About the Play:

Dial "M" for Murder is a classic thriller by Frederick Knott. A retired tennis pro plots the murder of his own wife – but when she turns the tables on her attempted assailant, she is convicted of murder. Can the police detective who brought her to trial now decipher the clues that will save her life? The play that inspired Hitchcock's suspense classic weaves an ever tightening web of danger and deception.

Dial "M" for Murder is the story of a young Englishman who plots the almost "perfect murder" of his young wife. Former tennis champ Tony Wendice has married his wife, Margot, for her money and now plans to murder her for the same reason. Margot is carrying on an affair with Marc, an American writer who specializes in murder mysteries. Tony, it appears, arranges the perfect murder. He blackmails a small-time con artist he used to know into strangling Margot, and arranges a brilliant alibi for himself. But his plan goes terribly wrong … the would-be murderer gets murdered and the victim survives. This doesn't baffle the husband: he sees his hit man's death as an opportunity to replace the perfect crime, with the perfect cover-up, which may have his wife convicted for the murder of the man who tried to murder her, and that is what almost happens. Luckily, the police inspector from Scotland Yard and a young man who is in love with the wife discover the truth, and in a scene of almost unbearable suspense they trap the husband into revealing his guilt, thus freeing Margot.

Dial "M" for Murder proved to be a durable thriller in its television, theatre and film versions. Originally a live BBC television production, the play was an immediate hit in 1952 at the Westminster Theatre in the West End of London, a highly successful 16 month run on Broadway at the Plymouth Theatre followed, then a movie filmed in Hollywood by Alfred Hitchcock. It won Frederick Knott the highly-coveted Edgar Award (the 'Oscar' of Crime) for best mystery play from the Mystery Writers of America in 1953. More than fifty years later, Dial M for Murder is still performed around the world, a staple of regional, high school, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 1 female, 5 male

What people say:

"…original and remarkably good theatre — quiet in style but tingling with excitement underneath." — The New York Times

"It's a holiday for the whodunit fans, and, as such, it couldn't be more welcome ... one of those happy cat-and-mouse melodramas which establishes [such] a wonderfully innocent belief in its macabre and complicated goings-on [that] no matter how many hollow footsteps are heard to pound along the hallway, no matter how many garden windows are bashed in, the play's sleek surface of credulity never cracks." — New York Herald-Tribune

About the Playwright:

Frederick Knott (1916-2002) was an English playwright and screenwriter known for his ingeniously complex, crime-related plots. Born in Hankow, China to English missionaries, he earned a law degree from Cambridge University. He served in the British Army from 1939 to 1946, and eventually moved to the United States. He wrote three enormously successful stage thrillers, Dial M for Murder, Write Me a Murder, and Wait Until Dark. They had long runs on Broadway and in the West End of London, and two were later made into films.