You know that thing where you buy a new blue mini and all you see for days are new blue minis? Or you have a baby and suddenly the world is full of people with babies? I’m having a moment like that with Ken Ludwig.

I read in The Guardian the other day about how this wealthy American playwright, Ken Ludwig, had given a million quid to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust to restore the home of Shakespeare’s daughter Susanna. Fantastic, I thought, but I’ve never heard of him.

So I looked him up on Wiki. There’s nothing like Wiki to help you plumb the depths of your own ignorance. He’s done everything, from award-winning musicals like Crazy for You to comedies like Lend Me a Tenor, had shows on Broadway and in the West End, and won loads of awards. Well, you get the picture. I felt a bit stupid not having heard of him, but I hadn’t actually seen anything by him. Until today. He is, of course, the adapter of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express.

Adapting a story from one medium to another is a difficult art, and adapting Christie for the theatre must be particularly tricky. Somehow you have to get all those characters, all those red herrings, all that plot, which might take you days to read, into about two hours tops. And half the audience will know the story so you have to satisfy their expectations, and surprise them if you can.  Ludwig manages all of this, so much so that at one point in act two there was an audible gasp from the stalls.

It helps that his adaptation is in very good hands. Mike Britton has designed a stunning set which steals act one. His period costumes – the story is set in the 1930s – are equally beautiful and expressive of the characters (Mila Carter’s Countess Andrenyi is straight out of a Lempicka portrait). Lucy Bailey directs with a sure hand, moving between realism and expressionism, never letting the audience know what might be coming next. And her work really shines through in act two, at the climax and at the end, so that we feel a great deal more than the satisfaction of finding out who dunnit.

The people bringing all this to life are the actors, led by Michael Maloney as Hercule Poirot, the Belgian sleuth. All the tropes are there: the professional pride, the fastidiousness, the leetle grey cells. Maloney’s Poirot sits comfortably alongside the other greats, Suchet, Moffatt, Branagh and Malkovich, and, at the end, surpasses them. He is ably supported by an excellent cast, outstanding among whom is Christine Kavanagh as irritating American socialite Helen Hubbard, who does something in act two which shifts the whole play into a different place.

It used to be thought that crime was a lesser form of literature than the novel, when in fact it is much harder. In crime writing you have to conceal the truth from your reader while all the time convincing them that you don’t know it either, and then on the last page present the reveal so that the reader goes ‘oh, of course, I should have worked that out ages ago’. Agatha Christie was very good at it, and Ken Ludwig and the team have created a version that, even if you know the book backwards, will still surprise and delight. This is a very good night out indeed. I saw the production on the third night of the tour and enjoyed myself so much that I’m going again in a couple of months to see how it’s bedded in.

By Chris Wallis, Theatre Editor

All photos by Manuel Harlan

 

Murder on the Orient Express is touring the UK until April 2025. For more information about showings at The Lowry (it runs until September 14, 2024), click here.