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VIRGINIA BEACH — Ticket, please.
In a play chock full of superlatives, eight strangers (or are they?) board the finest, most fabulous train in the world, the Orient Express, running from Istanbul to Calais. It’s a journey their creator Agatha Christie, one of the most popular detective fiction writers of all time, made several times. Her characters are fortunately (or unfortunately?) accompanied by the world’s greatest detective — the famously fastidious Belgian Hercule Poirot (here Robin Chapman, a veteran of 40 community productions).
You can bet your ‘stache these are hard shoes to fill, and Chapman tries manfully, following in the steps of filmic Poirots the likes of Albert Finney (1974), TV’s David Suchet (my favorite, in a series starting in 1989) and Kenneth Branagh (first in 2017). Her 1934 novel, “Murder on the Orient Express,” the 10th involving Poirot, was inspired, in part, by the gruesome kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby in 1932, a real case that uncomfortably haunts this and any production.
The LTVB stage adaptation by Ken “Lend Me a Tenor” Ludwig was impressively commissioned by the Christie estate (especially impressive considering Ludwig is a Yank and not a Brit). Author of 28 plays, Ludwig made his rep adapting classics by Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson and A. Conan Doyle, as well as concocting comedies of his own such as “Lend Me a Tenor” and “Lend Me a Soprano.”
This adaptation is a bullet train in design, beginning — out of nowhere — with a shocking echo of the kidnapping. Instead of a 20-month-old boy (the age of the Lindbergh child), the victim is a school-aged girl named Daisy Armstrong (played by 7th-grade actor/dancer Zoey Pham). The more advanced age of the victim may detract slightly from the pathos of the scene, but the most striking thing here (supposedly occurring four years before the titular murder), is that director Jeff Seneca has chosen to film it in black and white and project it on the set’s back curtained wall. It’s a bold, effective move, on par with the serviceable set design (Mike Hilton) and truly sumptuous 1930s costumes and wigs (by David Prescott and Marilyn Abernathy, respectively).
Here’s what the set, mostly onboard, is supposed to convey. The manager of the Wagon-Lit company, M. Bouc (James McDaniel) expounds, speaking to his friend Poirot in Act 1: “It is not a mere train that will carry you tonight, it is a legend …The fittings are from Paris, the paneling Venice, the plates are from Rome and the taps from New York. The best food, the best beds, the best pillows, the best feathers inside the pillows. It is poetry on wheels, and Lord Byron himself could not write it better.” A bit of a challenge, yes?
Designer Hilton builds a platform and turntable — nearly miraculous on a stage this small — that enable us to move from an Istanbul restaurant to a station platform to the dining car and the all-important individual private rooms on the train. It’s a whole world on a postage stamp but does suggest the claustrophobia of train travel, especially when the train gets stuck in the snow with “a dead man rotting in Compartment 2.”
The plot, however familiar, must still make the familiar strange. We struggle, as we should, to keep the characters and excess of clues in our heads, then end up feeling we know this group almost as well as our family.
Here’s the lineup: Poirot and Bouc are there as friends; there’s Mary Debenham (ArLynn Parker, who excels with her English accent), supposedly alone but actually romantically involved with Colonel Arbuthnot (Davis Haymes, playing an easily enflamed Scot). Helen Hubbard (a perfectly over-the-top Ghillian Porter-Smith) plays an incredibly obnoxious and loud American lady, traveling alone (i.e., until she can snag her next man).
Then we have our noble characters, Princess Dragomiroff (Beth Buchanan) with her altruistic companion Greta Ohlsson (Monica Kello) and the medically trained Countess Andrenyi (Jessi DiPette). Their costumes rival the film versions and these ladies do well, especially since they are playing the roles of people playing roles.
Bruce Hermans is fine as Michel, the conductor, which brings us to the obnoxious still center of this whole revolving system: Samuel Ratchett, a.k.a. Bruno Cassetti, played with sinister swagger by local stalwart actor Clifford Hoffman. He is attended by male secretary Hector MacQueen (John Eidman, suitably mild until he gets more gumption later in the play). The villain’s “real” first name is a dead giveaway that he was inspired by the all-too-really-real Bruno Hauptmann, who was executed for the Lindbergh killing. The play diverges from the Lindbergh case in making Cassetti directly or indirectly responsible for five deaths: Armstrong’s parents, their new baby, the kidnapped child and a maid. The details of the train riders’ relationships to the Lindbergh/ Armstrong case—both true and specious — fill up Poirot’s frantic quest for the truth.
Two other mighty challenges still exist for any director and company brave enough to take on this play: The flashbacks Ludwig includes in his adaptation and the daunting bevy of accents to be mastered. In the case of accents, one must do them well or not at all.
Flashbacks on stage are notoriously difficult because stage time, by convention, is eternally present. But Seneca, thanks to his initial film trick and then later special sound, lighting and acting effects, masters them.
The accents prove a more intractable problem. We need Russian, Hungarian, Swedish, French, Scottish and, in Poirot’s case, a French-Belgian (Walloon) accent. We get little, if any, of the above. Mon Dieu! Supposedly French-speaking people have to be able to say “Monsieur!” Bouc and Poirot stumble too often, creating linguistic faux pas left and right. A dialect coach would have helped, and, while we’re dreaming, a mustache stylist to better convey Poirot’s famously fussy grooming habits.
But the audience does successfully get the play’s most important theme: morality isn’t always easy to judge. In Christie’s world, murderers are usually bad, and Poirot and other heroes feel good about catching them. This novel and play present a superlative challenge to such moral certitude.
Weekend Scoop
So, all aboard! Departing Virginia Beach until June 4, ride the Orient Express. (Eurail passes accepted.)
Page Laws is dean emerita of the Nusbaum Honors College at Norfolk State University. prlaws@aya.yale.edu
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If you go
When: Check availability
Where: Little Theatre of Virginia Beach, 550 Barberton Drive, Virginia Beach
Tickets: $20
Details: 757-428-9233, ltvb.com