The Shaw Festival makes an open-and-shut case for Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution

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• Title: Witness for the Prosecution
• Written by: Agatha Christie
• Director: Alistair Newton
• Actors: Patrick Galligan, Marla McLean
• Company: Shaw Festival
• Venue: Royal George Theatre
• City: Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.
• Year: Runs to Oct. 13, 2024

Critic’s Pick

I had 99 years to figure out what was coming in Witness for the Prosecution – and Agatha Christie still outsmarted me.

The Shaw Festival has kicked off its season with a stylishly self-aware production of the popular English writer’s 1953 courtroom drama based on a 1925 short story of hers. It had me gasping in delighted shock at the secrets revealed at its ending.

Making a strong case for all the exposition-heavy dialogue that leads up to Christie’s climax, however, is director Alistair Newton.

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He’s taken an entertaining and expressionistic tack on what could easily seem a chatty procedural from a bygone age when audiences expected three acts, one that makes the dark comedy already there in the material pop and highlights what a shrewd social satirist Christie could be in addition to a master crafter of twisty mystery.

As Newton teases in his director’s note: “What is suggested about a society whose most archetypal representation of justice is not a blind woman, but rather a blindfolded woman?”

Witness for the Prosecution opens in the chambers of Sir Wilfrid Robarts, QC – a lawyer played by Patrick Galligan with just the right amount of self-regarding swagger – and his easily shocked associate Mr. Mayhew (now crucial Shaw company member Kristopher Bowman).

Leonard Vole (Andrew Lawrie), a soft-spoken and naive young man, has showed up at Sir Wilfrid’s office, concerned that he is about to be arrested for murder.

Miss Emily French, a rich “elderly” woman whom he only recently met after helping her cross the street, has been killed shortly after one of his friendly visits – and, as it turns out, he’s set to inherit her entire estate. (I put elderly in quotation marks because the victim died at the ripe old age of 56 – which plays as ironic today, and I suspect must have from the start.)

The circumstantial evidence is not in Leonard’s favour – but he does have an alibi. Romaine (Marla McLean), his German wife, saw him arrive home at 9:25 p.m. – and the coroner has made clear that the murder took place later just after that.

The problems are not only that Romaine is a “foreigner” and a woman – two categories of humanity that Sir Wilfred believes play badly with juries and that he seems to be somewhat prejudiced against as well – but that she also moves through the world in a very mysterious manner.

In a production otherwise black and white, Romaine enters Sir Wilfred’s office in a dark green outfit with a long cigarette holder – briefly pausing to hold a femme-fatale pose in a shaft of light amid suspenseful music made to sound as if it were sampled from an old movie by composer Lyon Smith.

In all three of her entrances, in three differently coloured but otherwise similar, striking outfits designed by Judith Bowden, McLean does a wonderful job of playing her character on a symbolic level that highlights the different, flatly stereotypical ways in which a woman like her might be perceived in the male-dominated English world of law offices and courtrooms.

The lighting, set and performance styles will conjure film noir for many: a secretary (Fiona Byrne) sashays through all her entrance and exits, while a detective (Martin Happer) wears a fedora at an angle that obscures half his face.

But noir had its roots in the stark symbolism of German expressionism on stage and screen – and Newton and his designers seems to draw on those traditions as much as Hollywood’s cynical crime capers.

Crucial to making it all work is an absence of the jokeyness that can mar so many noir-inspired stagings and come across as sketch comedy or parody. This is a frequently funny production, but the characters take everything seriously and performances are all pitched on the same plane. (Shawn Wright is a particular treat as an interjecting judge who is well versed on precedent but ignorant of basic terms from the feminine or domestic sphere such as “cat brush” and “strawberry blonde”.)

Witness for the Prosecution can be read as a damning indictment of a law system not so different from our own that prioritizes the performance of justice above all – and how easily that can be subverted by those with a sense of theatre. What made me feel like a woman had written the play was how smartly it interrogates structural sexism in society – and demonstrates how prejudice can be subverted and turned into a smokescreen.

Indeed, I went into the show thinking “Ho, hum, an old chestnut!” and came out realizing how much my own casual dismissal of the old authoress, who always listed her occupation on documents as “housewife,” allowed her to set me up and deliver a suckerpunch.