It’s good to be back in the West End as theatre finally reopens

St Martin’s Theatre which reopened with a socially distanced performance of The Mousetrap

(PA)

“Are we allowed to clap when they come on stage?” said the woman sitting in front of me.

She needn’t have worried. We clapped when producer Adam Spiegel introduced the The Mousetrap and clapped again when it ended with a heartfelt standing ovation.

It was the sound of relief from the 200-strong audience that just maybe life was starting to get back to normal.

But it was a new normal that started with having my temperature tested and then being guided to my socially-distanced seat before the curtain went up on the long-running murder mystery.

Maybe it was the plot that appealed to the audience? We can all empathise with a group of characters snowed in together – you could even say locked down? – who start to get on each other’s nerves before one of them is driven to murder.

They played Anything Goes while we waited for the curtain to go up but Anything definitely did not go – there was no dash for interval drinks, no jumping over rows of seats to see old friends and I spent a good part of the two hours waiting for the killers mask to slip while making sure mine didn’t.

But the overwhelming feeling was how good it is to be back and now we have to hope the vaccine continues its steady work and that the variant does not provide a last minute plot twist worthy of Agatha Christie herself.

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