About the Play:

Winner of the 1955 New York Critics' Circle Award for Best Foreign Play

Witness for the Prosecution is a full-length dramatic thriller by Agatha Christie. A married man is accused of murdering a widow to inherit her wealth. His wife can prove can prove his innocence, but when she takes the stand she denies his alibi. Can he escape the hangman's noose? In a world where everyone seems to be harbouring a dark secret, Witness for the Prosecution will keep your audience guessing as this gripping courtroom drama unfolds before them.

Witness for the Prosecution is a compelling story of deceit, desire, murder, money and morality, innocence and guilt, heartbreak and most painful and dangerous of all, love. Only Agatha Christie could have conceived such a suspenseful thriller and then capped it with an uncanny triple flip ending. Befriended by a wealthy middle-aged woman, a young man spends many evenings with her. When she is found murdered, he is arrested as the prime suspect. In 1953 a guilty verdict will mean the gallows. Though he protests his innocence, the circumstantial evidence against him is damning. The more he says, the worse his case looks. His only alibi is that of his wife, but she viciously turns the tables when called to the witness stand and all but hangs him before a vindictive mystery woman appears with letters against the wife. After the man is freed, it is revealed that mystery woman is actually the wife. She discredited and perjured herself because she felt that direct testimony on her husband's behalf would not have been sufficient to free him. When he turns his back on his wife and goes off with another woman, we realize that he was the murderer. He does not get away it, for there is one turn of plot remaining. Witness for the Prosecution was a personal favourite of Agatha Christie's and is considered her theatrical masterpiece.

Witness for the Prosecution started life as a short story which Agatha Christie adapted into a successful stage play. The ending of the short story was changed because she felt the theatre needed something more visually dramatic and violent. The play opened in 1953 at The Winter Garden Theatre (now the Gillian Lynne Theatre) in London and ran for 468 performances in London before crossing to America where it enjoyed even greater success. The Broadway production ran a year and a half and won the New York Drama Critics' Circle award for the best foreign play. It's still enormously popular, and has been a staple of community theatres, regional repertory houses, and high schools since then.

Cast: 5 female, 8 male

What people say:

"It was one of my plays that I liked best myself. I was nearly as satisfied with that play as I have been with any." — Agatha Christie from her autobiography

"Undoubtedly Christie's best. A tour de force that will keep you guessing till the last second. Genius." — The Gazette

"A walloping success." — Herald Tribune

"Once more the Christie conjuring trick has come off. Once more we have been led down the garden path. Apart from being a clever puzzle, this is an extremely actable play." — The Daily Telegraph

"Packs plenty of surprise in its cargo of suspense." — Daily Mirror

"The play has all the usual advantages of Counsel in conflict, agonised outbreak in the dock, and back-answers from the witness-box. To these are added an ingenious appendix; the jury's verdict is only the beginning of a story that has as many twists as a pigtail." — The Observer

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.