Murder by cliché

The best way to treat this all-too faithful stage adaptation of Agatha Christie's famous mystery story, in which 10 visitors to an island houseparty are one by one bumped off, would have been to send it up skyhigh.

For these days, it is hard to take Christie-land seriously in the theatre. Dame Agatha's fairy-tale versions of 1930s middle England, where far-from-decent, well-born people come up against murder, blood and the odd detective in gorgeous country houses, complete with flocks of loyal servants, appear more than faintly ridiculous.

As for the way Christie's characters speak, it seems scarcely more natural than cats walking on stilts in its stiff, not to say frozen, upper-lip blandness. For example: "Is anything the matter?" "It's Mrs Rogers. She's dead." "Oh my God, how?"

When it comes to cheap thrills, or at least spooky ones, Kevin Elyot's adaptation, far from fresh or inventive, leaves me unthrilled.

Even when Dr Armstrong's head - which had gone missing with the rest of him - turns up bloodily in a bag, it's hard to resist a mild smile. When Sam Crane's camp, poisoned Mr Marston vomits his way to death, the audience cannot take him seriously. They laugh. They applaud. Unsurprisingly, director Steven Pimlott tries to energise his production with heavy shots of melodrama.

Hysterical seagulls - or are they vultures? - make a frightful din when the latest corpse is discovered. Thunder bursts out as loud as on judgment day.

Mark Thompson's unlovely design for the island mansion boasts a vast, central pillar, stoney walls, Art Deco windows and dull pictorial backdrops. Sections of the set, though, dully revolve, slide and advance.

An air of unreality variously blows hot and cool. The scene is a party in a mansion off the Devon coast, to which 10 single people have unbelievably accepted an invitation from an unknown, absent host. After a voice on a short-playing record has accused them all of being unrecognised murderers, a revenge plot unfolds.

The visitors are variously killed with indecent speed, according to the dictates of the song, Ten Little Soldier Boys. As each one dies, another of the toy soldiers on display vanishes.

The situation ought be fraught with dread, tension and alarm. Yet the wooden characters played by actors mainly so wooden that the worm must have got into them stir up nothing more than apathy.