By Agatha Christie
Adapted For The Stage by Ken Ludwig
Directed by Jonathan Church
Designed by Robert Jones
Lighting design by Mark Henderson
Music by Adrian Sutton
Chichester Festival Theatre
26th May 2022, 7.30 pm
CAST
Henry Goodman – Hercule Poirot
Marc Antolin – Michel The Conductor
Philip Cairns – Colonel Arbuthnot
Samuel Collings- Hector McQueen
Joanna McCallum – Princess Dragomiroff
Taz Munyaneza – Mary Debenham
Patrick Robinson – Monsieur Bouc
Laura Rogers – Countess Adrenyi
Sara Stewart – Helen Hubbard
Joanna Van Kampen – Greta Ohlsson
Timothy Watson – Samuel Ratchett
Sophie Bye / Eleanor Sebastian – Little Girl
with
Matt Addis- ensemble
Kelvin Ade- ensemble
Joelle Dyson – ensemble
Jacqueline Tate – ensemble
I’ve never seen The Mousetrap. I can’t tell you the ending though I wouldn’t be surprised if a butler did it. Butlers main theatrical roles were spitting in the soup and murdering people. My theatre interest probably started with crime thrillers with the fake French windows at the back of the wobbly set, a butler, a housemaid, and the dead body behind the sofa. I went to a youth club where they did one every Autumn, and cold, wet and dark November nights still bring back the memory of waiting for the bus to go to a rehearsal.
Fortunately, I can never remember whodunit in any Agatha Christie until quite a way in. I’m going to try extremely hard not to introduce plot spoilers here. That sadly means insufficient appreciation of what every one of the actors does here, because it would be a giveaway.
David Suchet (most recently in 2010), and Kenneth Branagh (2017) are the Poirots I recall best of all in this story. Then there was Alfred Molina in 2001, Albert Finney in 1974. Peter Ustinov (1978) was a great Poirot, but that was in Death On The Nile. I saw them all, though for me Poirot is a Sunday evening with nothing better to do, or an afternoon feeling ill, with nothing else much to watch, rather than a ‘must see event.’ We booked this one because of the director, Jonathan Church, and because we had seen Henry Goodman as Volpone at the RSC. OK, and because we rely on anything at Chichester to be good.
The adaptation by Ken Ludwig is bold. The list of potential suspects is reduced from twelve to eight. Characters are combined, so that Countess Adrenyi (Laura Rogers)now takes over the original actions of her husband, herself and the doctor. This involves script changes and they tighten the story considerably, and to its benefit.
There is a pre-scene on the kidnapping of a little girl three years before the action. Then Poirot does a prologue to the audience, the set changes and we are in a hotel in Istanbul. He needs to get back to London quickly, but there are no compartments left on the Orient Express, fortunately he runs into Monsieur Bouc, an old friend, who runs the Wagons Lit company.
The overhearing scene with Poirot behind a newspaper observing those who will be his fellow passengers is both funny, and also leads us as an audience to identify strongly with Poirot. The construction as a play is faultless.The oft-married American, Helen Hubbard (Sara Stewart) gets a sexier role than Agatha might have imagined, but it all fits.
David Suchet has imposed himself so strongly as Poirot that any performance is comparison. Suchet read every word Christie ever wrote on Poirot and made comprehensive notes. He knows more about Poirot than the author would ever have remembered. The other thing about Poirot is that it’s all written into the original Christie stories. It’s more “fixed” than almost any role an actor can take on … the accent, the mannerisms, the vanity, the moustache. The moustache is so fixed that in the Branagh productions it took over the leading role.
The first thing every comment agrees upon is that Henry Goodman is brilliant in the role. He does not imitate others, though as I’ve said, so much is in the original story. He brings something new though I can’t define it. This is a twinkling Poirot. A trickster Poirot. A great bonus in this play is his introductory and final speeches to the audience in character but outside this story. He also runs from comedy, to incisive detective, to seriously struggling with his conscience. He has to take most of the last third of the play with a lion’s share of the lines too.
Casting is right for every one of them. It’s so hard to say more without veering into letting plot points out. Timothy Watson’s Ratchett is extremely powerful, scary right away.
The set design by Robert Jones is so important. I had wondered how it was possible to do this play on stage at all given it takes place in the narrow confines of a train that gets stuck in a snowdrift in 1930s Yugoslavia. It works. You wonder who the ensemble are, but they play waiters, porters and scene shifters. It’s a triumph of stage management, with everything flowing so smoothly in transitions.
We have a dining car, and a row of compartments. Characters have to edge along the dining car or corridor as if restricted by an imaginary train side.
We have the train for Michelle the guard to stand on as he desperately tries to call for help by what should be a radio (it looks suspiciously like a phone!). We have an observation platform where we see the lovers, Colonel Arbuthnot and Miss Debenham.
I often suspect that Agatha Christie (and Enid Blyton) were fond of in jokes. Debenham and Freebody was the original name of the London store which became Debenhams, and Miss Debenham is having an affair with a married man (Geddit?). There is a plot point in the original book, where one character inadvertently refers to Miss Debenham as Miss Freebody and Poirot notes it and comments.
Eh bien, you may not know it, but there is a shop in London that was called until recently, Debenham and Freebody …
The original novel
The adaptor here wisely decided that not a lot of people would know that in 2022.
It’s a given in Poirot stories that no expense is spared in costume or 1934 settings. The TV versions were always big budget productions, with the major stories scheduled for bank holidays or Christmas, and this follows suit. On the suits. Elaborate costumes, and on the Orient Express, obviously everyone dressed for dinner, even stuck in a snowdrift.
It’s Agatha Christie, so a major part is the end where Poirot explains his deductions to the seated suspects. This is done with seats in a circle using the revolving stage which moves slowly and continually.
We can’t have the usual flashbacks, but as he describes an event, all the characters stand, freeze and the one concerned repeats the ‘flashback’ line, and each is pinpointed by a spotlight as they do. As an ex-limelight operator, I know about pinspots. I marvelled at how they hit the actor in the circle with the stage slowly revolving all the time. Is it a computer programme? It uses fixed lights on the ceiling, but I’d assume there has to be a degree of human intervention. Mark Henderson, the lighting designer, deserves an award.
Mark Lawson in The Guardian review was unduly worried about the accent:
Recent theatre has sensibly moved away from accented English for foreigners. However, Christie’s characterisation of Poirot centres on English mispronunciation. The excuse is that he is speaking a second tongue, so Jonathan Church’s perky production of an adaptation by US playwright Ken Ludwig (Lend Me a Tenor) is careful also to give Poirot some impeccable French, plus Hungarian and Russian with two of the polyglot suspects.
The first line is a questionable comment. Has it? Why? Everyone has an accent. If someone is Polish or Greek in a play you’d expect that accent. It’s certainly untrue at the RSC where we watched King Louis of France with hilarious French accent last week. Shakespeare was fond of funny accents for the Welsh and the French. He knew they worked. This is Poirot. The accent is basic to the character. This is a man who speaks impeccable grammatical English, but doesn’t know the English words for Bon! Eh bien, Merci or Allors. Accept it. Peter Ustinov also made sure that his Poirot spoke other languages fluently. A nice line in this play is where Poirot compliments Countess Adrenyi on her excellent English.
Rating? Five star on adaptation, lead actor, direction, lighting, with a great supporting cast. It combines thriller with comedy and a genuine moral dilemma. I’d assume An Inspector Calls by J.B. Priestley in 1945 was partly inspired by Murder On The Orient Express. To a degree, it’s a surprise that Christie, who was also such an accomplished playwright, never tried a stage version, but considering this production, she knew it was impossible for her with the technology then available.
I’m sure it will move on to London. Eventually it may tour. The version of An Inspector Calls which opens with a street scene with a triangular building has been going for so many years that we’ve inadvertently seen it twice. As you see the set, you realize this was the one you saw ten years earlier but with a new cast. That train will go into store for re-use. The first issue with touring will be that few theatres have a built in revolve stage, though one can be mounted on top of a stage, and you could (just about) dispense with the revolve and re-plot the scene. The second issue is that it will be extremely difficult to find a Poirot as good as Henry Goodman.
The critics are pretty universal on four star ratings. I’d put that down to it being a stage crime thriller, i.e. it’s not Hamlet nor is it Waiting for Godot. Within its genre, it’s as good as you’ll ever get, so five stars as a stage thriller. Suffice it to say, when the interval arrived after an hour, we were shocked. It had felt like half the time. It flew by. On the way home,. we were saying how much we enjoyed the sheer theatricality of it all.
*****
WHAT THE CRITICS SAID
Four Star
Guardian – ****
Telegraph – ****
WhatsOnStage- ****
Three Star
The Times ***
LINKS TO REVIEWS ON THIS SITE
JONATHAN CHURCH (Director)
The Price by Arthur Miller, Theatre Royal Bath 2018
An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde, Classic Spring 2018
Racing Demon, by David Hare, Bath 2017
Hobson’s Choice, by Harold Brighouse, Bath 2016
Mack & Mabel, Chichester Festival Theatre, 2015
Amadeus, Chichester Festival Theatre, 2014
HENRY GOODMAN
Volpone, RSC 2015 (Volpone)
MARC ANTOLIN
Romantics Anonymous by Emma Rice, Wanamaker Playhouse, 2017
Twelfth Night, Globe 2017 (Sir Andrew Aguecheek)
The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk, by Daniel Jamieson, Kneehigh / Bristol Old Vic
PHILIP CAIRNS
Peter Gynt,by David Hare, National Theatre 2019
SAMUEL COLLINGS
Boudica by Tristan Bernays, Globe 2017
Antony & Cleopatra, RSC 2013 (Octavius)
JOANNA McCALLUM
Hobson’s Choice, by Harold Brighouse, Bath 2016
PATRICK ROBINSON
King Lear, (with Ian McKellan) Chichester 2017
The Rover by Aphra Benn, RSC 2016
LAURA ROGERS
Pressure by David Haig, West End, 2018
An Ideal Husband, Chichester 2014
SARA STEWART
The Price by Arthur Miller, Theatre Royal Bath 2018
Hay Fever by Noel Coward, Bath 2014
JOANNA VAN KAMPEN
An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde, Classic Spring 2018
The Magna Carta Plays, Salisbury, 2015
TIMOTHY WATSON
The Beaux Stratagem, National Theatre, 2015
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