Emile Littler – Ingliando

On this day, Agatha Christie’s stage play “The Mousetrap” opened at the Ambassadors Theatre in London’s West End after a brief pre-West End tour starting on 6th October at the Theatre Royal in Nottingham. The play is a classic whodunit murder mystery with a twist ending which the audience is traditionally asked not to reveal on leaving the theatre. Much to the surprise of both Christie and the producer, Peter Saunders, the play was destined to become the longest-running West End show ever, stopping only once, for just over a year, during the Covid pandemic in 2020. The play began life as a short radio play written as a birthday present for Queen Mary and was originally broadcast on 30 May 1947 under the name “Three Blind Mice”. Later, it had to be renamed at the insistence of Emile Littler, who had produced a play called Three Blind Mice in the West End before the Second World War.