CHRISTIAN VIEWPOINT: Agatha Christie actor imagined Bible as script through the letterbox
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Sir David Suchet once told a journalist, with a smile, that if he were ever to write the story of his coming to Christian faith, he might entitle it ‘Dragged kicking and screaming into Christianity’.
The renowned actor who appeared in a ‘Poirot and More’ retrospective at Eden Court Theatre recently is most widely known for his portrayal of Agatha Christie’s Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, and his audio recording of the Bible – all 250 hours of it.
Formerly an atheist, Sir David began exploring Christian faith at the age of 40 in 1986. He’d been told when preparing to play a Shakespeare character to imagine that the script had ‘just come through your letterbox and it’s a brand new play’.
He took the same approach when he was drawn to explore the Bible’s teaching, imagining it too had just been delivered to his front door, addressed to him personally. Turning first to the letter to the Romans he found in the later chapters ‘a world-view that I had been searching for all my life’ – the Christian ‘world-view of love’.
This revelation sent Sir David to the Gospels where he encountered Jesus.
The ‘kicking and screaming’ was due to his doubts, and to questions raised by the fact of cruelty and war. But now he says ‘I have a very strong Christian faith’. Convinced Jesus rose from the dead, he claims this resurrection ‘is the greatest miracle justifying Christian belief in Jesus’s divinity’.
Some aspects of Sir David’s approach to acting illuminate the Christian’s quest for authenticity in faith.
He advises young actors not to ‘paint on’ the character, but to be the character. If my Christianity is merely ‘painted on’ – rather than being heart-deep and fully embodied – its falseness and superficiality will soon be evident.
He describes becoming the character he is to play, letting the role embody him while on stage. In contrast, Christian faith is about stepping out of the role we have been playing, the false self, shaped by secular values and our desperate yearning for significance, and finding our true, free selves.
He tells us he has always aimed ‘to serve the writers rather than just serve myself’. He hopes Agatha Christie would have been pleased by the way the Poirot on the page becomes the Poirot before our eyes. How closely does the John Dempster that God sees on the stage of life match the John that God dreams of?
Still for Sir David, as for most of us, there are questions and doubts. But he says, there is an unwavering truth about the God who persistently dragged him to faith. ‘The constant for the Christian is to know that you are beloved of God.’
