Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express
Or, What Could Be Funnier than Child Murder? Well, not quite, but still. Playwright Ken Ludwig knows that familiarity breeds…maybe not contempt, but perhaps a certain lack of enthusiasm — even if you are working with the greatest detectives in the genre. What to do to liven things up? Bring on the laughs! It worked with audiences when he adapted Sherlock Holmes’ spookiest case into Baskerville, so why not here, for Agatha Christie’s terrible tale about the reverberations of violence and the murkiness of justice? (Perhaps because it’s a terrible tale about the…oh, never mind.)
But comedy does help with coping, and Ludwig and the Globe deploy the gambit with considerable skill, first by giving us the awful murder that begins the action in movie form, so that it’s formally separated from the antics of the actors on-stage, then by having Belgian detective Hercule Poirot play it almost entirely straight throughout, and finally by backing off the funny bits as the play progresses toward its undeniably weighty conclusion. And oh yes, fair play: the broadest broad in the bunch, the moneyed Minnesotan, has good reason to act the way she does.
The setting for this murder mystery is justly famous — a seemingly disparate group of passengers on a luxurious train that has been stopped in its tracks by a blizzard — and the Globe has done that setting justice. (The revelation of the train’s dining car marked the first time I have ever heard an audience applaud a set change.) The wintry surroundings, projected around the ingenious interiors, contrast splendidly with the purpled luxury on display. The murder scene itself is also famous: a riot of wounds, a mess of clues. Poor Poirot has a lot of slogging through to do. Good thing the lovely doctor who assists him notices that the deceased’s cheek is red, as if he had been slapped earlier. How can she tell? “Because I slapped it.” Ho ho!
Still, it gets confusing when, just after one character wishes eternal damnation on the dead man for what he did before he died, another character runs screaming from the stage like a frightened chicken, and everyone…laughs? Finally, Ludwig might have worked a little harder on Poirot’s penultimate speech, in which he first accuses the killer of playing God and then invokes the deity’s blessing upon him.
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