Interview with Martin Shaw

Written by Helen Jones

Friday, 01 January 2010 07:47

Martin Shaw guest stars as a world renowned actor alongside David Suchet in Three Act Tragedy, a Martin Shaw - ITV brand new Poirot film scheduled for Sunday 3^rd January 2010 at 8pm on ITV1. Shaw (George Gently, Judge John Deed) takes on the role of Sir Charles Cartwright, a retired actor who relishes the opportunity to assist Poirot with his investigations after the death of a guest at his home. Three Act Tragedy also stars Art Malik (Ben Hur), Kate Ashfield (Collision), Kimberley Nixon (Cranford), Jane Asher (The Palace) and Tom Wisdom (The Boat that Rocked).

Poirot visits Cornwall to attend a dinner hosted by his friend, the retired actor Sir Charles Cartwright. But when an amiable local Reverend chokes to death on his cocktail Poirot cannot see how murder can have been committed. With the exception of Sir Charles’s doctor friend Sir Bartholomew Strange and the enigmatic Miss Egg Lytton Gore, any one of the eclectic mix of guests might have taken the glass - the inquisitive playwright, vulnerable ex-jockey, celebrated dressmaker, faithful housekeeper or young suitor of Miss Lytton Gore’s.

ITV When, weeks later, Sir Bartholomew Strange chokes to death at a dinner party he is hosting with many of the same guests, Poirot and Charles are not surprised to discover that Strange was poisoned. The motives seem plentiful - could a missing butler, mysterious telephone message or secret tunnel be the key to solving the case?

Interview with Martin Shaw who plays Sir Charles Cartwright.

Although they are poles apart in some respects, Martin Shaw and his character have one small detail in common. They are both established actors...

“Sir Charles Cartwright is an old time, rather grand actor in the Laurence Olivier mould. He’s very well educated, extremely rich and very insecure about his age and his standing in the world. He manages to cover it all up under this exterior of celebrity, fame and a great deal of wealth. Plus he’s an old friend of Poirot’s.”

Martin resists the temptation to play around with an audience he knows will be scrutinising each and every character for clues.

“Audiences are much more sophisticated nowadays and they want to be genuinely intrigued about who did what and when. And so all of us who are suspects are playing it in a very unobvious way to try and confuse the audience even more! The stories are always so very well constructed that they require a certain amount of brainpower on behalf of the audience. Almost everything we actors have to do [these days] is over explained because TV executives are terrified of the audience not understanding [a drama], moment by moment. Agatha Christie doesn’t do that and I think audiences like that – they like to be treated as intelligent.”

Martin has been keen to star in Poirot for some time, even more so since meeting David Suchet and discussing the possibilities.

“David and I had discussed this quite a long time ago, because we meet from time to time at various functions. We shared a table at an awards ceremony once and we chatted and both agreed that we liked each other’s work a lot. It seemed a bit daft that there was a convention that if you had your own TV series, you couldn’t appear in anybody else’s. Both David and I thought that was silly and that at the earliest opportunity we would break that convention by working with each other. And so the opportunity came up and I jumped at it! I like David very much – he’s one of our very finest actors and I like his outlook on life and work. We just blended very well together. I had a great time doing Three Act Tragedy - it’s one of the happiest times I can remember. It was a lovely show to work on.

“Of course, Poirot is also a product that’s been going on for a very long time and a convention has arisen that established actors come along as guest artists. And I think that really is a tribute to the quality of the show and to David. The films will always be attractive to actors provided they are done well and, of course, if David Suchet is in them, they invariably are, not least because he is an associate producer and is able to impose some artistic input.”

Martin believes Poirot’s success is down to the fact that the current productions breathe fresh life into classic stories.

“Paradoxically, Poirot is something different, something we have seen evolving. We’ve all grown up on that old fashioned black and white, over dramatised, over played, over demonstrated way of playing Agatha Christie. And I think the new generation of actors - and I include myself here because I have been wanting to work this way since the early 1960s - can do these old, old fashioned stories in a modern and realistic way. It’s a different slant on an old topic.”

And why does Martin think David Suchet’s Poirot is so well loved throughout the world?