A Brief Study of The Cat and The Canary, and A Review of the 2020 Production.
Matteo Sedazzari
Publisher (ZANI) - Author - Tales from The Foxes of Foxham and more
John Willard’s (28th November 1885 – 30th August 1942) The Cat and the Canary (1922) is a classic from the ‘dark house mystery’ genre. The traditional theme of a ‘dark house mystery’ is a combination of a whodunit and comedy, where a group of strangers, friends or distant relatives spends a stormy and dark night in a mansion or castle with secret passageways with a madman and in some cases, a gorilla is on the loose. As the plot unravels, skeletons from the key characters come out of the cupboard, as the story twists and turns.
Immensely popular with the general public in the early 1920s, USA, with New York’s Broadway is the theatre district to spawn the big three plays of this genre; Crane Wilbur’s The Monster, Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood’s The Bat(Based on Rinehart’s novel, The Circular Staircase, 1908) and Willard’s The Cat and Canary.
