The Unexpected Guest (play)

The Unexpected Guest
Written by	Agatha Christie
Date premiered	12 August 1958
Original language	English

The Unexpected Guest is a 1958 play by crime writer Agatha Christie.

The play opened in the West End at the Duchess Theatre on 12 August 1958 after a previous try-out at the Bristol Hippodrome. It was directed by Hubert Gregg.

On a foggy night, Michael Starkwedder enters the home of the Warwicks through a window in the study. He finds the dead body of Richard Warwick, and finds Warwick's wife, Laura, holding a gun that supposedly killed him. Despite the murder being obvious, and overwhelming evidence pointing towards it, Starkwedder does not believe she killed him, and she soon tells him she's innocent.

The two decide to place the blame on an enemy from the past, MacGregor, a man whose son was run over by Richard while he was drunk. As the story progresses, the two fake the fact that they were just finding out about the murder, and others in the house were introduced. It is revealed Laura was having an affair due to Richard's cruel nature, and was vouching for the man she was cheating with when she claimed to have killed Richard. But there are other suspects as well – Warwick's mother, his simple half-brother, the sinister Angell or the apparently goody-goody Miss Bennett.

The action of the play takes place in Richard Warwick's study in South Wales near the Bristol Channel.

ACT I

ACT II

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Philip Hope-Wallace of The Guardian reviewed the opening night in the issue of 13 August 1958 when he said, "The Unexpected Guest is standard Agatha Christie. It has nothing as ingenious or exciting as the court scene and double twist of Witness for the Prosecution but it kept last night's audience at the Duchess Theatre in a state of stunned uncertainty; guessing wrongly to the last. There are one or two irritating factors: an outsize red herring in the shape of what, naturally, one may not disclose; also one of those corpse's mothers who say, in so many words, "Inspector, I have not many years to live…" and embark on enormities of tedious repetition."
Mr Hope-Wallace said that the corpse was, "impeccably played with, no doubt, full assistance of the Method, by Philip Newman" and concluded, "I have known more tension and greater surprise from other of Mrs. Christie's classics but this is quite a decent specimen of her craft."

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