Leeds Playhouse: Sir David Suchet to talk about his role as Poirot

David last played Agatha Christie’s hero in 2013, hanging up his Homburg hat after a remarkable 70 TV adaptations for ITV.

A decade on, he says he still misses Hercule very much indeed. “Personally and professionally, he changed my life, and I got to know him better than any other person that I’ve [come across]. And then I had to die as him, which was a very conflicting moment for me. Even as I’m saying it now, I can still feel the emotion of it.”

But while David will never play Poirot again, he is reunited with the great man and his “little greycells” in an autobiographical stage show, which is touring the UK.

Entitled David Suchet: Poirot and More, A Retrospective, it sees David being interviewed about his long and esteemed career, letting audiences into the secrets of how his Poirot came to be, as well as revisiting some of the great theatrical roles that made his name.

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Having been to the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield earlier this month, it comes to Leeds Playhouse on March 7 and 8.

The show has already had one successful UK tour, and because it prompted a flood of letters from people in areas where he didn’t perform asking him to visit, David and his producers have decided to stage another.

“The thing that excites me [this time round] is that [many of the places we’re going to] I’ve never been,” he says.

“This is going to be a whole new experience.”

Indeed, David has always been passionate about supporting regional theatre, stretching all the way back to when he started out as an actor performing around the UK in rep.

Whenever David does a West End play, he says, he always asks the producer if they can do a four to six week tour before hand.

“London is a great source of tourism and a great showcase for theatre. But we must never forget that England is a little country with lots of regions that have their own theatres, and they are just as important to their local communities as in the big cities.”

One of the sections of the show sees David offer a mini-Shakespearean masterclass, reciting speeches from Shakespeare characters he has played to demonstrate the Bard’s “highway code” of language.

It was Shakespeare that really made David’s name in the 1970s when he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company: two big defining moments for him came in 1978 and 1981, when he played Caliban in The Tempest and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, respectively, both to much acclaim.

Not everything was plain sailing from there, however: in the mid-1980s, he recalls having a blip when preparing to play Iago opposite Ben Kingsley as Othello.

“I was getting very fed up with myself and my own [anxieties], thinking ‘how am I doing?’ And then I realised that an actor is there as much as anything else to serve the playwright, and try and be the spoke in the wheel that is their play. And as soon as I discovered that, I could then forget about myself. I had a reason for existing as an actor.”

Indeed that belief in serving the writer, above all else, carried through to his job as Poirot. He was intent on playing the detective as he imagined Agatha Christie would have wanted – that is, in an understated and serious-minded fashion.

But then when he started reading the novels themselves, he was “introduced to a character that I’d never seen portrayed ... and [so] I decided I’d become the man that Agatha Christie describes in huge detail, for her and her millions of readers”.

In fact, after filming the first series, he confesses that he was worried that his performance was going to be seen as “boring”, because he wasn’t as flamboyant as Peter Ustinov and Albert Finney, who had played Poirot on the big screen.

All the way through his time in the role, David never wanted his Poirot to be a figure of fun.

“My main thing was not to bepersuaded by certain directors that would come on board to change my interpretation to become more funny or silly or more entertaining. That was quite a struggle and quite a fight, to maintain the integrity [of the character].

Since David stopped playing Poirot, Kenneth Branagh has taken the mantle on, starring as the private investigator in a number of big-budget Hollywood films – but David says he has deliberately refrained from watching them.

“I made a decision very early on because with all the publicity that Ken was getting, I got journalist after journalist wanting to find out my opinion of him – and what they were looking for was my critical sense of [his depiction of] the character. And so I determined not to watch any of Ken’s Poirot, for the simple reason that I then have ‘no comment’.”

As for the future, David, now 77, says that he is “calming down” theatrically: “I’m still getting some lovely offers, but I don’t want to do any more big long runs. I want to spend more time with the family, and I’m having more difficulty learning my lines as we all do [when we get older].”

But he certainly has no plans to retire. “I’m not going to use [that word] but I always say that I’ll stop working properly when the telephone stops ringing.”

Which, in David’s case, seems a very far-fetched proposition indeed.

Poirot and More, a Retrospective is at Leeds Playhouse on Thursday, March 7 and Friday, March 8.