by David Suchet
As the weeks passed, he would gently make suggestions from time to time: ‘Maybe it might be a little better, if you don’t mind me saying so, if you dropped that last line. You don’t need to say it.’ Sean gradually became my filter, and he came to know the role almost as well as I did.
It was all the more exhausting when, not long after we started shooting, the old arguments about what Poirot should or should not do raised their head again.
When Poirot and Hastings go to visit Mrs Todd’s house in Clapham, in pursuit of the missing cook, they go for a stroll on the common while they wait for Mr Todd to come home from the office. They want to talk to him about his cook, as well as speak to the couple’s ‘paying guest’, a lodger, at the same time.
Clive Exton’s script called for Poirot to sit down on a park bench to talk to Hastings, and so, when the moment came to rehearse the shot, I did exactly what Poirot would have done. I removed my handkerchief from my pocket, carefully wiped the seat, spread the handkerchief out, and then sat on it, so that there would no danger of Poirot getting a stain on his trousers.
Ed Bennett, the director, genuinely thought that looked ridiculous, and said so, which rather upset me. Once again, it was as if all the conversations I’d had with everyone connected with the series over the past weeks – focusing on my determination to play Dame Agatha’s Poirot exactly as she had written him – had been sidelined. It felt as though I was suddenly right back where I’d started.
But I was not prepared to budge. I felt certain that wiping the seat and sitting on the handkerchief was exactly what Poirot would have done in those circumstances. I refused point blank to sit down without doing so.
‘But it looks ridiculous,’ I was told again and again. ‘The audience will think he is quite mad.’
‘Nonsense,’ I replied. ‘It is exactly what Poirot would do and exactly what Agatha Christie has him doing.’
The director would not allow me to do what he believed looked ridiculous, and I would not sacrifice the integrity of my Poirot. It was a stalemate. But I was fighting for what Dame Agatha wrote, and in doing so, serving Poirot’s creator.
If I lost the argument, it would mean that my custodianship of Poirot’s character was in severe jeopardy – so much so that I really thought that I might not be able to go on playing him. I had to play the character she’d created, I was certain of that. I would not compromise.
Now, I am not a confrontational man. Frankly, I don’t like any kind of confrontation at all. It upsets me too much. But I’ve always found it easier to argue for someone else – in this case, Hercule Poirot – rather than for myself. That way, I’m defending the character, not being a sort of grand ‘luvvie’, a word which I hate.
Ed Bennett was adamant that it looked silly, and I was every bit as certain that it was precisely in character, and so the shoot came to a dead stop.
Brian Eastman was summoned to adjudicate. I had some distinctly anxious moments as I waited for him to decide how we should play this scene. I only knew what my instinct told me. I had to be true to Poirot.
Fortunately, Brian went with the handkerchief, and the shoot resumed, with me wiping the park bench before sitting down. I’m not exactly sure what would have happened if Brian’s decision had gone the other way. Perhaps I would have accepted it, but in my heart, I very much doubt it. I think it would have made continuing to play Poirot much more difficult for me, as I would not have been true to the man I had come to know so well.
Yet the irony is that in the final cut of The Adventure of the Clapham Cook, the one that was eventually broadcast around the world, you only see Poirot, umbrella in hand, standing beside Hastings, who is sitting on the park bench. Poirot never actually sits down! The scene of Poirot wiping the park bench with his handkerchief ended up on the cutting-room floor. When I saw that, I allowed myself a wry little smile.
I am not sure that it made the slightest difference to the audience’s enjoyment of the story and, if I am truly honest, I do not believe that it diluted my interpretation of Poirot, but, in spite of that, the ‘affair of the handkerchief’ mattered desperately to me at the time. Someone had to stand up for and protect Dame Agatha’s Poirot, and that person was going to be me, no matter what the consequences might be.
I felt that responsibility more and more as the weeks passed on the first series, because I knew that by putting myself in that position, I was getting closer and closer to the character I was playing. The more that I knew about Poirot, the more I could protect him.
What began as my exploring Poirot and his character gradually developed into a relationship in which we began to merge into one – so much so that by the end of the series, I knew that I could have gone out into the real world, rather than a television studio, dressed in his costume, and lived his life exactly as he would have lived it, and still have beeen myself.
Poirot and I steadily became one and the same man. Suddenly it was Poirot and me.
Chapter 4
‘I’M AFRAID THEY’RE GOING TO BE TOO TAME, OR TOO ECCENTRIC’
The second Poirot story we shot, though it was the third to be transmitted, started exactly two weeks after our first. It was The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly – the case of an attempt to foil a threatened kidnap of the son of a wealthy landowner, Marcus Waverly, played by my old friend Geoffrey Bateman.
Geoffrey and I had definitely worked together before – at the Connaught Theatre in Worthing in 1971 – when he played a Samurai warrior in a stage version of the classic 1950 Japanese film drama Rashomon. It was very early in my career, and I directed all the fight scenes, as well as playing the bandit. Now Geoffrey was playing the landowner whose huge country house seems to be falling down around his ears, while his son is in danger.
For this story we had a new director, Renny Rye, who was then only forty and would go on to direct five episodes of that first Poirot series. Renny started his television career producing the children’s programme Blue Peter, before graduating to drama. He was to stay with Poirot until 1991. Since then, he has gone on to direct episodes of the British television series Midsomer Murders and Silent Witness, among many other things.
Because of the schedule, Ed Bennett, who’d directed Clapham Cook, disappeared into the cutting room to edit his film, while Renny worked on Johnnie Waverly. Then Ed would return to direct the third, while Renny went away to edit his. Alternating the two directors was the only way we could be sure to produce the films within the twenty weeks that we had been given by London Weekend, who were keen to transmit the series in January 1989, barely three weeks after we would finish shooting.
Johnnie Waverly again reminded everyone how much Poirot loathed the countryside, especially when he is forced to walk across the fields after Hastings’ Lagonda breaks down just minutes before the threatened kidnap is about to take place. The resilient Chief Inspector Japp arrives with a team of constables in an effort to foil the crime, but to no avail, although Poirot realises that the kidnap must have been organised by someone who knew the family, and eventually retrieves young Johnnie.
The bond that was beginning to develop between Hugh, Philip and me seemed to grow as the weeks passed, and it was certainly clear for all to see at the start of the third film, Murder in the Mews, which opened with the three characters walking home after dinner past a November fireworks party and the mews where Hastings garages his Lagonda.
I also seemed to develop a rapport with the rest of the cast. David Yelland was one of the guest stars of Murder in the Mews. He’d played the Prince of Wales in the Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire. Educated at Cambridge, where he read English, and only a year younger than I am, he was wonderful as the ambitious MP Charles Laverton-West.
No sooner had we finished Mews than we were on to the next, Four and Twenty Blackbirds. There was hardly a moment for me to do anything except go to Twickenham and work. That meant that I had to leave home every morning at 6.30 a.m. and I often didn’t get back to Pinner until 8.30 or 9 p.m. I’m a
fraid that meant that Sheila and the children did not see a great deal of me in the months between July and Christmas 1988, because even when I did get home, I had to look at the script for the next day. I eventually got into the habit of making sure that I learnt my lines at least two weeks ahead, to overcome the panic of trying to learn them the night before.
One difficulty for me was that Poirot always had to explain exactly who did it – at the end of the story – to whichever group of people had been involved, including, of course, Hastings and Japp. So I found myself often having to learn quite long speeches after I’d finished filming for the day. I tried to prepare for them by making sure I looked at them throughout the filming, but, inevitably, when it came down to making sure I had them firmly in my mind, everything hinged on the night before we were due to shoot.
The denouement was the moment when I revealed the murderer to everyone, including, most important of all, the audience. I simply could not allow myself to get it even a fraction wrong; that would have been to let Poirot down, and I would never allow myself to do that.
There was another issue about the denouements, however, which involved being true to Poirot and to myself as an actor.
When Dame Agatha wrote those final scenes where the villain is revealed, she was allowing Poirot his ‘theatrical’ moment. He is well aware of who is guilty as he goes round the room explaining the nature of the case, but Dame Agatha and he often take great pleasure in picking on an innocent party and seeming to accuse them of the crime, before revealing their innocence. It was her way of building up suspense for the final ‘reveal’.
In those scenes, Poirot is acting – teasing the characters, apparently accusing them and then changing his mind, making them an essential part of the final drama – and in that sense, he is treading on my territory as an actor.
Now, because I am an actor, I know precisely how to play those scenes, for they allow me to use my theatricality. I feel instinctively what I need to do, and how to do it. No one needs to direct me in those denouements because Poirot has strayed into my world as an actor, which means that – in a strange way – I feel more comfortable doing those scenes than almost any other.
In fact, it is in those scenes that Poirot and I completely merge, touching one another in a quite extraordinary way. There is the actor in Poirot which merges almost seamlessly into me the actor; the perfectionist in Poirot and the same perfectionist in me; the need for order in Poirot precisely matched by my own need for order, not least in the filming of his stories.
We are all but one person, so much so that I often feel the line between us blurring. If he feels pain, so do I; if I feel unsettled, it shows in him. Our symbiosis is all but complete. Interestingly, the fifth film in the first series, The Third Floor Flat, reflects exactly that, especially when it comes to Poirot’s respect for women.
The story is almost entirely set in Poirot’s Whitehaven Mansions, which is actually named Florin Court and lies in Charterhouse Square in London, not far from a fourteenth-century monastery which later became a Tudor mansion, an almshouse and a school in the seventeenth century.
Hidden away not far from Smithfield Market, Charterhouse is one of the most beautiful and secret of all London’s squares. On the east side, Florin Court was built in 1936, and consisted of nine floors, a roof garden and an indoor swimming pool, all in the Art Deco style. It is one of the best-preserved of all the Art Deco blocks of apartments in London, which made it the perfect location for Poirot’s flat, Number 56B, on the fifth floor.
Regalian Properties refurbished the building in the 1980s and kindly allowed us to film there, but it still looked exactly as it had done when it was built. The stories in the first series were all set precisely at a time when the block would have been new, between 1936 and 1938, even though Dame Agatha had, in fact, written most of them a few years earlier. From the very beginning, Brian Eastman had been very keen to set all the films within a certain period of time, to give them a particular look and feel.
The Third Floor Flat allows Poirot to reveal his dislike of being ill and bored. As the story opens, he has a terrible cold, and is complaining to Miss Lemon that he has had nothing interesting to do for three weeks – ‘an eternity for a brain like mine’. To divert him, Hastings arranges a trip to the theatre, inevitably to see a murder mystery, which only further infuriates Poirot, as he insists the man who is finally revealed to be the murderer could not possibly have done it. The true culprit was, for Poirot, obviously the butler.
The irony of a detective not agreeing with a playwright’s view of who might have been the killer is not lost on Hastings on their way back to the flat. But the mood quickly changes – and Poirot’s cold disappears – when a body is found in the flat two floors below Poirot’s, number 36B. The victim was played by the comedienne Josie Lawrence in one of her first straight television roles.
Most important of all, however, is the fact that the heroine of the story, played by Suzanne Burden, makes Poirot a ‘fluffy omelette’ during his investigation, which only serves to remind him, and me, of his repressed love for a young Englishwoman in his past who once also made him ‘fluffy omelettes’.
But what did those omelettes mean for a man like Poirot? I think they were a sign that he could only love at a distance, at one remove, rather than as a red-blooded man. Dame Agatha could not and did not allow him to cross the barrier and release himself into a full relationship with a woman because it would have proved too great a threat to his personality. Poirot could admire, even ‘love’, a woman, but it would always be from a distance, and I understood that instinctively, although it is not a feeling I share.
Those omelettes were a symbol of his remoteness, underlining the fact that Poirot was well aware of the fact that Suzanne’s character reminded him of the love he could never quite have, and that affected me deeply. Once again, it helped me to understand his deep regret at never having truly experienced love, even though Dame Agatha did allow him a relationship with the dramatic Russian Countess Rossakoff, but one which was also destined to disappear into the wind.
What was so charming was that Suzanne, and every other actor and actress who came into the series, were genuinely thrilled to be in a Poirot story. They all seemed to have known and read Poirot as a child, whereas I didn’t know him at all to begin with, even though I was becoming him more completely every single day.
The sixth and seventh films in the first series underlined exactly how much money London Weekend was spending. Triangle at Rhodes was set on the Greek island, and the whole unit was transported there. For the next, Problem at Sea, everyone stayed in the Mediterranean, while Poirot took a cruise on a magnificent 1930s motor yacht, and we visited another group of beautiful, exotic locations.
In fact, those two stories reflected Dame Agatha’s own fascination with travel and adventure, and helped to set the series far apart from some of the other British fiction of the time, most of which seemed landlocked in Britain.
In Triangle at Rhodes Poirot uses a little wooden doll that belonged to a child, who was one of the characters, while in Problem at Sea he reveals an interest in ventriloquism. Both only increased the pressure on me to make sure that I could carry those vital scenes at the end of the film to satisfy every single person in the television audience.
One thing I knew was that Dame Agatha always made sure that all the clues were there for everyone to see – if only they looked for them. If you did grasp them all, then you would know who did it; if not, you would have to wait for Poirot to tell you. It was one of her greatest qualities as a writer – she was always honest with her readers – and I wanted to be equally honest with her viewers. They had to feel that they might have reached the same conclusion as Poirot if they had put all the clues together; although they knew, in their hearts, that although they might have noticed one or two, Poirot saw them all – which was why he was a great detective.
The Incredible Theft, which was the eighth film, demonstrated yet again the extraor
dinary lengths that Brian Eastman and London Weekend went to in order to find exactly the right backgrounds and props. The story revolves around a maverick aircraft manufacturer and his designs for a new fighter in 1936, because there is ‘so much at stake for England’ as the possibility of a second European war looms.
The fact that the producers found so many vintage planes to illustrate the story was extraordinary enough, but the cast was every bit as special, with John Stride as the maverick millionaire and John Carson as the politician Sir George Carrington.
I found myself explaining the nature of the ‘theft’ of a critical page of the aircraft’s design at the denouement, this time in a wonderful country house. In fact, the Poirot stories were most often set in the homes of the landed aristocracy or millionaires, although The Adventure of the Clapham Cook demonstrated that he both could and did work with the rather less affluent. Nonetheless, Poirot does not take the wealth of those around him too seriously. He takes some considerable pleasure in gently poking fun at the foibles of the English aristocracy, often ridiculing their insistence on respecting ‘good chaps’.
This is one of the great charms of Poirot’s investigations, for they reveal a world where manners and morals are quite different from today. There are no overt and unnecessary sex scenes, no alcoholic, haunted detectives in Poirot’s world. He lives in a simpler, some would say more human, era: a lost England, seen through the admiring eyes of this foreigner, this little Belgian detective. For me, that makes the stories all the more appealing, for although the days he lives in seem far away, they are all the more enchanting because of it.
The last stories for the first series were The King of Clubs, about the death of a film producer, which starts with Poirot visiting a film set – which, of course, was created at Twickenham Studios, next to our own set – and The Dream, about a famous pie manufacturer who is killed in a locked room in his flat above the factory. The cast were as tremendous as they had been throughout, including Niamh Cusack as a film actress in the story about the movie mogul, and my old colleague from the Royal Shakespeare Company Alan Howard as the pie manufacturer. His daughter was played by the delightful Joely Richardson, in one of her first television appearances.