Murder on the Orient Express tour review – just about stays on the rails

Director Lucy Bailey’s puzzle to solve isn’t whodunnit but how to do it. While most Agatha Christie murder mysteries are set in stately homes and sleepy villages, Murder on the Orient Express is set on the famous train of the title – less straightforward to stage. Although that’s accomplished without feeling static, the production as a whole doesn’t send us hurtling along on a thrill ride.

The story’s train hits a snowdrift soon in its journey, after which a passenger is discovered dead, but the production’s gears have already ground to a halt even earlier. It has a large ensemble of characters to marshal, introduced in a long scene as they board the train by conveyoring them across the stage in front of a screen. They include an elegant Hungarian countess, a Russian princess in exile, a feisty American actress and a gangster. Stranded onboard, detective Hercule Poirot agrees to identify the culprit.

Ken Ludwig’s script is largely as blunt as a murder weapon, with Poirot exclaiming, “I sense something is wrong!” or using his peerless deductive skills to suppose a note has been burned “perhaps to destroy its contents”. There are “Ooh la la”s and Americans declaring: “I always thought the French were crazy.”

The cast are left to project archetypes rather than portray convincingly real people. Rebecca Charles’s function as pious servant Greta Ohlsson, for example, is to offer a stream of fretful muttering only broken by intermittent shrieks. There is a fun turn from Christine Kavanagh who pinballs from seductive to scathing as Helen Hubbard, but they all feel as well-drawn as a detective’s criminal profiles.

Our evening’s conductor is Michael Maloney’s Poirot. Although he doesn’t notably distinguish himself from his Poirot predecessors, he captures the defining characteristics. There is the sanctimony and pomposity, with supercilious head tilts and self-satisfied smirks. And there is the conflict: both appalled and fascinated by human nature.

We see how the thrill and satisfaction he finds in cracking the case comes close to being as repellent as the crime itself. His barking orders at the characters appears as objecting to their wrongdoing and frustration at them impeding his triumphant success.

But the play draws out little of the deeper themes. Apart from a nice moment when Poirot stands at the centre of the revolve while fragments of set spin around him, we don’t get enough impression of a man who’s bewildered by the changing world around him. So much of the Poirot stories, set in the 1930s, expresses a national anxiety where a society tries to cling to the mores of morality, order and justice that are shaken by catastrophic events like world wars.

Equally scarce is the sense of characters haunted by past trauma, without which the denouement doesn’t carry the sense of grief clouding our moral compass like the smoke that constantly fills the stage. But there is a strong image where they stand facing us, as if in a police line-up, and we see the corruption beneath the finery of Sarah Holland’s lustrous costumes.

The same is true of the glamour of Mike Britton’s handsome design for the train described as “poetry on wheels”. Complete at the start, it’s gradually split into smaller compartments – their own interrogation chambers – as Poirot narrows down the suspects. It’s just a shame that this requires so much laborious hulking around of the set.

If, by the end, one of Christie’s most far-fetched plots has survived thanks to the soapy pitch, there could be more to excite our little grey cells.