See How They Run, review: a delightfully absurd Mousetrap send-up that has its cheese and eats it

Getting The Mousetrap into cinemas is a game that’s defeated every producer who’s tried. Blame Agatha Christie’s distaste for adaptations, which yielded a clause she insisted on when she sold the rights: no film of the play was ever allowed to shoot until six months after it closed. Famously, of course, that never happened. Even devious old Christie could hardly have dreamed that 28,000 West End performances would keep the identity of the killer safely off our screens to this day. The people behind See How They Run, with its mousetrap-adjacent title, have craftily figured out how to make the next best thing: a jolly, winking, and delightfully absurd send-up.  We open outside the Ambassadors Theatre in 1953, with the mystery wrapping its 100th performance. Right before the curtain, a telegram drops from Agatha explaining she won’t make the party after all, but has sent a big cake. Within 10 minutes, someone’s dead in the dressing room.  Let alone whodunit, I’m not even divulging who gets done in, because that’s an impish sting in itself. The plot specifically revolves around Christie’s contract stipulations, as well as the true story she based her play on. It also remembers the first actor to play Sgt Trotter – none other than Dickie Attenborough, who’s rendered here in a peach of an impersonation by Harris Dickinson, both wicked and affectionate. The usual suspects haughtily assemble: glam impresario Petula Spencer (Ruth Wilson), dandyish playwright Mervyn (David Oyelowo) and the actual producer who fatefully signed on that dotted line, John Woolf (a furtive Reece Shearsmith). Adrien Brody, raising toasts in his Wes Anderson glad-rags, is one Leo Köpernick, the American movie director Woolf wants to hire, who thinks the play’s a relic and sets about raising hell.