David Suchet’s soiree reveals the secrets of his greatest hits
David Suchet: Poirot and More, A Retrospective Chichester Festival Theatre ★★★★★
David Suchet, 75, was given a knighthood in the Queen’s 2020 Birthday Honours list for “services to drama and charity”. Perhaps he should also have got it for “services to sanity”. In this touring soirée, re-treading his life and career, it’s suggested that his portrayal of Agatha Christie’s Poirot in the long-running ITV series is being watched somewhere in the world at any given moment. And why wouldn’t it be? As Suchet’s genteel interviewer, Geoffrey Wansell, observes in passing, there’s something intrinsically reassuring about the way the Belgian detective considers messy, ’orrible crime scenes and, using his little grey cells, coolly puts the jigsaw puzzle together.
So thoroughly did Suchet inhabit Poirot that strangers in the street have addressed him as if he were the real deal. For fans, the pièce de résistance comes at the end of this evening, when he talks us through finding his way into the role that changed his life. Suchet had to get the detective’s gait perfect, so he borrowed a trick from Laurence Olivier, who achieved the walk of a Restoration fop by sticking a penny between his buttocks. And before our eyes, Suchet dandily modifies his movement, producing Hercule’s bustling and rigid footwork.
There was the issue of the Belgian character’s accent, too, with much sleuthing done to ensure that it was both faithful and intelligible. Suchet had to blend French, Flemish and Walloon accents together, and here he reprises that experimentation on the spot for our aural gratification. The summit of his transformation into Poirot is when he slowly brings his voice up from the diaphragm, past the throat and right up into the head, magically achieving Christie’s vision of “a walking brain”.
How lucky Christie’s family and estate were to alight on an actor who, as Suchet explains, had the simple epiphany that his job was to serve the writer’s interests without ego – and to do so as meticulously as possible. In the preceding two hours (plus interval), Suchet pulls off the difficult task of talking and walking us through his achievements without sliding into thespy triumphalism or false modesty.
An old-school gent with plenty of warmth and charm, Suchet doesn’t have much of a gritty backstory to peddle, though his days at boarding-school weren’t without emotional deprivation or his years at drama-school lacking in humiliation. He had luck in catapulting up the ranks of the RSC in 1973, and a gregarious champion in his actress mother. His gynaecologist father was less approving, but Jack would finally beam with delight, aged 90, when he watched his son’s Poirot being filmed. The evening could have been a bit too cosy, a bit too “cruise along the Nile”, yet Suchet’s commitment to his craft blazes forth. Just watch those hands: as he refers to piles of essays on Poirot, he conjures them in the air; as he stresses the need to get the “exact man”, he brings his palms together. It’s a subtle masterclass in gesture.
And there’s a kind of tutelage, too, in the second half, as Suchet delivers some of his other greatest hits. As Salieri, he stands entranced and mortified, listening to the adagio of Mozart’s Serenade No 10 and stiffening with envy. Then he over-emphasises the Shakespearean text as Oberon rebukes Puck, in order to lay bare the rhetorical devices at work. The best bit of trivia on offer? The late Duke of Edinburgh once taught Suchet how to peel and eat a mango, and referred to him thereafter as “the mango man”. Never one to miss a trick, Suchet planted the peeling act in a Poirot script. The Theft of the Royal Ruby, since you ask.
Touring, and will run at the Harold Pinter Theatre, London SW1 from Jan 4-22. Tickets: davidsuchetonstage.com; 0333 009 6690 (London run)