About the Play:

The Unexpected Guest is a full-length melodrama by Agatha Christie. Lost in the fog, a stranger seeks refuge in a nearby house, only to find he's stumbled upon the scene of a murder. When the dead man's wife confesses to the crime, the unexpected guest agrees to provide her with an alibi in Agatha Christie's classic murder mystery. But who is he really protecting?

The Unexpected Guest is a thriller as well as a puzzler set in a foggy estate in Wales. When Michael Starkwedder, "The Unexpected Guest" of the title, enters an open door, he finds the dead body of Richard Warkwick with his wife Laura standing over him with a gun. But the woman is dazed and her confession unconvincing. So Michael decides to help the pretty widow concoct a wild story of how her husband was murdered. But, of course, all may not be as it seems in a Christie play. Is Laura telling the truth or is she covering up for someone? We are soon introduced to other members of the Warwick household, each of whom had a possible motive to send the despicable Richard Warwick to an early grave. So who really did it? Soon the police arrive to sort things out but as the ghosts of a past wrong begin to emerge, a tangled web of lies reveals family secrets and chilling motives, where the real murderer turns out to be the greatest mystery of all. The Unexpected Guest is as gripping and ingenious as you would expect from the Queen of Crime.

The Unexpected Guest premiered in 1958 at the Duchess Theatre in London and ran for 18 months. It has been staged many times by community theatres, regional repertory houses, and high schools.

Cast: 3 female, 7 male

What people say:

"You'll come out of The Unexpected Guest wondering how you missed it. Who did it, I mean. So clever is Agatha Christie's conjuring trick you'll spend the evening going back and forth from character to character, trying to determine who killed Richard Warwick." — The Spectator

"There is an ingenious display of suspects, as if lids were being taken off wells of depravity and hastily put back." — The Observer

"The impact is tremendous [...] Just when the murder seems solved [...] Miss Christie pulls her almighty knock out punch. I admit her complete victory." — The Evening Standard

"It kept last night's audience in a state of stunned uncertainty; guessing wrongly to the last." — The Guardian

"The impact is tremendous... Just when the murder seems solved ... Miss Christie pulls her almighty knock out punch. I admit her complete victory." — London Evening News

"Tantalizing ingenuity." — London Tatler

About the Playwright:

Agatha Christie (1890-1976) is known throughout the world as the Queen of Crime. Her books have sold over a billion copies in English with another billion in foreign languages. She is the most widely published author of all time and, in many languages, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. In a writing career that spanned more than half a century, Agatha Christie wrote 66 crime novels, 150 short story collections, over 20 plays, and six novels written under the name Mary Westmacott. Her work includes Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, and the genre-defining And Then There Were None. In addition several of her original works were adapted for the stage by third parties.