Poirot and Me (25 page)

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 Revengers’ 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.

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