Our Grand Tour 2026, Part 2: The Plays

We booked two plays for our visit to London: Agatha Christie’s drawing room murder mystery, “Mousetrap,” which is the world’s longest running play, and a production of Noel Coward’s 1924 play, “Hay Fever,” starring Richard Grant and Christine Baranski in her West End debut. (Keira Knightley is also presently performing in “The Lives of Others,” but tickets had already sold out for the days we’d be in town.)

Opening in 1952, Mousetrap has played at St. Martin’s Theatre, where we saw it, since the 1970s. We attended performance #30,740, which was dutifully stamped in the souvenir program. And even though it was a Thursday night, it was a full house!

The show was a total delight with terrific and hilarious performances featuring a boarding house full of suspects both eccentric and shady. At the curtain call at the end, the cast asks the audience to become their partners in crime and not reveal the ending to anyone—so my lips are sealed and you’ll have to see it yourself (and there’s no butler in the play).

”Hay Fever” is a comedy of manners, or more accurately, a comedy about an eccentric family with *no* manners, whose guests for the weekend become the sorry victims of their capricious, outsized and self-involved personalities.

It’s a high farce, full of scenery chewing performances, anchored by Richard Grant and Christine Baranski, who were born to play these parts. I was also delighted to realize that the cast also included actors Charles Edwards (Rings of Power and Holy Flying Circus, where he portrayed Michael Palin, bearing a slight resemblance to him) and Ophelia Lovibond (the lead in the underrated series, Minx, who my wife didn’t know was British until this show!)

We watched the play at the Wyndham Theatre, which staged its first show in 1899. Though we were in the balcony (we had seats at Mousetrap in the orchestra just five rows from the stage), like the theaters we experienced in New York last year, the theater is intimate and close to the stage, so even in the balcony, you feel like you’re right on top of the actors. My one regret is that I likely might have been able to get the actors to sign my program since the back stage entrance was very accessible in the alley in back, but it slipped my mind. At both shows we sat next to and chatted with fellow Yanks, and at Mousetrap, I helped a British couple sort out the name of the screenwriter of Taxi Driver lol (Paul Schrader).

Btw, we discovered that the Noel Coward Theatre was just next door to the Wyndham and hosting Into the Woods, so I made sure to make a quick visit. Afterwards, as we were in Leicester Square on the West End, we took in the hopping night life and grabbed a late dinner.