David Suchet's live presentation focuses on Agatha Christie's detective Hercule Poirot and his other great roles

Beyond Poirot, this Emmy award-winning actor has been celebrated for his portrayal of iconic roles such as Lady Bracknell, Cardinal Benelli and Freud. David has also graced the world’s stages bringing literary greats to life, including Shakespeare, Wilde and Albee.

The man, the actor and his many roles will be shown in his live presentation, David Suchet: Poirot and More, A Retrospective which tours to Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre on February 2, 2024. There will be two performances; limited tickets are on sale for the afternoon show at 2.30pm while the evening show is sold out.

David said: “I am utterly delighted to be taking this show back on the road after such a warm and wonderful reception to its first UK outing and West End run. Regional theatre is where my career began and was nurtured so I’m very much looking forward to sharing my stories, memories and favourite moments across the country again and visiting a number of new towns and cities that we couldn’t reach post-lockdown when theatres were still closed, particularly in Scotland and Ireland.”

He has always been passionate about supporting regional theatre, stretching all the way back to when he started out as an actor performing around the UK in rep. He said: “We must never forget that England is a little country with lots of regions that have their own theatres, and they are just as important to their local communities as in the big cities.”

It is a common misconception to assume actors are like the characters they play. However David does admit to sharing a number of attributes with Hercule Poirot. “I care about detail and he greatly cared about it (too). I like symmetry, we’re very similar there… and the other similarity of course is that I’m the most difficult person I have to live with, because I’m a perfectionist, and so is he,” he tells Hugh Montgomery.

He was intent on playing the detective as he imagined Agatha Christie would have wanted – in an understated and serious-minded fashion. When he was first offered the part, he had doubts about taking it on, he says, mainly because he’d always seen Poirot “as a very lightweight character, which came from the films I’d seen.” But then when he started reading the novels themselves, he was “introduced to a character that I’d never seen portrayed … and I decided I’d become the man that Agatha Christie describes in huge detail, for her and her millions of readers”.

David last played Agatha Christie’s hero in 2013, hanging up his Homburg hat after a remarkable 70 TV adaptations for ITV. A decade on, he says he still misses Hercule very much indeed. “Personally and professionally, he changed my life, and I got to know him better than any other person that I’ve (come across). And then I had to die as him, which was a very conflicting moment for me. Even as I’m saying it now, I can still feel the emotion of it.”

But while David will never play Poirot again, he is reunited with the great man and his “little grey cells” in this autobiographical stage show, in which he is interviewed about his long and esteemed career.

One of the sections of the show sees David offer a mini-Shakespearean masterclass, reciting speeches from Shakespeare characters he has played to demonstrate the Bard’s “highway code” of language. It was Shakespeare that really made David’s name in the 1970s when he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company: two big defining moments for him came in 1978 and 1981, when he played Caliban in The Tempest and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, respectively, both to much acclaim. Not everything was plain sailing from there, however: in the mid-1980s, he recalls having a blip when preparing to play Iago opposite Ben Kingsley as Othello. “I was getting very fed up with myself and my own (anxieties), thinking ‘how am I doing?’ And then I realised that an actor is there as much as anything else to serve the playwright, and try and be the spoke in the wheel that is their play. And as soon as I discovered that, I could then forget about myself. I had a reason for existing as an actor.”

Now 77 years old, David is still broadening his career horizons – he made his panto debut playing Captain Hook in Peter Pan at the Bristol Hippodrome in 2023. He said: “I suddenly thought ‘if I don’t do it now, in my 54 years of acting, I will never have done a pantomime – I’ve got to say yes!’

David, who received a knighthood for his services to drama and charity from Prince William in 2022, has no plans to retire. He said: “I always say that I’ll stop working properly when the telephone stops ringing.” With various TV projects mooted, that seems a far-fetched proposition.

Tickets for David Suchet: Poirot and More, A Retrospective cost £37; go to www.sheffieldtheatres.co.uk