Erin Harrington reviews Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express¸ adapted by Ken Ludwig, directed by Dan Bain, at the Court Theatre, Saturday 2 March 2024.
The Court Theatre is entering its final year in the Shed in Addington before it shifts into its new premises in the central city’s Performing Arts Precinct. Director Dan Bain’s production of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express opens this last season. It’s a stylish crowd-pleaser that rides the momentum of the sell-out season of summer musical Something Rotten!, and takes full advantage of the current site’s features, not least its distinctive, spacious stage.
Murder on the Orient Express stars Christie’s most famous creation, Hercule Poirot (played magnificently by James Kupa), an unassuming but celebrated Belgian detective with a distinctive moustache and sartorial flair, who solves cases using only his ‘little grey cells’. Thanks to years’ worth of film and television adaptations, and a strong literary tradition, many will be familiar with Poirot, if not the specifics of what is perhaps Christie’s best-known work. Still recovering from a difficult case in Syria, Poirot finds that he must travel unexpectedly from Istanbul to London. While dining he bumps into his old friend Monsieur Bouc (Daniel Allan), the Belgian director of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits train company, who finds him a last-minute berth on the unusually packed first-class cabin of the Orient Express.
While travelling through Yugoslavia the train becomes trapped in a snowdrift. Overnight, an unpleasant American businessman, Samuel Ratchett (Ben Freeth), is stabbed multiple times in his compartment. He had tried, and failed, to employ Poirot to investigate death threats he’d been receiving. The murder scene is arranged as if the crime were done by an interloper, but Poirot observes that this is a set up, and that the murderer must be on the train.
An assured ensemble of Court Theatre regulars plays the motley crew of unexpected, seemingly unconnected suspects: English beauty Mary Debenham (Millie Hanford); Ratchett’s anxious American secretary Hector MacQueen (Andrew Todd), the elderly Russian Princess Dragomiroff (Yvonne Martin); skittish Swedish missionary Greta Ohlsson (Kathleen Burns); the beautiful young Countess Andrenyi (Monique Clementson); brash American Helen Hubbard (Juliet Reynolds-Midgley); brusque Scot Colonel Arbuthnot (Ben Freeth); and Michel, the train’s French conductor (Roy Snow). There are too many clues, everyone has an alibi, and a mysterious second conductor cannot be found. Poirot faces his greatest challenge as he attempts to deduce how the impossible occurred.
The show’s production design is as we’ve come to expect from the theatre’s team: impeccable. The terrific set takes full advantage of the Shed’s deep, wide stage. The entrance of the train itself gets a much-deserved round of applause. Clever sliding panels, which draw a little from the spatial language of farce, separate the train’s compartments and hallway. Larger framing elements, and the arrangement of rooms and props, draw us in and out of various planes of depth. In combination with sympathetic sound and textured lighting we move between rough naturalism and bold stylisation, although I’m curious about how the mise-en-scène reads from the edges of the audience. I particularly appreciate points where the action is arrested and beams of light slice through the haze onto elements of interest – a knife, a body, a face – as if trying to pin down facts, in turn literally illuminating Poirot’s own process of deduction. The costuming and wig design are also lush. The cast glide around in beautiful silk dresses and well-cut suits, each tweaked to evoke the late-20s / early-30s period and the individuals’ social standing, and heightened to give clues to character.
This sharp-eyed 2017 adaptation, by acclaimed American playwright Ken Ludwig, clarifies much of the story’s action. It adds a helpful prologue and preamble, pares back the cast of characters, and strips out some of the mystery’s more complicated workings (goodbye mysterious red kimono, detailed timelines, and floorplan). Usefully, it overtly dramatizes the present’s connection to the past through recollection and flashback.
Ludwig also celebrates Christie’s arch sense of humour, expanding upon her droll dialogue and sharply-drawn national stereotypes as he fleshes out the diverse crew of suspects. Bain’s production pulls out the script’s more comedic elements and characterisations in a manner that is, at times, inspired by farce, but that still honours the characters’ motivations and emotional depth. The role of M. Bouc is doubly important on stage. As Poirot’s long-time friend and accidental sidekick he acts as a proxy for the audience and our string of deductions, making us feel smart as we anticipate his conjectures, even if they inevitably turn out to be wrong. Theatrically, Allan’s genial ‘Allo ‘Allo!-adjacent comic persona is also an important release valve, loosening a terrible and tense scenario with frequent invitations to laugh, and helping us understand the bounds of the production’s serio-comic tone.
There’s also an interesting dramaturgical tension throughout. Poirot’s extensive interviews and intellectual calculations, which in prose might be static and interior, gain a sense of physical momentum the longer the train is stalled. We know that we must meet a point of crisis before the train is able to shift, moving us into an uncertain future. Action that might be constrained to narrow hallways is offered more theatrical scope. Kupa’s Poirot slips between refinement and agitation, and the remaining cast’s increasing articulations of frustration and distress come to render the broad stage claustrophobic. The relationships between the various passengers are spatialised in thought-provoking ways, particularly in the play’s climax. It’s a locked room mystery in every sense; something must be unlocked before we are able to leave.
The script also introduces a denouement that celebrates the cozier elements of the murder mystery genre – drawing applause halfway through the closing monologue – but then reminds us of the stakes. This, and the play’s address, are presented in an effective and stylised manner, employing cutouts and silhouettes, recalling the opening and closing of a book. Poirot believes in justice: he wishes to weigh the facts cleanly in the balance and not become moral arbiter, but his presence as an accidental observer changed the crime, and he is unable to extract himself. We are left with a sense of deep estrangement. It is notable that Ludwig’s script directly alludes to the political context of the book’s writing, and setting, in 1933-34 – a reminder too that even the cosiest of works in the Golden Age of detective fiction have war and moral turpitude nibbling at their edges.
Murder on the Orient Express is a confident, well-designed production, although like so many productions with complex staging it perhaps has some settling in to do. Nonetheless, the audience is utterly engrossed throughout; some amateur sleuths around us can’t help but mutter clues to one another. It is also rewarding to see Bain back in the director’s chair after some years away from the Court. Ultimately it doesn’t matter if you already know whodunnit, or where the train is headed – the pleasure in the Court Theatre’s compelling production is in the journey.
Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express runs at the Court Theatre until Saturday 6 April 2024.
Flat City Field Notes 