The writer of The Mousetrap has become such a fixture in seasonal TV and theatre listings that the estate might rebrand her as Agatha Christmas. The Guildford Shakespeare Company – here moonlighting with England’s second most famous literary figure – enjoyably pays homage to this connection in The Housetrap, an interactive yuletide murder mystery set within a real 16th-century manor house.
West Horsley Place already has two showbiz connections: it was used as the location of the BBC series Ghosts, and it formerly belonged to the historian and broadcaster Bamber Gascoigne, founder host of University Challenge. Eleanor Murton, writer of The Housetrap, would do well on that show with a specialist subject of the tropes of classic crime fiction. Her script works in references to snowbound mansions, seances, lead piping, Mrs White, a butler who might have done it and the letter of the alphabet that you dial for murder.
