David Suchet interview

You thought you'd seen the last of my posts on The Last Confession but no. Today's London Theatre Guide has a lengthy interview with David Suchet about The Last Confession and Poirot.

Thankfully, Suchet has never been confined to playing the same person, despite frequently returning to inhabit the little Belgian detective – a role he says, unequivocally, he loves. He puts this flexibility down to the fact that he was a theatre actor long before he got his big break in television, as Blott in Blott On The Landscape in 1985. Since then, he has happily been able to work in both. “That’s where both the business and the public have been so generous to me. They haven’t limited me,” he says.

It says everything about his skill as an actor, though, that people are able to forget Poirot when they see him in other things. As much as he loves the character, this is part of the reason that he would never bring Poirot to the stage. “I got a letter only two days ago from a member of the audience saying will I please, please, please, please, underlined, bring Poirot to the stage,” he says. “It’s not my intention, and I don’t want to bring him to the stage, because that would intrude on the wonderful variety that I have in the theatre and that would be bringing something that everybody knows. I would be doing it for very much the wrong reasons.”

Nevertheless, he is excited about going back to the role again on television – he has two new mysteries lined up to film after he finishes his run in The Last Confession. “To think that that’s the legacy I’ll leave behind actually fills me with a great deal of pride,” he says. “Because he’s a great character to play in a great literary setting and a wonderful writer and I believe it’s been good, clean, healthy television; it’s not reality TV, it’s not smutty. If I can leave the complete works behind me of that little character, that will be a first and it will please generations to come and that’s really what I’m here for.”

You can read the whole interview here and you can book tickets for the production at the Haymarket here.

The Last Confession is on its way to the West End

Indie London reports that:

FOLLOWING its run at this year’s Chichester Festival and a brief regional tour, the new thriller by Roger Crane, The Last Confession, will transfer to the West End’s Theatre Royal Haymarket for a limited 12-week season – from July 4, 2007 (previews from June 28).

You can read a review in This is London. I agree with most of it, though I disagree with the comment about the pedestrian nature of the internal enquiry scene. If you get chance, do go see the master (Suchet) in action...

The Last Confession

I've succumbed to temptation and a recommendation in the comments to my earlier post, I've booked tickets to see David Suchet in The Last Confession at Malvern Theatre on Wednesday.

If all goes well with the trains, I hope to get back to Birmingham to try the Organic Vegetarian restaurant which had a good review in the What's On a few weeks ago.

Radio 4 - Front Row

On yesterday's Front Row amongst other arts news, including a portion on the follow up to The Graduate, Colin Bateman talks about why he's just Bateman on the cover now.

and in today's Front Row (19.15-19.45):

"...Mark reports on Dali & Film, a major exhibition which focuses on the long relationship between the controversial surrealist and the cinema. Mark also discusses the events surrounding the sudden death of Pope John Paul I with Roger Crane, writer of a new play called The Last Confession, and David Suchet, who takes the role of Cardinal Benelli."

This play is currently touring, see my earlier post.

David Suchet in The Last Confession

David Suchet is taking time away from Poirot to play another sort of detective, this time on the stage. He will play Cardinal Benelli in 'The Last Confession' which is about the death of Pope John Paul I.

The Vatican 1978: a little-known Cardinal from Venice is elected to succeed Pope Paul VI. A compromise candidate, he takes the name Pope John Paul I, and quickly shows himself to be the liberal the reactionaries within the Catholic Church most feared.

Just thirty-three days later, he is dead. No official investigation is conducted, no autopsy is performed, and the Vatican’s press release about the cause of death is later found to be, in large part, false. And just the evening before his death, John Paul had warned three of his most influential but hostile Cardinals that they would be replaced.

His death marks the climax of fifteen troubled years of controversy and machination within the Church; schisms threaten its unity and the shadow of the Mafia hovers over its financial affairs. Only Cardinal Benelli has the power to challenge the dead Pope's enemies.

This incisive new thriller tracks the dramatic tensions, crises of faith and political manoeuvrings inside the Vatican surrounding the death of the man known as ‘the Smiling Pope’.

I can't find a complete tour listing but 'The Last Confession' will be on at the following: Chichester 27 April - 19 May, Malvern 11 - 16 June, Milton Keynes 18 - 23 June and Plymouth 29 May - 2 June.

Wikipedia has a page on conspiracy theories about Pope Jean Paul I.