Poirot and Me by Suchet David

Author:Suchet, David [Suchet, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Headline
Published: 2013-11-06T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

‘A VERY LONG WAY INDEED FROM POIROT’

Harold Pinter’s rehearsals for Oleanna started just a few weeks after my decision to leave Poirot altogether, for a year at least, and they were particularly intense. As there were just two members of the cast, the talented young Lia Williams and me, there was nowhere to hide as Harold, looking as serious as ever in his habitual black sweater and thick glasses, took us through the battleground of the sexes that David Mamet had constructed in three lacerating acts.

These were some of the most difficult weeks I had ever spent in a rehearsal room, because the play is so consuming, so brutal about the true nature of the relationships between men and women, and so filled with poison that it was all but impossible to keep those emotions from spilling over into my own life. Sheila and the children had got used to the rather benign figure of Poirot returning from the studio each evening, but now I was this man struggling with exactly how he felt about women and himself, who in the end resorts to violence, even though he knows he should not.

The title comes from an American folk song which refers to a nineteenth-century version of utopia, but there is nothing utopian at all about the play itself. When it was first produced in 1992 in the United States, my character, John, was described as a ‘smug, pompous, insufferable man whose power over academic lives he unconsciously abuses’ – a very long way indeed from Poirot.

Curiously enough, I had experienced something of the problems that John faced in the play. In 1975 I was teaching drama at an American university when I found myself confronting the same issue of sexual politics that is examined in Oleanna. I was teaching on a very hot day. We were doing a drama exercise that involved passing a ball around, which made everyone very sweaty, so I suggested that my male students might take their shirts off.

The idea that my decision might infuriate the female students never occurred to me, but it most certainly did to them. My female students immediately complained to the head of the department, who told me that I had to write an apology, as I had discriminated against them because they could not take off their own shirts.

Rather than apologising, I asked to be sent back to London, as I honestly did not believe I could preserve any kind of relationship with my female students after their complaints. In the end, the storm blew over, and a few days later, a spokeswoman for the women in the group came to apologise, although she did point out that I obviously did not understand about rights for women at the university. I carried on teaching until the end of that academic year, although I have to confess that I kept a very careful eye on my relationship with my female students from then onwards. Perhaps my own experience may just have done something to illuminate my performance in Mamet’s play.

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