Arsenic and Old Lace opened on Broadway in 1941 and ran for 1,437 performances. In London it opened in 1942 and ran for 1,332 performances. In between it was transferred to the screen with Cary Grant, Priscilla Lane, Raymond Massey, Peter Lorre and others. Strange, perhaps, that its most famous incarnation is, in the minds of theatre buffs, its least effective due to the grand guignol acting-style adopted in the film. The programme for this production suggests that a good performance needs much less over-acting and more subtle comic timing.
      It was a pity the cast did not read the programme note, as it impossible not to imagine the portrayal by Sylvester McCoy was lifted straight from Peter Lorre, and that Andrew Havill was not trying to out-do Cary Grant in hurling himself about the set in stage-frustration.
      That said, the production was very enjoyable and was moved with pace. The twists and turns of the plot, and the outrageously unlikely mad-cap characters, such as the two old sisters, Abby and Martha Brewster and the delusional son Teddy, were so elegantly presented that the plot seemed almost plausible. The play's almost psychological point about hidden crimes beneath respectable veneers underlay everything and added piquancy to the various tea-scenes, that must never become wine-scenes without another outbreak of 'yellow fever' occurring. The glorious misapprehension of the police, and the neat way the old ladies are escorted off to a life-time in a secure sunshine home is both one of the joys of the play and one that was underplayed on stage and thus much more effective.
      Elaine Harper, the daughter, frustrated by the antics of fiancé and watched over by her over-protective clergyman father, was sometimes too drawn into the over-heated world of her beloved Mortimer, but her prim frocks seemed just starched enough to stop her going into over-acting free-fall.
      Arsenic and Old Lace is a farce with resonances. Like all good thrillers murder is real in the play but not at all real outside it. Without this clear distinction such gruesomeness could not become funny. Getting the numbers of bodies in the cellar correct, or the outsmarting of the gangsters (real-life killers) by the 'innocent' old ladies and Teddy would not be funny but sick. However, as a comedy of manners the plausibility of the poisoning sisters and their hood-winking Rev Harper and the police with their crinolines and tea-cakes carries a deeper echo of that "nice Miss Smith" who murdered her lover (or did she?). The play points up we see what we want to see, but in the end all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Ironically, a good murder mystery must have a happy ending. It is a utopia. Wrong-doing is righted, often in the most ingenious. But here fate does the righting and the good-man, Mortimer Brewster, seizes what the gods present. In the murders of Poirot and Miss Marple, the gods descend in human form and right the wrongs of the world.
      It is not so much comic timing Arsenic and Old Lace requires (though it does require this) as a suggestion that something more important is being played out than a ridiculous farce. Despite the rushing around, this production does manage in the end to convey this and was thus very enjoyable.
Roderick Swanston