Actor Robert Duncan raves about an Agatha Christie masterpiece

THEY are dearly loved because they are so tremendously English — in a calming Sunday evening way. There is something reassuringly unthreatening about a good Agatha Christie yarn and the period in which it is set.

Actor Robert Duncan, who stars in Christie's Witness For the Prosecution at the Queen's Theatre this month, believes people are comforted by seeing how life used to be.

"People love to immerse themselves in a bygone age," he said. "There is this kind of longing for that retro feel. Certainly Agatha Christie has that in spades: the old mansions, the fire burning, the wood panelled walls. That throwback to something maybe safer."

Safer? Surely that's debatable. For beneath the charm of the old country houses, there usually lurks an unsettling fact: all of Christie's victims tend to be intimately known to their killers. Husbands kill wives, children kill parents, siblings kill each other. The real answers to the puzzle of conflicting evidence, it would seem, lie not in railway timetables or false identities but in the darker side of human psychology.

"The stories are beautifully constructed and the dramas do leave you guessing," said Duncan who plays solicitor Mr Mayhew. "I think this particular one, Witness For The Prosecution, is Agatha Christie's best thriller. It's quite exciting just to read it. Even if you know the ending, you get quite sucked into it. It's terribly clever."

Christie has her detractors but one thing is for sure: nothing seems to get rears into theatre rows quite like a traditional whodunnit from Devon's queen of crime.

"Quite frankly her enduring appeal is something to see," said Duncan. "I started to do Agatha Christie's last year and every house was full. That's fantastic in this day and age. I'd go back to the same venue with a brilliant Ayckbourn and they wouldn't be."

Duncan is most famous for playing Gus Hedges in Drop The Dead Donkey, a verbose boss with a penchant for corporate gobbledygook. In real life Duncan is no stranger to the newspaper world having worked as a journalist on the Cornish Guardian.

What made him leave reporting for acting?

"You as a journalist are asking me that?" he teases. "I liked journalism. It's hard work but I was a little bit keener on acting really."

Does the actor, who grew up in Cornwall and now lives in Reading, enjoy coming back to the South West?

"Ah yes. 'You cannot forget the ground from which you are dug' as an old methodist minister once said to me and it's true. It has a hold. I think it's peculiar to all the Celtic regions you know. Wales and Ireland are the same. James Joyce talked about it. You have to get away to realise what your home is."

Certainly this Cornishman can't wait to bring this gripping courtroom drama — which he promises will leave you guessing until its climax — to North Devon for a week.

"Agatha Christie is not devoid of comical touches but there is this unravelling in the mystery that everyone has to get involved with and you never know until the final moment. This one has a wonderful cliff hanger."

● Agatha Christie's Witness For The Prosecution starring Honeysuckle Weeks, Denis Lill, Ben Nealon, Robert Duncan, Peter Byrne, Jennifer Wilson and Mark Wynter is at the Queen's Theatre from Monday, February 8 to Saturday, February 13. Box office: 01271 324242.