Christie whodunnit’s Devon sent for Bob!
HOLBY CITY STAR BOB BARRETT IS PLAYING A VERY DIFFERENT DOCTOR IN MURDER MYSTERY AND THEN THERE WERE NONE
FOR people who are new to And Then There Were None, what is it all about?
I can’t say too much because I don’t want to give the game away but basically the premise is that ten people have been invited to Soldier Island, near Devon, by Mr and Mrs Owen and they all think they’re there for legitimate reasons. Then, when they turn up, they find out that all is not as it seems. Mr and Mrs Owen are nowhere to be seen and they learn that they are being accused of various different murders.
How would you describe your character in the play, Doctor Armstrong?
He’s a former surgeon who left to become a nerve specialist and he has risen to the top of the tree. He’s world-renowned. As a person he’s patrician and quite remote, keeping himself to himself. Because of what he’s been accused of in the play, he has trouble with his own nerves, so ironically a man who is an expert in treating nerves is actually a very nervous man himself. He tries to keep it under wraps, to keep it hidden, but it becomes more and more revealed as the play goes on.
What appealed to you about the play?
I played a doctor in Holby City for 12 years, but Doctor Armstrong is a totally different character, and I don’t often get to play characters like this. I tend to play more sympathetic characters. Nobody in the play is a particularly sympathetic character and he certainly isn’t. When you first meet him, you think he’s a snob and stuck up, although as the story goes on more and more humanity is revealed in him. Another thing that appealed to me is that I’ve never done an Agatha Christie play before and I thought, ‘If you’re gonna do an Agatha Christie, then do it with Lucy Bailey’. You should do anything with Lucy Bailey because she’s an extraordinary director. My wife [Rebecca Charles] has worked with Lucy and told me how amazing she is, and it’s a wonderful experience.
And I wanted to do it because my mother was a big Agatha Christie fan – she even named her car ‘Agatha’. She died when I was 12 and I worshipped her, so this felt like a nice thing to do for her. And if you’re going to do an Agatha Christie this is the one to do because it’s the jewel in the crown.
The novel is the best-selling crime story of all time. Why do you think that is?
It’s so perfectly constructed, and Lucy has done a brilliant new take on it. Obviously, there are going to be people coming along who are Agatha Christie fans and people of a certain age who’ve lived with this book for a very long time. Then for a younger audience you can cite things like The Hunger Games and there are elements to do with the climate crisis in the play that Lucy has picked up on, which make it very relevant for a modern audience.
Why do you think theatre-goers love a good thriller?
I think it’s largely because they’re more invested in a thriller than any other genre because there’s something to solve. In the interval everyone’s going, ‘Well, who do you think it is?’. You could almost have a keypad where people press one for Armstrong, two for Judge Wargrave and three for whoever. We have a mixture of people who’ve read the book, know it backwards and have just come to just watch our take on it, and people who’ve never seen it before and don’t know what happens, which is very exciting.
This is your first time on stage since you did A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2009. How is it being back out there?
I did a couple of smaller theatre things last year but this is my first foray back into big productions and I love it. There’s something special about being in a proper big theatre
and doing a play for 800 or 1,000 people. I missed the sort of flexing of the stage muscle, the excitement and the stretch of it both vocally and physically, so it’s exciting to be doing all that again.
When it comes to TV, is Dr Sacha Levy from Holby City the role people most recognise you for?
It is, yes. Every now and then I get ‘Oh, you were in Bad Girls’ or ‘You were in this and that and the other’. But pretty much 99.5% of the time it’s Sacha. I’m still amazed by that. It’s such a popular show and I’m very conscious that you only get to do what you do because you have an audience.
My mother was a big Agatha Christie fan – she even named her car ‘Agatha’.
What have been your other favourite jobs over the years?
I did an episode of Absolutely Fabulous, which was amazing. I met my wife when I did Cyrano de Bergerac in the West End, so that was a special one.
And Then There Were None is at the Alexandra Theatre, Birmingham, from March 5-9.