2 weeks Ago
Agatha Christie lays claim to being the bestselling novelist of all time. Her success is explained not only by our insatiable appetite for a whodunnit, but for our enormous nostalgia for a bygone era of steam trains and leather portmanteaus, of tea with the village vicar and ladies donning gloves and hat, of stately butlers and jewel-laden dowagers. It is entirely antithetical to the way we live now, but we can’t resist the glamour and charm of it.
In Murder on the Orient Express, adapted for the stage by Ken Ludwig and directed by Lucy Bailey, the luxury and exoticism of life as a monied person in the 1930s is summoned in sumptuous detail. The set is to die for. Train carriages – at turns separated and joined together – revolve on a turntable to allow the audience to see passengers lounge in their cabins on one side and wander down the corridors on the other.
The movement of the compartments is seamlessly handled, and with real aplomb when the bloodied body of the thuggish Ratchett is discovered. Murder on the Orient Express is one of Christie’s “closed circuit” mysteries, in which the murder occurs within a confined space and in which the perpetrator is necessarily one of a defined group of individuals. This makes it particularly suitable for the stage, and a claustrophobic and oppressive atmosphere is nicely conveyed.
The train hits a snowdrift soon in its journey, after which a passenger is discovered dead, and Poirot must deduce who the murderer is. The suspects include a Hungarian countess, a Russian princess in exile, a pious Swedish missionary and an American actress with a string of husbands behind her. They are all stereotypes to the point of pantomime.
It felt at times that the script led these actors dangerously close to the pantomime, although, it is not easy to escape stereotypes with Christie. This stage adaptation has plenty of humour. Of course, there is comic relief in Agatha Christie’s novels – this isn’t Luther after all – but it tips into the frothy a little too often for my taste.
I want the dark underbelly which Christie cultivated in her novels to remain. David Suchet is so adored as Poirot, that some of us even bristled when legendary actor Kenneth Branagh took on the role in recent reboots – big shoes to fill and all that. Michael Maloney (Belfast, Young Victoria, The Crown) is an awesome actor, but he is a little more animated and effusive than one might expect for Poirot.
I like my Poirot a little neater, smaller in his movements and slightly more sombre than Maloney’s. At times, there was something more Italian, than Belgian, about Maloney’s version of the detective. That said, this is ultimately a very enjoyable evening with competent acting and stylish visuals across the board.
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