All aboard!

To concoct the locomotive set design for Murder on the Orient Express, Brian Perchaluk harkened back to his days working on the railroad.

Before punching his ticket to the National Theatre School in the 1980s, the Roblin-raised Perchaluk collected summer paycheques as a member of CN Rail’s extra gangs.

“One summer, me and another guy tightened all the bolts between Winnipeg and Emerson,” says Perchaluk, who has designed over 40 sets for the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre.

No offence to the southern Manitoba flatlands, but Orient Express required Perchaluk to imagine a train rolling between vastly more opulent terminals — Istanbul, Turkey and Calais, France.

Dressed up in the art deco tradition, the Express was a real train, which Orient Express author Agatha Christie rode for the first time in 1922 and described in letters as “the train of my dreams.”

The luxury passenger train created by Belgian engineer George Nagelmackers set off on its inaugural journey in 1883, ferrying 40 passengers on a weeklong trek between Paris and the former Constantinople.

On her travels, Christie, whose books have outsold both Shakespeare and the Bible, typically brought her typewriter along for the ride, finding literary motive in both the setting and the characters she met aboard.

Last April, while visiting friends in London, Perchaluk sought inspiration of his own. The designer — who was also the mastermind behind the rotating, surprise-laden mansion of the RMTC’s 2024 production of Clue — took a half-hour steam train ride from the capital to Christie’s summer estate along the River Dart in Devon.

Now managed by the National Trust as a historic site, the Greenway House holds Christie’s Steinway piano and a collection of over 5,000 books, including dozens of Christie first editions. (An attached apartment is available to rent for a minimum of three nights, starting at 955 pounds (CAD$1,783), though Perchaluk didn’t stick around).

Working with director Kelly Thornton, Perchaluk says one of the show’s key design challenges was to convey the luxury of the Express while also emphasizing the growing sense of confinement within the train cars as Belgian inspector Hercule Poirot (played by Alex Poch Goldin) investigates a fellow passenger’s murder.

The story is in constant motion, shifting on a 30-foot revolving stage from station to dining car to sleeping car to observation deck.

The story is in constant motion, shifting on a 30-foot revolving stage from station to dining car to sleeping car to observation deck.

While the train is undoubtedly posh, with legroom to spare, the passengers — including a countess (Winnipeg’s Dutchess Cayetano in her RMTC debut), a princess (Davina Stewart) and a talented, if shady, stage actress (Donna Fletcher) — are typically interrogated in close quarters, says Thornton. If Poirot makes too sharp a turn, his moustache could poke a murderer’s eye out.

“At certain points, we’re blocking an entire show inside a sleeper car,” the director says.

At times, all 10 performers contort to fit inside a six-by-seven car.

That level of precision — on the part of the actors, the designers and the behind-the-scenes craftspeople keeping the moving elements on track — leads Perchaluk to compare the production to a Swiss watch, a device known as a paragon of both elegance and mechanical superiority.

Whereas the RMTC has in recent seasons found success with farcical mysteries such as Clue and The Play That Goes Wrong, Thornton says Murder on the Orient Express strives for elegance instead of controlled chaos.

Even as a dastardly crime scandalizes the clientele, there’s still an intention to lull the audience into the escapist mindset promised by a well-planned vacation.

“There’s something so calming about the motion,” says Thornton, a truism which makes for tremendous dramatic potential when the machinery grinds to a sudden halt.

Though Christie never actually witnessed a murder on her favourite train, her husband Max Mallowan recounted in his memoirs that the writer nearly met her end while waiting to depart Calais.

Once, she slipped on the icy platform and fell beneath the train. A porter came to her rescue and pulled Christie up from the track before the Orient Express started moving again, according to the Christie estate.

“It was luck that she lived to write the book,” Mallowan wrote.

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