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‘Murder’ coming down the tracks at Stageworks
Mystery novelist Agatha Christie created one of literature’s two great detectives, the Belgian eccentric Hercule Poirot, in 1920. Sherlock Holmes, the other fictional sleuth to become a household name, was the handiwork of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – who, like Christie, was British.
Countries of origin are facts to remember in 1934’s Murder on the Orient Express, Dame Agatha’s 10th novel to feature the brilliant, strangely moustachio’d, crime-solving Poirot. For there on the titular train, traveling west from Istanbul, are a Russian, a Frenchman, a Swede, a Scot and several Americans. Along with a certain detective from Belgium, who happens to have a mind like a steel trap.
As the train sits immobile in the Yugoslavian countryside, the track blocked by a towering snowbank, one of the passengers turns up dead.
It’s up to Poirot to determine which of the international oddballs did the poor fellow in.
Getting there, of course, is half the fun, as director Clareann Despain and Stageworks Theatre determined early in the process of bringing Murder on the Orient Express to the stage (it opens tonight and runs through April 10).
Leading the large ensemble cast is Matthew McGee, who recently came off of the one-man show I Love to Eat, where he starred as legendary TV chef James Beard.
With Murder on the Orient Express, McGee crosses another larger-than-life character off his lengthy bucket list.
“I really wanted to play this character at some point,” he says. “I’d loved Agatha Christie since I was 13 and picked up one of her books. The first time I read Murder on the Orient Express I went ‘I have to learn more about this Poirot. He is fascinating.’”
The Stageworks cast includes Theron (T.R.) Butler, Laura Flemming, Aaron Castle, Susan Haldeman, Brian Shea, Nicole Jeannine Smith, Jarryn McCann, Katrina Stevenson and Donna DeLonay.
“I had not done a play with this many people in what, two years?” McGee says.
To find “his” Poirot, McGee reviewed the actors who have interpreted the character over the years, starting with David Suchet, star of the long-running ITV series Agatha Christie’s Poirot (it aired on PBS and A&E in the United States).
“Everyone loves David Suchet – and he’s very hard to top,” McGee reveals. “But his portrayal is very much for the camera. It’s very small. Onstage, I think, even David Suchet would have to amplify it a little bit.
“My first Poirot was Peter Ustinov in Death on the Nile and Evil Under the Sun. I really liked a lot of what he did. And there’s a great swashbuckling quality to Kenneth Branagh,” who starred in recent cinematic adaptations of Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile.
Albert Finney played Poirot in the first movie version of Murder, in 1974.
“I thought really hard about what they brought to the table.”
Stageworks is performing the adaptation by playwright Ken Ludwig, best known for the comedies Lend Me a Tenor and Moon Over Buffalo. Ludwig, according to McGee, “found the humor in the show.”
Ultimately, McGee discovered, “Poirot is pretty much an observer in the play. All the other characters are pretty wild and outlandish and over the top. It’s a real interesting challenge.”
In the stage production, “You start to realize how important it is to be there for everybody, because Poirot guides the action forward … it’s important for me to help the audience clue in to what’s happening.”
For tickets and additional information, click here.
