Black Coffee – Class 12 Play

29 - 30 June 2025
3pm / 7pm

Class 12 this year have chosen to perform Agatha Christie’s first stage play, Black Coffee.

It is worth noting that this play, first performed in 1930, predates the second World War and the invention of the atom bomb. As such its characters reflect the views and attitudes which were common at the time. This play also contains references to drug misuse
and murder.

This is a classic ‘whodunit’ which features the now familiar character of Hercule Poirot, the famous Belgian detective, who working alongside his
old friend Captain Hastings, unravels the mysteries of Sir Claud Amory’s murder at his house in Abbot’s Cleve.

This production will be performed three times, premiering with a Sunday Matinee at 3pm on 29th June, followed by a school performance for Classes 6 upwards on Monday 30th at 11am, and a final performance at 7pm that evening.

As this is a longer play, there will be a short interval in the performance of 15 minutes. Running time is estimated at 2 hours ten minutes with the interval. Public performances will be ‘exit by donation’.

Born in Torquay, England in 1890, Agatha Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time. With over one billion books sold in English and another billion in over 100 languages, she is outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. She wrote 80 crime novels and collections of short stories, over 25 plays (including The Mousetrap, the world’s longest running play), and six novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, introduced the world to the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, followed a decade later by the shrewd and often-underestimated Miss Marple.