Anyone who thinks Agatha Christie’s plays are based solely around rambling country houses and bodies in the library has probably been misled by poor adaptations.

That’s the opinion of Joe Harmston, artistic director of the Agatha Christie Theatre Company, whose eighth production, Go Back For Murder, comes to Theatre Royal Brighton next week.

“We are offering something different year on year,” he says, as he prepares for the company’s ninth touring production, Black Coffee, Christie’s only stage drama to feature her famous Belgian detective Poirot.

“She offers so many different styles of play. Go Back For Murder is particularly experimental. She was a great admirer of other dramatists. I suspect this was her thinking it would be interesting to play with some JB Priestley-style time changes.

“There are some pretty dodgy adaptations of her work. She is much cleverer than the people who have adapted her.

“She writes Whydunnits, not Whodunnits, which has always been crucial in the way we approach her work. Often adapters seem to regard her work as Cluedo onstage and focus on the plot points about who did what when, rather than what it was that made somebody commit murder.”

Go Back For Murder was Christie’s adaptation of her Poirot novel Five Little Pigs, where the Belgian detective was asked to reopen a historic murder case.

Carla Le Marchant’s mother, Caroline Crale, died after being found guilty of the murder of her husband – Carla’s father – 20 years before. Now, as she prepares to marry, Carla wants her mother’s name cleared and to find the real murderer.

In common with many of her stage adaptations, Christie erased her most famous detective from the theatrical version, leaving it to Crale’s former defence lawyer Justin Fogg to piece together what really happened.

Questioning morality

“Something I find interesting is Christie’s own morality,” says Harmston.

“She had a very clear sense that there is a legal justice and a divine justice. Although legal justice might sometimes make mistakes, divine justice never errs.

“In this play, although someone has got away with it for 20 years in legal terms, they have suffered existentially since the day of the murder. The law may not have caught up with them but they have punished themselves.”

Harmston has set Go Back For Murder in 1960, the year the play was penned, further underlining the period which Christie was working in.

“People have an image of her as an inter-war dramatist and novelist. Black Coffee is one of her oldest plays, from 1930, whereas Go Back For Murder is one of her later plays.

“In it, Christie is essentially doing a dramatic reconstruction, which the police do now as a routine thing to nudge people’s memories. As they go back in time various links are made and the crime is solved.”

That structure lends its own problems to a director – not least the fact that two characters have to come back from the dead to make the reconstruction authentic.

“There aren’t many scenery changes, it all happens in one space,” says Harmston. “There are a lot of quick costume changes as people shift from their older to their younger selves.

Future projects

“We are helped hugely by the music Matthew Bugg has created. He did a wonderful soundscape for Murder On The Nile last year and he has created some wonderful music which helps us move from the past to the present at various stages of the plot.”

As Go Back For Murder’s national tour comes to an end, Harmston is now focusing on Black Coffee – a play he has already directed as a rehearsed reading as part of Chichester Festival Theatre’s 50th anniversary celebrations.

That one-off production had a very special guest in the starring role – David Suchet himself.

“We have known each other for a while but had never done anything together,” says Harmston, who admits he would love to get Suchet to take part in next year’s run of the play.

“It was such a delight and a real joy for a relatively small audience to see him perform Poirot in front of a full house.”

Harmston has amassed a cast of regular performers for the Agatha Christie Theatre Company’s national tours.

Returning cast members include Robert Duncan, Ben Nealon and Gary Mavers, who starred in the first Agatha Christie Theatre Company production of The Hollow in 2006.

Go Back For Murder also stars Liza Goddard, Lysette Anthony, and Sophie Ward in the key role of Carla.

“We have all the benefits of a touring rep company, in terms of the experience and familiarity with audiences, but none of the downsides,” says Harmston. “There is no danger of us casting people in roles that aren’t suitable for them as they aren’t tied to the company.”

He admits he would love to tackle The Mousetrap with the company but it is unlikely he will ever have the chance following this year’s one-off national tour.

“I’m sure The Mousetrap will run until we are all dead and gone,” he says. “My father took me to see it in 1976 and I remember him saying, ‘This is the longest running play ever, so we should go and see it because it can’t last much longer.’

“It’s fantastic to see how well The Mousetrap has done on tour. We were concerned it might take away from our audience but if anything it seems to have picked up. There’s a huge appetite for Christie’s work.”