I’m not really into crime fiction, even though it is recognised as the world’s most popular literary genre. Ditto true crime podcasts. Cold case series leave me cold. Procedural thrillers set in small towns? No thanks.
By rights, then, I should not be particularly interested in a good old-fashioned theatrical whodunnit. But I did not hesitate to go watch Black Coffee, the first of Agatha Christie’s plays, now almost 100 years old.
The reason? Christie’s eccentric detective, Hercule Poirot, was to be played by Alan Committie — a man who is bankable “comedy gold”, to use the title of his recent one-man show. Of course, despite his heavy French-Belgian accent and his quirky investigative methods, Poirot is not simply a stock comic figure. Nor is Black Coffee a farce; though it can be pushed for laughs, it also requires the interpersonal friction and intellectual puzzle to be sustained if an audience is to remain engaged.
The play is an excellent vehicle for Committie, who has achieved something rare by building a reputation as both a comedian and a weighty actor in “straight” theatre. Over the past few years he has starred as Richard III in Shakespeare’s eponymous play, as George in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and as Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus.
He is joined in this production by a strong ensemble, including stage veterans Michael Richard and Peter Terry, with Ashley Dowds and Dianne Simpson almost stealing the show as Poirot’s rather hapless sidekick Captain Hastings and the terribly modern Barbara Amory (niece of the much-unloved murder victim Sir Claud Amory), who pair off in an amorous subplot.
In a sense, the identity of the killer doesn’t really matter. I read a synopsis of the play a couple of weeks before going to watch it and promptly forgot most of the details — which made for a few surprises at the end. It turns out I have this plot-loss experience in common with most people who watch an Agatha Christie play.
Ken Ludwig, the US playwright who has adapted Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile for the stage to much acclaim, reckons that in a given audience a small minority are “real Agatha Christie fans” who will know the outcome, but “80%-90% of the audience doesn’t: they’re people who like mysteries or just want a good night at the theatre”.
The pleasure lies in the resolution. “In comedy and in cosy crime,” adds Ludwig, “all these things go up in the air, come down again, break, but then eventually everything is ordered and calm again.” This also suggests why Committie is well placed to bring Poirot to life; as Ludwig notes, the detective “seems like this fussy, pompous fellow” who’s not going to cause a criminal much trouble — until all of a sudden “he’s got ya”.
Committie was also drawn to the role for sentimental reasons. He explains that his first theatre memory was being taken by his mother to a production of Black Coffee starring Bill Flynn. One imagines Flynn’s spirit presiding benevolently over this show. Like Committie, he was a “classy clown”, a comic who also saw into the dark heart of human experience; Flynn could do slapstick with the best of them but brought tears of sorrow to audiences watching him as Johnnie in Athol Fugard’s Hello and Goodbye or Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.
Joining a venerable tradition of Poirots — page, stage and screen — may be an appealing prospect, but an actor wishing to do so must navigate tricky waters.
Christie was a novelist first and playwright second, and the action of her plays rises and falls at a sedate pace. Poirot needs to keep our attention without resorting to caricature. But the gentle physical and verbal humour is a constant, even in moments of tension or triumph.
Committie manages it all with aplomb, and this production, which has opened in Johannesburg hot on the heels of a successful Cape Town run, is sure to make new Agatha Christie fans — even among “crime entertainment” agnostics like me.
• ‘Black Coffee’ is at the Pieter Toerien Theatre at Montecasino until June 7.
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