Agatha Christie: A Life in Theatre

On the same day as The Times’s announcement, Chimneys arrived at the Lord Chamberlain’s office. Act One of the script submitted to the Lord Chamberlain is clearly from a different copy of the play to the rest of it, and includes rehearsal notes written in pencil apparently by the actor playing Lord Caterham.34 Interestingly, the list of characters at the front shows evidence of what appears to have been an earlier attempt to cast the production, with ‘Wolfit’ pencilled in as one of two suggestions for George Lomax and ‘Sullivan’ for Superintendent Battle. Neither of these were still under contract to the Embassy repertory company by the time the play went into production – Donald Wolfit was by then touring Canada with Barry Jackson’s company. ‘Boxer’ (John Boxer) is pencilled in as Bill Eversleigh and Agatha’s favourite, ‘Joyce’ (Joyce Bland), as feisty heroine Virginia Revel, and it is fairly safe to assume that these two were cast in these roles when Chimneys finally went into rehearsal, particularly as they were both appearing in the Embassy’s previous production, Britannia of Billingsgate – Bland in a small role no doubt in order to allow her to prepare for her leading role in Chimneys. A note next to the role of Anthony Cade says ‘Oliver’ or perhaps ‘Clive’. I don’t know who this is, but I’m sorry to disappoint those who believe that ‘Olivier’ may have been been considered for the production.

Writing to Max from a bug-infested train on her journey back from Nineveh in early December, Agatha, having just seen the 19 November copy of The Times, probably in a hotel lobby, laments:

Darling – I am horribly disappointed, Just seen in the Times that Chimneys began December 1st, so I shall just miss it. I did want to hear how this child of mine sounded on the stage. I could have gone on the Saturday convoy because my passport came back in time and then I’d have got home on the Friday and could have seen the last night Saturday. What I ought to have done was wired to Carlo … 8th or 1st? I’ve been getting out of my good telegraphy habits lately – with bad results! If she had had any sense she would have wired the date to me!35

Agatha had commenced her journey too late to return by Saturday 12 December, which would have been the last night of a run commencing on 1 December. In reality, under a two-weekly repertory system, with Britannia of Billingsgate having opened on 10 November and announcing in its programme, ‘Change of programme every fortnight’ and ‘production in preparation: Chimneys, a new play by Agatha Christie’,36 the scheduled opening date for Chimneys would originally have been Tuesday 24 November (the date for which it was licensed by the Lord Chamberlain’s office). But in the event the unexpected success of Britannia, a new comedy by Jope Slade and Sewell Stokes about a charwoman at a film studio who ‘walks on’ in a film and is such a hit that she later becomes a famous character actress, meant that it had been extended for a week at the Embassy and was thought worth transferring to the St Martin’s thereafter. Chimneys was therefore pushed to 1 December by the extended run at the Embassy, rather than being brought forward as Agatha seemed to believe it had been. It could only ever have opened on 8 December if there was another production scheduled between Britannia and it, which clearly there wasn’t.

Agatha arrived in Istanbul in mid-December, writing to Max, ‘Am now at Tokatlian [hotel] … looked at Times of Dec 7th and “Mary Broome” is on at the Embassy!! So perhaps I shall see Chimneys after all? Or did it go off after a week? All bookshops etc are closed of course – so can’t get any other papers.’37

Mary Broome, featuring Robert Donat and Joyce Bland, had indeed followed Britannia of Billingsgate into the Embassy on 1 December instead of Chimneys. With the transfer of Britannia to the St Martin’s went, presumably, the majority of the cast who would have been in rehearsal for Chimneys. The ‘extension’ of Britannia at the Embassy for a week would have helped to buy some time in respect of organising a new cast for Chimneys and was announced on the same day as the news that Chimneys was to follow it into the Embassy, so the original intention still seems to have been to make Chimneys work. But at some point it must have been decided that the logistics of re-casting Chimneys to open by 1 December were simply too daunting. Christie’s play is a relatively complex piece of theatre and not without its challenges; Mary Broome, on the other hand, was a twenty-year-old comedy by Allan Monkhouse which had become a firm favourite with repertory companies. Only two cast members of Britannia of Billingsgate did not transfer with the production, one of them being Joyce Bland, whose small role allowed her to be replaced and to take up the lead in Mary Broome rather than Chimneys. John Boxer was amongst those who departed with Britannia. Had Robert Donat, who was not in the cast of Britannia, perhaps been in rehearsal for Chimneys when the switch was made? The programme for Mary Broome states: ‘Production in preparation: to be announced later (see Daily Press)’,38 indicating the disarray into which the Embassy’s scheduling had been thrown by the sudden departure to the West End of a number of the resident ensemble. With the transfer of Black Coffee, this had of course been avoided by taking a break in which to recast the production.

This piece of opportunism on the part of Reandco paid off for them, and Britannia of Billingsgate enjoyed a successful West End run, moving on from its launching pad of the St Martin’s to the Duke of York’s in much the same way that Black Coffee had moved on to the Little. The fact that they had produced Britannia in the West End would doubtless also have secured Reandco a share of the proceeds when it was filmed two years later, just as their brief West End presentation of Black Coffee had cut them in on 50 per cent of Christie’s income from the 1931 film of her play. The reason for the rescheduling given to Agatha on her return was rather different, however. On 23 December 1931 she wrote to Max, ‘Chimneys is coming on here but nobody will say when – I fancy they want something in Act One altered and didn’t wish to do it themselves’ She also mentions that ‘Alibi may come on in New York with Charles Laughton.’39

Chimneys was eventually rescheduled to commence at the Embassy on either 23 February or 1 March 1932. On 31 December 1931 Agatha wrote to Max from the Torquay Medical Baths, ‘I’m going to have a sea water bath (HOT!) to buck me up after Christmas … If Chimneys is put on on Tuesday 23rd I shall stay for first night. If it’s a week later well I shan’t wait for it. I don’t want to miss Nineveh and shall have seen rehearsals, I suppose. By the way, Alibi is being put on in New York after being rewritten and “Americanised” by someone. Charles Laughton to be Poirot.’40

What Agatha didn’t realise was that Reandco were about to relinquish their lease on the Embassy. Business had not lived up to expectations and the commitment to repertory, with fortnightly productions and a permanent ensemble, whilst highly regarded in theatrical circles, was putting the company under financial pressure. Ticket prices had been lowered in the hope of attracting more customers, but the struggle proved an unequal one and Rea, ever the pragmatist, decided to cut his losses, terminating his arrangement with the venue at the end of February 1931, just prior to the rescheduled dates for Chimneys. There can be no doubt that for Rea, balancing the demands of a full-time repertory company with those of a West End theatre (the St Martin’s) and a portfolio of commercial productions was proving unfeasible.

Ivor Brown, writing in the Observer, commented, ‘The suitable play is scarce and one fortnight of poor houses will swiftly obliterate the small profit derivable from two or three of reasonably crowded attendance. The policy of the house seems to have been to give everything a turn and balance a few high-aspiring swings with the more ordinary jollity of the roundabouts. I suspect that the management attracts the critics rather than the public when it goes for the swings and has to pay for its receipts of complimentary writing by some bestowal of complimentary seats.’41

The Times also lamented the Embassy’s loss: ‘Valuable work in London has been done by the Embassy Company at Swiss Cottage, where under the skilful direction of A.R. Whatmore many plays … were performed in London for the first time. In its comparatively short life the company has created for itself a public which will learn with regret that the lease at the Embassy is not to be renewed and that the theatre is to become a cinema.’42

The rumours of the Embassy’s change of use proved unfounded, however, and it soon reopened under Ronald Adam, who had been its business manager under Reandco. He turned it into a club theatre, thereby avoiding the need for the Lord Chamberlain’s approval and facilitating a sometimes more radical programme of work. Andre van Gyseghem replaced A.R. Whatmore as the venue’s artistic figurehead, directing a number of notable productions including two plays starring Paul Robeson. Adam ran the Embassy until 1939, and his business model appears to have been more robust than Rea’s, with numerous plays going on to enjoy West End success.

Chimneys, therefore, was to an extent a victim of the organised chaos of the repertory system, the very system that had given Christie her West End debut with Black Coffee. There was actually no mystery about its sudden disappearance from the schedule; she was clearly advised that it had been postponed, purportedly to enable rewrites, and the management that had optioned it then ceased their involvement with the theatre that was to have presented it shortly before the rescheduled dates. The truth is, however, that had Rea been particularly enamoured with the play he could easily have renewed his licence and facilitated its production elsewhere. Similarly Ronald Adam and Andre van Gyseghem, both of whom had been involved with it at the Embassy, could easily have acquired a new licence on the Embassy’s behalf. In December 1931 it had clearly been felt that Britannia of Billingsgate was a safer bet than Chimneys. The critics had been lukewarm towards Britannia, but it proved popular with audiences and was perhaps a more obvious candidate for a pre-Christmas West End run than Christie’s new work, particularly if they did feel that it needed rewrites.

In any event, Alec Rea presumably felt that it was ultimately worth sacrificing Chimneys to ensure a future for Britannia. In reality, too, he must have known some time in advance that he was going to give up the lease on the Embassy, and one cannot help surmising that it was more than coincidence that the new dates for the production given to Agatha turned out to be just after the theatre’s enforced temporary closure. By the time that the Embassy and Reandco parted company Agatha was already back at the archaeological dig at Nineveh with her new husband, and the problems with Chimneys were no doubt soon forgotten. Whatever the truth of the matter, the situation had been finessed in a manner that carefully avoided putting the firm of Reandco out of favour with Agatha Christie, playwright, and they were to work together again in the future.

It is not difficult to see why the ensemble of a small repertory theatre might have lost their initial enthusiasm for Christie’s rambling, light-hearted melodrama once they started rehearsing it. As a piece of theatre, it offers many more unwelcome challenges to the director, designer and actors than Black Coffee. The Secret of Chimneys does not immediately lend itself to stage adaptation, and limiting the action of the novel to two rooms in a country house necessitates the cutting of various multi-locational escapades in its early chapters, which are set in Bulawayo and London. As a result the stage version is burdened with a great deal of back-story and this, combined with a convoluted plot involving diamonds, oil concessions, exiled royalty from a fictional principality, international diplomacy, secret societies, an elusive master criminal, suspicious foreigners, wily assassins, blackmail, deception, multiple impersonations, unexpected guests and an unexpected corpse can make the whole thing a bit impenetrable. The Lord Chamberlain’s reader’s report, dated 20 November 1931, describes the play as ‘harmless’ and ‘melodramatic’, noting that it is ‘excessively complicated to read but I dare say will be less complicated when acted; it is naturally written’.43

Virginia Revel, the heroine of Chimneys, is very much a British ‘Elaine’, ‘about twenty-six and bursting with vitality, a radiant gallant creature’. As she becomes embroiled in various potentially dangerous exploits she exclaims, ‘You don’t know how I’m enjoying myself. After years of Ascot and Goodwood and Cowes and shooting parties and the Riviera and then Ascot all over again – suddenly to be plunged into the middle of this! (Closes her eyes in ecstasy).’44

The Foreign Office’s Honourable George Lomax, however, represents a more traditional view. ‘I disapprove utterly of women being mixed up in these matters. It is always dangerous. Women have no sense of the importance of public affairs. They display a deplorable levity at the most serious moments. The House of Commons is ruined – absolutely ruined nowadays – all the old traditions – (He breaks off) I am wandering from the point.’ At time of the play’s writing 1929’s ‘flapper election’ was yet to come, and Lomax is referring to the tiny number of women MPs who had been returned to Parliament since 1918, when women over thirty were given the right to vote (subject to minimum property qualifications) and women over twenty-one were given the right to stand for Parliament.

The feisty Virginia finds a natural ally in adventurer Anthony Cade, who remarks, ‘Perhaps I was born colour blind. When I see the red light – I can’t help forging ahead. And in the end, you know, that spells disaster. Bound to. (a pause) Quite right, really. That sort of thing is bad for traffic generally.’

When the two eventually but inevitably tie the knot he confesses:

ANTHONY: Darling! I have let you believe such a lot of lies about me. And I have married you under false pretences. What are you going to do about it?

VIRGINIA: Do? Why we will go to Herzoslovakia and play at being kings and queens.

ANTHONY: The average life of a king or queen out there is under four years. They always get assassinated.

VIRGINIA: How marvellous! We’ll have a lot of fun – teaching the brigands not to be brigands, and the assassins not to assassinate and generally improving the moral tone of the country.

Christie’s dialogue is seen to best advantage when presented in dramatic form, and it is notable that, in the plays which are adaptations of novels, it is often an improvement on the equivalent passage in a book from which it is taken; this delightful banter being a case in point. Indeed, her stated frustrations with the need to break up the flow of dialogue in a novel with descriptive passages are never more apparent than in the novel of The Secret of Chimneys itself where, instead of a description of the house, she gives us this: ‘The car passed in through the park gates of Chimneys. Descriptions of that historic place can be found in any guidebook. It is also No 3 in Historic Homes of England, price 21s. On Thursday, coaches come over from Middlingham and view those portions of it which are open to the public. In view of all these facilities, to describe Chimneys would be superfluous.’45

Intriguingly, sections of The Secret of Chimneys are written as though they were themselves part of a playscript. Here is the start of Chapter 10: ‘Inspector Badgeworthy in his office. Time, 8.30am. A tall, portly man, Inspector Badgeworthy, with a heavy regulation tread. Inclined to breathe hard in moments of professional strain …’ And most of the final chapter is written in the present tense, again in the idiom of a playscript:

Scene – Chimneys, 11am Thursday morning.

Johnson, the police constable, with his coat off, digging.

Something in the nature of a funeral feeling seems to be in the air. The friends and relations stand round the grave that Johnson is digging …

The play, like the book, features a character named Herman Isaacstein, who represents the interests of a British oil syndicate. Although his position as a high-powered man of finance is clearly respected by the other characters, they occasionally make reference to him, usually humorously, in a manner typical of the casual anti-semitism of the pre-war upper middle classes. Like that of Hergé, the Belgian creator of boy detective Tintin, Christie’s work was published between the 1920s and the 1970s, spanning and reflecting for popular consumption a century of extraordinary social and political upheaval; and it is important to consider the context in which it was written before passing judgement. Because Christie was still writing in the 1970s it is easy to forget that she was raised an Edwardian and, like Hergé’s, some of her early work contains elements of racial stereotyping that typify her class and the era in which she was writing. Suffice to say that, when Chimneys finally received its stage premiere in Calgary in 2006, certain lines relating to Isaacstein were subtly adjusted to take account of the sensibilities of modern audiences.

For all her efforts to provide audiences with alternative fare, however, Poirot was to continue to weigh heavily on Christie’s theatrical ambitions and, on Broadway as in the West End, the character was to make his debut before his creator. Key to successfully dating Agatha’s correspondence relating to Chimneys (previous misdating has exacerbated the perceived problem of the ‘disappearing play’) are the references to the forthcoming Broadway production of Alibi, starring Charles Laughton, which received its premiere at the Booth Theatre on 8 February 1932. Laughton had already made his own Broadway debut, enjoying a modest success in Payment Deferred, an adaptation of a 1926 C.S. Forester crime novel presented at the Lyceum Theatre at the end of 1931. Payment Deferred was produced by Gilbert Miller, a defiantly independent producer who was a friend of Basil Dean’s and who was later to play a key role in Agatha’s own Broadway success. Broadway was a calling-card for Hollywood for British actors in the 1930s, and Laughton felt that Alibi would provide a notable showcase for him, as it had in London. The play had been successfully revived in repertory, notably at London’s Regent Theatre in 1931, and in the same year the clean-shaven young Austin Trevor, a former ReandeaN player, had improbably played Poirot in British film versions of both Alibi and Black Coffee.

For the Broadway production of Alibi, Laughton teamed up with the notoriously acerbic and bullying Jed Harris, a prolific thirty-two-year-old producer/director whose various Broadway producing successes to date had included journalistic comedy The Front Page at the Times Square Theatre in 1929. Harris, who had changed his name from Jacob Horowitz, purchased a licence for $500 from Hughes Massie at the end of 1931 and engaged John Anderson, a critic on the New York Evening Journal, to revise the script for the American market; a process which Agatha was not involved in but which, from her letters to Max, she was evidently aware of. Authors’ royalties were split three ways, between Christie, Michael Morton and John Anderson, unusually giving Christie herself a minority share in the work.46 The title was also changed, to The Fatal Alibi, and the production was credited as ‘staged by Mr Laughton’ although Harris was closely involved in the rehearsal process.

The cast also notably included Broadway veteran Effie Shannon, but it was Laughton who once again stole the show. The Booth Theatre’s playbill (i.e. programme) shows a moustachioed Laughton in a gaudy pin-striped suit and carnation gurning and waving his hands in the air. ‘Look at me,’ it clearly states.47

The three-act, five-scene acting masterclass that The Murder of Roger Ackroyd had become was not welcomed by the American critics. The New York Times commented, ‘Since Mr Laughton enjoys playing the part, a guileless theatregoer may enjoy watching him. But colourful acting, slightly detached from the flow of narrative, can also temper a drama’s illusion. In the opinion of this department, Mr Laughton’s lithographic performance has that subtle effect. It diverts attention from the play.’48

Legendary Hollywood gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky in his syndicated ‘Tintypes’ column led off an affectionate character sketch with:

Charles Laughton is the latest English actor to invade Broadway and capture the critics and the public – a neat trick. Although movie companies have already tried to entice him to go to Hollywood, little is known about him here. And even less is known about him in London … Is sensitive about his weight. Wants to forget about it and not step on the scales. The wife has a scale in the house and tries to coax him to step on it by placing a piece of cake on the machine … Normally retires between one-thirty and two in the morning. When with Jed Harris between six and seven in the morning …

His nicknames are Fatty, Henry VIII and Pudge and Billy. The wife’s pet name for him can’t be printed.49

The Fatal Alibi ran for only twenty-four performances on Broadway, but it was enough for Laughton to make his mark, and it served its purpose as a springboard for a successful Broadway and Hollywood career. ‘The wife’, of course, was the actress Elsa Lanchester, whose film career was to take off alongside Laughton’s; according to Skolsky, Laughton designed ‘most of her clothes’.

And so Agatha Christie made her Broadway debut; in her own absence, her work processed by not one but two adaptors, and with her ‘French’ detective once again stealing the limelight. Later in 1932 he would appear in Paris in yet another re-adaptation of Alibi, this time by French dramatist Jacques Deval. With Black Coffee Christie had, however, finally seen her own work reach the West End stage, albeit for a very brief run. It was to be over a decade before another of her own plays was to be produced, a decade in which adaptors misleadingly continued to keep her name on theatrical marquees on both sides of the Atlantic, and in which she herself wrote four further full-length scripts, none of which were to achieve West End productions in her lifetime.

SCENE THREE

Stranger and Stranger

Charles Laughton made his Broadway exit as Poirot on 1 March 1932, and six weeks later Hughes Massie issued Francis L. Sullivan with a licence for a new Poirot stage script written by Christie herself.1 This was a one act play (or ‘Sketch’ as it was titled) based on the short story ‘The Wasp’s Nest’, which had been published in the Daily Mail in November 1928. The licence allowed Sullivan to perform the piece at a ‘royal charity matinee’ in June 1932, which appears to have been the purpose for which it was written, and to present it at London’s Arts Theatre. It also gave him the right to perform it as a ‘music hall’ act, in return for 10 per cent of his income therefrom; the concept of a Poirot play featuring on a variety bill is indicative of the theatrical curiosity that the character had rapidly become.

On Tuesday 7 June 1932 the King and Queen attended a gala matinee in aid of the British Hospital in Paris at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane.2 The production consisted of a variety of numbers and sketches, in one of which Gerald du Maurier caused much hilarity by playing the role of a non-speaking butler. This may well have been the event for which The Wasp’s Nest was originally written, although it did not in fact form part of the programme. Neither did it turn up at the Arts Theatre or on the music hall stage, although in 1937 it was broadcast live by BBC television, with Sullivan as Poirot. Also in the cast were Douglas Clarke-Smith, who had directed the West End transfer of Black Coffee, and Wallace Douglas, who would go on to direct the London premiere of Witness for the Prosecution. The broadcast took place on 18 June at 3.35 p.m., with the Radio Times announcing that