By Joy Watters at Pitlochry Festival Theatre

NOW JOINING the repertoire at the theatre in the hills is Agatha Christie’s “lost” play which has only once been staged, in Canada a decade ago.

Due to open in London in 1931, the play was never performed and disappeared until a photocopy manuscript which had been sent to Calgary turned up.

One theory is the London theatre failed to stage the piece before the rights expired and it was simply forgotten.

There is a mystery, though, about who sent it across the Atlantic.

The play is given the full Pitlochry treatment with vast impressive sets, designed by Adrian Rees, recreating a baronial mansion with lots of antlers and suits of armour.

Before the curtain goes up a series of radio news broadcasts set the piece in 1926.

Featuring a large cast, several of whom are foreigners, it is not the traditional whodunit so beloved of Christie fans.

It is a mix of murder mystery with a dash of politics, a mention of power play for oil—how little things change—and turbulence in Eastern Europe.

It is not one of Christie’s best pieces. It was only her second play, and she did not sustain this sort of approach in her subsequent writing.

Fans of Christie may be interested to trace her development and see the start of her career.

Director John Durnin and his cast of 13 do their best but the writing does not really give them the chance to romp through it.

As a result, it is quite slow-moving, lasting nearly three hours with two intervals, when a more brisk pace is needed to sustain the audience’s interest.

The actors turn in their performances of old buffers, snooty butlers, mysterious foreigners and bright young things with some brio but it is quite a bewildering plot.

For example, there is something fishy about a French detective (Jonathan Coote) and maybe the clue is in his cod accent but then the other foreigners seem to have been tutored at the Clouseau School of Languages.

It is a trifle static and perhaps more movement would have really sparked the fire in Chimneys.