Houston Theatre Presents Agatha Christie's 'The Unexpected Guest'

With tickets starting at the low price of $21, ExxonMobil Summer Chills is a great way to introduce live theatre to first-timers, giving them an opportunity to thrill in the series' plot twists, suspenseful moments and unexpected revelations. Agatha Christie's The Unexpected Guest runs through Sunday, August 3.

Agatha Christie's The Unexpected Guest will be the single ExxonMobil Summer Chills play, running for three weeks. In dense fog near the South Welsh coastline, a stranger runs his car into a ditch and arrives at a nearby house. Inside, he finds the murdered body of a former big-game hunter. The dead man's wife is near the body with a gun in her hand. Is she guilty or is she protecting someone? Appearances are sure to deceive in this twisty mystery. Guardian review of the 1958 premiere said "At the end [Agatha Christie] heard the kind of applause that has given her Mousetrap a record six-year run."

Dame Agatha Christie, the most famous creator of murder mysteries, was born in 1890 and worked as a hospital dispenser during the First World War. Her first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), introduced Hercule Poirot, the Belgian hero who was to appear in many subsequent novels and plays. Over the next 56 years, Christie wrote 66 novels and more than a dozen plays, including Murder on the Orient Express, The Mousetrap, The Unexpected Guest, Black Coffee, And Then There Were None, and the Miss Marple mysteries - which served as the basis for the films Murder, She Said and Murder at the Gallop and the inspiration for many television programs. The Alley has produced many of Christie's plays, among them Death on the Nile, Witness for the Prosecution, The Mousetrap, Black Coffee, Spider's Web and Towards Zero. -- www.alleytheatre.org