In character: Nathaniel Middleton, Debra Lawrance and Elizabeth Nabben. Credit:Marco Del Grande Published in 1950, Christie's novel was adapted for the stage in the late '70s by English writer Leslie Darbon and it has become a fast favourite of amateur companies. Now, in the wake of the success of last year's 60th-anniversary production of Christie's most famous play, The Mousetrap, A Murder Is Announced is about to receive a rare professional staging in a major theatre. ''It feels like there's a yearning out there for this kind of show,'' Yap says. ''I saw it when I went to see The Mousetrap. I was fascinated by the number of young kids there, the mums and dads, all sitting there during the interval, trying to work it out. I'd never seen that kind of engagement before, the feeling of participation in something, really enjoying the chance to use their noggin.'' They will have plenty to ponder in A Murder Is Announced. Unanswered questions abound. Why announce a murder in the local paper in the first place? Who turned the lights off? Why does the new cook tell everyone a different family story? What really happened to Letitia Blacklock's sister? Where did the scissors come from? To make sure everything synced up, Yap says, he first had to work out the mechanics of the unseen murder.

Precision: Darren Yap. Credit:Marco Del Grande ''You have to be like a detective when you direct this play,'' Yap says. ''You have to be a bit of a magician, too, and control where the audience is looking from one moment to the next. It's the art of deception and distraction.'' Debra Lawrance, who plays Letitia (''the chatelaine of Little Paddocks'', she laughs), describes Christie's plot as ''a symphony of pictures''. ''There is a certain style you have to observe to make a play like this work,'' Lawrance says. ''I'm not even remotely a method actor and so I really enjoy something like this. It's quite technical and it requires absolutely flawless diction. The audience needs to hear every word clearly because there are plot points in the lines.'' Lawrance will be joined on-stage by James Beck, Robert Grubb, Jamie Kristian, Elizabeth Nabben, Nathaniel Middleton and Judi Farr, who plays Christie's indomitable Miss Marple.

You have to be like a detective when you direct this play. All the characters have secrets, says Nabben, who plays Letitia's distant cousin, Julia. ''She's so typically English,'' Nabben says. ''Polite on the surface but there's so much going on underneath.'' Nabben says she grew up watching the Miss Marple stories on TV. ''There's something so comforting about that genre and I love the intellectual game-playing. Some people might think it's old-fashioned but I think there is a place for reinventing classics and there's also a place for keeping them as they were.'' Productions such as The Mousetrap and A Murder Is Announced tap a segment of the audience feeling disenfranchised by the works produced by some of our main stage companies, Yap says.

''You don't want to go to the theatre to feel alienated or confused,'' he says. ''You don't want to be made to feel stupid. Sometimes you want to watch the thing you expected, the thing you paid for. ''An audience wants to be transported, it wants the works.'' A Murder Is Announced When September 27-October 27, Wednesday-Saturday, 8pm; matinees Wednesday, 1pm, Saturday, 2pm, Sunday, 1pm and 5.30pm Where Sydney Theatre, Hickson Road, Walsh Bay

Tickets 9250 1999, $75-$120 Show Curious to see if a murder announced in a local paper will actually happen, the villagers of Chipping Cleghorn gather in a state of high excitement. As promised, at 6.30pm precisely, the lights go out and someone fires a gun … Director Darren Yap