Bringing Agatha Christie's great exploration of evil to the Brighton stage
There is evil, real evil, at the heart of Death on The Nile – which is part of what makes it one of Agatha Christie's most intriguing, most striking and greatest works.
Mark Hadfield (Belfast; Outlander; Wallander) is delighted to step into the Poirot shoes for a tour which takes the Christie classic to the Theatre Royal Brighton from March 31-April 4.
As Mark says: “You just don't know which way it is going to go and even though you might have an idea who has done it, you just don't know how they actually did do it, and I think you really get that with Death on The Nile.”
But how do you step into a character that comes with as many expectations as Hercule Poirot does?
“To start with, I just thought to myself that I've got the text in front of me but also I was intrigued by how this adaptation was going to pan out and what form it would take. It is a theatre piece so obviously it's not going to be the same as the film. You can't have a cast of 30 and you can't go up the Nile! To start with they tried to achieve the very large monument that features in the book but in the end they just thought that it was more theatrical to keep everything on the boat. So obviously some tweaks were made and the adaptation has bent a little around Agatha Christie's central story but it maintains the central thrust, and playing the whole thing out on the boat makes it more claustrophobic and, I think, more suspenseful.
“So I started by reading what was in front of me. I've not seen David Suchet's version of Poirot except in excerpts. Probably deep down I was very envious that he had been cast before me! But my initial introduction was through the Peter Ustinov version. Also I have delved into other people's performances.
“I have not tried to reinvent Poirot but I have actually tried to make him more human. This is a Poirot at a melancholic later age, almost wishing for retirement. And that's why he's gone on the Nile for a bit of R&R. He's just come off the case of the Murder on the Orient Express and that has worn him out. To have one suspect is bad enough but to have nine is just so much harder, and I think it has made Poirot more melancholic and more reflective.
“But in this case he is very intrigued by the love triangle and he reflects a lot on age and youth. I don't want to disappoint audiences that have other actors and performers in their heads but I think most of all my aim is to achieve what I have read in the book, to get across the sort of person Poirot is, his vanity, his obsession with symmetry but ultimately tinged with this melancholy. I wanted to introduce a little bit of warmth into the character.
“And the thing is in this case that we are not dealing with arch criminals or psychopathic murderers that we all want to see found guilty. Really it is a story about young people that are at the beginning of their lives and have everything in front of them. But there is evil in this case. He talks about evil a lot. He says in the course of this case that he has come as close to the heart of evil as he's ever come and that's quite some admission when you think of all the cases that he's worked on. He's seen a lot of death and crime but this one he says specifically is evil. It wipes out three lives and it hits him pretty hard. I want that sense that this is the case that could tip him over the edge. I don't believe that he is ever going to want to go into anything quite like this again.”