Somebody has been murdered. The circumstances are mysterious. Nobody can be trusted. Everybody is a suspect. And a crafty detective must get to the bottom of a crime that grows only more complicated with each newly revealed detail.
This sounds like a classic whodunit because that is precisely what we’ve got at Red Bank’s Two River Theater in “Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Links,” newly adapted for the stage by Darko Tresnjak.
Christie’s 1923 novel stars the author’s most famous creation, super detective Hercule Poirot. Our hero (Campbell Scott) receives a vague but intriguing letter from Jack Renault (presented throughout in voiceovers by Patrick Page), a man in fear of his life and in desperate need of the detective’s services. But when Poirot arrives, Renault is dead. Locals found his body that morning lying in an open grave on a golf course.
From there the plot becomes everything we would want and expect from Agatha Christie. The bereaved wife, Madame Renauld (Kate Baldwin), spins an extravagant story of abduction that Poirot instantly doubts. The single and flamboyant neighbor, Madame DuBois (Lauren Worsham), raises suspicion with her shiftiness. Large sums of money and international business interests are at stake. A questionable will is in play.
And Poirot must untangle the whole affair.
Under Tresnjak’s direction, Two River’s production hits just the right notes of romantic intrigue to breath life into a Poirot mystery. The whole affair feels cloaked in the mist and fog of classic detective stories. Much credit for that goes to the performers, who lean into the melodrama that the genre demands. Baldwin’s Madame Renauld is resolute in her dignity while nonetheless betraying cracks of bitterness and duplicity that hint at an entirely different person beneath the surface.
Opposite her as the lower-class Madam DuBois, Worsham subtly reveals a fierceness that forces one to wonder if there is anything she won’t do to protect herself and her family. Jason O’Connell is also excellent as Commissary Lucien Bex, the local and mostly clueless detective who must be a sounding board to enhance Poirot’s insight.
And Scott’s Poirot provides the show its necessary captivating anchor. As with many Poirots, Scott is occasionally aloof and ponderous in ways that invite the audience to wonder what his mind is turning over, but this production’s best moments are when its Poirot is most pointed and assertive. Scott shows Poirot to be more of a cop than a philosopher, a man invested primarily in ferreting out crime and most pleased when doing so requires the full breadth of his intellectual faculties. He is a more visceral and human Poirot than most.
All of this plays out across Alexander Dodge’s beautiful set that is able to whisk the production from a country villa to a to a foggy flashback and to misty seaside cliffs with just a bit of lighting (Pablo Santiago) change or a shift from the stage to an elevated level.
With fine attention to and execution of the classic mystery genre’s expectations and customs, “Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Links” is a brand new adaptation that feels at every turn like a quintessential detective story.