Writer: Agatha Christie
Adaptor: Ken Ludwig
Director: Lucy Bailey
While Murder on the Orient Express may be a whodunnit, the story is so well known that its unlikely there will be many people who don’t know how it ends. This means that any production of it, whether it’s on stage, TV or film has to have its own unique selling point if it’s going to keep audiences entertained and not feel like they’re simply seeing a repeat of something they’ve seen before. Ken Ludwig’s adaptation of the Agatha Christie novel goes for a combination of comedy and reflection on the nature of crime and criminals that calls into doubt everything a seasoned detective such as Hercules Poirot believes. It’s a tricky balancing act to pull off and, while it comes close to it at times, it doesn’t pull it off overall.
Opening with a group of people moving as one, before Michael Maloney emerges centre stage as Poirot, there are immediate nods to Stephen Daldry’s production of An Inspector Calls in both Lucy Bailey’s direction and Mike Britton’s design. After the blank stage is quickly transformed into the bustling hotel restaurant where Poirot accepts an invite for his friend Monsieur Bouc (Bob Barrett) to travel back to London on the Orient Express, and then equally quickly reverts to a large black box, the curtain closes and behind it three rail carriages are assembled that will form the basis of the set for the rest of the production.
Undoubtedly impressive, the set is also incredibly flexible as the carriages rotate and separate and the corridors between compartments are removed to show the characters occupying them and the events playing out in them individually or simultaneously.
Again Daldry’s production comes to mind with the set opening up to mirror the revealing of the inner lives of the people inhabiting them, but it’s here that the script doesn’t live up to the potential of the idea. While Ludwig has removed several major characters from the Christie novel, which should in theory mean that greater depth can be added to those who remain, the comedic elements of the script prevent this happening. Characters such as Princess Dragomiroff (Debbie Chazen) and her travelling companion Greta Ohlsson (Rebecca Charles) are caricatures, while the famous actress Helen Hubbard, played by Christine Kavanagh, is given a vampish air that mixes Mae West with a stock character from a murder mystery dinner party.
It brings the set up for the titular murder closer in style to a murder mystery improv show at the fringe than to a chilling exploration of how far humans will go to seek revenge and the depths of evil that can make rational people risk their futures in order to obtain closure.
Structurally, act one provides the set up that leads to the murder of Samuel Ratchett, played with some relish by Simon Cotton. Cotton makes him a thoroughly unpleasant man even before darker secrets about his real identity and why any one of the passengers or train guard might want him dead are revealed.
While Poirot’s investigation commences in this act, it doesn’t get into full flow until after the interval, and it’s only at the end, when all the suspects are gathered together for Poirot to reveal the identity of the murderer and the reasons the crime was committed, that the tone really shifts from the lightweight into something far more nuanced and menacing.
Maloney finally gets the chance to deliver on the internal conflict he references in the opening monologue but the imbalance between the gravitas of the closing scene and the rest of the production feels somewhat out of kilter and unearned, while also hinting at what the adaptation could have been had Ludwig and Bailey had not tried so hard to find and enhance a comedic element that Christie probably never intended to be there.
It’s entertaining but with the quality of the source material, it could be so much more than this, and it seems unlikely that the stage play will linger in the mind or be as successful as other adaptations of this novel or Christie’s best known stage play The Mousetrap.
Runs until 26 October 2024 | Image: Manuel Harlan