‘Witness for the prosecution’, a trial with British perfume

In 1953, five years after telling the story in a book of stories with the same title (its first publication was, however, in 1925), Agatha Christie premiered her work ‘witness for the prosecution‘ (‘Witness for the Prosecution’). The work has the unmistakable stamp of its author, the ‘queen of crime’, as she is known (among other ‘titles’) with all the right reason in the world; She is undoubtedly the queen of the detective genre, which she cultivated in novels (more than sixty titles) and in theater (more than twenty works).

‘Witness for the Prosecution’ tells the story of the trial against a young man accused of murder who seems difficult to free from prison, something a veteran lawyer, famous for never having lost a case, is trying to do. Agatha Christie twists the intrigue several times until it leads to a surprising ending. Everything has a distinctive British scent (classic, we are in the years after World War II), especially marked in the protagonist, the lawyer Sir Wilfrid Roberts, with a characteristic sense of humor, who Roberto Santiago has maintained its wonderful version.

Fernando Bernués pays homage to Agatha Christie and its schematic staging (pianist seats are practically the only scenographic elements) symbolizes a blank page on which the story is ‘written’ in view of the spectators, ‘converted’ into the trial jury. It is the setting that gives contemporaneity to the performance, led by Fernando Guillén Cuervo, who fills his interpretation of Sir Wilfrid Roberts with restraint.