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    Opening Night
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    Opening Night
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    Opening Night
    Ebook284 pages4 hours

    Opening Night

    By Ngaio Marsh

    4/5

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    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this ebook

    A classic Ngaio Marsh novel reissued.

    Dreams of stardom had lured Martyn Tarne from faraway New Zealand to make the dreary, soul-destroying round of West End agents and managers in search of work. The Vulcan Theatre had been her last forlorn hope, and now, driven by sheer necessity, she was glad to accept the humble job of dresser to its leading lady.

    And then came the eagerly awaited Opening Night. To Martyn the night brought a strange turn of the wheel of fortune – but to one distinguished member of the cast it was to bring sudden and unforeseen death…

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateOct 29, 2009
    ISBN9780007344635
    Unavailable
    Opening Night
    Author

    Ngaio Marsh

    Dame Ngaio Marsh was born in New Zealand in 1895 and died in February 1982. She wrote over 30 detective novels and many of her stories have theatrical settings, for Ngaio Marsh’s real passion was the theatre. She was both an actress and producer and almost single-handedly revived the New Zealand public’s interest in the theatre. It was for this work that the received what she called her ‘damery’ in 1966.

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    Reviews for Opening Night

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    • 3/5
      Martyn Tarne, a young actress from New Zealand, arrives in England with no money and no immediate job prospects. After a fortnight of fruitless job-hunting, she arrives late for the auditions at the Vulcan Theatre - but not too late to overhear the leading lady's dresser is ill. It is not the sort of theatre work Martyn wants, but she's exhausted and desperate - and so, despite her lack of appropriate references, she applies. The opening night of a new play is just days away, and relationships between some members of the cast and crew are strained. As an unlikely dresser, Martyn attracts a certain amount of attention, not all of it welcome. This is a murder mystery, although considerable time passes before the murder occurs and Chief Detective-Inspector Alleyn arrives on the scene. It is not one of Marsh's better mysteries: the revelation lacks dramatic surprise and the denouncement has never struck me as being clever. The investigation is brief, and does not really even provide insight into 1950s police-methods - at one point, Alleyn turns to a young constable and says "[What I just did] was an almost flawless example of how an investigating officer is not meant to behave. You will be good enough to forget it."And unlike some mysteries, where the romantic subplot can be half the reason for reading the book, Opening Night's romance is neither entertaining nor intelligent; in fact, I wish it was absent from the story entirely. Nevertheless, Opening Night is one of the Ngaio Marsh mysteries I like to reread in its entirety. It mightn't be a great mystery, but it's a very interesting portrayal of a theatre approaching opening night. Marsh does a wonderful job of conveying the physical space of the theatre, the different jobs and people involved in a show, and the potential tensions between them - as well as the intentions of the play itself. I like Martyn. I like the way her wishful thinking is challenged - she discovers it's one thing to daydream about getting a role on short notice, and another to hope for the misfortune of someone she knows so that she herself may have a chance. I love how Marsh captures Martyn's exhaustion throughout the novel - there's something remarkably evocative about it, and it makes Martyn easy to sympathise with.It's disappointing that in Opening Night Marsh was unable to write a good mystery about the theatre, but that does not mean the novel is without any redeeming qualities.
    • 4/5
      I'm fondest of mysteries where the characters are complex and their interactions more interesting than just trying to guess whodunit. This book delivers a rich set of theater people and some interesting looks at the theater behind the scenes.
    • 4/5
      The bulk of this book is not about the murder that justifies its inclusion within the Alleyn series but rather with the background against which the murder takes place. Unlike previous books I felt I understood who must be the murder not because of painstakingly distributed clues. Marsh paints her characters and interactions more carefully and more believably than in many of her books. The exception, in my opinion, is the portrait of the character to actually commits the murder. In that case either Marsh felt she could not more clearly paint his/her portrait without giving the conclusion away or because she herself finds it difficult to get inside the mind of such a murderer.Marsh so clearly enjoyed writing about actors and the theater that one wonders if she was dissuaded by her publishers from doing so and therefore found herself forced to place murders within theaters and the theater community in order to write about what she found most interesting.