The first adaptation for cinema was in 1945 with René Clair’s seminal film. More recently in 2005, Kevin Elyot, screenwriter for many of the Poirot and Marple episodes, wrote a new version of the play, restoring the original ending of the novel and using the US title. It was performed in 1943 under the book’s original UK title, and the ending was changed as both she and the producers were concerned about leaving the audience on a low note. New York TimesĬhristie began the adaptations, determined to challenge herself further by moving the story to the stage. It is the most baffling mystery Agatha Christie has ever written. The whole thing is utterly impossible and utterly fascinating. “It was so difficult to do,” she writes, “that the idea had fascinated me.” It was an idea which is now the basis for many Hollywood horror films and has become a cliché to modern audiences, but it was Agatha Christie who was the first to do it and so successfully that the story has become her most adapted piece.

This is the story that made Agatha Christie the best-selling novelist of all time and is read the world over in more than 50 languages. Who will survive? And who is the killer? Copies of an ominous nursery rhyme hang in each room, the murders mimicking the awful fates of its ‘Ten Little Soldier Boys’. The strangers include a reckless playboy, a troubled Harley Street doctor, a formidable judge, an uncouth detective, an unscrupulous mercenary, a God-fearing spinster, two restless servants, a highly decorated general and an anxious secretary. Each of them has a secret to hide and a crime for which they must pay. Ten strangers arrive on an island invited by an unknown host.

And Then There Were None will be embarking on a UK theatre tour, commencing in September 2023

Ten little indians christie