The Traitors On Stage and the Trouble With Murder Mysteries

The murder mystery is a genre that never quite knows what it is on stage. It is notoriously difficult to write a book that holds its secrets while still delivering a genuinely impressive punch at the very end. The Mousetrap, the longest-running play in the world, survives now more as a ghost of what was once a legitimate thriller, its reputation drifting into something closer to accidental pastiche than sustained suspense.

So when it was announced on 26 January 2026 that Studio Lambert and Neal Street Productions would be bringing The Traitors On Stage to London in 2027, with a book by John Finnemore and direction from Robert Hastie, the response was inevitably one of intrigue. Billed as a “bold and surprising” new play based on the worldwide televisual phenomenon, the production arrives with a weight of expectation that few new plays ever face.

The questions come thick and fast. How do you construct narrative arcs for a game built entirely on secrecy? How do you translate a format that relies on editing, confessionals and misdirection into live performance? And how does the sheer scale and cinematic beauty of the television series survive the compression of the stage?

Quite how scale and perspective will be managed in a production based on a show renowned for its vast, often claustrophobic challenges will only be known when audiences take their seats. It is hard to imagine a version of The Traitors On Stage that does not lean heavily on screens and projected visuals. Yet the show is also deeply physical by nature. The rituals, the tasks, the geography of suspicion all lend themselves to theatre. Show-stopping set pieces and practical effects feel inevitable, but it is the Round Table that seems most naturally theatrical: a live audience sitting in the same room as paranoia, accusation and silence, watching people unravel in real time.

This is a play that cannot afford to be anything other than breathtaking. The pressure on the shoulders of those making it is unlike almost any other contemporary project, simply because of how culturally embedded the franchise has become. Every creative decision will be scrutinised. Every risk will be dissected. There are countless questions about how it will work, but if we are being honest, part of the appeal is that none of us actually want the answers yet.

Secrecy will be key. Good etiquette will not be optional. For this show to succeed, there must be an unspoken contract between production and audience that the experience will not immediately spill online in the form of poorly filmed spoilers and plot breakdowns. Phones stay in pockets. Official images remain carefully controlled. Of course, someone somewhere will break that contract and once they do, the damage will be done. But even a brief period of collective restraint would allow The Traitors On Stage to build the kind of mystique that theatre so rarely gets to enjoy anymore.

What emerges in 2027 remains to be seen. But if this works, it will be because it dares to treat murder, mystery and mistrust as live, dangerous things once again, while trusting its audience to approach the experience with a small amount of discretion and a healthy dose of common sense.