REVIEW: And Then There Were None – at the Festival Theatre, Malvern, from Monday, March 16 to Saturday, March 21, 2015.

IT’S the unplottable plotted by the ‘Queen of Crime’ which perfectly celebrates not only the 125th anniversary of her birth but also a decade of quality stage works from the Agatha Christie Theatre Company around the UK.

Her reign sails supremely on.

Returning – for the first time since 2008 - to And Then There Were None for this year’s tour is an excellent choice to mark both these events and particularly so as the company sets the action in 1939, the year Christie wrote the novel, and decided not to tinker too much with the original.

At the time she said: “I wrote the book after a tremendous amount of planning and I was pleased with what I had made of it... It was clear, straightforward, baffling and yet had a perfectly reasonable explanation.”

It is all of that, and a little more, in this hugely enjoyable production which once again left many of the near capacity audience as baffled as Christie intended as one by one a group of 10 stranded on a remote island off the Devon coast is bumped off!

It won’t really be giving anything away if it is said all 10 of the group carry a dark secret from their past for which they will be ‘judged’...

Although we are talking murder, there is nevertheless a nice cosiness about Christie’s whodunits. We roughly know what to expect, not necessarily when and how, as twists and turns and the occasional red herring divert the mind in the wrong direction. There is a familiarity, almost as if we are back in the company of a good and trusted friend.

And as for the ‘company’ we are also in tried and trusted territory with a cast of well-known quality boasting a host of familiar faces and names from stage and television. They know how to act, can act, and voice projection was the best heard in a long time.

Verity Rushworth – a recent 'departure' from the popular television soap Emmerdale for which she has been nominated for the 2015 National Television Award for Best Serial Drama Performance – revealed not only a large expanse of flesh with a completely bare back in a cut-away dress but also that she has the talent to go far.

Paul Nicholas is a splendid gravelly voiced Sir Lawrence Wargrave, while Colin Buchanan also impressed as a blunt ex-police officer, along with Susan Penhaligon’s portrayal of an elderly eccentric, Emily Brent. Elsewhere Mark Curry brings style and substance to the role of the nerve-shredded nerve specialist – Doctor Armstrong, Frazer Hines is totally at ease as the not so efficient butler, Rogers, and so too is Ben Nealon with his energetic and edgy ex-soldier Philip Lombard.

Surely it must be the butler? It usually is – but that thought was surely dismissed by our policeman because he’s not that bright? Maybe just another red herring swimming by... or it could be our ex-man in blue diverting attention. It’s that sort of night – could be, may be, surely is?

One by one, as predicted by the Ten Little Soldiers poem hanging on the wall, the gathering diminishes following each disappearance of a tiny soldier statuette from the mantelpiece below where once had stood 10!

It’s part of the fun attempting to spot when one has been removed as is the little sprinkling of wry humour which lifts the tension among the threatened guests who have no boat and no telephone to make contact with the mainland.

The one-room set, with its huge window out onto a stormy sea, admirably helps stoke up the intimidating atmosphere and along with subtle lighting changes cranks up the tension.

Christie was pleased with what she had written and were she still with us she would rightly proud of this first class adaptation of one of her classic tales.