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Setting: Place and time

While the story is set in a theater, the play within the play is set in Muldoon Manor, a lavish manor surrounded by "desolate marshes" and "treacherous swamps". It is a direct parody of Agatha Christie’s "closed" settings in which no one can enter or leave, so the characters know that the murderer must be one of them.

The manor itself is described as having French windows and a large settee. The play is set, as spoken by Mrs Drudge, in the "drawing room of Lady Muldoon’s country residence one morning in early spring." In essence, the entire setting is a parody of Christie’s cosy settings and this particular setting has had comparisons drawn between it and The Mousetrap.^{[citation needed]}