Poirot and Me

by David Suchet

  Perhaps it had something to do with the death of my mother, I cannot be sure, but by the time we came to the end of the series, I was not entirely happy with what I had done. The stories worked, of course, especially The Chocolate Box, but I had a sinking feeling. I was not sure they were as quite as good as I could have made them. I was satisfied with my performances, but felt as though perhaps – like Poirot in the last film – I needed a break.

  In this reflective mood, I went back to Pinner for a rest. I was not sure what to do next; nor, for that matter, exactly what I wanted to do. I certainly was not ready to give up Poirot, but there was something troubling me. Yet again, there was no indication from London Weekend about the future. My agent had given them a deadline in February 1993, by which they had to tell me their Poirot plans for the coming year, but they had not taken out an option for me to play the role again. That was familiar enough. The only option that they had ever taken out was for me to do a second series after the first. Since then, I had been left in limbo every year. But this time I was restless, not completely happy with myself, and was waiting, waiting, waiting to discover what would happen to Poirot and me.

  With nothing firm on my horizon, I accepted the role of the flamboyant Viennese business man Rudi Waltz in English director Jack Gold’s film The Lucona Affair, a fictional account of a huge Austrian political scandal. It was based on the bombing of the cargo ship Lucona in the Indian Ocean in 1977, which had been chartered by my character, who then tried to claim £13 million in compensation for the loss from an insurance company. It set off one of the great financial and political dramas in modern Austrian history. In reality, the Austrian Minister of Defence committed suicide after it was discovered that he had allowed the bomb onto the ship, and several other ex-ministers were imprisoned for covering up the affair.

  My co-star was the Italian Franco Nero, who had made his reputation in the 1970 version of D. H. Lawrence’s novella The Virgin and the Gypsy, and had famously fallen in love with Britain’s Vanessa Redgrave in the 1960s, in the wake of her divorce from director Tony Richardson. Franco’s career had continued apace. In 1990 he had even appeared in the Hollywood blockbuster Die Hard 2, alongside Bruce Willis, although most of his work for the cinema was produced in Europe rather than in the United States. The Lucona Affair was a European production, with a large German and Austrian cast and crew, in spite of the presence of Jack Gold and me representing England.

  Poirot was still there in the background, however. I simply could not ignore the little Belgian. Indeed, one of the nicest things that happened while I was filming in Austria was that the four two-hour Poirots that we had made finally emerged on American television, starting with The ABC Murders on 19 November 1992. The New York Times’s John J. O’Connor was particularly kind, noting that the Poirot series started immediately after my appearance in The Secret Agent on the same channel in the United States, and thereby gave the audience ‘another opportunity to savour a gifted actor’s versatility’.

  ‘Mr Suchet’s Poirot’, he went on, ‘is now a paragon of charming ego and unquestionable shrewdness . . . “Poirot” just keeps getting better. Much like Mr Suchet.’ Mr O’Connor set the tone for most of the American reviews, which were almost all equally flattering. What those critics did not know, however, was that I had no idea whether I was ever to get the opportunity to make my Poirot any better.

  The Americans liked the series so much that they even granted the show the accolade of a cartoon in the New Yorker magazine, with the title ‘Hercule Parrot’. It featured a parrot with a Poirot-like moustache saying, ‘A cracker, s’il vous plait.’ I wondered what Dame Agatha would have made of it.

  It was in early December 1992, when I was sitting in my hotel room in Vienna during the filming of Lucona, that the first indication of what the future might hold for me came in a telephone call from my agent in England at the time, Aude Powell – and it had nothing whatever to do with Poirot. Aude rang me to say that the playwright Harold Pinter was very interested in casting me in a new play by the American playwright David Mamet, called Oleanna, which he was going to direct.

  ‘Harold would like you to read the script as soon as you can,’ she said.

  At that moment I knew nothing about the play, but I did know that no actor could refuse an opportunity to work with probably the most gifted English playwright of the second half of the twentieth century on a play written by one of the great talents of the American theatre in the same period. Oleanna represented a tremendously exciting opportunity, and I did not intend to let it slip away without exploring it carefully.

  I read the play within a week and realised that mine was a wonderful role. I could not wait to tell Harold that I would love to play it. I was to play the college lecturer John in Mamet’s ferocious examination of sexual harassment and exploitation in American universities. My character is accused by Carol, a female student, of attempted rape, abuse of power and ‘classism’, and his career is destroyed by the allegations.

  The play had only been performed once before, in the United States, when Mamet had directed his wife, Rebecca Pidgeon, as Carol and William H. Macy as John. It had provoked an enormous response, not to say a controversy, with Newsweek magazine’s famous theatre critic Jack Kroll describing it by saying, ‘Mamet has sent a riveting report from the war zone between the genders and the classes, a war that will cause great havoc before it can create a new human order.’

  The so-called ‘Butcher of Broadway’, the New York Times theatre critic Frank Rich, had enthused, ‘John and Carol go to it with hand-to-hand combat that amounts to a primal struggle for power’ with ‘highly distilled dialogue unencumbered by literary frills or phony theatrical devices’. Mamet himself had asked Pinter to direct the play in London.

  I was fascinated. It was a unique opportunity to appear in what could become one of the great new plays of the last quarter of the century, a work that had never been performed anywhere other than New York, and offered me the chance to return to the theatre in a part that would utterly confound the expectations of the television audience that had grown used to me in Poirot. Ironically, Harold’s interest came just as the fifth series of Agatha Christie’s Poirot started on ITV on Sunday, 17 January 1993, with The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb. It was to air every Sunday until the first week of March, and was just as well-received as its predecessors had been. The audience clearly did not share my own slight sense of disappointment, one which Sheila, however, did share.

  Still there was no word from London Weekend about what they intended for the future of Poirot, while now there was the tantalising prospect of Oleanna. I was torn in two directions, and did not know what to do, but a week or two after the original call from my agent Aude, and after I had finished the script, I got another telephone call from her.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry to tell you, David,’ she said, ‘but Harold has decided to go in another direction for the part of John.’

  My stomach did a somersault and my heart sank because this was a role that I desperately wanted to play.

  ‘Please tell Harold that I quite understand,’ I said to Aude, trying to conceal exactly how upset I was, ‘but would you ask him if he would be prepared to have coffee with me, just to discuss his decision?’

  Aude said she would, and came back later that day to say that Harold would be more than happy to see me.

  So, in the early days of February, I found myself in Harold’s office in his house in Camden Hill Square in Kensington, London. He was utterly charming. We talked about The Lucona Affair, and what else I was thinking of doing. In fact, we talked for almost half an hour before the subject of Oleanna came up.

  What I did not realise was that Harold was using our conversation to audition me.

  ‘Now look here,’ he said finally. ‘You are sitting here in front of me because – in essence – you require me to tell you why I am going another way in the casting of this role.’

  He paused for what seemed like a very long
time, while I kept absolutely silent.

  ‘But you know, I have to admit something to you.’

  There was another Pinteresque pause.

  ‘I have been completely wrong, and I don’t know whether you will take this as a compliment or not, but I think you are perfect casting.’

  My jaw dropped, and I struggled to know what to say. Finally, I thanked him profusely for the compliment, but then confessed, ‘But, Harold, I don’t know whether or not I’m going to be offered another series of Poirot, though there is a time limit on London Weekend making an offer, which is very, very imminent.’

  ‘Well, there you are, and there it is,’ he said in his quiet, firm voice. ‘It is for you to decide. It is yours if you want it, but I have to know very soon.’ Rehearsals were due to begin in just a few weeks.

  As I left his house, I realised that I had never been in a situation quite like this in my life before.

  All I could think about was what London Weekend was going to do about Poirot, and exactly when the time limit on them having to make an offer to me ran out. I did not want to let them down, and would stand by our agreement to play him again if they wanted me to, even if that meant me turning my back on Oleanna, but I was still torn.

  As it happened, Sheila and I had decided to go for a week’s break to my parents’ serviced flat in the Imperial Hotel in Torquay. There was no point in altering our plans. I simply asked my agent to re-check the date by which an offer for Poirot had to be made, and off we went.

  The day of the deadline came, and I heard nothing at all. To me, that meant that I was now free of the obligation.

  The next morning, I telephoned Aude and told her to ring Harold and accept the offer to play John. It was the first time ever in my five years with the little Belgian that I knew that I could be saying goodbye to him, perhaps for a year, perhaps forever.

  As a courtesy, I also asked Aude to telephone Nick Elliott, the executive producer of the Poirot series since it began, to tell him my decision. Within minutes, Aude rang me back to say that Nick was desperate to speak to me.

  A few moments later, Nick rang. He was as upset as I was. ‘But you knew we were going to offer you another series,’ he said, his voice all but breaking.

  ‘But I didn’t, Nick,’ I told him. ‘The deadline passed, and we’d heard nothing.’

  ‘But we are. We want to shoot again this summer.’

  I felt absolutely terrible. They had given me this wonderful opportunity to play the role of Poirot and here I was, letting them down.

  ‘I hadn’t heard, Nick. I thought nothing was going to happen, and so I said yes to Harold and Oleanna.’

  ‘Can’t you get out of it?’

  ‘No,’ I told him sadly. ‘I don’t want to go back to Harold, and besides, I really want to play in the theatre again. I haven’t been on the stage since Timon of Athens in 1990, and this is a truly wonderful part.’

  Nick was very upset, and I felt absolutely dreadful. I apologised profusely, but I also knew in my heart that I wanted to do this play. It fulfilled my ambition to go back to the theatre and I knew I would be mad to turn it down. In the end, LWT postponed the new series for a year and waited for me, but I had no idea they would do that at the time. In fact, I wondered if I had lost Poirot altogether.

  How an actor’s life can change, I thought to myself, as I explained what had happened to Sheila. If I hadn’t asked Aude to call Harold and see if I could have coffee with him in the wake of his decision ‘to go in another direction’, none of this would ever have happened.

  Actors leap off into the unknown in their careers, without really ever knowing where their decisions are going to take them. It has always been my view that we, as human beings, go through our lives like spiders spinning our threads behind us, but only by looking backwards do we see how the past affects the present, and how those threads of our lives fit together.

  What I certainly did not know then was that if I hadn’t made the decision to say goodbye to Poirot at that moment, I would never have had the career in the theatre that I have been lucky enough to enjoy since then. Just as importantly, however, it also did not mean that it was the end for the little Belgian and me.

  Chapter 11

  ‘A VERY LONG WAY INDEED FROM POIROT’

  Harold Pinter’s rehearsals for Oleanna started just a few weeks after my decision to leave Poirot altogether, for a year at least, and they were particularly intense. As there were just two members of the cast, the talented young Lia Williams and me, there was nowhere to hide as Harold, looking as serious as ever in his habitual black sweater and thick glasses, took us through the battleground of the sexes that David Mamet had constructed in three lacerating acts.

  These were some of the most difficult weeks I had ever spent in a rehearsal room, because the play is so consuming, so brutal about the true nature of the relationships between men and women, and so filled with poison that it was all but impossible to keep those emotions from spilling over into my own life. Sheila and the children had got used to the rather benign figure of Poirot returning from the studio each evening, but now I was this man struggling with exactly how he felt about women and himself, who in the end resorts to violence, even though he knows he should not.

  The title comes from an American folk song which refers to a nineteenth-century version of utopia, but there is nothing utopian at all about the play itself. When it was first produced in 1992 in the United States, my character, John, was described as a ‘smug, pompous, insufferable man whose power over academic lives he unconsciously abuses’ – a very long way indeed from Poirot.

  Curiously enough, I had experienced something of the problems that John faced in the play. In 1975 I was teaching drama at an American university when I found myself confronting the same issue of sexual politics that is examined in Oleanna. I was teaching on a very hot day. We were doing a drama exercise that involved passing a ball around, which made everyone very sweaty, so I suggested that my male students might take their shirts off.

  The idea that my decision might infuriate the female students never occurred to me, but it most certainly did to them. My female students immediately complained to the head of the department, who told me that I had to write an apology, as I had discriminated against them because they could not take off their own shirts.

  Rather than apologising, I asked to be sent back to London, as I honestly did not believe I could preserve any kind of relationship with my female students after their complaints. In the end, the storm blew over, and a few days later, a spokeswoman for the women in the group came to apologise, although she did point out that I obviously did not understand about rights for women at the university. I carried on teaching until the end of that academic year, although I have to confess that I kept a very careful eye on my relationship with my female students from then onwards. Perhaps my own experience may just have done something to illuminate my performance in Mamet’s play.

  What is not in doubt was that Oleanna provoked the most extreme reactions from its audience. When it opened at New York’s Orpheum Theatre, some of Carol’s speeches elicited hisses and walk-outs from the audience. Couples left the theatre in a rage, so angry were they about the issues involved, while other members of the audience repeatedly shouted at the actors on the stage. There was even spontaneous clapping and cheering when John finally snaps and attacks Carol. William H. Macy, who created the role of John there, memorably remarked afterwards, ‘It’s not a good date-show.’

  Neither Lia nor I knew, when we were rehearsing with Harold, what the reaction would be in England. I had never worked with Lia before, but I recognised her talent as soon as rehearsals began. Born in Cheshire, she was only twenty-nine when we started to work together. She had spent the year before working with the English director Michael Winner on the film Dirty Weekend. Her stage breakthrough had come in 1991, when she received the London Critics’ Circle award for the most promising newcomer, for her performance in Alan Ayckbourn’s play The Reve
ngers’ Comedies.

  Slight, with long auburn hair, Lia sometimes looked as though she might be blown over by a puff of wind, but that concealed a very strong character beneath the surface, which certainly appeared as we rehearsed Oleanna.

  We opened for previews at the Royal Court on London’s Sloane Square on Thursday, 24 June, and the press reviews came out exactly a week later, on 1 July. They were quite extraordinary. Michael Billington, in the Guardian, commented that ‘The first night . . . was greeted with rapt attentiveness which is a tribute to the power of the acting, the writing and, not least, to Harold Pinter’s production.’ Thankfully, every other West End critic was equally complimentary.

  I was quietly delighted. It made my decision to put Poirot aside for a time worthwhile, and brought me back to my first love – the theatre – in a play that I was sure would become a classic, even though it had both fascinated and frightened me when I first read it.

  Charles Spencer called Oleanna ‘the most controversial hit in living memory’, and it was hard to disagree with him. But he also recorded, in the Telegraph, that Lia and I made every effort not to allow our characters to overtake our lives completely. We always gave each other a hug in the wings at the end of each performance. ‘We hold on to each other very tightly,’ Lia told him, ‘to remind ourselves that we actually like each other.’

  The controversy, the reviews and the audience reaction helped to ensure that the play was a sell-out from September when it transferred to the Duke of York’s in the West End until 8 January 1994, when we ended our run. The great English director Sir Peter Hall came to one of the last performances and sent me a postcard afterwards, which really made me feel my decision to forgo Poirot and do Oleanna was right. Peter was kind enough to say that my performance was one of the best pieces of acting he’d seen in years because I’d portrayed John’s failings so well, and in doing so had truly challenged the audience.