Winter Play To Bring Suspense This Weekend

The RMHS Drama Club Presents Murder on the Orient Express

Pete Koster ('22), Orbit Contributor

This weekend the RMHS Drama Club will present their winter show Murder on the Orient Express.

After an extremely successful fall musical, the drama club is set up to put on a killer play this winter.

Murder on the Orient Express is a classic Agatha Christie murder mystery. The play follows Hercule Poirot, played by Caz Vieira, on his train ride from Stamboul to London. The train is unusually full, and Poirot is forced to ride in second-class. On the first night, the train gets stuck in a big snow bank, and Ratchett MacQueen is found dead in his cabin with 12 stab wounds in his chest. It is now Poirot’s job to determine who the killer is, among the 13 passengers on board the train.

I’m very excited about the cast, I think everyone worked really really hard

— Mrs. Cunha

Mrs. Cunha, the drama club advisor, and director of the play, is really excited about this season, and the production of Murder on the Orient Express. “Even though this playwright is known for comedy – even though there are comedic elements, and great one liners – it is really a tense, suspenseful drama.” She says that the Drama club doesn’t usually put on very serious, suspenseful plays like this often. She is also looking forward to the more technical side of the show, and what makes this show different from past shows. This play is set in 1934, and is mainly in a train, challenges that Mrs. Cunha are excited about.

Mrs. Cunha is also very excited for the cast of the show. As far back as the earliest read-throughs she said that the cast sounded incredible. “It was like listening to a radio play already… I’m very excited about the cast, I think everyone worked really really hard, we had such an amazing round of auditions and interviews, and I think that there are a lot of great people, and a lot of great positions to make a lot of awesome art.”

The theme of the shows for the drama club this year is “Things that Go Bump in the Night,” a topic that explores fear in the theatre. They take a look at how distress affects us as individuals and as a society. Mrs. Cunha reflected on how the theme of the shows this year relate to the shut-downs that the world experienced these past two years. “After a year and a half of a pandemic, we thought that we all have a little understanding of fear now.”