The real mystery in See How They Run is its mishandling of The Mousetrap

: a spoof whodunnit based on the idea that a killer is on the loose, apparently to prevent Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap being turned into a movie.

The film is escapist fun and Mark Chappell’s script bulges with theatrical in-jokes. The title is identical to that of a 1945 farce by Philip King that contains the famous line, “Sergeant, arrest most of these vicars.” The putative Mousetrap movie is to be directed by Leo Köpernick, which I take to be a deliberate echo of Carl Zuckmayer’s play The Captain of Köpenick.

While Ronan is terrific, I was irked by the film’s lack of theatrical accuracy. One reason why The Mousetrap took off was that itin one of London’s smallest theatres, the Ambassadors, which seats 453. In the movie, however, scenes from The Mousetrap are shot in the Old Vic, which has a capacity of over 900, and the audience congregate in the foyer of the Dominion which can house nearly 3,000 people.

I was also puzzled by the film’s pick-and-mix approach to its characters. Three of them are identifiably real people: Richard Attenborough and Sheila Sim, who were in the original Mousetrap cast, and John Woolf, who planned to make a movie once the play closed. Why, though, is The Mousetrap’s producer a fictive female rather than Peter Saunders, who presented numerous Christie plays? Saunders, a tweedy English clubman, was a very engaging character.

See How They Run is a perfectly pleasant movie but it would be even better if it was set in a small-scale theatre and caught the precise flavour of the early 50s.

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