by David Suchet
It was a marvellous compliment, but it did not mean that I had become John. I was simply serving Mamet’s text, serving him as the writer, as I had always wanted to do. In reality, as I told a lady from the Daily Mail, ‘I am rather an old-fashioned man . . . I like what is called decent social behaviour. I was brought up like that, it’s part of me. There is a way of opening a door so that the lady continues moving. There is nothing patronising about that. What’s wrong with looking after someone?’
That is part of the reason why I always so enjoyed playing Poirot, and thankfully the little Belgian was waiting in the wings. I could never forget him, no matter what else was going on in my career, and now London Weekend had returned to my agent with an offer for me to film four two-hour Poirot specials at some point during 1994, which were to be broadcast at the very beginning of 1995, including one that was aimed specifically at the Christmas holidays, a new version of Dame Agatha’s story Hercule Poirot’s Christmas. I have to say that I was flattered, and mightily relieved, as the little man might just have disappeared altogether had LWT not been so generous.
But I could not start preparing right away, because I had agreed with my Poirot television producer Brian Eastman to appear in a brand-new play about the life of the famous Birmingham-born English comedian Sid Field, who died at the age of just forty-five in 1950, as one the greatest stars of the London stage, admired by everyone from Laurence Olivier to the American comedian Danny Kaye, from Charlie Chaplin to Noel Coward. Called What a Performance, after one of Field’s best-known phrases, it had been written especially for me by William Humble – who, funnily enough, had written the two-hour film Death in the Clouds in the fourth series of Agatha Christie’s Poirot – with a bit of advice from the legendary Jimmy Perry, one of the two creators of the BBC’s dazzling sitcom Dad’s Army.
Field was a mighty step away from Oleanna, and from Poirot. I had never sung before in front of an audience, never danced before, and I had hardly done a line of comedy in twenty-five years as a character actor. I remember telling one interviewer, only half joking, ‘This is the new David Suchet.’ It was a terrifying move to make, and yet the challenge of trying to recreate the gentle style of comedy sketch that Field specialised in during his London heyday in the 1940s was impossible to resist. It was a risk, of course it was, but I just could not say no to portraying the man I thought was probably the greatest English clown since Chaplin – and we were not going to try it out in the glare of the lights of Shaftesbury Avenue in London.
What A Performance was scheduled to open at the little Drum Theatre in Plymouth, just three weeks after the last night of Oleanna in London. In fact, I had been rehearsing it during the last weeks of Mamet’s play, working partly with the great actor and comedian Jack Tripp, probably Britain’s best-known pantomime dame at the time, who had once been Field’s understudy and had performed for him on the small number of occasions when the great man was ill.
One of the things that attracted me to the role of Sid Field was that he had been such a complex, fragile man. He was so timid as a person that he could not stand up to anyone, and especially not his tyrannical, dressmaker mother Bertha. Sid was so terrified of her that he did not even tell her that he was married until the birth of his first child. He was also terrified that people would not laugh at his work, which I began to feel myself as I started turning myself into him. Field turned to drink to give him the courage to perform, but I had never done that. When I am working on a new project, I do not drink any alcohol at all; I need to focus on what I am doing so completely that I dare not risk it.
Slightly to my alarm, two of the London critics came down to Plymouth especially to see the premiere of the show. I was hoping for a little more time to hone my performance, but I need not have worried so much, because they were both kind. Jeremy Kingston, in The Times, even suggested that I played ‘the buffoon as if he had never been away’. The local press were complimentary and we played to good houses during the three-week run in Plymouth.
Brian Eastman was keen to take the show on a tour before bringing it to London, but by the beginning of February 1994, we both knew that London Weekend were growing increasingly anxious to start the four new two-hour Poirot films, and neither of us wanted to keep them waiting. Besides, I had been away from the little Belgian for quite a long time, and his voice and manner was calling me back. The compromise was that I would tour with What a Performance as soon as the latest series of Poirot had finished filming, with a view to coming to the West End at the end of September.
I hardly had a moment to draw breath after I came back from Plymouth before Sean was back at our front door in Pinner to take me to Twickenham again – complete with its promise of Poirot’s padding, silver-topped cane and Homburg. In fact, I was not needed for the first part of the first film in the new series, Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, as it opens in South Africa in 1896, when a ruthless diamond prospector, Simeon Lee, betrays his fellow prospectors.
In fact, Dame Agatha’s original story, which was published in 1938 in both Britain and the United States, where it was called Murder for Christmas, had no such beginning. Our new television version, written once more by Clive Exton, used the story of betrayal in South Africa to establish Lee’s ruthless character, but then rapidly moved the events forward forty years, to 1936, when Lee is an old man and living in a grand country mansion in England. He has summoned his dysfunctional family to a reunion, while at the same time inviting Poirot to join them because he believes his life is in danger.
Lee’s family are at each other’s throats, and there is the scent of blood – even murder – in the air, which is not always the case in the build-up to Dame Agatha’s mysteries. On Christmas Eve, Lee is found with his throat cut in the locked study of his house and Poirot begins an investigation in earnest, although he decides to do so with the help of Chief Inspector Japp, who is spending his Christmas not far away, across the border in Wales, with his wife’s Welsh family. That is another of the elements that sets this story apart from some others of Dame Agatha’s. Not only is there more blood – a brutal killing with a knife, rather than her more familiar poison – but Japp, rather than Hastings, plays Poirot’s assistant, away from his formal job at Scotland Yard. Indeed, Hastings plays no part whatever in the story, which is not in the slightest bit ‘Christmassy’.
Philip Jackson enjoyed himself hugely making the film, not least because Clive Exton had given him the opportunity to flesh out Japp’s character, providing him with a set of hearty Welsh relations, who insist on celebrating Christmas by singing endlessly around the piano in the parlour, revealing Japp’s sense of melancholy humour which is not always visible in the other stories.
Another joy for me was to appear alongside John Horsley, one of the great stalwarts among English character actors, who played Simeon Lee’s faithful but elderly butler, Edward Tressilian, who plays a crucial role in unravelling the mystery. The denouement, which takes place on Christmas Day, slightly foreshadows her famous stage play, The Mousetrap, which began its life as a short story and radio play called Three Blind Mice in 1947, in that the least likely suspect is revealed to be the murderer.
The second film in the new series was one of Dame Agatha’s better-known stories, and another with a nursery rhyme in its title, Hickory, Dickory, Dock, which had first appeared in England in 1955. The story opens with the usually faultless Miss Lemon making not one but three mistakes in a single letter she is typing for Poirot in Whitehaven Mansions, much to his annoyance and amazement. It transpires that the good Miss Lemon’s sister, Mrs Hubbard, who manages a hostel for London University students in Hickory Road, has been suffering a string of inexplicable petty thefts. Out of loyalty to the invaluable Miss Lemon, Poirot offers to help, only for the thefts rapidly to turn into not one but three murders.
When the novel itself was first published, it was not greeted with the universal acclaim that Dame Agatha usually garnered. Frances Iles, reviewing it for the Sunday Times in London, su
ggested, ‘It reads like a tired effort. The usual sparkle is missing,’ while the novelist Evelyn Waugh, one of Dame Agatha’s greatest fans, recorded in his diary that one of ‘the joys and sorrows of a simple life’ was a new Agatha Christie story. This one, however, he recorded sadly, began well enough, which was a joy, only for sorrow to take its place as the novel ‘deteriorated’ one third of the way through into what he described – rather unfairly – as ‘twaddle’.
Our film version was certainly not twaddle. The director, Andrew Grieve, who had worked with me so often in the series before, made a wonderful job of it, adding the visual theme of a mouse running beside a clock – a reference to the nursery rhyme itself – and recruiting a stunningly good cast that included the then twenty-three-year-old Damian Lewis, almost straight from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and long before his successes in Band of Brothers, Life and Homeland on international television. As so often, I was aware that here was a young actor who was going to have an extraordinary career. It was not just his performance – in a relatively small part – but the fact that the camera loved him. I could see that myself, and so could Poirot, who was never wrong. We could both always spot real talent when we saw it.
Andrew not only recruited a terrific cast, he was also fortunate enough to benefit from Brian Eastman and London Weekend’s determination to provide our four new films with the best possible props and locations – which in this case included the regular use of a vintage London Underground train.
On top of that, Anthony Horowitz, who wrote the screenplay, decided to set Poirot’s investigation against the background of the October 1936 march from Jarrow, six miles from Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the north-east of England, to London by 207 unemployed men and women to protest against unemployment in Britain and the extreme poverty that had seen their communities all but destroyed by the country’s economic depression. The march meant that no policeman could take any kind of holiday, which leaves the redoubtable Chief Inspector Japp marooned in his office, only too eager to help Poirot.
I think our film revealed just how good Dame Agatha’s original story really was and redeemed it from some of its original negative reviews. The adaptation was excellent and the locations stunning. The one strange thing was that I never actually saw our mouse on the set – all the scenes with it were shot by Andrew Grieve after my performance was over, which meant that the first time I saw it was in the final version. I thought it was beautifully done, and added something special to the story.
But I also felt the film demonstrated the confidence that we all now felt in the character of Poirot on the screen, which had been growing steadily since the series had begun five years earlier. By now, he no longer had to prove that he was interesting to the audience by displaying his foibles. He could just be himself, idiosyncratic, polite and a fully realised person that everyone – both behind and in front of the camera – could understand, and perhaps even love.
The third film was Murder on the Links, which is set principally in Deauville in France, where Poirot is being taken on holiday by Hastings – the first story in the new series to feature Poirot’s old friend. It too had a script by Anthony Horowitz and was directed by Andrew Grieve, but – just as important to me – it was also a story that gave me an opportunity to explore Poirot’s inherent loneliness.
Significantly, this was Dame Agatha’s second Poirot story, published in 1923, just three years after he was introduced in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and, as she explained in her autobiography, in 1977, was influenced by Gaston Leroux’s classic French detective story, The Mystery of the Yellow Room, which had appeared not long before she had started writing.
Just as importantly, it was also the novel that proved to her that she was ‘stuck with Poirot’ and how wrong she had been to create his character ‘so old’ at the very beginning. As she put it herself, ‘I ought to have abandoned him after the first three or four books, and begun again with someone much younger.’ I can only say that I am delighted that she never did.
Dame Agatha did, however, provide Hastings with a love interest in Murder on the Links – in fact, she was even thinking of marrying him off, as she was ‘getting a little tired of him’, as she put it. She also created what she called a ‘human foxhound’ for the story in the shape of Inspector Giraud of the French police, who regarded Poirot as ‘old and passé’, to use her own words. In the end, Poirot and Giraud face up to each other with a wager that means that the Frenchman will present Poirot with his beloved pipe if the Belgian solves the mystery before he does, while if the Frenchman succeeds in solving the case first, Poirot will be obliged to cut off his moustache.
I loved being in France, and Brian Eastman kindly brought Sheila and the children over to stay with me during the half-term holiday for a few days. We seldom spent much time filming out of the country because of the cost.
The film itself was not quite the success I had hoped, however, as I seemed to be struggling to keep Poirot human against the rather more caricatured portrait of Inspector Giraud. But it did give Poirot the opportunity to reveal his affection for his old friend, when he reunites Hastings and his love interest at the end of the story, while Poirot himself returns to England alone, and obviously rather lonely.
For me, the final two-hour film in this series was the most delightful. Dumb Witness, which was first published in 1937, is one of the best-loved of all Dame Agatha’s stories, not least because it contains a wire-haired terrier called Bob, who is the dumb witness of the title. In fact, the original novel was dedicated to her own wire-haired terrier – ‘To dear Peter,’ it read, ‘most faithful of friends and dearest of companions: A dog in a thousand.’
I felt exactly the same way about the terrier in our film. He captivated me from the moment I set eyes on him. The little dog, whose real name was actually Snubby, became my dear friend, and even managed to capture Poirot’s heart, no easy task, as my little Belgian did not care for dogs, regarding them as rather smelly and dirty. Nevertheless, Bob allowed Poirot to show some affection for animals, without compromising his natural suspicions about dogs.
Directed by Edward Bennett, from a script by Douglas Watkinson, the film was set in the Lake District, which was another reason I found it so wonderful to do. The scenery was spectacular and the cast were excellent, especially the unforgettable Muriel Pavlow as one of two spiritualist sisters, an actress I had spent my childhood admiring in the cinema. The special effects were equally impressive, especially when showing, in a kind of haze, the death of Emily Arundell, the lady who has invited Poirot to investigate in the first place. And, of course, there was Bob, complete with his trick of sending a tennis ball bouncing down the stairs and running down past it to catch it in his mouth at the bottom.
The shoot was a joy from beginning to end – fresh air and wonderful locations, especially the cottage on Lake Windermere, which was so dear to me because of my own love of water and narrow boats. I simply could not have asked for anything nicer. I love the Lake District, and have done since I went on a hiking holiday with Sheila and the children, before Poirot. I can vividly remember carrying Robert around as a small boy and loving every minute of it. I think all this helped my performance, as I felt more relaxed and more at home than I had sometimes done in the past couple of series. Certainly, my now ever-expanding fan club wrote to tell me how much they enjoyed it, and, so they also told me, the sales of wire-haired terriers shot up exponentially after it was shown for the first time in March 1996.
I was lucky that I had enjoyed Dumb Witness so much, however, for no sooner were the four new films finished in the late summer of 1994, than I was back rehearsing for the tour and then London opening of What a Performance. Sadly, that proved to be a rather less joyful experience.
The show toured the country, including Bath and Richmond, and everywhere we went, the audiences seemed to like my portrayal of Sid Field in those golden days of comedy in the second half of the 1940s. One local paper insisted that it ‘will run
and run’, while another called my performance ‘stunning’, even though, as I told one reporter who came to see me, the headline should have read, ‘Suchet puts his head on the block.’
I knew the risk I was running in impersonating such a unique talent for a generation that had never seen him, but my fears disappeared on the opening night at the Queen’s Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue in London’s West End on Wednesday, 12 October 1994. The following morning, the Daily Mail’s theatre critic, Jack Tinker, was incredibly generous. ‘Miraculously, that match-less actor Mr David Suchet conjures up the vaguely campish clowning which made the likes of the young Tony Hancock hold Field in such awe,’ he wrote.
I received shoals of letters congratulating me on my tribute to Field, but the harsh reality of whether a modern audience actually wanted to pay to see the recreation of old comedy routines – with a script that did not seem quite strong enough – hung above the show like a dark cloud.
Just a few days after the show opened, Sheila rang the box office to book two tickets for the following Saturday week, only to be told over the phone that the show would not be running then.
Sheila telephoned me at once and said, ‘Did you know you’re not playing on Saturday week?’
I rang the box office myself immediately, and asked them if it was true.
There was a very long pause, before finally the box office manager said, ‘I’m terribly sorry, sir, I thought you’d been told.’
What a Performance closed in the West End after just four weeks, in November 1994, even though we had been scheduled to run until at least the end of January. It was the shortest run I had ever had in the theatre in twenty-six years, and – even though I had known it was a risk – it shook my confidence.