2012 audio adaptation by Joy Wilkinson of Christie's 1945 mystery, in
three 30-minute episodes. The feckless and erratic wife dies of
cyanide in the champagne at her birthday party; suicide, everyone
supposes. Then a year later her husband recreates the event, and dies
the same way…
I confess I rather enjoy the complete ghastliness of Rosemary,
portrayed here by Jasmine Hyde. She is so splendidly horrible that
it's really only a question of who will kill her first. (Inevitably
one does wonder a little how anyone could have fallen for her for long
enough to marry her, but one can hardly claim that that sort of thing
is unrealistic.)
Joy Wilkinson seems to have more freedom to alter matters than Michael
Bakewell did, but she doesn't use it much here. There are some minor
variations in detail as to exactly who is where, but nothing that
would significantly derail the plot (certainly nothing on the order of
the changes that Christie made in expanding the short story Yellow
Iris to novel length).
Colonel Race (Sean Baker) manages to avoid the appearance of
blimpishness (perhaps because for a change he isn't the Watson to
Poirot). Naomi Frederick manages to make Iris-the-ingenue less than
completely annoying. It's a decent staging of an enjoyable story.
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