Setting The Mousetrap

Aside from the many bad puns directing Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap will be in good taste.
The ultimate in country house English murder mystery productions this is an exciting challenge.
But first some background
The play has been running for 60 years and over 25,000 performances in London.  The old rules stipulated that while the West End production is running only 1 other show can be performed anywhere in the world and all productions must be professional.
Some time in 2010 some of the aspects of obtaining rights changed and every highschool in the US seems to have put it on badly.

Canterbury Repertory Theatre was to have the first NZ production, scheduled for Nov 2010. But the earth moved, the world changed, the theatres collapsed and somewhere between 6 and 10 productions have been held up and down NZ, including a High School in South Canterbury. Perhaps the biggest insult was the Australian production that toured and in their publicity gave away a part of the mystery presumably because they were devoid of other ways to be noticed.
As there are only 4 remaining theatres in Christchurch I'm aware of, we're performing at a non theatre venue: St Michael and All Angels' Anglican church. This is fantastic as it looks like an old Monastery in some of the features so that will work well.  More on the venue another time.
Our performance dates:  11 till something later in April.

This production.
At the time of writing it's the first week of rehearsals. The auditions threw up actors that took my breath away. I went in with some ideas of who and what I wanted and this was thrown to the wind. I will return to this as well in another post.
First rehearsal as Wednesday. I made the decision to start the rehearsals at the end not the beginning of the play and it worked very well, apart from one actor in hospital. I've never seen or heard of rehearsals starting at the end of the play but given the issue of how characters need to react to each other this seemed a good place to start. 
I wanted to make sure we all know and understand where we're going and get the appropriate equivocal, enigmatic or complex reactions identified before we go back and sort out Act 1 through. And to know the character arcs.  When I was doing one play some years ago I remembver not getting to the second act till halfway through rehearsals and not having a full script I had no idea how it ended.
Today I met the woman doing hair and make-up and I also met with the designers for the poster and art work.  Faith had a lot of ideas and the look for hair and make-up is promising.
The brilliant ideas the designers (G&A Nelson) presented was hinged on a Noir theme.  Given the aim is to have the audience's spines tingle this is looking like a great direction.
I'll come back to Repertory and how good they are, and the cast and these issues later but this is a great start.  Angela the production manager has been fantastic and I just need to get her to pencil in the 'what the hell are we doing and why?' week in sometime in March. Only pencil though it might not be necessary.