by Michael Cox
‘Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express’ – Adapted by Ken Ludwig. Directed by Spiro Veloudos. Scenic Design, Brynna Bloomfield; Costume Design, Gail Astrid Buckley; Lighting Design, Scott Clyve; Sound Design and Original Music, Dewey Dellay; Projection Design, Seaghan McKay. Presented by the Lyric Stage Company, 140 Clarendon Street, Boston, MA, through December 22.
In 1934, when “Murder on the Orient Express” was first published as a novel, this country was looking for a way out – a way out of the joblessness, poverty and the endless ache of day-to-day existence. The economic agony that the United States felt quickly spread to Europe and around the world. And it certainly hit Great Britain, where Agatha Christie’s prolific career as a mystery writer was well underway. Christie had an astounding career. According to her estate, she is the world’s most published English novelist, and only those who have read Shakespeare and the Holy Bible (King James) outnumber her readership. A key ingredient to Christie’s success is the escapism she provides. So it should come as no surprise that the era of “The Great Depression” is one of Christie’s most critically successful periods. This is interesting because although the characters in the “Murder on the Orient Express” are plagued by a variety of dramatic problems – kidnapping, extortion, death threats, suicide, and of course, murder – there is one thing that never troubles them. Money.
The Lyric Stage’s production of “Murder on the Orient Express” (adapted by Ken Ludwig) offers a different kind of escapism. It’s not the escapism one experiences by reading about the luxurious rich, those who have the expendable income to whisk off to foreign lands. This stage version of the novel offers audiences the opportunity to flee from reality, but it does so by making reality utterly ridiculous. Although the show is called Agatha Christie’s ‘Murder on the Orient Express,’ it is certainly not that. This show may borrow some of Christie’s plot and characters, but it has none of the author’s austere propriety, her circumspection or her deadpan dry wit. This show is a parody of Christie’s novel, taking the murder mystery and turning it into high camp.
In addition to Christie’s legend as a novelist, she is a force to be reckoned with as a dramatist. Say what you will about her formulaic plots and stereotypical characters, Christie has written one of the most widely regarded mystery/suspense plays the stage has known (Witness for the Prosecution), and the longest running play in history (The Mousetrap) which has been running continually in London’s West End since 1952.
Undoubtedly, the reason she has been a success is that she follow the laws of Aristotelian structure and the dictates of the cozy mystery genre that she has created: There is a crime in which the method and motives of the perpetrator seem baffling. There is a quiet observer who gradually gathers the clues and solves the mystery. And there is a small cast of characters in a relatively confined location. Set on an opulent, first class express train sailing through the snow-capped Swiss Alps, the crime in this murder mystery involves a smarmy wolf of a man named Samuel Ratchett, an American man who knows he’s being hunted.
The quiet observer is the famous consulting detective Hercule Poirot. When Ratchett first meets Poirot, he asks the funny little Belgian sleuth to protect him. He’s willing to pay Poirot $15,000 to be his bodyguard. (Consider that, at the time, an American could buy a house for this kind of money – and a nice one at that.) But Poirot doesn’t need the cash, so he refuses Ratchett because he’s on vacation. Finally, the suspects here are few and the space is contained. In fact, this is very nearly a locked-room mystery. When Ratchett is indeed murdered, the murder takes place while the train is stopped by the severe weather and there are no footprints in the snow surrounding the train compartment, so the murderer has to be someone on board the train. Poirot is tasked with solving the crime, but he’s not doing it for the money, instead choosing to solve the case to help out an old friend.
The plot of “Murder on the Orient Express” is legendary because it throws one of the truly epic fastballs in the history of the mystery genre; it’s even remarkable among Christie’s reputably clever plots. Unfortunately, the ball in Ludwig’s adaptation falls to the ground before it hits the catcher’s mitt. Whereas the novel teases out the plot, slowly revealing each suspect’s hidden past and drip-feeding clues, the adaptation jumbles the plot into a confusing mess, condenses the characters, and puts them into brisk, superficially developed scenes. Then it goes one step further. It takes Christie’s questionably credible characters and turns them into theatricalized clowns.
By the time the novel came out, Christie’s infamous detective Hercule Poirot was already a legend. It had been fourteen years since he first appeared in print (“The Mysterious Affair at Styles”) and by this time had already been in 8 novels by Christie, a novelization by another author, a book of short stories, three movies and two plays. (Athough Christie had opened her works up to adaptation, she was never satisfied with the way Poirot was portrayed.)
In the Lyric version, legendary Boston actor Remo Airaldi plays Poirot. Airaldi cut his teeth at ART when the work at ART was wildly experimental and notoriously avant-garde, and this larger-than-life performer went on to play steal-the-show comic roles with Commonwealth Shakespeare. Airaldi is anything but discreet in the role. He has none of the subtlety of the Poirots that populate the BBC. But neither does he have the clownish histrionics of many American Poirots, such as Tony Randall. (Randall played the role in a groovy 1960s update of a Christie novel.) It’s hard to say what kind of Poirot would fit this production, but Airaldi is not as surefooted as he has been in the past. If anything he is too reserved. This is nothing that anyone has ever said about Airladi, and perhaps that is because this production, under the direction of Spiro Veloudos, doesn’t realize how silly it actually is.
But how could it not? Veloudos has chosen to cast the play through the lens of a film noir. This could only be played for absurdity, as the material is anything but hardboiled. Poirot has no deep character flaw, and although he will contemplate the nature of justice and the law, Christie’s mysteries are hardly from the genre known for its “blackness,” moral ambiguity, and extreme pessimism.
As far as the technical aesthetics of noir go, black and white images are projected onto the walls. But the video recordings that the production uses draw from the hokiest filmic techniques. To have flashbacks, flashbacks created by the dismembered heads of the characters, flashbacks floating above the actors on stage and remembering lines they have previously stated – this is universally passé in the movies and even worse on stage. Seaghan McKay worked hard to design and create these extravagant projections, but they must have been made for comic effect.
The one actor who embraces the absurdity of her character is Kerry A. Dowling. In her campiest performance since “Carrie, the Musical!” – (yes, that “Carrie,” the Steven King horror novel) – Dowling lambastes us with the ludicrous.
Dowling plays Helen Hubbard, an outlandish American woman who spends her vacation lasciviously soliciting strangers and belting out a show tune. (Yes, belting in 1934. Anachronistic, certainly, but when you consider the song she sings hadn’t even been published yet, it’s all par for the course.)
Christie’s over-the-top American was actually inspired by a real person, a woman named Mrs. Hilton who Christie met on the Orient Express. Christie herself was stuck on the train for 24 hours in 1931 when she and her husband returned from an archaeological dig.
But Christie’s characterization was too restrained for Ludwig. So he made Mrs. Hubbard into a sexually frustrated caricature from a Marx Brothers film. (In fact, I think, her best line was taken directly from Groucho Marx: “You remind me of one of my husbands. – Which one? – The next one.”)
All of Christie’s suspicious characters in this story have a hidden past. This helps throw us off the track of the murderer. But if we are to believe the in hidden past of Mrs. Hubbard, a woman who has been parading around like Margaret Dumont in “Duck Soup,” we would next ask, “Who is this sociopath?” But we don’t because the constraints of realistic human behavior don’t apply in this world.
As a religious zealot in “Carrie,” Dowling had the ability to bring down the house just by quoting the “Old Testament.” And in “Murder on the Orient Express” she is completely convincing in her role, because she plays her comedy with absolute sincerity. Not since the last time Donald Trump spoke has someone been able to state the absurd with such conviction. It’s as though she believes the person she’s playing could be real. For tickets and information, go to: https://www.lyricstage.com/
