually difficult to read. As suspicion begins moving around the room, I found myself wondering more than once whether Vera knew considerably more than she was letting on.

Manon Halliburton makes a sharp impression as Mrs. Rogers, while Ken Martinez plays her husband, the increasingly strained butler charged with keeping an impossible household functioning. Adam Griffith is steady throughout as Dr. Armstrong, gradually revealing cracks in his strong façade as the night continues. His fight choreography also produces some genuinely tense moments of stage combat. Jared Joplin returns to the Lyceum as William Blore, with Trace Burchart as Anthony Marston and Rick Langdon as Fred Narracott.

Ryan Zirngibl's scenic design earns its applause. The drawing room dominates the stage, with a fireplace and the framed rhyme above it, the ten small figures arranged where both the characters and the audience can keep count. The entire upstage wall opens onto a window and balcony.

That balcony is the design's smartest gift to Parrish's staging. Characters can step outside for private conversations while life inside the house continues behind them, leaving the audience watching two things at once and never entirely certain which one deserves its attention. In a play where everyone is concealing something, a set that forces the audience to divide its attention is doing real dramatic work.

Parrish's staging understands that a mystery is a game played fairly or not at all. The deaths are positioned so that the answer is, at least in principle, available to us. Characters remain onstage and in view for long stretches, and more than once there is the tantalizing sense that, had you been watching the right person instead of the obvious one, you might have caught something. That feeling of having almost solved it is one of the genre's chief pleasures, and this production earns it honestly.

One late sequence, played in near-total darkness, is the production's most effective individual piece of stagecraft. Rather than simply withholding information, the darkness makes the audience acutely aware of how badly it wants to see. Joshua Williamson's lighting repeatedly understands a basic rule of suspense: what the audience is allowed to see matters just as much as what remains hidden.

The evening does take its time getting started. Christie spends the opening stretch delivering guests through the door and establishing relationships one by one. That is largely an inheritance from the script rather than a failure of the staging, although this production does not completely disguise the machinery. Once the full company is trapped inside the house together, however, the tension holds.

That reservation does not diminish what the Lyceum has accomplished here. This is a well-made, well-acted “And Then There Were None” from a company confident enough in Christie's machinery not to overplay it. The production does not wink at the material or apologize for the age of the puzzle. It simply assembles the pieces carefully and trusts them to work.

If you have never seen “And Then There Were None”, there is considerable pleasure in watching suspicion move from one end of the room to the other. If you know the novel but have never encountered Christie's stage adaptation, there is still a different ending waiting for you.

And if you miss it in Arrow Rock, this particular island will surface again: much of the production is scheduled to transfer to The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis in March 2027.

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