Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Suchet makes Poirot sound like craft beer: Poirot and More, at Harold Pinter Theatre, reviewed

Plus: there are several good plays in Kate Reid’s overcrowded script for Park Theatre

David Suchet looks surprisingly athletic with the squat broad frame of a coal miner or a scrum-half. Image: Ash Koek

Producers are getting jittery again. Large-scale shows look risky when a single infection can postpone an entire show. Hence Poirot and More in the West End. This is a conversation piece in which David Suchet talks about his career as Agatha Christie’s most celebrated nosy parker. Not much technical rehearsal is needed and Suchet relies on the support of a single performer, Geoffrey Wansell, who feeds him easy-peasy questions. Scrapping the production would hardly cost the earth.

The pair are old friends but they seem to be at war in the costume department. Suchet looks like a Blair clone in a dark blue blazer and a white, open-necked shirt. Wansell’s richer plumage stretches to a spotted bow tie and a pair of pink-rimmed John Birt spectacles. He looks like a country auctioneer who aspires to cable TV.

David Suchet makes Poirot sound like craft beer

Suchet dominates. He’s surprisingly athletic with the squat broad frame of a coal miner or a scrum-half. Don’t cheek him. He’d flatten you. His hands are large, potato-digging paddles that he uses with amazing delicacy and expressiveness. He’s known to West End audiences as a terrific physical comedian but he’d probably be a great mime as well. His early years sound like a recital from a standard actor’s autobiography. He describes the moment of revelation when, as a thunderstruck adolescent, he pledged his life to a career on stage. (Thesps should go easy on these rhapsodic memories because they lend weight to the view that theatre is a religious derangement, like mountaineering or yoga, which can survive without public money.) His greatest triumph was to win the role of Poirot by convincing Christie’s heirs that he would never mock their sacred possession.

After the interval he does a karaoke routine.

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