Styles: Photo Shoot

Spent some time at TRG Reality yesterday to begin work on the promotional image for this year's Great Lakes Theater Outreach Tour, The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

Previous Great Lakes Theater outreach tour images from TRG Reality:

Seeing Red (2008)

Two By Chekhov (2009)

On the Dark Side of Twilight (2010)

Twice Told Tales of the Decameron (2011)
Todd, Daniel and I batted around ideas a week or so ago. The title, Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles communicates that you can expect some kind of mystery. To give a sense of this play in particular we wanted to emphasize 1) it's a Hercule Poirot mystery and 2) that it takes place a bit earlier than most Christie novels, during World War I.


Thomas and his crew created a well-lit sitting room in their studio. Peg was on hand to create my make-up. Poirot is quite vain, and would not allow for any gray hair, so for the purposes of this shoot she made my hair black, black, black. It was quite freakish in person, especially the eyebrows, but worked extremely well for the purposes of photography. I will have a more naturalistic hair dye for the actual tour.


Most photo shoots I have been participated in for Great Lakes involve engaging my abilities as a contortionist, abilities I do not actually have. Twisting the body for this kind of closely focused picture is much more interesting and dramatic, yet it is not obvious in the final product how difficult it is. At least for me. They asked me yesterday if this was most uncomfortable position they've had me in and I said no, it wasn't. When they asked which image was I immediately answered, Mousetrap.


The Mousetrap (Opens March, 2012)
Frightfully difficult, that one put a kink in my neck for a day or so.


Styles involves a few significant props, including a broken coffee cup and a substance which may or may not be salt. These were included in the shoot. There will be a special digital effect on the cup to remove a piece the size of that puzzle piece I am holding. In addition, the plan is to change the coloring so it is suggestive of an old magazine cover. We found when looking at old magazines that most images were not black and white, but color-tinted.

Thanks to Daniel Hahn for these candid photographs, and to the fantastic people at TRG. We will meet again. (You can find the final image here.)

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (book)

Completed The Murder of Roger Ackroyd this morning, about which the less said the better. Asked my brother in England about the book last week, he says he's never bothered to read it because of my father's unfortunate reveal. It is his opinion that Christie isn't really for re-reading, though I have found numerous others on the Internet who think otherwise. In any event I can say this, knowing the ending from the beginning saves me the time it would have taken impulsively reading the entire thing over again from the beginning right away.

Last night we watched the BBC movie Agatha Christie: A Life In Pictures (2004). Queer little film, detailing the true story of when Christie suffered amnesia (or did she ..?) and went missing for almost two weeks in 1926. Though it features a fine performance by Olivia Williams, and the appearance of Mark Gatiss always makes me happy, it is an interesting piece if bio-fiction that is marred by too much sinister cleverness on the part of the director. Most of the text is narration, taken from first-person accounts that are dramatized by the actors, punctuated by odd film stock (see: Mark Romanek) and the more-cheesy-than-disturbing appearances by the Gunman, an image from Christie's childhood nightmares.

This film also includes several spoilers, including the conclusion of Roger Ackroyd. So there you go, I inadvertently gave away the ending to my wife. Read it now while you still have the chance.

Curtain (book)

Through her early 80s Christie found it increasingly difficult to write. Contemporary studies suggest she was suffering from Alzheimer's, as her capacity for vocabulary began to diminish exponentially. In 1975 she chose to release Curtain, the "final" Hercule Poirot novel. It was released in Britain in September of that year, and shortly thereafter in the United States where it became a best-seller.

Critics noted this work was a marked improvement over her recent work. This may have been because Christie had actually written Curtain during World War II. She has also written a "final chapter" for her popular detective, Miss Jane Marple. She did this out of concern for her own survival during the war, and to give her characters what we today might call "closure."

Because in the case of Poirot, he dies. Sorry to give away the ending. He did receive an obituary in the New York Times, so it's not exactly a secret. I will say no more.

Oddly enough, the author did little to update the book from the 1940s to the present, in spite of the fact that her other works took place during the time period in which they were published. Poirot's last case reunites the Belgian detective with Captain Arthur Hastings whom we meet in the very first Poirot mystery, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, though Christie had not used Hastings as a character since 1937. If contemporary, Hastings would be in his late 60s ... and Poirot a centenarian.

Preparing for the role of Hercule Poirot has its challenges. I'm not a big mystery reader, I never read a single Poirot novel or story until this year. However, my awareness of the character stretches back to 1976 when my brothers returned from a trip to England with my father. Henrik was consumed with mystery novels, he had a monthly subscription to Ellery Queen Magazine. Christie had been dead since the beginning of the year, and though I had little comprehension of what he was telling me about her detective, the idea of writing a novel to be published posthumously (it wasn't, but I thought he was telling me it had been) seemed kind of spooky. So did the shadowy cover of this book, written by a dead woman, featuring a guy in a bowler and a weird mustache.

I have avoided watching any of the films, or any of the TV series -- which is a shame because I love David Suchet and am looking forward to seeing what many have told me is the definitive interpretation of the role. No, I am just reading the books, finding my inspiration there. Right now I am ploughing through The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. My father famously gave away the ending to Henrik, for which he has never been forgiven. Unfortunately, whenever my father recounts this tale (he finds it amusing) he gives away the ending again, to whomever is listening.

Including me. I will never forgive him.

Sources:
The Guardian
Wikipedia

To End All Wars (book)

One of the signs of impending imperial collapse is the tendency of a dominant power to celebrate wholesale stupidity.

The Romans, awash in plenty, succumbed to decadence. One prime example was the phenomenon of the Gladiators. We know about the enslaved people who were subjected to violent arena games for the entertainment of the masses, but there were also the rich, pampered youth of the ruling class who, for want of the glory of combat subjected themselves to the public grindhouse for the sake of either glory or death, often both.

One of my father's favorite books is The Last Place on Earth by Roland Huntford, a chronicle of the "race" to the South Pole between Roald Amundsen of Norway and Robert Falcon Scott of England. It is a testament to the fighting British spirit that Scott's expedition, while a horrific failure, was celebrated by his countrymen as a shining example of English can-do resolve and daring. They also pasted Amundsen, who employed many modern techniques to get his crew to the Pole first and home safely (Scott and most of his men perished) as some kind of cheater. For example, the devious Norwegian used dogsleds and not horses.

Horses. Scott brought horses. To Antarctica. Hail Britannia.

Speaking of horses, I just finished To End All Wars by Adam Hochschild, a new history of World War I with a unique point of view; that the war was stupid and wrong. It covers not only the build-up to the "Great" war, and its execution (and that is an appropriate word to use) but also the British peace movement. There were loud voices against the war from the beginning, and they continued and built throughout, in spite of the draconian powers employed by the existing hierarchy to stifle them.

My education of WWI has been scant. Americans know a great deal about World War Two. It has been with us our entire lives. It shaped our nation. World War One ... not so much. For example, I have two uncles who served in the Pacific during WWII. One of my grandfathers was too young to have served in Europe in 1918, the other had a medical deferment. It is the war before talkies, before radio, before everything.

And yet, the war that started the 20th Century created the 20th Century. I was taught that the War was inevitable because of all of the interlocking treaties and that the assassination of Franz Ferdinand (I LOVE that band!) lit the bug. What we are not taught is that after two centuries of colonial expansion, the great powers of Europe believed themselves invincible, the Masters of Earth, and that war was an un-loseable game.

And so they attacked with machine guns and barbed wire, and there was nowhere to go but down. British generals longed for the day which never came, the day when they could finally open their enemies defenses wide enough to send in the cavalry. The actual cavalry. You know, with horses. That would be a glorious day. Instead each side murdered the other, for years. It was only when the U.S. joined the fight, so late in the game, that Germany capitulated. Not because there was anything special about the United States. But in a "game" where the only end in sight was the entire decimation of the others' population, it was only a war of numbers. Numbers of men. Sacrificial men.

World War One was a waste of absolutely everything, gaining no one anything, and it effects have reverberated through every single battle since, up to and including today's. And tomorrow's.

My adaptation of Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles goes into production soon. It takes place in the summer of 1917. Our narrator, Captain Arthur Hastings, is on medical leave from the Front. His friend Poirot is a Belgian refugee. Other characters are excused from battle for one reason or another, but contribute in their own way. Reading up on the period, I have discovered after the fact elements included by the author which were popular themes at the time - including the almost maniacal fear of German spies.

Styles was not published until 1920, during that period when hostilities were presumed over, but Great Britain was no longer so great, a point which is reflected in this story and all subsequent Poirot mysteries. Britain valiantly attempts to prevail, protesting its relevance in full-throated denial of things as they are.

A lesson to be learned, for every empire.


Happy Christmas.
UPDATE: My play adaptation of Agatha Christie's "The Mysterious Affair at Styles" is available from Playscripts, Inc.

Agatha Christie

After God, Agatha Christie (15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976) is the best-selling writer of books of all-time. Before God, He pales from the comparison.

1920 she debuted as an author with The Mysterious Affair at Styles, a book she had been working on for roughly four years. It was a very well-received first novel ("She betrays the cunning of an old hand." - The New York Times Book Review) and introduced the world to a legendary fictional creation, the fastidious and bizarre Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, a figure Christie herself would come to detest though she kept creating crimes for him to solve because he was so darned popular.

The most recent Poirot adventure in 1954 was Funerals Are Fatal (released in the UK as After the Funeral) which is notable as homosexuality is discussed as a possible motive for the crime, in this case between two women. It is described by one of the police inspectors as a "feverish female friendship" which is how I insist all lesbian relationships must be described from now on.

Christie was also a very successful playwright, though she never presented the character of Poirot on stage, sometimes even adapting Poirot novels for the stage, but eliminating him as a character. By 1954, her play The Mousetrap began its second year playing the West End where it remains to this day, the longest continually-running play in history with over a whopping 24,000 performances to date.

The Mousetrap at Great Lakes Theater
March 10 - 25, 2012

Yes, that's me.