A Murder is Announced: In Conversation with Debra Lawrance

Almost invariably there’s a charming country home of the period, in a sleepy country town, and when Miss Marple arrives you know there’s also a murder or two ahead. Debra Lawrance plays Letitia Blacklock, owner of the charming Little Paddocks, in sleepy Chipping Cleghorn, where a crowd has gathered in response to the invitation in the local newspaper ‘A murder is announced and will take place on Friday October 13th, at Little Paddocks at 6.30pm’. The peace is shattered when, without warning, the lights go out, a gun is fired…

Debra speaks to Neil Litchfield.

Neil Litchfield: Were you a fan of Agatha Christie before you were cast in A Murder is Announced?

Debra Lawrance:I was. I came to it via the television series because they were all so beautifully done, and they always had really, really gifted Britsh actors, so I just loved watching them because the sets were fabulous, the country houses were fabulous, the costumes were fabulous, the actors were fabulous and of course there’s the whole thing about the murder mystery, and trying to guess who’s done it. Even though you try to hold yourself away from it and be objective, you eventually get sucked in. You can’t help yourself.

NL: Did you have a particular favourite actor as an Agatha Christie sleuth?

DL: David Suchet is great. Just the meticulous, slightly oily quality to him, because it’s historically said that Agatha Christie wasn’t particularly fond of Poirot, which is, I think, why she killed him off. He really captures that sort of OCS person that Poirot is, so I really enjoyed his performance, and the most recent Miss Marple, Geraldine McEwan. We did watch an old Margaret Rutherford and it was just delightful … just beautiful. Margaret Rutherford was of the era, of course, so she was this wonderful, seemingly dotty Miss Marple, but in fact she’s got a mind like a steel trap. So that was really enjoyable too.

NL: So where does the current production fit in between these two types of interpretations?

DL: The beauty of ours is that we get to recreate this era on stage in 21^st Century Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane for 21^st Century audiences, who are all mostly diehard Agatha Christie fans, so there’s the responsibility to get it right, so that you show them something that they imagined. It’s like when my children saw the Harry Potter films – they thought, ‘Yes, it’s exactly the way I imagined it in the book.’ So you’ve got a responsibility to get it right for people who really love it.

Then for the people who aren’t so familiar with it, you’ve got a responsibility to be really authentic. So I think the costumes are beautiful, the set is truly magnificent, we’ve all got really good English accents and it’s a great script, so if you put all those ingredients together we should be way up there.

NL: With Christie stories, of course it’s essential that the audience are kept guessing right up until the very end.

DL: We had a young man come in on work experience during rehearsals, and he had no idea who the culprit was right until the very last scene, which is terrific. It was great to have an objective view in the room with us. He said he started to suspect in the second last scene, but he still didn’t really believe it till the last scene. That’s the beauty of this play too. It really does keep you guessing right till the very end.

NL: Do the actors have to work hard to keep the identity of the culprit secret?

DL: No, it’s in the script. Because it’s all smoke and mirrors and Agatha Christie takes you down so red herring laneways to dead ends, I think the psychology of it is that the audience is so keen to be the first to spot the murderer that they really intently look at and follow the red herrings. Even the clever ones, and we’re assuming ones who don’t know the ending of course, may have trouble with this one. But it’s fun!

NL: And your character?

DL: She’s the owner of Little Paddock, the house in the country, in the village of Chipping Cleghorn; Agatha Christie used to set most of her mysteries in a milleu which she understood – of her life, and having a country home and people that she’d observed, so it’s a gracious home.

Letitia lives there. She’s a spinster. She’s come from Switzeralnd where she’s been nursing her sister, who subsequently died. She surrounds herself with lots of reugees of one sort or another, right from the housekeeper / cook Mitzi, who’s an Eastern European refugee from the Second World War. She obviously could have chosen a local girl to cook and clean, but she’s chosen an Eastern European refugee to look after. Then there’s her very dear childhood friend Bunny, Miss Bunner, who’s also a spinster, who has fallen on hard times, and comes to live at Little Paddocks as well. Then there’s two young people, a niece and nephew; Letty’s first cousin, who lives in the south of France, has asked if she will take in her two children while they’re studying in England. Then there’s a third young person, Phillipa, a very young, beautiful widow with a small child, who she’s taken in as a lodger, so she’s surrounded herself with all these people. She’s very kind-hearted.

The murder and all the action take place in her living room.

NL: And how does Miss Marple come on the scene this time?

DL: Like she always does, she’s down having rheumatism treatment in the spas. People used to ‘take the waters’ at places where there were hot springs. She always happens to know everybody, so she pops in and happens to get involved.

That’s a huge part of the enjoyment for the audience, of course; to say here’s Miss Marple, let’s watch her solve the murder mystery. They can’t wait to see how her brain is working.

Part of the charm of the Marple character is that lovely, seemingly fallible elderly lady who’s got a mind like a steel trap. That’s the enjoyment for the audience – where she gets treated with a little bit of – not disdain – because they respect and love her – but, like most elderly women, they get a little bit disregarded – you become a little bit invisible once you’re in your twilight years.

Part of the enjoyment for me is that you watch her work it out before the police. The police are always ‘ably assisted’ by her. In some of the stories they know her, so they work as equals, but in other stories they’ve got a little bit of ego, and she’s the device for them to get a little bit of comeuppance when they discover she’s actually very clever.

But there’s a nice balance in this one, because Craddock (the dtective) teases her a little, but he’s very quick to respect her, which is nice. If Craddock is played with disdain for Miss Marple I don’t think it works, so we certainly haven’t go that happening.

NL: You talk about Miss Marple’s charm, but is there a charm to your character too? How will audiences relate to her?

DL: Hopefully they’ll recognize a warm-hearted intelligent woman. She’s of an age group that if they’d been going to settle down they might have, but then the war happened. So she’s moved into an age group where she’s probably lost any chance of marrying, settling down and having children, if that was her choice. Those women then developed their brains and worked – she worked for a millionaire financier. They’re representative. There were many, many women like that – highly intelligent, weren’t tied down, and I think it’s really great that Agatha Christie gave them a voice and exposure to wider audiences, so that people understood that there were clever businesswomen our there. So she’s warm-hearted, she’s kind and she’s intelligent. She’s a little unnerved by the newspaper article that a murder has been announced – she’s a little anxious – so the audience will hopefully see all those things in her when they meet her.

NL: What can you tell us about the play without both of us needing to be killed?

DL: I suppose I can say there are two murders, but that’s probably all, because you need to be surprised.

Once they realize that the victim hasn’t died accidentally, they have to work out who the murderer is – and it could be someone from outside, because there’s a lot of financial stuff going down which concerns outside people. So we don’t quite know right until the end whether it’s an inside job or an outside job.

NL: So Agatha Christie fans will love the production, but how will people who are whodunit fans courtesy of more recent incarnations in the classic sense (like Midsomer Murders), and in the not-so-classic (by shows like the C.S.I. franchise) relate?

DL: Midsomer cashes in on the genre which Agatha Christie so cleverly made her own; she was a really gifted writer in this genre and really knew what she was doing in terms of formula, with so much detail. She really understood the psychology of the people who were reading – what they would want to hear about next. Midsomer Murders is a classic case. That’s on about its millionth repeat, and people are still glued to it. I have friends who you invite over to dinner on the night it’s on, and they say no, they can’t come. You say they could tape it, and they say, no we’ve got the whole series on tape anyway. It’s a whole ritual for them. They have to watch it in real time, in their house.

People can’t get enough because they feel as though they’re participating.

NL: And the CSI shows and the like? So many of them are based on a whodunit sort of platform.

DL: Yes, but it’s sped up a bit. It’s an absolute formula. You can see the red herrings coming, then before the second last ad break comes a rapid wrap up of events, and the last bit is where they catch the person.

NL: But will modern audiences who are so used to scientific clues and forensic slutions get something out of a Christie?

DL: Absolutely. There’s so many clues in this, and then the joy at the end when Miss Marple wraps it up is for them just to go, yes, I saw that or, no I didn’t see that. I can just imagine the conversations in the car on the way home.

It’s just that the technology is different, that’s all. Miss Marple works out things forensically if we take the loose use of that term. Forensic means closely examined, so she has a forensic sort of brain. Forensic doesn’t necessarily mean chemicals and all that sort of thing, like you can have forensic accounting – it’s just closely detailed, and the joy of Miss Marple is watching her forensic brain at work.: 

Agatha Christie's A Murder Is Announced opened on September 27, 2013, playing until October 27 at Sydney Theatre at Walsh Bay. It then travels to Melbourne, opening October 30 and Brisbane, where it plays from December 27 until January 19, 2014.

Images (from top): Debra Lawrance, Judi Farr as Miss Marple and the entire cast. Photographer: James Morgan.

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