Agatha Christie on the set of Witness for the Prosecution (1953).

‘Agatha has the gift of doing what all women want to do, but only men have the chance. She achieves something. Men climb Everest, race fast cars, invent atom bombs, fight wars, become famous surgeons and man lifeboats. In her heart every woman, too, would like to do these things. But all we can do is dream. It is all we can do. It’s a man’s world. The only consolation I get is that Agatha kills off a few of you.’

Margaret Lockwood

17 January 1954

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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This edition published 2018

First published as Curtain Up 2015

Text © Julius Green 2015, 2018

Agatha Christie archive papers © Christie Archive Trust 2015

Agatha Christie quotations © Agatha Christie Limited 2015

Agatha Christie® Poirot® Marple® and the Agatha Christie signature are registered trademarks of Agatha Christie Limited in the UK and elsewhere. All rights reserved.

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Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Photographs courtesy of The Christie Archive Trust, The Shubert Archive, The University of Bristol Theatre Collection, The National Portrait Gallery, The Peter Saunders Archive, The Museum of the City of New York Theatre Collection, The Theatre Royal Bath Archive and Getty Images.

Julius Green asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

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Source ISBN: 9780007546961

Ebook Edition © April 2018 ISBN: 9780007546954

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Dedication

To Dianne

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword

A Note from the Author

Agatha Christie’s Family Tree

Behind the Scenes

Act One: The People’s Playwright

Scene One: The Early Plays

Scene Two: Poirot Takes the Stage

Scene Three: Stranger and Stranger

Scene Four: Broadway Bound

Scene Five: Towards Zero

Act Two: Saunders Saves the Day

Scene One: The Binkie Effect

Scene Two: The Disappearing Director

Scene Three: Saunders’ Folly

Scene Four: Hat-Trick

Scene Five: The Late Plays

Curtain Call

Picture Section

Endnotes

Bibliography

Index of Agatha Christie Works

General Index

Acknowledgements

Mousetrap Theatre Projects

About the Author

About the Publisher

Foreword

A couple of years ago, my friend Julius Green came to see me looking unusually nervous! He said he wanted to write an important history of my grandmother Agatha Christie’s plays and asked if I would give my approval. I did so immediately, because I knew of Julius’ huge knowledge about her plays, and the admiration and passion he had for them. I remembered when we shuttled back and forth on a train to Westcliff-on-Sea in 2001, when Julius organised a festival of all her plays, which was not only a huge success but became a piece of history in itself. Recalling that time, and Julius’s long involvement with the Agatha Christie Theatre Company, I knew I could rely on him to be the right man for the job.

But then there was something more. Although my grandmother wrote plays before the 1950s, the great explosion of interest that occurred around the time of the opening of The Mousetrap and her other successes coincided with the period in my childhood when I spent the most time with her, and became aware what a star she was (even though she hated people saying that!). Therefore nobody could appreciate more than I do how much of a contribution her dramatic output made to her unrivalled reputation, and I am delighted to have in Julius’s book such a fitting tribute to the genius of Agatha Christie as a playwright to help balance her better known achievements as an author.

In addition, I was fascinated by Julius’s insight into the theatrical history of the period, to learn of the forthright personalities of the major players, and to read how my grandmother coped so calmly whilst all around her were living their theatrical lives.

All in all, a real treat for everybody!

MATHEW PRICHARD

June 2015

A Note from the Author

Given the quantity of published and unpublished material that is quoted in this book, I have decided to standardise various elements of it in order to assist the reader. This includes the layout of playscripts and the style in which the titles of works are expressed: in italics if quoting from a publication and not so if quoting from correspondence. My own occasional comments in the midst of quoted material are indicated by [square brackets]. Minor spelling and typographical errors in original documents have been corrected unless I believe them to be of interest, in which case they are indicated with (sic). Documents quoted in this book which date from before the 1950s tend to refer to what we now call the director of a play as the ‘producer’ and what we now call the producer as the ‘manager’. In such cases I have included a clarification. A number of Agatha Christie’s plays underwent changes of title; where this occurred, the title used in this book is that of the particular draft, production or published edition being discussed.

Agatha Christie’s Family Tree

Behind the Scenes

This is the story of the most successful female playwright of all time. She also wrote some books.

Agatha Christie (1890–1976) is universally acknowledged as the world’s best-selling novelist, and yet the significance of her contribution to theatre has been largely overlooked by historians. This despite the fact that she is responsible for a repertoire of work that enjoyed enormous global success in her own lifetime and continues to do so more than forty years after her death. She not only holds the record for the world’s longest-running theatrical production, but is also the only female playwright to have had three of her works running in the West End simultaneously. Her first attempts at playwriting date from around 1908 and her last completed play premiered in 1972. Nine of her plays opened in the West End in the 1940s and 1950s alone, and two of them were big hits on Broadway. For Christie, theatrical success arrived relatively late in life; it brought her much pleasure and, despite her legendary shyness, she enjoyed the company of theatrical people and relished their eccentricities.

From the point where she finally broke through as a playwright in the 1950s, it is clear that Christie continued to regard writing books as her day job, but that she found true creative fulfilment in her work for the stage. In her autobiography she notes:

Of course I knew that writing books was my steady, solid profession. I could go on inventing plots and writing my books until I went gaga … writing plays seemed to me entrancing simply because it wasn’t my job, because I hadn’t got the feeling that I had to think of a play – I only had to write the play that I was already thinking of. Plays are much easier to write than books, because you can see them in your mind’s eye, you are not hampered by all the description that clogs you so terribly in a book and stops you getting on with what’s happening. The circumscribed limits of the stage simplify things for you. You don’t have to follow the heroine up and down the stairs, or out to the tennis lawn and back, thinking thoughts that have to be described. You only have what can be seen and heard and done to deal with. Looking and listening and feeling is what you have to deal with.¹

In a 1951 article on Christie, The Stage newspaper reported that she found writing plays easier than writing books because ‘With a play you can go straight to your plot and characters and you have not to deal with the problem of describing scenes and the movements and habits of people. If you are at all successful, all this appears automatically through your characters and the action in which they are involved.’² And, in an interview for the BBC Radio Light Programme in 1955, she once again stated that ‘Of course writing plays is much more fun than writing books … you must write pretty fast, keep in the mood and keep the talk flowing naturally.’³

Some commentators have interpreted such remarks as implying that, whilst writing books was Agatha Christie’s profession, writing plays was simply her hobby. My own view is that, for a writer who had a real aptitude for dialogue and who, by her own admission, felt hampered by ‘description’, playwriting was her true vocation. And her determined, twenty-year struggle to gain recognition as a dramatist bears witness to this. Like most playwrights, Agatha Christie has her good and her bad days but, speaking as a theatre practitioner rather than an academic, it seems to me that she is both a master of her craft and a unique and witty voice with a great deal to say about the human condition. Actors always seem to enjoy engaging with her characters and find much in them to relate to, belying the popular misconception that they are thinly drawn caricatures. Her work is laced, whether consciously or not, with echoes of the other great playwrights of the era, and some of the most celebrated actors of the day appeared in her plays.

So why has history been so unkind to Agatha Christie, playwright? At the height of her popularity in the 1950s the dominant producing force in the West End was Binkie Beaumont, but Christie’s most enduring working relationship was with Peter Saunders, a rival impresario who was openly critical of the monopolistic tendencies of the Beaumont empire. So, despite her popular success, Christie was notable for working outside the established (and at times fearsomely ruthless) West End oligarchy of the day; a fact that makes her achievements all the more remarkable. As a doyenne of the ‘well-made play’ she remained delightfully untouched by the Royal Court revolution and consequently does not even feature in the vocabulary of those academics for whom the history of twentieth-century British playwriting started with Look Back In Anger in 1956. She thus occupies a unique position as a playwright, outside both the prevailing theatrical culture and its counter-culture; and her theatrical vocabulary suits the historians of neither.

Another very straightforward reason for the neglect of Christie as a playwright is continued confusion over the authorship of the plays credited to her. As well as her own work for the stage there have been a number of second-rate adaptations of her novels by third parties; and this, combined with the enduring success of third-party film and television adaptations, has led to an assumption that the plays credited to her were not from her own pen. There is an immediate and obvious qualitative difference between Christie’s own work for the stage and that of her adaptors, but the staging of a number of such works in her own lifetime, and several more since, has inevitably diluted her own stock as a playwright. Christie herself was unequivocal on the subject, repeatedly expressing her displeasure at her stage adaptors’ work: ‘Several books of mine were dramatised by other people and they all dissatisfied me intensely,’ she told the Sunday Times in 1961.⁴ Ironically, though, whilst arguably initially hindering her own development as a playwright, the adaptors’ efforts provided her with an entrée to the world of theatre and its practitioners, where she became a willing student and gained the confidence to promote her own work: ‘I think what started me off was my annoyance over people adapting my books for the stage in a way I disliked.’⁵ Certainly, she is the only playwright I can think of whose reputation has had to contend with the truly bizarre obstacle of a body of work for the stage penned by others but promoted to the public and the critics in her name.

And then there is the question of collaboration. Playwriting is often a shared undertaking, and writers from Shakespeare to Brecht to David Edgar have worked with others in the preparation of their scripts. There can be no doubt that one of the things that most attracted Christie to the stage was the collaborative nature of the process, enabling her as it did to exchange ideas with others in a way that her largely solitary work as a novelist did not. She was a willing and adept participant in script discussions, either as a commentator on other people’s adaptations of her novels or as a playwright herself attempting to address the concerns of producers, directors and actors. Despite the patronising claims of certain directors about the level of their own input, the fourteen full-length plays and three one-act plays that were premiered on stage in Christie’s lifetime, and which carry her name as sole playwright, are indisputably her own work. She only ever incorporated the suggestions of others up to a point, and always remained in control of the script development process. And when she was convinced that she was in the right she was legendarily immovable. Ironically, her own highly accomplished adaptation of one of her short stories was appropriated wholesale by an ‘adaptor’ without so much as an acknowledgement of her own dramatisation as source material. And, conversely, she had very little to do with the only script for which she is actually credited as co-adaptor. In such cases Christie herself acted in good faith at the behest of agents and producers, but it doesn’t help when it comes to establishing the extent of her own contribution to the dramatic canon that bears her name.

There is also perhaps a misconception that Christie exploited her reputation as a novelist to promote her career in the theatre, and that her theatrical successes were in some way dependent on the success of her books. If anything, as we shall see, the opposite was the case, and the expectations raised by the popularity of her detective fiction frequently hampered her progress as a playwright and prejudiced critical opinion against her work on the stage. Whilst her producers inevitably attempted to capitalise on her existing fan base, the adaptations of some of her best-selling novels proved to be critical and box office disasters, and theatregoers repeatedly demonstrated themselves to be more than capable of judging her work for the stage on its own merits. Christie’s success as a playwright was exceptionally hard-won and, far from resting on her laurels as a popular novelist, she consistently dedicated herself to honing her craft, observing and willingly learning from the numerous leading theatrical practitioners with whom she worked. In any case, Christie was writing at a time when combining careers as a novelist and a playwright was not uncommon; amongst the contemporary female playwrights who did so were Clemence Dane, Margaret Kennedy, Enid Bagnold, Dodie Smith and Daphne du Maurier. Christie was simply both a more successful novelist and, ultimately, a more successful playwright than any of them. And, for those who carp that her plays were simply adaptations of existing works, it is instructive to note how far these adaptations diverge from their source material and that, amongst her full-length plays, there are nine totally original works, six of which were premiered in her lifetime. Christie herself said, ‘I prefer to write a play as a play, that is rather than to adapt a book.’⁶

Christie was passionate about theatre and was deeply involved in the processes of making it. She attended and contributed to rehearsals, and her delightful ‘author’s notes’ at the front of some of the published editions of the plays show her engaging with everything from the mechanics of creating the effect of a lift ascending and descending in Appointment with Death to the problems associated with the unusually large dramatis personae of Witness for the Prosecution and the ‘ageing’ of actors and multiple locations in Go Back for Murder. She was very aware of the practicalities of putting on a play, favouring single sets and relatively small casts (Appointment with Death and Witness for the Prosecution are notable exceptions), and this partly accounts for her enduring popularity with cash-strapped repertory theatres and touring companies over the years, and the consequent law of diminishing returns in terms of both production values and credibility within the theatre community.

Born in 1890, for the first ten years of her life Agatha was a Victorian; Gladstone became Prime Minister for the fourth time shortly before her first birthday. As a teenager and a young woman she was an Edwardian. She waved husbands off to both world wars, and women got the vote on the same basis as men when she was thirty-eight. In 1969 she watched man land on the moon on television, and when she died in 1976, Harold Wilson was Prime Minister. Her first success as a novelist came when she was thirty; but although she started writing plays as a teenager, none of her work was staged until she was forty, and her playwriting career didn’t really take off until she was in her sixties. This is an interesting inversion of the timeline of Noël Coward’s career; Coward and Christie were contemporaries, but his success as a playwright came much earlier in life and reached its pinnacle in the Second World War with Blithe Spirit and Present Laughter, just as Christie was experiencing her first West End hit with Ten Little Niggers. (The history of this play’s problematic title is examined later in this book.)

All but one of Christie’s plays are firmly set in the period in which they were written, and they resist any attempt at updating in just the same way that the work of Noël Coward does. Although the moral dilemmas faced by the characters and their guilt, obsession, love and jealousy are timeless, their behaviour and interactions are very much a function of the social mores of the time in which each play is set; not to mention the fact that modern communications technology would severely compromise key elements of the plotting. The stakes are raised in several of the storylines by the ever-present threat of the hangman’s noose; particularly in Verdict, where the existence of the death penalty clearly informs the protagonist’s decision not to turn the murderer over to the police, and in Towards Zero, where it accounts for an extraordinary plot twist. The acceptability of smoking provides a continuous subtext of cigarettes, pipes and cigars both as a form of social interaction (offering someone a cigarette can be as good as a chat-up line) and to underscore key moments of tension. A nervous character will reach for a cigarette and a pipe smoker is usually to be trusted.

But it would be a mistake to assume that the society reflected in the majority of Christie’s stage work is a halcyon one of pre-war vicarage tea parties. Ironically, this relatively elderly woman, whose upbringing was defined by the mores of the previous century and whose frame of reference is generally assumed to be that of the pre-war era, found lasting fame as a playwright in the decade when ‘angry young men’ were allegedly redefining the theatrical playing field at the Royal Court. Christie did not live a cocooned middle-class life. She was adventurous, widely travelled and politically aware, and encountered people of all classes and cultures. She worked in a hospital dispensary during the First World War (gaining a comprehensive knowledge of poisons in the process), was one of the first people to surf standing up on a surfboard (whilst visiting South Africa) and made use of recent changes in the law to divorce her cheating first husband, Archie Christie, in 1928. Her work spans a century of massive social and political change and this does not go unacknowledged within it, from The Hollow with its crumbling aristocracy facing up to the loss of empire to the overtly political challenge to the conservative orthodoxy represented by Alderman Higgs in Appointment with Death, the ‘not a Red, just pale pink’ Miss Casewell in The Mousetrap, the post-war suspicion of foreigners in Witness for the Prosecution and the persecuted East European immigrants at the centre of Verdict.

Whilst the received wisdom is that Christie’s novels are to a certain extent formulaic, and much scholarly time has been devoted to analysing these alleged formulae, the same most definitely cannot be said of her work as a playwright, and it almost seems that she found herself enjoying greater freedom of expression as a writer in this genre. A repertoire encompassing the edge-of-your-seat chiller Ten Little Niggers, the definitive courtroom drama Witness for the Prosecution, the Rattiganesque psychological drama Verdict and the ‘time play’ Go Back for Murder can hardly be described as formulaic and there is no such thing as a ‘typical’ Agatha Christie play. Despite the enduring perception of her work as little more than an extended game of Cluedo, Christie’s plays tend to be character-led rather than plot-led, and she clearly relishes entrusting the entire momentum of the story-telling to the voices of her ever-colourful dramatis personae. Her dialogue fairly trips off the tongue and is spiced with witticisms and observational comedy frequently worthy of Wilde. In her plays the detectives and police inspectors are usually relegated to minor roles, with the solving of a crime taking second place to the human drama that is being played out. It is as if we come closer to what Christie wants to say as a writer without the dominating presence of Poirot and Marple. With the exception of Poirot’s appearance in Black Coffee, the first play of hers to be produced (in 1930), neither character features in any of her own stage plays, and indeed she removed Poirot from the storyline when undertaking her own adaptations of four of the novels in which he appears, maintaining, doubtless correctly, that he would pull focus on stage.

Explorations of guilt, revenge and justice loom large in Christie’s stage work and are timeless subjects that go back to the very dawn of playwriting, but although the concept of justice and the many forms that it can take is central to many of her plays, the image of the policeman leading away the guilty party in handcuffs is rarely part of her theatrical vocabulary. An inability to escape the past is a recurring theme, and man’s infidelity is often the catalyst for its exploration, a frequently used storyline that some have attributed to the philandering of Christie’s own first husband. In Christie’s work for the stage, the murder itself is usually nothing more than a plot device to move forward the action and to set the scene for Christie’s exploration of the human condition and the dilemmas faced by her characters. ‘Who’ dunit is far less important than ‘Why’.

Agatha was a regular theatregoer from childhood and engaged in theatrical projects from an early age, was hugely theatrically literate and drew on a broad frame of reference from Grand Guignol to Whitehall farce, all of which can be seen in her work. But her lifelong passion was for Shakespeare, and her theatrical vocabulary was defined in particular by an enjoyment and understanding of his works, gained as an audience member and a reader rather than a scholar. In a 1973 letter to The Times she wrote: ‘I have gone to plays from an early age and am a great believer that that is the way one should approach Shakespeare. He wrote to entertain and he wrote for playgoers.’⁷ And in her autobiography she says,

Shakespeare is ruined for most people by having been made to learn it at school; you should see Shakespeare as it was written to be seen, played on the stage. There you can appreciate it quite young, long before you take in the beauty of the words and the poetry. I took my grandson, Mathew, to Macbeth and The Merry Wives of Windsor when he was, I think, eleven or twelve. He was very appreciative of both, though his comment was unexpected. He turned to me as we came out, and said in an awestruck voice, ‘You know, if I hadn’t known beforehand that that was Shakespeare, I should never have believed it.’ This was clearly meant to be a testimonial to Shakespeare, and I took it as such.⁸

Agatha and her grandson particularly enjoyed the knockabout comedy of The Merry Wives of Windsor:

In those days it was done, as I am sure it was meant to be, as good old English slapstick – no subtlety about it. The last representation of the Merry Wives I saw – in 1965 – had so much arty production about it that you felt you had travelled very far from a bit of winter sun in Windsor Old Park. Even the laundry basket was no longer a laundry basket, full of dirty washing: it was a mere symbol made of raffia! One cannot really enjoy slapstick farce when it is symbolised. The good old pantomime custard trick will never fail to rouse a roar of laughter, so long as custard appears to be actually applied to a face! To take a small carton with Birds Custard Powder written on it and delicately tap a cheek – well, the symbolism may be there, but the farce is lacking.⁹

Agatha’s letters to her second husband, Max, during his wartime posting to Cairo are full of enthusiastic descriptions of her visits to the major Shakespearian productions of the day, including those presented by the Old Vic Company at the New Theatre, their London base towards the end of the war. Her critiques of the productions and the performances of the leading classical actors of the day, and her insightful interpretations of the characters’ motivations, display a comprehensive knowledge of the Shakespearian repertoire. She also shows a keen interest in Shakespeare’s craft as a playwright. Commenting on the fact that he did not devise original plots she says, of the era in which he wrote:

I think the playwright was rather like a composer – he had to find a libretto for his art (like a ballet nowadays). ‘I should like to do a setting of Hamlet, or my version of Macbeth etc.’ Inventing a story was not really thought of. ‘What is the argument?’ Claudius asks in Hamlet before the players begin. The argument was a set thing – you then exercised your art on it … I think plays tended to be loose on construction, because they incorporated certain ‘turns’ – like the music halls … He saw a play as a series of scenes in which actors got certain opportunities. Rather like beads on a necklace– the thing to him remained always individual beads strung together.¹⁰

Shakespeare’s portrayal of female characters particularly engaged Agatha – ‘All Shakespeare’s women are very definitely characterized – he was feminine enough himself to see men through their eyes’¹¹ – and she was intrigued by Oxford academic A.L. Rowse’s disputed identification of the ‘Dark Lady’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Rowse, in turn, was an admirer of Christie; ‘We must not underrate her literary ambition and accomplishment, as her publishers did, simply because she was the first of detective story writers.’¹² Meanwhile, Christie trivia buffs can spend many happy hours identifying the numerous Shakespearian references in the titles and texts of her works. To get the ball rolling, I will pose the question, what were the two plays she wrote that took their titles from Hamlet?

Agatha was as enamoured with the backstage world of theatre as she was with the performance itself. ‘I don’t think, that there is anything that takes you so much away from real things and happenings as the acting world,’ she wrote to Max in 1942.¹³ ‘It is a world of its own and actors never are thinking of anything but themselves and their lines and their business, and what they are going to wear!’ And she says in her autobiography, ‘I always find it restful to stay with actors in wartime, because to them, acting and the theatrical world are the real world, any other world was not. The war to them was a long drawn-out nightmare that prevented them from going on with their own lives, in the proper way, so their entire talk was of theatrical people, theatrical things, what was going on in the theatrical world, who was going into E.N.S.A. – it was wonderfully refreshing.’¹⁴ To Agatha Christie, whose imaginary world has offered a welcome escape for so many, the world of theatre offered one to her.

Agatha shared with her theatrical friends the excitements and disappointments of live performance – ‘Lights that do not go out when the whole point is that that they should go out, and lights that do not go on when the whole point is that they should go on. These are the real agonies of theatre’¹⁵ – and in particular the agonies of first nights:

First nights are usually misery, hardly to be borne. One has only two reasons for going to them. One is – a not ignoble motive – that the poor actors have to go through with it, and if it goes badly it is unfair that the author should not be there to share their torture … The other reason for going to first nights is, of course, curiosity … you have to know yourself. Nobody else’s account is going to be any good. So there you are, shivering, feeling hot and cold alternately, hoping to heaven that nobody will notice you where you are hiding yourself in the higher ranks of the Circle.¹⁶

Christie trivia buffs can again spend happy hours identifying the numerous theatrical references, characters and scenarios in her novels; I offer for starters 1952’s They Do It with Mirrors, in which Miss Marple is fascinated by the stage illusion involved in the creation of a production of a play that rejoices in the Christiesque title ‘The Nile at Sunset’. And it is no coincidence that disguise is a recurring plot device in her plays, a number of which feature characters who are impersonating someone else. This conceit accounts for Christie’s two greatest coups de théâtre, in The Mousetrap and Witness for the Prosecution; the latter is carried out with a high level of theatrical skill by a character who is a professional actress, in a plot twist with echoes of her 1923 short story, ‘The Actress’.¹⁷

Agatha Christie is herself one of the most written about of writers. Much of what has been published about her, however, engages either with the highly seductive imaginary world of her novels or with endlessly re-examined elements of her personal life; even those writers who do make a serious attempt to place her work in a historical and literary context tend to overlook her contribution as a dramatist. Alison Light’s persuasive study of Christie’s work as an example of ‘conservative modernity’ in Forever England (1991) focuses on the inter-war period and so can be excused for overlooking her plays. But other serious assessments of her work, from Merja Makinen’s Agatha Christie: Investigating Femininity (2006) and Susan Rowland’s From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell (2001) to Gillian Gill’s Agatha Christie: The Woman and her Mysteries (1999) and Agatha Christie in the Modern Critical Views series (edited by Harold Bloom; 2001), are united in their neglect of her work as a playwright. Ironically, many of the writers concerned may well have found an engagement with Christie’s work for the stage to have been beneficial to their arguments.

An honourable exception is Charles Osborne’s 1982 book The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie. Osborne, a theatre critic and former literature director of the Arts Council, is less academic in his tone than the writers listed above, but is diligent in affording Christie’s dramatic work equal prominence with her novels. Other than Osborne’s book, the only significant overviews of Christie’s plays in the context of appraisals of her own work are in J.C. Trewin’s lively and opinionated contribution to Agatha Christie; First Lady of Crime (edited by H.R.F. Keating; 1977) and a chapter in Peter Haining’s workmanlike Murder in Four Acts (1990). Two histories of crime drama, Marvin Lachman’s The Villainous Stage (2014) and Amnon Kabatchnik’s epic, five-volume Blood on the Stage (2009–2014), each contribute some original research to the subject, and at least acknowledge Christie’s significance as a writer of stage thrillers if not as a playwright in a wider context. Several of the multifarious Christie ‘companions’ and ‘reader’s guides’ dutifully list the plays and recite the often inaccurate received wisdom about their origins and first productions (an honourable mention here to Dennis Sanders and Len Lovallo’s 1984 The Agatha Christie Companion, which is a cut above many of its competitors); but I have seen ‘encyclopedias’ of her characters which omit completely those which appear only in the plays.

Perhaps most saddening, though, is the fact that Christie has even been eschewed by feminist theatre academics such as those responsible for The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights (2000), meriting not so much as a footnote in the chapter covering the 1950s in a book that purports to ‘address the work of women playwrights in Britain throughout the twentieth century’. Whilst not notable for chaining herself to railings, Christie challenged the male hegemony in West End theatre more successfully than any other female playwright before or since. She took on her male contemporaries on their own terms, and in many respects beat them at their own game. She created a series of strong and memorable female protagonists of all ages, and any actress complaining that there are not enough substantial stage roles for women need look no further than her plays. Most disappointing is Maggie B. Gale’s West End Women (1996). Although Gale’s book, which covers the period 1918–1962, offers a fascinating insight into a neglected area of theatre history, and acknowledges Christie’s commercial success as a playwright, it largely overlooks her contribution in favour of the usual suspects: Clemence Dane, Enid Bagnold, Gertrude Jennings, Dodie Smith and others. This is a missed opportunity in an otherwise excellent book. Gale does, however, make the following interesting point: ‘Research on women playwrights, let alone performers, managers, directors and designers is, in real terms, only just beginning. It is important that we look at what was there, rather than trying to fit our findings into some preconceived notion of what it is that, for example, women should have been writing.’¹⁸

And, examining Clemence Dane’s work in Women, Theatre and Performance (2000), Gale observes that Dane ‘falls foul of many failings in theatre historiography: the unwillingness to view women’s work in the mainstream; the fear of the “conservative”; and the general lack of interest in mid-twentieth century theatre. It remains quite extraordinary that there is so little critical, biographical and historical material on a playwright so recently working in theatre, a playwright, once a household name, who has somehow been removed from fame to obscurity.’¹⁹

It could so easily be Agatha Christie to whom Gale is referring that I have gladly taken this as the starting point for my own book. ‘Suffrage theatre’ gets a great deal of attention from historians of women’s writing for the stage, but theatre written by women simply in order to entertain audiences tends to be overlooked. Gender history is a fascinating subject, but the problem with it is that it tends to be written by gender historians. Lib Taylor, in British and Irish Women Dramatists since 1958 (1993), dismisses Christie’s plays solely on the basis that she believes them to exhibit an ‘underlying collusion with patriarchy’. This view is based on a comprehensive misreading of a small number of the later works, and seems to be a common misapprehension amongst academics. And even if it were true, a playwright is surely free to ‘collude’ with whoever they like. In 1983, seven years after Christie’s death, the Conference of Women Theatre Directors and Administrators undertook a major survey of women’s role in British theatre.²⁰ Amongst the many interesting statistics arising from this important exercise was that of the twenty-eight plays written by women produced in the previous year on the main stages of regional repertory theatres, twenty-two (or 80 per cent) were penned by Agatha Christie. More recently, on the eve of her 125th anniversary year, Christie was the only woman with a play running in the West End. It is a shame that the preconceptions and prejudices of many historians of women’s theatre appear to have dictated against a proper analysis of her achievements as a playwright.

Of the two ‘authorised’ biographies, Janet Morgan’s (1984) does its best to examine the importance of theatre in Agatha’s life and work, whilst Laura Thompson’s (2007) marginalises it in favour of an emphasis on the widely accepted thesis that much of Agatha’s work under the pen name of Mary Westmacott was semi-autobiographical. Both contain significant inaccuracies in relation to the plays, the former due mostly to the notorious difficulty of correctly dating Agatha’s correspondence (which Morgan quotes extensively) and the latter due to the author’s evident lack of interest in this area of Agatha’s work. The book you are reading is not a biography; I have had the privilege of being able to investigate in detail a particular aspect of Agatha Christie’s work, and I do not underestimate the task of attempting to chronicle the entire life of such a multi-faceted individual. So if you want to find out more about her personal life, and in particular her family history, then I recommend both of these books.

The journalist Gwen Robyns wrote an unauthorised biography, The Mystery of Agatha Christie, in 1978, based largely on interviews with people who knew and worked with Christie. Although somewhat unorthodox in its approach, it acknowledges the importance of theatre in her work, and is of particular interest in that Robyns appears to have spoken with some of the key players, including Peter Cotes, the original director of The Mousetrap, and Wallace Douglas, who as director of Witness for the Prosecution and Spider’s Web was responsible for two more of Christie’s biggest hits. Whilst inaccurate in a number of respects, Robyns’ book gives a good flavour of the spirit of Christie’s engagement with the world of theatre. As is often the case, though, her list of ‘Agatha Christie plays’ makes no distinction between those written by Christie herself and those which are the work of third-party adaptors.

It is autobiographies, rather than biographies, that provide the most fruitful source of published material for the Agatha Christie theatre researcher. In 1972, Agatha wrote the introduction to The Mousetrap Man, the autobiography of Peter Saunders, who produced all of her work in the West End between 1950 and 1962, including her biggest successes. An entertaining and opinionated romp, it gives an interesting, but nonetheless selective, insight into Agatha’s work at the height of her playwriting career, as well as Saunders’ own views on matters such as investors, critics and his fellow producers. In 1977, Agatha’s own autobiography was published posthumously. Written between 1950 and 1965, when she was aged between fifty-nine and seventy-five, it is a compelling read and gives some fascinating insights into her personality and her love of theatre, but is notoriously selective and not always entirely accurate in points of detail and chronology. Because of its focus on her early life, and the fact that her work as a playwright met with success relatively late in her career, it ironically is not the most reliable of sources on the subject. Agatha’s second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan, published his own autobiography, Mallowan’s Memoirs, in the same year. His opinions on his wife’s theatrical efforts are perceptive and insightful, if relatively brief.

In 1980 Hubert Gregg, who directed The Hollow, The Unexpected Guest and a couple of Christie’s later, less successful plays, published Agatha Christie and All That Mousetrap. In this bizarrely self-satisfied and resentful book from a relatively minor player in the story of Christie on stage, Gregg complains that Christie underplayed Peter Saunders’ contribution to her theatrical success in her own autobiography. What Gregg really objected to, of course, was that she had failed to mention his own modest contribution at all. I have had access to a small but very interesting privately held collection of Gregg’s rehearsal scripts and correspondence with Christie, which does not entirely bear out his version of events.

Peter Cotes, the original director of The Mousetrap, uses his 1993 autobiography, Thinking Aloud, to establish (at some length) his own position in respect of his lifelong dispute with Peter Saunders, the play’s producer. In doing so he quotes Gwen Robyns in support, although Robyns was presumably simply repeating information that Cotes had himself given to her. Saunders, Gregg and Cotes between them provide lively and often conflicting first-hand accounts of the production process of Christie’s plays from 1950 onwards, but tend to marginalise the role of Christie herself.

No Christie scholar’s bookshelf is complete without the extraordinary contribution of John Curran, whose meticulous transcriptions from and analyses of her seventy-three notebooks in his own two-volume work, Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks (2009) and Agatha Christie’s Murder in the Making (2011), provide a vital key to Christie’s imaginary world. Largely undated and frequently illegible, these copious, gloriously disorganised, handwritten aides memoires show work in progress as Christie developed ideas for storylines for both her novels and plays. The notebooks themselves are particularly interesting for their outlines of plays that never made it as far as a draft script, and Dr Curran has been unstintingly generous as an expert guide in this respect, sharing his knowledge in a manner that enabled me quickly to locate the particular nuggets that I was seeking. For plays that reached script stage, however, the notebooks are frequently less informative as a source for examining the work’s development than the often numerous versions of the draft scripts themselves, the typed and handwritten amendments made to them, and Christie’s sometimes extremely detailed correspondence with directors and producers as new ideas were explored and incorporated. The draft scripts for Three Blind Mice (which became The Mousetrap) and Witness for the Prosecution, for instance, are full of alterations, insertions, amendments and pencil notes made as she developed the scenarios and characters. We often see quite radical changes to plotting and outcomes taking place before us on the page. The draft scripts are, in effect, the ‘notebooks’ for the plays.

Many of these drafts are held by the Christie Archive Trust, whose collection consists mainly of papers that were removed from Christie’s cherished Devon estate Greenway when it was handed over to the National Trust in 2001, and includes a vast quantity of personal correspondence, as well as the legendary notebooks and drafts of many of the books and plays. The correspondence, mostly between Christie and her second husband Max, at times when he was either away on archaeological work or on wartime military service, gives a fascinating and deeply personal insight into Agatha’s devotion to family, the wide range of her interests and her delightful sense of humour. Almost entirely absent is any reference to her work as a novelist (which, to her, would have been the equivalent of discussing her ‘day job’). She does, however, frequently refer with obvious delight to progress on her numerous theatrical projects. The letters themselves, like the notebooks, are mostly undated (or not fully dated; we are usually told the day of the week) and often illegible; at one point even Max asks if she would mind typing her next epistle. Analysing the correspondence when a line about a play rehearsal could read either ‘it was absolutely marvellous’ or ‘I was absolutely furious’ is a labour-intensive but deeply rewarding operation. Dating the letters is an equally time-consuming process, although made easier by Max’s completely legible and meticulously dated side of the correspondence, where available. Some of the previous mistakes that have been made in documenting Christie’s theatre work have arisen from the misdating of letters, but ironically taking note of their theatrical context is often one of the most accurate ways of identifying the time of writing. When and where certain productions that she refers to were actually staged is, after all, a matter of record. Five key scripts are missing entirely from the archive: Black Coffee, Ten Little Niggers, Appointment with Death, The Hollow and Go Back for Murder; but it more than redeems itself by housing five unpublished and unperformed full-length scripts and a further seven one-act plays, all of them of considerable interest to the historian of her work as a playwright.

One of the many problems with assessing historic play texts is that what we currently accept as the published version may well contain significant changes to the draft that was accepted for production, and equally to the version that was eventually performed in front of the critics following amendments made during the rehearsal process. It is here that the Lord Chamberlain’s Plays collection at the British Library provides an invaluable resource. From 1737 until 1968 all new plays produced in the UK were subject to approval by the Lord Chamberlain’s office, thus effectively conferring a censorship role on a department of the royal household. Almost every play submitted has been retained in the collection, and scripts from the period 1824–1968 are housed at the British Library, referenced through thousands of handwritten index cards. Significantly, the script held in this collection would be exactly that performed on the first night, and thus reviewed by critics, because changes were not permitted once a licence had been issued.

Scripts had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain no later than a week before the first scheduled performance, and to allow for changes to be made right up to the last possible moment they were often sent at very short notice; it has to be said that the Lord Chamberlain’s office seems to have been remarkably good-natured and diligent in processing scripts and responding to them in what were frequently very short timeframes. The result of this was that playwrights effectively self-censored, as nothing could be more catastrophic than to have your play postponed by a last-minute spat with the censor when the production was paid for and in rehearsal. Each play was subject to an Official Examiner’s report on a single sheet of paper, which make for interesting reading and often show the censor in the role of would-be critic. There is also a file of correspondence between the Lord Chamberlain’s office and the producer of each production.

The card index is by play title and the handwritten, 17-volume chronological list of plays submitted for licensing between 1900 and 1968 is similarly far from user-friendly when it comes to identifying works by a particular writer; but amongst the collection’s many Christie treasures is a rare copy of the script for Chimneys, which was cancelled at the last minute in 1931, and some interesting correspondence that gives lie to the assumption that the censor never found cause to interfere with her work.

Another significant copy of any play that gets as far as production is the ‘prompt copy’ used by the stage manager to record technical cues and stage directions in rehearsal. Few of these still exist, although The Mousetrap’s is housed in the V&A Theatre Archive. The ‘acting edition’ of Christie’s plays, which was usually published by Samuel French within a year of the first performance, would often incorporate stage directions from the prompt copy which Christie herself had not actually written.

Christie researchers and biographers are also fortunate to have access to the archives of Hughes Massie Ltd, her agent, relating to her work. Edmund Cork, who took over the company from the eponymous Massie, started representing Christie in 1923 and masterminded her business affairs until his death in 1988. Central to this extensive collection are the file copies of his regular updates to Christie on the progress of her work with publishers and theatre producers. What is immediately apparent from this correspondence is that under Cork’s guidance ‘Agatha Christie’ rapidly became the first truly global, multi-media business empire based on the intellectual property of one individual. One woman with a typewriter was creating the work and one man with a typewriter (assisted by a small staff that latterly included his daughter, Pat) was responsible for selling it throughout the world; in print and on stage, as well as on film, sound recording, radio and television. Cork not only had to grapple with prototype contracts in many of the media concerned, but also with the complex and burdensome UK and international tax implications of individual worldwide royalty income on such an unprecedented scale. His unceasing labours on Christie’s behalf, and his unfaltering loyalty, charm, tact, discretion and good humour, led Christie to place a complete and deserved trust in her agent, who was four years her junior. Taking on a role which these days would be described as ‘personal manager’, he dealt with everything from organising tickets for her regular theatre visits to dealing with troublesome tenants and the purchase of a new car. So complete was the trust between them that she would give him power of attorney when she and Max were away together on archaeological digs, to avoid their work being interrupted by business matters.

Cork had an eloquent and witty turn of phrase and his correspondence, both with Christie herself and with his New York counterpart, her American agent Harold Ober, make both for an entertaining read and a comprehensive narrative of Christie’s business affairs. He may have made some mistakes, particularly when grappling with the unprecedented complexities of the network of companies and family trusts that latterly masterminded the collection and disbursement of Christie’s royalty income, but on the front line of dealing with the sale and licensing of her work he was a canny businessman and a shrewd judge of character.

The Hughes Massie archive is housed at Exeter University and contains extensive correspondence between Cork and Christie, but sadly it only commences in 1938, and is sparse before 1940, so we have to look elsewhere for information regarding the business side of Christie’s theatrical work prior to this date. Here her own correspondence with her husband can be used to fill in some of the gaps, as too can the archives of theatrical producer Basil Dean, with whom she discussed some of her work, although he never produced any of it.

Despite the huge success of adaptations of Christie’s work on both large and small screens, she herself had absolutely no interest in film or television. She disliked the majority of the film adaptations of her work that she saw and, apart from a lengthy and diligent, but unused, film adaptation of Dickens’ Bleak House, and a speculative, and equally unused, two-page film treatment for her play Spider’s Web, she never wrote for the medium. She took part in a couple of radio ‘serial’ stories on behalf of the Detection Club (of which she was appointed president in 1957) and wrote four original radio plays which were broadcast live on the BBC but, despite misinformation to the contrary, she never wrote for television. Theatre, on the other hand, was her lifelong passion, both as a creator and a consumer.

Although Cork was initially sceptical about the commercial value of Christie’s theatre projects, and was delightfully and wittily cynical about what he referred to as the ‘vicissitudes of theatre’ and the colourful personalities who populate its world, it is apparent that he quickly came to understand that the way to engage her attention was to prioritise her theatre work in his correspondence. And the result is that, doubtless against his own inclinations, a remarkably large amount of it relates to matters theatrical. As Christie herself commented in a 1951 press interview, ‘with a book you have fewer anxieties. You write it, send it to your publisher, and, after a time, it appears. In the case of a play such things as the right cast, the most suitable sort of theatre, the best time for its production, the success or not of the first night, and a dozen other things have to be taken into consideration.’²¹ It is evident from both her personal and her business correspondence that Christie greatly enjoyed engaging in these theatrical debates.

Eventually, though, even Cork had to admit that Christie’s work for the stage was not simply an intellectual diversion on her part but a valuable source of core income to the business empire that he masterminded. At the time when Christie’s plays were first being produced, London’s West End ‘theatreland’ as we now know it, comprising around forty high-profile commercially operated theatres, was a relatively recent phenomenon.²² A theatre building boom, facilitated by the 1843 Theatres Act’s removal of draconian licensing restrictions, had taken place between the last decades of the nineteenth century and the eve of the First World War, and playwrights now aspired to have their work presented in one of these prestigious London venues. A West End production, which would be reviewed by the national newspapers’ theatre critics and would gain considerable publicity, could greatly enhance a play’s value, making it attractive to repertory theatres, amateur groups, touring and international producers and even film companies. The key, therefore, did not necessarily lie in the success or otherwise of the first West End run but in the ability subsequently to exploit a title in these other markets. The licences issued to theatre producers by literary agents such as Hughes Massie consequently put a huge premium on achieving a West End production, rewarding producers who did so with participation in the subsidiary income thus derived and thereby ensuring that they shared an interest with the agent in achieving the maximum exploitation of a title. New York’s Broadway theatre district, which owes its current configuration to a theatrical building boom in the first three decades of the twentieth century, fulfilled a similar role to the West End in providing a valuable showcase for a playwright’s work. The licences issued to theatre producers today still reflect the importance of both West End and Broadway productions for this reason.

This book focuses on the journey that each of Agatha Christie’s plays took from page to stage in their original productions; there is simply not space to enumerate or evaluate the countless subsequent presentations of each title. Peter Haining sums it up well: ‘the number of productions of her work plus the adaptations in this country, let alone the rest of the world, has passed into the realms of the uncountable. The performances of touring companies, repertory theatres and amateur dramatic societies are simply legion … Though, like all playwrights, Agatha Christie had her flops and short runs, her name outside a theatre has long exercised a tremendous attraction for the public, and spelt gold for the management.’²³

The volume and complexity of the licensing of Christie’s stage work is apparent from the enormous typewritten card index which constitutes Hughes Massie’s Agatha Christie licensing records from the 1920s to the 1990s, housed in twenty-one leather-bound volumes at Agatha Christie Limited, the company which is now responsible for the global exploitation of her work. The two files labelled ‘DD – apart from radio’ are those of the Hughes Massie Drama Department, and detail the numerous global licensing and sub-licensing transactions relating to her dramatic work (apart from radio!). In most cases amateur rights for the English speaking world were licensed to Samuel French Ltd (who also publish the ‘acting editions’ of the playscripts), and in many other overseas territories deals were done with licensing sub-agents for both professional and amateur rights. These unique records confirm once again that the plays of Agatha Christie were, and remain, a vast international industry. As soon as each West End production opened, licences were being issued from Iceland to Kenya.

Of course, commercial success is a double-edged sword when it comes to critical reputation. Christie believed that critics resented the success of The Mousetrap, the longevity of which has become something of a theatrical running joke and which is by no means her best work as a playwright; and Hubert Gregg blamed the poor critical response to Go Back for Murder in 1960 on the fact that on the same day the newspapers had announced that Christie had signed a lucrative film deal with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It is undeniable, though, that the enormous and enduring popularity of Christie’s stage work in the repertory, secondary touring and amateur markets inevitably resulted in an association with cut-price and sub-standard productions, and a consequent law of diminishing returns as regards theatrical quality. Christie’s estate have become sensitive to this in recent years and have done their best to reverse the trend, with a licensing policy that prioritises quality rather than quantity.

The story of Christie’s contribution to theatre is very definitely a drama of two acts; that which predates her alliance with producer Peter Saunders in 1950 and that which follows it. Up to that date her own stage work and that of her adaptors was produced for the most part by Alec Rea and Bertie Meyer who, although great men of the theatre, failed to leave us either autobiographies or any substantial accessible business records. Until now, the Saunders archives have also been unavailable, but I am privileged to have been granted unique access to them for the purpose of researching this book. Sir Stephen Waley-Cohen, who bought Sir Peter Saunders’ business, including The Mousetrap, when Saunders retired in 1994, thereby took ownership of two metal filing cabinets in the bottom drawer of each of which are files relating to Saunders’ wide-ranging portfolio of productions and theatrical investments, including a meticulously ordered file relating to each of the nine Christie-authored plays that he produced in the West End. Here, for the first time, we see the story as it unfolded from the point of view of those responsible for the staging of Christie’s work: literary licences, theatre and artiste contracts, publicity material, budgets, accounts, and lively correspondence with directors, designers and Christie herself, including handwritten missives from her about script changes and casting, often sent from archaeological digs in the Middle East. Here we also see further confirmation of Christie’s box office success in the 1950s, in the form of statements to investors detailing the considerable profits that were being made from her work.

There can be no doubt that Saunders’ meticulous attention to detail, exemplary financial housekeeping and understanding of publicity in all its forms was instrumental in establishing Christie’s unassailable position as Queen of the West End in the 1950s. Without Saunders at the helm The Mousetrap may well not have run, and Christie would certainly never have penned her dramatic masterpiece Witness for the Prosecution. The former journalist, who was a relative newcomer to theatre when she first entrusted him with her work, became a lifelong friend and a frequent visitor to Greenway, the family home. In any event, the triumvirate of Cork, Harold Ober and Saunders proved an unstoppable force in ensuring the business success of Christie’s theatrical work. But Saunders, for all his achievements, carved his own niche in theatreland based largely on a profitable, populist repertoire rather than allying himself with the theatrical oligarchy of the day and their aspirations to educate audiences as well as to entertain.

The irony is that Christie herself didn’t need the money – her ‘day job’ took care of that – and it would have been interesting to see what history would have made of her as a playwright if she had persevered with some of her interesting early theatrical associations. The first Christie play to be produced was directed by a leading light of the Workers’ Theatre Movement, and her first West End hit was directed by the first woman to direct Shakespeare at Stratford and co-produced by a female producer and a co-operative founded by a leading Labour politician. The first ‘director’ Saunders introduced Christie to was Hubert Gregg, a comedy actor even less experienced in the role of director than Saunders himself was at the time in that of producer. The taxman might have been less happy if Christie had never met Saunders, but the chances are that theatre historians might have taken her work more seriously. And to me that is a poor reflection on theatre historians rather than on the resourceful, diligent and hard-working Saunders.

The combination of the Cork and Saunders archives furnishes a comprehensive backstage picture of the ‘Saunders years’, but although the British side of the operation prior to that is sparsely documented, the American side is not. Christie’s first Broadway venture as a playwright (a couple of third-party adaptations from her novels had preceded it) was an even bigger hit than it had been in London. The retitled Ten Little Indians was produced by the Shuberts, America’s leading theatrical producers of the day, in 1944. The company, set up by three brothers from Syracuse at the end of the nineteenth century, still flourishes; and their archive, located at the Lyceum Theatre on New York’s West 45th Street, in a splendid office complete with the brothers’ original furnishings and photographs, provides an unparalleled insight into American theatre history. As with Saunders’ archive, a wealth of original documentation has been retained, along with a well-resourced script library. It was the latter that took me to New York, on the trail of the only copies of a completely overlooked Christie script, which turned out to have been the only play of hers to receive its world premiere in America in her lifetime. Not only did I find exactly what I was looking for, but also a whole lot more …

The only other play of Christie’s to transfer to Broadway was an even bigger hit there: Witness for the Prosecution in 1954. By this time Saunders was at the helm in the UK, and he was not alone in finding the Shuberts frustrating to deal with. The more affable Gilbert Miller was therefore offered the licence to co-produce on Broadway, and while I was in New York unearthing the Christie treasures in the Shubert archive I also tracked down some of Miller’s papers, which resulted in a visit to the Library of Congress in Washington DC. Several other important theatrical archives in both the UK and the USA have assisted hugely in completing the picture of Agatha Christie, playwright from the ‘backstage’ perspective.

So, what is this book exactly? It is not a biography – if you want the story of Agatha’s childhood or her two marriages, or an analysis of how her life is reflected in some of her lesser-known works, then please look elsewhere. It is not about the ‘eleven missing days’, or ‘one missing night’, as I prefer to call it, since we know exactly where she was for the rest of the time. One of the ‘missing’ plays, I believe, may have some bearing on this over-reported episode; but you must draw your own conclusions, and my book will no doubt avoid the best-seller list by failing to come up with yet another ‘definitive’ new theory on the subject. It is not a literary analysis; there is no point at all in engaging in the long-running debate between the ‘highbrow’ and the ‘middlebrow’ when it comes to popular culture. I have neither the vocabulary nor the patience for it. Neither is it a ‘reader’s companion’. If you want to find out about the plots and the characters then I suggest you read the plays themselves or, better still, go and watch a production of them; and if you want to play ‘spot the difference’ between the novels and short stories and their adaptations then read the originals as well. This is not a book about Christie’s imaginary world, it is about the very real world of a playwright struggling to get her work produced, enduring huge disappointment and finally enjoying success on a scale that she could only have dreamt of. Because the playwright concerned happens to be female, it is unusual in not having been written by a feminist academic; as a theatre producer I have no agenda other than to set the record straight about Christie’s contribution to theatre on a number of levels. I am hoping that by offering more detail about what she achieved, particularly as an older woman in a male-dominated industry, working at a time of enormous social, political and cultural change, the value of her work for the theatre, over and above its purely monetary one, may come to be more widely acknowledged than it currently is.

To understand the unique trajectory of Christie’s playwriting career, it needs to be set within the theatrical history of the time. In Christie’s case this means charting a timeline from around 1908, when she made her first attempts at writing scripts, through to the last premiere of her work in 1972. In so doing, I will introduce a whole new cast of characters to the oft-told story of this extraordinary lady; the colourful and eccentric cast that populated Agatha Christie’s much-cherished world of theatre.

One thing that this book is definitely not about is detectives, and I am sorry if that disappoints some readers. But I have often felt like a detective myself as I have hunted down, assembled and analysed the evidence from a variety of different sources, and from often conflicting accounts of the same events. I hope that Hercule Poirot would have approved of my efforts and that what emerges is something approaching the truth behind the remarkable and previously untold story of Agatha Christie, playwright.

Act One

SCENE ONE
The Early Plays

Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was fascinated by theatre from an early age. In sleepy, Victorian middle-class Torquay, ‘one of the great joys in life was the local theatre. We were all lovers of the theatre in my family,’ she writes in her autobiography. Older siblings Madge and Monty visited the Theatre Royal and Opera House in Abbey Road practically every week, and the young Agatha was usually allowed to accompany them. ‘As I grew older it became more and more frequent. We went to the pit stalls always – the pit itself was supposed to be “rough”. The pit cost a shilling and the pit stalls, which were two rows of seats in front, behind about ten rows of stalls, were where the Miller family sat, enjoying every kind of theatrical entertainment.’¹ Clara and Frederick Miller clearly did everything they could to encourage this interest in their children, and Agatha was always captivated by the colourful dramas unfolding in front of her:

I don’t know whether it was the first play I saw, but certainly among the first was Hearts and Trumps, a roaring melodrama of the worst type. There was a villain in it, the wicked woman called Lady Winifred, and there was a beautiful girl who had been done out of a fortune. Revolvers were fired, and I clearly remember the last scene, when a young man hanging from a rope from the Alps cut the rope and died heroically to save either the girl he loved or the man whom the girl loved.

I remember going through this story point by point. ‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘that the really bad ones were Spades’ – father being a great whist player, I was always hearing talk of cards – ‘and the ones who weren’t quite so bad were Clubs. I think perhaps Lady Winifred was a Club – because she repented – and so did the man who cut the rope on the mountain. And the Diamonds’ – I reflected. ‘Just worldly,’ I said, in my Victorian tone of disapproval.²

The first story Agatha ever wrote took the form of a play, a melodrama concerning ‘the bloody Lady Agatha (bad) and the noble Lady Madge (good) and a plot that involved the inheritance of a castle’. Madge only agreed to take part in the production on condition the epithets were switched round. It was very short, ‘since both writing and spelling were a pain to me’, and amused her father greatly.³ Agatha’s parents often travelled, and when they did so she would stay in Ealing with great-aunt Margaret, who had been responsible for the upbringing of Agatha’s mother and was thus referred to by her as ‘Auntie-Grannie’. Even when Agatha was away from home, theatre ‘never stopped being a regular part of my life’, she recalls. ‘When staying at Ealing, Grannie used to take me to the theatre at least once a week, sometimes twice. We went to all the musical comedies, and she used to buy me the score afterwards. Those scores – how I enjoyed playing them!’⁴

The family spent some time in France during her childhood, and seven-year-old Agatha, inspired by the local pantomime in Torquay, began staging her own work for the enjoyment of her parents, using the window alcove in their bedroom as a stage, and assisted by her long-suffering young French chaperone, Marie. ‘Looking back, I am filled with gratitude for the extraordinary kindness of my father and mother. I can imagine nothing more boring than to come up every evening after dinner and sit for half an hour laughing and applauding whilst Marie and I strutted and postured in our home-improvised costumes. We went through the Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast and so forth.’⁵ Although young Agatha studied piano, dance and singing, and at one point had aspirations to become an opera singer, she appears to have gained the greatest fulfilment from her various youthful theatrical ventures, a natural progression from the dreamy childhood role-play games that, as a home-educated child, she created to pass the time.

The Christie archive contains a delightfully witty, meticulously handwritten twenty-six-page ‘acting charade in three acts’ called Antoinette’s Mistake, with a colourful hand-drawn cover that is clearly the work of a child. The play concerns the exploits of a French maid in the house of one Miss Letitia Dangerfield and her niece Rosy, and features characters called Colonel Mangoe and Major Chutnee. The closest handwriting match with that of family members is to Frederick’s, and I like to think that this piece was perhaps penned by Agatha’s father as a tribute to the long-suffering Marie (Antoinette?), whose performance in one of Agatha’s fairy tale dramatisations ‘convulsed my father with mirth’. Agatha’s father was a leading light of the local amateur dramatics, and it was perhaps in recognition of the enjoyment which this brought the family that she agreed, in later life, to become president of the Sinodun Players, an amateur group based in Wallingford where she owned a house. She received numerous such requests throughout her life, but the local amateur dramatics and the Detection Club were the only societies of which she accepted the presidency.

Frederick died aged fifty-five, when Agatha was eleven and both of her siblings had already left Ashfield, the family home in Torquay; but her mother continued to nourish young Agatha’s enthusiasm for theatre, whisking her off to see Irving perform in Exeter. ‘He may not live much longer, and you must see him,’ she insisted.⁶ Agatha herself, notoriously averse to public speaking in later life, enjoyed venturing onto the stage in her youth, and an ambitious production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Yeomen of the Guard, produced by a group of young friends at the Parish Rooms in Torquay, gave her the opportunity to show off her singing voice in the role of Colonel Fairfax. ‘As far as I remember I felt no stage fright … There is no doubt that The Yeomen of the Guard was one of the highlights of my existence.’⁷

Finishing school in Paris at the age of sixteen was an opportunity to sample the French capital’s theatrical delights. She enjoyed herself in drama class, and had a remarkable ability to appreciate a fine theatrical performance:

We were taken to the Comedie Francaise and I saw the classic dramas and several modern plays as well. I saw Sarah Bernhardt in what must have been one of the last roles of her career, as the golden pheasant in Rostand’s Chantecler. She was old, lame, feeble, and her golden voice was cracked but she was certainly a great actress – she held you with her impassioned emotion. Even more exciting than Sarah Bernhardt did I find Rejane. I saw her in a modern play, La Course aux Flambeaux. She had a wonderful power of making you feel, behind a hard repressed manner, the existence of a tide of feeling and emotion which she would never allow to come out in the open. I can still hear now, if I sit quiet a minute or two with my eyes closed, her voice, and see her face in the last words of the play: ‘Pour sauver ma fille, j’ai tué ma mere,’ and the deep thrill this sent through one as the curtain came down.⁸

After spending a ‘season’ as a seventeen year old in Cairo with her mother, Agatha found herself a regular guest on the house party circuit. This served its purpose of introducing her to a number of eligible young bachelors, and she also became friends with the colourful theatrical impresario C.B. Cochran and his devoted and long-suffering wife, Evelyn. Charles Cochran was indisputably the greatest showman of his generation, in a career that included productions of Ibsen alongside the promotion of boxing, circus and rodeo as well as the management of Houdini. He was also to be instrumental in launching the career of Noël Coward. That was still ahead of him when he met the young Agatha, but for one thing he could take credit. Cochran was responsible for introducing the rollerskating craze which swept the country in the early 1900s, and a famous photograph shows Agatha and her friends enjoying some skating on Torquay’s Princess Pier. The Cochrans eventually invited her to their house in London, where she was ‘thrilled by hearing so much theatrical gossip’.

As a young woman, Agatha continued her own forays onto the stage. Photographs show her and her friends gloriously costumed for The Blue Beard of Unhappiness, which the programme (printed on blue paper of course) reveals to be ‘A drama of Eastern domestic life in two acts’.⁹ An open air production with a dozen in the cast, it is, we are told, set on a part of the terrace in Blue Beard’s castle in ‘Bagdad’. The folktale of wife-murderer Bluebeard was to provide Agatha with inspiration on more than one later occasion. In the ‘Confessions Album’, in which members of the Miller family regularly made light-hearted entries listing their current likes and dislikes, a 1910 entry from Agatha nominates Bluebeard as one of two characters from history whom she most dislikes.¹⁰ The other is nineteenth-century Mormon leader Brigham Young, the founder of Salt Lake City: another extravagantly bearded polygamist, though in this case not a serial killer. ‘Why did they Bag-dad?’ asks The Blue Beard of Unhappiness’s programme, and goes on to state ‘Eggs, fruit and other Missiles are to be left with the Cloak Room Attendant’. No playwright is credited and, sadly, no script survives.

Many of Agatha’s earliest writings were in verse, and her first published dramatic work took this form. A Masque from Italy, originally written in her late teens, was later included (with the subtitle ‘The Comedy of the Arts’) in the 1925 self-published poetry volume Road of Dreams, and has thus been overlooked as a playscript. Although it is structured as a series of solo songs (which she set to music shortly before the book was published), the piece is clearly intended as a short theatrical presentation, as indicated by, the word ‘masque’ in its title, and may have been written as a puppet show. There is a cast list, consisting of six characters from Italian commedia dell’arte; and a clear dramatic through-line based on the love triangle between Harlequin, Pierrot and Columbine, delivered in a prologue, seven songs and an epilogue. Punchinello serves as a master of ceremonies and is here envisaged as a marionette rather than as the ‘Mr Punch’ glove puppet. We know that Agatha was intrigued by a Dresden China collection of these characters owned by her family, but the piece shows a thorough understanding of their traditional dramatic functions and motivations (apart from some ambiguity over a female counterpart of Punchinello), and it is more than possible that local pantomimes were still including a traditional Harlequinade sequence featuring them when she was in the audience as a child at the turn of the century. Her lifelong interest in the Harlequin figure, later to manifest itself in the Harley Quin short stories, is here informed by his role as the dangerous and exciting stranger stealing women’s hearts, which was to be a recurring theme in her early plays.

And when the fire burns low at night, and

Lightning flashes high!

Then guard your hearth, and hold your love,

For Harlequin goes by.¹¹

The pain of lost love and the tensions between these passionate and flamboyant characters are well drawn, and with Harlequin in his ‘motley array’ and Punchinello inviting the audience to ‘touch my hump for luck’, the whole effect is deeply theatrical. Whether performed by puppets or people, it would have been fun to watch.

Encouraged by her mother, and perhaps in the hope of emulating her sister who had had some success with the publication of short stories in Vanity Fair, Agatha began writing stories in her late teens. ‘I found myself making up stories and acting the different parts and there’s nothing like boredom to make you write.’¹² Adopting the pseudonyms Mac Miller, Nathaniel Miller and Sydney West, Agatha set about composing a number of short stories on her sister’s typewriter, but they failed to impress the editors of the magazines she sent them to.

‘Sydney West’ had a particularly idiosyncratic style, and was responsible for a short one-act play entitled The Conqueror which, like the short story ‘In the Market Place’, also authored by West, is a parable with a mythological flavour. The Ealing address of Agatha’s great-aunt is inked on the script, which does not list a dramatis personae. Subtitled ‘A Fantasy’, the scene is ‘a great Mountain overlooking the Earth. On a throne sits a huge, grey Sphinx like figure, veiled and motionless. Around her are Messengers of Fate, and the air is full of winged Destinies who come and go ceaselessly.’¹³ A blind youth ascends the mountain and exposes the Sphinx, who appears to represent Fate, as a sham. Like ‘In the Market Place’, the whole thing is rather baffling and appears to be some sort of morality tale. It is intriguing to imagine what future Agatha envisaged for this play, particularly given the practicalities of ‘winged destinies’. Though atmospheric, and not without its interest as a stylistic experiment, it is hard to imagine that it would have proved particularly popular with the local teams responsible for putting together Antoinette’s Mistake and The Blue Beard of Unhappiness. What this odd little offering does do, though, is once again confirm the broad range of Agatha’s theatrical vocabulary.

When eighteen-year-old Agatha produced her first novel, Snow Upon the Desert, her mother suggested that she send it to local author Eden Phillpotts for his comment. Phillpotts became Agatha’s valued mentor, and it was his literary agent Hughes Massie & Co. which, having rejected Snow Upon the Desert, would eventually take her under their wing fifteen years later, the imposing Massie himself having by then been succeeded by the more affable Edmund Cork.

A long-time neighbour of the Millers in Torquay – his daughter Adelaide attended the same ballet class as Agatha Eden Phillpotts was forty-six when he started advising Agatha, and already a successful novelist. A sort of Thomas Hardy of Dartmoor, specialising in work written in Devon dialect and set in Devon locations, his prolific output would eventually exceed even Agatha’s, and he enjoyed some success latterly with detective fiction. Well connected in literary circles – he had undertaken collaborations with Arnold Bennett and Jerome K. Jerome – Phillpotts had originally trained as an actor in London but had been forced to abandon his thespian aspirations due to a recurring illness that made him unable to control his legs. His love of the theatre never left him, though, and although he had experienced no great success as a playwright by the time he counselled Agatha, he went on to write some thirty plays, a number of which were notable and long-running West End successes.

In 1912 Phillpotts famously refused to concede to the request of the Lord Chamberlain’s office that he alter two lines in his play The Secret Woman, about a man who starts a relationship with his son’s lover, with the result that they refused to issue it with a licence. The ensuing furore saw many of the great writers of the day sign a letter to The Times in his support and contribute to a fund to enable performances to take place in a ‘club’ theatre where a licence was not required. Amongst the signatories was Bernard Shaw, whose work ‘in its massive and glittering magnificence’ Phillpotts admired greatly, in particular ‘the thousand challenges he offers to humanity on burning and still living questions’.¹⁴ Phillpotts and Shaw would later meet at Birmingham Repertory Theatre which, under its legendary founder Barry Jackson, regularly produced the work of both men. There can be no doubt that Phillpotts shared his enthusiasm for Shaw with the young Agatha and that this informed some of her early, unpublished playwriting ventures, which deal with such Shavian preoccupations as variations on the marriage contract, grounds for divorce and eugenics. The lengthy and witty preface to Shaw’s 1908 Getting Married has particular resonances in some of Christie’s early work.

In any event, contact with Phillpotts would have broadened young Agatha’s mind when it came to the issue of human relations, as is evidenced by his recommended reading for her. In a letter to her he suggests that she try ‘a few of the Frenchmen’, including Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. ‘But this last is very strong meat and perhaps you had better wait till you have taken some lighter dose first of the more modern men. When you come to it, remember that Madame Bovary is one of the greatest works in the world.’¹⁵ Although one may concur with his literary appraisal, Madame Bovary seems a particularly daring recommendation for an eighteen-year-old Edwardian girl, given its subject matter and the lifestyle of its author, who stood trial in France for obscenity in 1857 after it was published in a magazine.

Sadly, Phillpotts’ advocacy of unconventional human relations extended beyond literature and into his family life. His daughter Adelaide, who collaborated with him on a number of books and plays, including the 1926 Theatre Royal Haymarket success Yellow Sands – and whose literary career was to cross paths with Agatha’s in the future – was the long-term victim of his incestuous attentions, as is apparent from his correspondence with her and, indeed, her own autobiography.¹⁶ This bizarre obsession was confined to the one relationship, and there is no indication of any impropriety as far as the young Agatha was concerned. There can be no doubt that Phillpotts’ advice and input, and his role as a sounding board for her early work, was critical to Agatha’s blossoming as a writer, enabling her to gain confidence in her writing and widen her horizons. Indeed, her 1932 novel Peril at End House was dedicated to Phillpotts ‘for his friendship and the encouragement he gave me many years ago’. He doubtless, too, encouraged her interest in theatre, and they maintained a sporadic correspondence until the 1950s. In 1928 Phillpotts’ wife died and the following year he married a young cousin. We will hear more of Adelaide later.

Nobody would publish Agatha’s novel Snow Upon the Desert, but she carried on producing short stories and one-act plays. Amongst these, Teddy Bear is an endearing and performable comedy for two male and two female actors, written under the pseudonym of George Miller. A well-constructed but lightweight romp, it centres around young Virginia’s attempts to attract the attention of Ambrose Seaton, a fellow who is involved in an impressive array of charitable ventures:

VIRGINIA: He’s so good looking and – and so splendid. Look at all his philanthropic schemes, the Dustmen’s Christian Knowledge, and the Converted Convicts Club, and the Society for the Amelioration of Juvenile Criminals.¹⁷

Virginia eventually adopts a strategy of attracting Ambrose’s attention by herself becoming a ‘juvenile criminal’. Needless to say, things do not go according to plan, and after the farcical unravelling of her scheme she abandons her attempts to ensnare the virtuous but elusive (and possibly gay) Ambrose and settles instead for her long-suffering admirer, Edward:

EDWARD: You heard me say I wasn’t going to propose again?

VIRGINIA: (smiling) Yes.

EDWARD: (with dignity) Well, I’m not going to.

VIRGINIA: (laughing) Don’t.

EDWARD: Not in that sense. I was going to suggest a business arrangement.

VIRGINIA: Business?

EDWARD: You see, you’ve got a lot of money, and I’m badly in need of some. The simplest way for me to get it would be to marry you. See?

VIRGINIA: (still laughing) Quite.

EDWARD: No sentiment about it.

VIRGINIA: Not a scrap.

EDWARD: Well – what do you say?

VIRGINIA: (very softly) I say – yes.

EDWARD: Virginia! (tries to take her in his arms)

VIRGINIA: (springing up) Remember you’re only marrying me for the money …

This is nicely constructed comic banter, although there is already an undercurrent of more serious debates about the nature of the marriage contract. In this case, it all ends happily, although it is clear who the dominant force in the relationship is going to be:

VIRGINIA: (tragically) … a confession of weakness. I’ve fallen from the high pinnacle of my own self esteem. I fancied that I was strong enough to stand apart from the vulgar throng, that I was not as other women (sits upright) but I am beaten, I am but one of the crowd after all, (slowly) I have –

EDWARD: (breathlessly) Fallen in love?

VIRGINIA: (dramatically) No. Bought a Teddy Bear!

Eugenia and Eugenics, another of Agatha’s unpublished and unperformed early one-act plays housed at the Christie Archive, is a more ambitiously constructed comedy which explores a popular theme of the day. We are told that it is set in 1914, which may be either the present or the future, given that it deals with the repercussions of a fictitious piece of legislation. In 1905 Shaw’s Man and Superman had received its London premiere, with a plot that underlined his belief that women are the driving force in human procreation, and that the development of the species is dictated by their success in finding biologically (rather than socially or financially) suitable partners: a quest which essentially constitutes the ‘Life Force’. There can be no doubt that Agatha’s work was also informed by this philosophy, although by what route it reached her is unclear. ‘What are men anyway?’ asks Kait in the 1944 novel Death Comes as the End. ‘They are necessary to breed children, that is all. But the strength of the race is in the women.’¹⁸ This novel is set in ancient Egypt, but time and again we see in Christie’s plays examples of the weak male either dominated or rejected by the superior female.

Shaw’s take on the topic, which challenged received Darwinian theory, was just one aspect of a much wider debate about the subject of eugenics that was current at the time, leading to the first International Eugenics Conference, held in London in 1912. Although there were ethical issues from the outset with a philosophy that advocated the genetic improvement of humanity, this was well before the concept of breeding a ‘master race’ took on a much more sinister aspect. Whilst Christie seems at home with Shaw’s approach to the matter, her comedy both makes merciless fun of the wider philosophy’s advocates and touches on some other burning issues of the day. Faced with an upcoming new law that will enforce eugenic philosophy by allowing only the physically and mentally perfect to marry, Eugenia has taken herself to what she believes to be a eugenics clinic advertising perfect partners. Her maid, Stevens, accompanies her:

EUGENIA: Talking of divorce, Eugenics will revolutionise the divorce laws.

STEVENS: Indeed Ma’am. Well I’ve heard as in Norway and Sweden and such countries you can get rid of your ’usband as easy as asking, with no more reason than just losing your taste for him. Very unfair I calls it. All men is trying at times, but don’t turn them helpless creatures adrift, call ’em your cross and put up with ’em.¹⁹

In the preface to his 1908 play Getting Married, under the heading ‘What does the word marriage mean?’ George Bernard Shaw had written: ‘In Sweden, one of the most highly civilized countries in the world, a marriage is dissolved if both parties wish it, without any question of conduct. That is what marriage means in Sweden. In Clapham that is what they call by the senseless name of free love.’²⁰ The divorce laws were the subject of much debate in the early twentieth century, and it was not until 1923’s Matrimonial Causes Act that women were able to file for divorce on the same basis as men. Prior to that, men had simply to prove infidelity on the part of their spouse, whilst women had to establish further exacerbating circumstances such as rape or incest.

Christie’s play goes on:

EUGENIA: It’s an equal law for men and for women. Men can obtain a divorce with equal ease.

STEVENS: Ah! Ma’am, but a wife’s an ’abit to a man, and we all know how attached a man is to his ’abits, drinking and smoking and such like.

EUGENIA: So you class a wife with drinking and smoking, Stevens!

STEVENS: Well, Ma’am it’s true she comes more expensive sometimes.

EUGENIA: Stevens, you are lamentably behind the spirit of the age …

STEVENS: (thoughtfully) It seems to me M’am, what with the gentlemen being as difficult and scarce to get hold of as they are, that it’s a pity to ask too much of ’em …

EUGENIA: … next week, the Marriage Supervision Bill will become Law. It ensures that only the physically and mentally sound shall marry … I’m sure I don’t know what society is coming to. A few years ago money was everything – like birth used to be, and now nothing counts but notoriety. To be anybody one must have a new religion, or a new pet. My baby kangaroo, in spite of the fuss with the police, kept me in the forefront of society last season. But this year, Hyde Park is a walking menagerie, and an elephant would hardly attract attention. Eugenics, I feel assured, will be the next society craze. Let me then, be the first to take it up … This advertisement caught my eye this morning (reads) ‘Eugenic Institute. Men and Women of England. Protect the Race. Choose mates of physical and mental perfection. Come here and find your mate (Guaranteed with Medical Certificate). Remember the Race and Come. And here we are. What do you think of it, Stevens. Shan’t I be the most talked of woman in society?

STEVENS: It’s my experience, M’am, as anything that mentions racing, is shady.

Even the suffrage movement does not escape Stevens’ wisdom: ‘I holds as votes is very much the same as husbands, they’re a lot of trouble to get, and not much use once you’ve got ’em.’

Women over the age of thirty were finally enfranchised in Britain in 1918, but this play’s 1914 setting places it at the height of the suffrage campaign; the previous year, the Women’s Social and Political Union had mobilised thousands of supporters to march through the streets of London behind the coffin of suffragette Emily Davison, who had thrown herself in front of the king’s horse at Epsom. The characters in a play, of course, all speak with their own voices and without the benefit of authorial comment. Agatha’s writing, as ever, is well considered and fully engaged with the issues of the day, but it is up to the audience whether they believe Stevens to be speaking from a position of ignorance or whether they think her homespun philosophy may contain some pearls of wisdom.

Meanwhile, the ‘Eugenic Institute’ in the play turns out not to be all that Eugenia had hoped. The farcical construction of the piece is not as well handled as the comic dialogue, but suffice to say that Eugenia’s schemes to find the physically perfect partner are frustrated, and she resigns herself to marrying the devoted but self-professedly imperfect Goldberg who, from his name, we may assume to be Jewish. Agatha’s play thus wittily subverts eugenic philosophy and underlines the importance of putting the heart first. They decide to tie the knot immediately, before the new ‘Marriage Supervision Bill’ takes effect:

GOLDBERG: It seems to me, the only solution is for us to get married before next Wednesday.

EUGENIA: (reflectively) After all, if everyone is forced into Eugenics it will be far more chic to have an uneugenic husband …

GOLDBERG: Well, you know man hunting’s quite ousting foxhunting as a sport amongst the fair sex. You can hunt a man all the year round, you see, and English women are so deuced sporting.

Agatha’s own hunt for a husband, which had started in the social whirlwind of colonial Cairo and moved on to the more genteel setting of English house parties, was about to result in her marriage, at the age of twenty-five. Abandoning her fiancé, family friend Reggie Lucy, she opted instead for love from a stranger, and the promise of adventure offered by dashing young airman Archie Christie.

‘Archie and I were poles apart in our reaction to things. I think that from the start that fascinated us. It is the old excitement of “the stranger”.’²¹ Married on Christmas Eve 1914, their early years together were disrupted by war, with Archie gaining distinction for his contribution to the ground-based operations of the Royal Flying Corps, mostly on overseas postings, while Agatha remained in Torquay as a member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment at the Red Cross hospital in Torquay, completing the examination of the Society of Apothecaries and becoming a dispenser.

At the end of the war Archie, by now a colonel, was stationed at the Air Ministry in London, and after the war ended he found himself a job in the City. The couple divided their time between a flat in St John’s Wood and Ashfield, Agatha’s mother’s house in Torquay, where their daughter Rosalind was born on 5 August 1919.

The following year Agatha enjoyed a successful publishing debut with her novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Written on a break from her hospital work during the war, it was finally accepted for publication by Devon-born John Lane of the idiosyncratic and often controversial publishing house The Bodley Head, which specialised in books of poetry, and whose authors included Eden Phillpotts’ friend Arnold Bennett. The Bodley Head had been responsible at the end of the previous century for the notoriously decadent literary quarterly The Yellow Book. The five-book deal she signed with the firm was to establish her profile as an author, but it was to be another ten years until a play of hers was produced.

In 1922, Archie was engaged to take part in a world tour to promote the forthcoming British Empire exhibition, and Agatha took the opportunity to join her husband on this eye-opening voyage, which took in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii and Canada, with a stop for Agatha in New York in November on the way back, while Archie continued his work in Canada. In New York, Agatha stayed with her elderly American godmother Cassie Sullivan, and it is her name and address, along with the date 9 November 1922, that tantalisingly appears in handwriting on the front of the typed one-act playscript The Last Séance. In her autobiography, Agatha remembers this as one of her very first short stories, later rewritten for publication (which occurred in the American magazine Ghost Stories in 1926). The scenario works much better as a short play, however, and I believe that it was in this format that she first envisaged and wrote it, as an exercise in the then popular theatrical genre of Grand Guignol. In a letter to her mother from Melbourne in May 1922, Agatha writes, ‘I’ve been rather idle – but have written a Grand Guignol sketch and a short story.’²² Notes for The Last Séance (titled ‘The Mother’) appear in Notebook 34, along with those for the novel The Man in the Brown Suit (1924). ‘Passed Tenerife last night’ she observes at one point.²³

At the time of Agatha’s stay in Paris as a teenager, the original Parisian Théâtre du Grand-Guignol was under the direction of Max Maurey, and at its height as a ‘horror theatre’ venue, with André de Lorde its celebrated and prolific principal writer. An ever-changing programme of evening entertainments consisting of a collection of graphically bloodthirsty and macabre one-act plays, occasionally interspersed with comedies by way of light relief, were the talk of the town. It was widely advertised that audience members frequently passed out from fear, but the public proved themselves more than happy to rise to the challenge, and flocked to the small theatre in the Quartier Pigalle. It seems unlikely that those responsible for the education of a group of teenage girls would have allowed their charges to sample the delights of the Grand Guignol, but in 1908 the French company made headlines when it toured to London, including in its repertoire a play called L’Angoisse (The Medium).

In the early 1920s the Little Theatre on the Strand hosted London’s own Grand Guignol season, with a poster so horrifying that it was banned from the London Underground. A total of forty-three plays were produced in its rolling repertoire and the Lord Chamberlain’s office added to the publicity by refusing a licence to several more. Rarely out of the newspapers, the regular casts included such stalwarts of the English stage as Sybil Thorndike and her husband Lewis Casson, and a repertoire of work that included translations of some of the original French pieces (including The Medium) along with pieces by several English writers of the day. Noël Coward even contributed a short play, although he opted for a comic interlude rather than a horror piece. The Better Half, which was another play highlighting the inadequacies of the divorce laws, culminates in this heartfelt plea from its heroine:

ALICE: I tried to make him strike me, so that I could divorce him for cruelty – but No. He wouldn’t! He did just twist my arm a teeny bit but not enough even to bruise it … As somebody so very truly remarked the other day, the existing Divorce laws put a premium on perjury and adultery! Therefore I am going to find a lover and live in flaming sin – possibly at Claridges.²⁴

As regards the horror element of the programme, the following review from The Times sums up the sort of evening that audiences could enjoy:

The other new feature of the evening is probably familiar to most visitors to the Paris Grand Guignol, and it has already been seen in both French and English in this country. It is The Medium, the gruesome little play about a sculptor who is filled with strange imaginings on moving into a new studio. His model is a medium and goes off into a trance … during which she reveals the grizzly secrets which the studio holds … Those who like two series of shudder in one evening will probably appreciate The Medium, particularly as it gives Miss Sybil Thorndike another opportunity for a hair-raising performance … but we confess that for us The Hand Of Death is quite enough for one evening.²⁵

There is no record of Agatha having attended a Grand Guignol performance at the Little Theatre, but she was living in London at the time and would have read the numerous press articles and reviews that the season generated. The genre’s preoccupations would certainly have resonated with her interest in the occult and with some of her own literary experimentations, including a few published stories and a number of unpublished ones such as ‘The Green Gate’, ‘The Woman and the Kenite’, ‘Stronger than Death’, ‘Witch Hazel’ and ‘The War Bride’.²⁶

The Last Séance itself is a short, atmospheric and effective shocker in the true Grand Guignol tradition. Written for two male and two female actors, and set of course in Paris, it concerns a medium, Simone Letellier, who is persuaded to communicate with the spirit of a dead child. The outcome is marvellously gory, as a curtain is pulled back to reveal that ‘Simone is lying on the marble floor in a pool of blood which is dripping down the steps.’²⁷ This would be a gripping coup de théâtre, but it does not make for a satisfactory short story. The dialogue, which in the story simply appears to have had speech marks put around it, works well when spoken but not when read, and the highly theatrical denouement, when briefly described on the page, goes for nothing. We don’t know whether the play was submitted for performance, but in these early days Agatha found it a lot easier to get her work published than produced, so this is likely to have accounted for the change of format.²⁸

Agatha also continued to write one-act plays on themes that seem likely to have been suggested by the writings of George Bernard Shaw, but which latterly sound as if they may also have been informed by her own experiences as a wife and mother. Ten Years concerns a couple who have lived together as man and wife on the basis that they will review their relationship after a ten-year trial period. Elliot, the husband, is an author who has begun to enjoy some success, here talking to his lawyer, Rogers:

ROGERS: I fancy your – early views – were rather unpopular.

ELLIOT: Oh! They gained me a sort of notoriety. But unorthodoxy is for the young, Rogers – the young who imagine they’re going to remake the world on their own improved pattern. As we go on in life we find that the old pattern is not so bad after all! …

… I admit that my one aim then was to free the world from many of its existing conventions which I considered hampering and degrading. You may have heard that I met my – that I met Desiree when she was studying art in Paris. She too held unorthodox views. We both agreed in condemning the convention of marriage, which seemed to us then an ignoble bondage. Instead we favoured what is known as the ten years marriage system.²⁹

When the time comes, however, Desiree decides that, despite having been entirely faithful for ten years, she wants to leave Elliot and set up home with another male friend.

DESIREE: I’ve been a good wife and mother – but – I’m still young. Young enough to feel the divine fire, and long for it. I’m only thirty-three, remember. And something cries out in me – for more life! I want romance – passion – fire – the things we had once and can never have again. I want to feel the first exquisite thrill of mingled fear and joy. I want the beginning of love – not its end. I don’t want peace and security, and calm affection. I want to live – to live my life – not yours.

This comes as a shock to Elliot, who believes that the ten-year experiment has been a success. He and Desiree argue over custody of their child and, in a sentimental ending, resolve to stay together for the child’s sake.

Marmalade Moon is another four-hander one-act play, this time a comedy reminiscent of Noël Coward. As usual with most of these early, unpublished works, the typescript is undated, the author’s name is not given, and the researcher has to turn detective, scouring the script for contemporary references, or comparing stylistic traits or even paper quality, typefaces and layouts with other works the dates of which are known. In this case, it seems likely that the play predates Coward’s Private Lives by several years, although the scenario is not dissimilar to his 1930 comedy about a divorced couple reuniting during their honeymoons with their new spouses.

There are two versions of the script in the Christie archive, Marmalade Moon being a slightly amended version of the earlier New Moon. The location is a continental hotel, the second draft rationalising the first’s two settings into a more user-friendly single one. Here we meet two couples, one celebrating their honeymoon and the other the first anniversary of their divorce. In this extract, the divorced man offers some words of wisdom to the female honeymooner:

BRANDON: As a matter of fact, I’m here to commemorate my wife’s divorce.

SYLVIA: Who from?

BRANDON: Regrettably, but inevitably, myself. She didn’t start threatening soon enough. She just went (flicking his fingers)– like that. That’s why I advised you to start threatening now. Then you may not have to leave later.

SYLVIA: Since you seem so frank about it, perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling me why your wife left you?

BRANDON: (lightly) – You mean why I left my wife. Certainly. We couldn’t agree on how to pronounce ‘Wagner’. She would call him ‘Oo-agner’. She was an American. They said it was incompatibility of temperament. Anyway, I never loved her.

SYLVIA: Oh dear!

BRANDON: Yes, it distressed me greatly, in fact, almost as much as her quite indecent mispronunciation of Wagner! (slight pause, then seriously) But perhaps the real trouble was that neither of us would give in to the other. In married life you have to have a master – or a mistress.³⁰

Again, there are echoes of Shaw’s preface to Getting Married, in which he asserts, ‘the sole and sufficient reason why people should be granted a divorce is that they want one’, and indeed to the play Getting Married itself, which involves a couple who are hesitant to marry and another who are divorced. In Agatha’s play, as in Shaw’s, the happy outcome follows a traditional dramatic convention. The newlyweds split up and then reunite, and the divorced couple are eventually reconciled. In the first version, New Moon, Brandon concludes, ‘This is just the beginning of a new era of our married life – a new moon.’ In the wittily retitled Marmalade Moon he states, ‘This is just the beginning of a new era of our married life – our second honeymoon! Our Marmalade Moon. That’s it – a little less sweet, perhaps, but a lot less sticky, and a thousand times more satisfying!’

It is not clear for what purpose the four playlets Teddy Bear, Marmalade Moon, Eugenia and Eugenics and Ten Years were intended; it may be that they were designed to be Guignol comic interludes. They appear to have been written over a number of years, but in terms of their subject matter they share a frame of reference informed by Shavian explorations of the theme of marriage. If performed together the effect would not have been dissimilar to Noël Coward’s popular 1936 short play compilations Tonight at 8.30.

Agatha’s early playwriting experiments demonstrate a natural aptitude in a variety of styles, but she had yet to see any of her work reach the stage. Then, in 1924, her sister Madge (or, perhaps, a clever agent working on her behalf) suddenly raised the stakes by somehow persuading impresario Basil Dean to produce her own full-length play, The Claimant, in the West End. Madge’s penning of short stories for magazines had ceased when she married the wealthy and quietly charming businessman James Watts and moved into his impressive Victorian mansion Abney Hall, near Manchester. Meanwhile, Agatha’s career as a writer had been successfully launched with three novels in three years for The Bodley Head. But now, suddenly, it was Madge’s name that was in lights, albeit the non-gender specific name ‘M.F. Watts’ under which she now wrote. ‘Awfully exciting about her play!’ Agatha wrote to her mother from the Grand Tour in May 1922. ‘And I shall be furious if she arrives “on film” before I do! It seems as though there was such a thing as an agent who is some good.’³¹

Basil Dean, who at this time was in his mid-thirties, had abandoned a career on the Stock Exchange in favour of training as an actor in repertory at Manchester, before becoming the first director of the Liverpool Repertory Theatre (later Liverpool Playhouse). During the First World War, in which he became a captain in the Cheshire Regiment, he had been director of the Entertainment Branch of the Navy and Army Canteen Board, supervising fifteen theatres and ten touring companies. Such experience served him well when he set up a theatrical production company in partnership with businessman Alec Rea, one of the principal sponsors of the Liverpool Rep project. As the Theatre Royal Windsor’s Curtain Up magazine commented: ‘One of the great men of the theatre of our time, Basil Dean began his remarkable career as a West End producer and manager in 1919 in partnership with Alec Rea. For the twenty years between 1919 and 1939, which at the beginning saw Galsworthy at his height and later Priestley at his prime, Basil Dean held a position in the West End theatre quite as powerful and influential as any of the big London managements of our post-war days. Under his sure guidance, plays by nearly all the leading dramatists of that period saw the light of day.’³²

A passionate commentator on theatre, and an early advocate of a National Theatre, Dean wrote a highly readable two-part autobiography, in which he remembers Alec Rea’s offer to him to go into business:

had I dreamed for a hundred years I could not have imagined an opportunity more suited to my circumstances … I needed a business manager whom I could trust. My choice fell on E.P. Clift, who was doing an excellent job as manager of the latest garrison theatre at Catterick Camp. He jumped at the chance, and thereafter wove himself in and out of my story with persistent self-interest … Meanwhile Alec [Rea] busied himself with the legal formalities of registering our company, to which he gave the name ReandeaN, always printed with capital letters at either end. People scoffed to see this name at the head of our playbills … Eventually the public came to accept it as the hallmark of an efficient presentation … I felt an urge to replace the ramshackle productions of the wartime theatre by the standards of acting and homogeneity of production in which I had been trained … Inspiring the new company with these ideals would not be easy. Actors trooping back from the battlefields and munitions factories were discomfited, more anxious about future employment than present perfection.³³

Rea paid Dean a salary of £20 per week, and set about looking for a theatre to use as a base for their operations. He settled on the St Martin’s, a small and elegant playhouse and London’s newest theatre, built by theatrical manager Bertie Meyer for Lord Willoughby de Broke and opened in 1916. C.B. Cochran had taken a lease on the building but failed to make a success of it and was keen to dispose of it. Rea eventually paid £20,000 for the remaining nineteen and a half years of the lease – as Dean put it, his ‘enthusiasm overcame his business caution’ – and ReandeaN took over the theatre on 11 February 1920.

The new company’s first major success was to be a play by a new female playwright. ‘Still walking the tight-rope between success and failure,’ writes Dean, ‘I decided that my only course was to go forward boldly … so I chose A Bill of Divorcement, a first play by Clemence Dane, a young writer who had already attracted the attention of the literary critics with two early novels. This moving play would have stood no chance of acceptance by a commercial management because the subject of madness was taboo on the London stage.’³⁴ Clemence Dane was the pen name of Winifred Ashton, whose work merits many a chapter in the established histories of female playwriting. The production, directed by Dean himself, was by all accounts an extraordinary one, not least due to the performance of ReandeaN’s ill-fated young starlet Meggie Albanesi, and it ran at the St Martin’s for over four hundred performances. It was also to launch Dane’s career as one of the best known and most prolific women dramatists of the inter-war years. A friend of Noël Coward, who based Blithe Spirit’s Madame Arcati on her, she continued writing plays until her death in 1965.

As with Agatha’s early plays, the issues of the divorce laws and eugenics were primary themes of Dane’s West End debut. Following the First World War the divorce rate in England had quadrupled, fuelled by hurried courtships, enforced separations, wartime adultery (both at home and abroad) and a new-found independence enjoyed by women, not least in the realm of employment. The resulting public and political debate lent renewed urgency to the recommendations of a 1912 Royal Commission, which had suggested a liberalisation of the divorce laws, and Clemence Dane’s 1921 play, set in 1933, controversially considered a future in which some of the proposed reforms had been introduced. As a dramatic exercise, this was not dissimilar to Agatha’s examination of the potential consequences of the fictional ‘Marriage Supervision Bill’ in Eugenia and Eugenics. When, in 1923, the Matrimonial Causes Act removed the additional exacerbating circumstances that women needed to prove in order to obtain a divorce, the immediate result was that the number of cases brought by women rose from 41 per cent to 62 per cent of the total. However, the only grounds for divorce on either side remained proven adultery until the 1937 Matrimonial Causes Act, which additionally allowed for cruelty, desertion or incurable insanity to be cited as reasons. The latter reason, of course, was kept firmly on the agenda by the eugenics movement.³⁵

Dane’s play concerns war veteran Hilary Fairfield, who suddenly returns to his wife and daughter one Christmas Day, having been hospitalised for over seventeen years with mental problems, thought to be shellshock. Citing the ‘incurable insanity’ clause in the fictional new divorce law, his wife Margaret has divorced him and is on the verge of remarriage. His daughter Sydney, meanwhile, is about to marry the son of the local rector. Although he claims to be cured, it comes to light that the mental illness from which Fairfield is suffering is in fact hereditary, and the play’s debate, whilst sympathetic to his predicament, involves a wide-ranging consideration of the issues of women’s rights in the matter of divorce and the ethical implications of knowingly passing on hereditary illness to the next generation. Eventually Sydney, fearful of passing on the illness to her own children, gives up her own aspirations of marriage in order to care for her father, thus liberating her mother to find happiness with a new husband.

Critics and audiences welcomed the play’s bravery and, as Dean’s obituary in The Times summed it up, ‘Basil Dean excelled himself as a director, and his young contract players, Meggie Albanesi and Malcolm Keen, excelled themselves in the roles of the daughter and the father.’³⁶ In Dean’s words, the response to Albanesi’s sensational performance as Sydney was ‘The only instance within my memory of a young actress achieving an international reputation by virtue of her performance in a single play.’³⁷ Three years later the object of Dean’s heartfelt admiration was dead, at the age of twenty-four, most probably as the result of a botched abortion.

Quite what attracted Basil Dean to produce and direct Madge Watts’ The Claimant is unclear. He perhaps hoped to repeat his success promoting the work of a female writer and The Claimant, like A Bill of Divorcement, concerns a man re-entering the family circle after a long absence. But there the similarities end. The play was cleared by the censor on 9 August 1924 for ‘performance at St Martin’s in a few weeks’,³⁸ but actually opened on 9 September at the Queen’s Theatre. It ran for forty-four performances and was not a success, although Madge’s letters from rehearsals to her husband and son are full of theatrical gossip and details of her involvement – clearly encouraged by Dean – in the process of creating the production.³⁹ She stayed in London during rehearsals and frequently visited Agatha and Archie, entertaining them with news of the latest dramas from the rehearsal rooms. Agatha herself attended rehearsals on at least one occasion, and doubtless enjoyed her first experience of the making of professional theatre. She also may well have noted the immaculate work of Marshall’s typing agency in the preparation of her sister’s playscript, and certainly entrusted them with much of her work thereafter.

As for the play itself, it has been said that it is inspired by the notorious case of the ‘Tichborne Claimant’, Roger Tichborne, who having been assumed dead in an 1854 shipwreck, turned up almost twenty years later to claim his inheritance. This resulted in a celebrated 1874 court case, following which the claim was rejected and the ‘claimant’ subsequently imprisoned for perjury. Madge’s play is a relatively light-hearted domestic drama, in which the protagonist abandons his claim and admits his true identity when it is discovered that the man he is impersonating was married, and that if he keeps up the pretence he will thus be unable to marry the young lady with whom he has fallen in love. There is an almost incomprehensible back-story and the central family’s relationships are so labyrinthine that a family tree is included in the script by way of explanation. This relatively trivial affair is a long way from the courtroom drama that gripped the nation in the 1870s. As G.S. Street at the Lord Chamberlain’s office put it, ‘I see no harm in the play. The Tichborne case has inspired many stories; in this case (except for calling the hero Roger) the resemblance is quite remote.’⁴⁰

The Times, which the week before opening had announced a new play by ‘Mr M.F. Watts’,⁴¹ corrected itself with its review headline ‘Woman Dramatist’s new play’ and went on to say

The history of the Tunstall family is a little complicated, even with the aid of a genealogical table kindly issued by the management with the programme … The author, Mrs M.F. Watts is, we take it, new to the stage, and inexperienced dramatists are apt to be over-lavish with their plots. There was, for instance, a first act exhibiting various members of the Tunstall family who were never seen again. You identified them carefully by the aid of the genealogical table, but it was labour wasted; the play got on very well without them … But there is plenty of competent acting from an exceptionally choice cast … And, for an ‘extra’, there was Mrs Lottie Venne, in a yeomanry helmet and Union Jack as Britannia ruling the waves and evidently wondering, as well she might wonder, why she was there.⁴²

The latter is a reference to a fancy dress party scene, which may have inspired a scene in Agatha’s 1930 short story, ‘The Dead Harlequin’, later adapted by her for the stage as Someone at the Window. In The Claimant, a footman comments on seeing the cream of society in fancy dress: ‘To see all these ’Arliquings and Pantomimes and Columbias, and then to think ’oo they are … well, reelly!’

The Claimant, which appears to have been the only play by Madge to reach the stage, sank without trace and has never been revived, although forty-five years later the seventy-nine-year-old Agatha would request a copy of it from the Lord Chamberlain’s office; to what purpose we will probably never know.⁴³ The irrepressible Madge, undaunted by the reception of her play, expressed her intentions to write a piece about Warren Hastings, but the only other script of hers that remains is another three-act drama, Oranges and Lemons, in which the widow Octavia has to choose between Junius, the young radical MP, and Rockhaven, the Conservative Prime Minister, both of whom are up against the machinations of a Labour leader of the opposition. The saying ‘Life’s a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel’, usually attributed to seventeenth-century French playwright Jean Racine, appears on the title page. Yet again, there are shades of eugenics in the play’s debates, as in this conversation between young Junius and the older Octavia:

JUNIUS: We’re not intended to be saints. We’ve got bodies. We’re born into a cruel animal world whose only design is – creation …

… if you deny … frustrate my love, I’ve nothing. Nothing left. It’s all of me.

OCTAVIA: It isn’t natural. You must turn to Spring, not autumn.

JUNIUS: I want no April to freeze me. I want the gold of October. Can’t you see, can’t you understand?⁴⁴

The central political argument, however, is a debate about land value tax, a policy advocated by the American political economist Henry George in the late nineteenth century which found favour with Asquith and Lloyd George, and subsequently the Labour Party, in the early twentieth:

JUNIUS: All that results from unimproved land should be sacred.

ROCKHAVEN: Humph! You differ from the socialists there.

JUNIUS: Land is different from everything else. It’s not for some men, or a few men, but for all men. Man must pay that one tax to mankind, then, for God’s sake leave him alone to work or starve! He’s had his opportunity.

ROCKHAVEN: How are you going to value your land?

JUNIUS: The value of land alters from day to day. But there’s already a rent paid for every plot and field in England. Deduct the value of buildings and improvements and there’s your ground rent.

ROCKHAVEN: You wouldn’t collect enough from this one source to run the country.

JUNIUS: The rent roll of England is roughly four millions. It ought to be enough if the government only stuck to essentials.

ROCKHAVEN: Essentials?

JUNIUS: The Army, the Navy and the Administration of Justice. Now we pay for a grandmother not a government!

ROCKHAVEN: The incapables would loathe to lose their grandmother.

…

ROCKHAVEN: I suppose you believe that all men are born equal?

JUNIUS: No. But there is a chance they might be bred equal if they had an equal chance.

ROCKHAVEN: You’ll never eliminate human nature.

JUNIUS: I want to eliminate poverty. Now we’re taxing wealth. What harm does wealth do a country? If there is a man capable of making money, for Heaven’s sake encourage him to make more!

This is hardly the stuff of gripping drama, but neither is it what immediately springs to mind as the likely subject of breakfast conversation in the Miller/Watts/Christie households. Oranges and Lemons does not appear to have been performed. Agatha says in her autobiography that after The Claimant Madge ‘wrote one or two other plays, but they did not receive London productions’,⁴⁵ which does not rule out the possibility that they were performed at regional repertory theatres in productions listed in the Lord Chamberlain’s plays card index (which Oranges and Lemons isn’t), or indeed by amateurs. We are told by Agatha that Madge was ‘quite a good amateur actress herself, and acted with the Manchester Amateur Dramatic’ so, after her brief spell as a West End playwright, we must assume that this is where she focused her theatrical energies.

Amongst Agatha’s own unpublished and unperformed early works are two very different full-length plays, The Clutching Hand and The Lie. The first of these, ‘A Play in Four Acts by A. Christie’, states on the title page that it is ‘Adapted from the novel The Exploits of Elaine by Arthur B. Reeve’. Significantly, this is undoubtedly her first dramatic adaptation of a novel, albeit not one of her own.⁴⁶

Arthur B. Reeve was a journalist who became America’s most popular writer of detective fiction in the second decade of the twentieth century. His recurring character, ‘scientific detective’ Craig Kennedy, was billed as ‘The American Sherlock Holmes’, and Kennedy’s investigations are characterised by the use of pioneering forensic techniques and bizarre gadgets created by him in his lab. In fact he would probably have had more success than me in dating some of Agatha’s manuscripts and correspondence. Of course this particular detective’s investigative techniques may well have appealed to Agatha the chemist, although it is notable that her own sleuths tend to treat forensic evidence as secondary to an analysis of character and an understanding of motive.

The Exploits of Elaine itself is an odd hybrid. Conceived by Pathé in 1914 as a fourteen-part film serial, it was primarily a vehicle for their star Pearl White, who had been a huge success in the Perils of Pauline series. Arthur B. Reeve was employed to create the storyline, and included the character of Craig Kennedy. This meant that the syndicated newspaper instalments of the story, when compiled into a book the following year, effectively became both the next Craig Kennedy novel and the ‘book of the film’ of The Exploits of Elaine. It has to be said that the result is far from being a literary masterpiece; Reeve is no Raymond Chandler, and the disjointed ‘novel’, the chapter titles of which exactly reflect the titles of the film serial’s episodes, very much betrays its origins.

Quite how this ended up on Agatha’s bookshelf, and why she felt drawn to adapt it for the stage, is something of a mystery; it may have been done in response to her sister’s challenge to write a piece of detective fiction, which more famously resulted in her first published novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. We know that she had read Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room, Edgar Allan Poe’s short story ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin stories and, of course, Arthur Conan Doyle and Wilkie Collins; but we can now add Arthur B. Reeve’s brand of pulp fiction to the august roll-call of those who inspired Agatha’s early experiments in crime fiction.

The book and play concern the efforts of the plucky young Elaine Dodge to track down her father’s murderer, a master criminal known as The Clutching Hand, who leaves ‘a warning letter signed with a mysterious clutching fist’ next to the body of each of his victims. In order to do this, she enlists the help of Craig Kennedy, scientific detective, and his ‘Doctor Watson’, the journalist Walter Jameson. Other characters include the lawyer Perry Bennett and three gangsters named Limpy Red, Dan the Dude and Spike. For good measure, the book also includes Chinese devil worshippers and even a medium performing a séance, none of whom, perhaps thankfully, make it into Christie’s dramatisation.

Whilst the play is an interesting early exercise in the efficient adaptation of a novel for the stage, it would be fair to say that Agatha is no Damon Runyon when it comes to a grasp of New York vernacular. Her leading characters tend to speak in cut-glass English accents and her gangsters endearingly lapse into cockney while referring to ‘drug stores’ and ‘janitors’. Agatha’s father was a New Yorker, but although she was proud of her American ancestry she herself did not travel to America until she was thirty-one, and it seems either that Frederick Miller’s American accent cannot have been a strong one, or that by the time Agatha wrote The Clutching Hand her memory of it was distant.

Although The Clutching Hand never made it as far as the stage, the influence of The Exploits of Elaine can be seen in Christie’s early adventure fiction; in particuar, the pursit of an elusive master criminal was a theme that she would return to on a number of occasions. As she says in her autobiography, “Thriller plays are usually much alike in plot – all that alters is the Enemy. There is an international gang à la Moriarty – provided first by the Germans, the “Huns” of the first war; then the Communists who in turn were succeeded by the Fascists. We have the Russians, we have the Chinese, we go back to the international gang again and again, and the Master Criminal wanting world supremacy is always with us.’⁴⁷

Arthur B. Reeve’s adventurous young heroine undoubtedly held a particular appeal for Agatha. Tuppence Beresford (The Secret Adversary, 1922), Anne Beddingfeld (The Man in the Brown Suit, 1924) and Virginia Revel (The Secret of Chimneys, 1925) would all appear to owe something to Reeve’s Elaine Dodge. Here, to cherish, is his description of her: ‘Elaine Dodge was both the ingénue and the athlete – the thoroughly modern type of girl – equally at home with tennis and tango, table talk and tea. Vivacious eyes that hinted at a stunning amber brown sparkled beneath masses of the most wonderful auburn hair. Her pearly teeth, when she smiled, were marvellous. And she smiled often, for her life seemed to be a continuous film of enjoyment.’⁴⁸

When, in 1922, Christie was writing notes for The Man in the Brown Suit while on the Grand Tour, they appear under the heading ‘Adventurous Anne Episode 1’.⁴⁹ Reeve’s heroine and ‘episodic’ format were therefore very much on her mind – although she later claimed that ‘Anne the Adventuress’, the title under which the novel was serialised in the Evening News the following year, was ‘as silly a title as I had ever heard’.⁵⁰ All of this, though, seems to indicate that the script for The Clutching Hand pre-dates 1922, and Agatha’s own first visit to America.

And now on to more serious matters, in the shape of an unpublished and unperformed three-act ‘domestic drama’ called simply The Lie. In her autobiography Agatha mysteriously states, ‘I wrote a gloomy play, mainly about incest. It was refused firmly by every manager I sent it to. “An unpleasant subject”. The curious thing is that, nowadays, it is the kind of play which might quite likely appeal to a manager.’⁵¹ I believe The Lie to be that play and, although the chronology in her autobiography is notoriously inaccurate, Agatha clearly places it in the mid-1920s after her and Archie’s return from the Grand Tour. The action of the play, of which there are two drafts, takes place in a suburban house, located in Wimbledon (amended to Putney) in version one or Hampstead in version two. The house belongs to John, who is married to Nan. Nan’s mother and grandmother live with them, and her younger sister Nell, who is fighting off the attentions of an ineffectual young suitor, shares a flat with a female friend elsewhere.

Nan is disillusioned with the boredom of her marriage to John, whom she married when she was seventeen, and the fact that he lavishes more of his attention on her golf- and tennis-playing younger sister than on her. In an attempt to get some excitement back into her life, she spends a night with an older admirer, Sir Peter (whom we never meet), claiming that she is staying with family friends. But when she returns home the next day she discovers that a friend of John’s has told him that he has seen her dining with Sir Peter, and it is not long before he establishes that she has not in fact been staying with the family friends. As Nan explains to her mother, Hannah:

I suppose he’s a good husband. He’s kind and polite, and feeds and clothes me well, and doesn’t beat me. Oh! A model husband! But I’m outside his life – right outside it. He goes to his business in the morning, and when he comes back in the afternoon, if it’s summertime, he plays golf or tennis with Nell. In the evening there’s music – with Nell. He’d sooner talk to her than to me. He never cares to be with me – he never wants me – I don’t interest him. Although I’m his wife I never dare laugh and joke with him as Nell does. And so it’s gone on from day to day – until I felt I couldn’t bear it any longer! (a pause) And then, Sir Peter came. He wanted to talk to me, he liked to be with me – I was the person to him! What happened? John told me to drop him! Altogether! Told me quite coldly and calmly, not because he cared – not because he was jealous – but because I was his wife, and he disliked having his property talked about!⁵²

As Hannah explains to her own mother, ‘A love not expressed is no love at all to Nan. And a man like John, upright, honourable, and straight as a die, lacks one thing – imagination.’ We are told that Hannah herself followed her dream: ‘I loved him! He was fascinating. His bad qualities were all beneath the surface. I promised to marry him. My people did their best to stop it, they knew him better than I did, but I was young and headstrong, I wouldn’t listen! I went my own way, and shut my eyes to the truth.’ As a result of this experience, she now advises, ‘Love isn’t everything. Marry a man you can respect and admire. Love will come.’

In order to preserve Nan’s marriage, and indeed in order to prevent three generations of her family becoming homeless, Hannah enlists the assistance of Nell, who is asked to lie for her sister and claim that Nan in fact stayed overnight with her after dining with Sir Peter. This is ‘the Lie’ of the title. It is believed that this plan will work, because of John’s apparent affinity with Nell. Hannah persuades Nell with the forceful argument, ‘I believe with all my heart and soul, that in every life there comes a moment, one supreme and all powerful moment, when we hold our fate in our hands, to decide our entire life for good or evil! Nell! Don’t let this moment pass by!’

The whole drama is played out in the course of one evening – ‘one never knows what a day might bring forth’ is a repeated line in the play – and the tension that Agatha builds as the various revelations unfold in a suburban front room over a matter of hours is skilfully sustained. The final scene is brilliantly dramatic as, with the disgraced Nan upstairs in her room, Nell faces her brother-in-law to tell him ‘the Lie’. His astonishing response, having seen through and dismissed Nell’s fiction for the attempt to protect her sister that it is, is to declare his secret love for Nell – which is clearly reciprocated as they embrace and ‘he kisses her long and passionately’.

Rather than John divorcing Nan for her infidelity, Nell and John vow to elope and allow Nan to divorce him, so that the shame of her own indiscretion is thereby not revealed. ‘Let the disgrace be ours,’ says Nell, ‘We’re doing a far worse thing than she has done.’ At this moment Nan walks in and, oblivious to developments between her husband and her sister (of which she continues to remain blissfully ignorant), falls to her knees, confesses her infidelity and begs John to forgive her. In a final twist, Nell fights her sister’s corner and begs John to return to the realities of married life rather than pursuing the fantasy of what might have been, echoing her mother’s words: ‘A moment comes to everyone – a moment when they hold their life in their hands … Sometimes – it’s not only one life there might be three – three lives and we hold them all! It’s our moment!’

John is persuaded to forgive his wife and is reconciled with her, forgoing the possibility of a relationship with the younger Nell, and unwittingly echoing his mother-in-law, ‘We’ll both start again, Nan – together … Someday – who knows? – happiness may come …’ In the final moments of the play Nell is left alone on the stage, repeating John’s words:

Someday – who knows? – happiness may come … Someday … (she stands over the lamp, preparing to blow it out. In a final tone of doubt and wonder.) Someday? (she blows out the lamp. The stage is in darkness. Curtain.)

This play is about many things: infidelity and divorce, sisterly and motherly love, and the familiar Christie theme of choosing between the excitement of dangerous, passionate love and the perceived tedium of steady commitment. One thing it may at first not appear to be about is incest.

However, as with all things Christie it is important to set the subject matter in context. In 1907, the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act had ended decades of controversy by allowing widowers to marry the sister of their deceased spouse. This form of marital union had been made illegal in 1835, and remained a topic of lively debate, both inside and outside Parliament, throughout the Victorian period. The controversy centred around the effects of sexual desire on the purity of the English family, not to mention the ability of government to legislate on issues of morality, control individual behaviour and regulate the family. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the relationship between sisters was used to make the domestic sphere part of the public, political world. The sisterly bond was used by politicians as the catalyst for discussions about marriage, the sanctity of family life and even threats to the authority of the Church of England. The issue even merits a mention in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe (1882); when Strephon is sent by the Queen of the Fairies to stir up Parliament, one of his tasks is to ‘prick that annual blister, Marriage with deceased wife’s sister’. In the end, the change in law was to an extent an acknowledgement of the status quo. It was common in the nineteenth century for single women to move in with a sister’s family and assist with the raising of the children; and it was a small logical step, at least in nineteenth-century terms, for that role to be formalised in the event of the married sister’s death.⁵³

The Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act, however, permitted only what was referred to in its somewhat convoluted title. It was not until the 1960 Marriage (Enabling) Act that a man could marry his former wife’s sister whether that wife was ‘living or not’. So, when Christie started writing her autobiography in 1950, she might well still have regarded the relationship between John and Nell as ‘incestuous’ (although there are wider theological issues here that we need not concern ourselves with). Readers who have been paying close attention to the intricate legislative subplot of this chapter will note that, prior to 1923, the ‘incestuous’ nature of John’s relationship with Nell may well have assisted Nan in obtaining a divorce from him. Meanwhile, John and Nell discuss fleeing the country, perhaps not only in order to escape the scandal but possibly also so that they can marry, once his divorce comes through, without the requirement for Nan to be ‘deceased’.

Christie underlines this theme in the play when John declares to Nell, ‘I love you – and you love me – Oh! Why did I marry Nan? Nan – when you were there, growing up day by day, from childhood to womanhood … You! My Nell!’ He goes on to refer to her as his ‘little sister’, asserting ‘I look upon you as my sister’ and ‘Haven’t I always been a brother to you?’ Further emphasis is given to the relationship between John and his sister-in-law by a change in title in the second draft from The Lie to The Sister-In-Law.⁵⁴ I prefer the original. All of this, I am sure, was done in ignorance of the darker side of life in the Phillpotts household.

The fact that ‘The scene represents a typical suburban drawing room’ and not some distant, imagined country house, only serves to add to our discomfort, and gives the astonishing subject matter of this relentlessly unfolding drama even more impact. This could happen to any of us, Christie seems to be saying. John sums up the frustrations of the daily grind that have led both his wife and himself to seek illicit adventure elsewhere: ‘Oh! I know! I was keen on my work – that dull, plodding work, the same day after day! It seems incredible now to think of it! I meant to wear the collar steadily year after year. I never dreamed of any other life. The 8.16 train up to town every morning, the 5.10 back, the annual holiday to the sea side – I thought all that was life! How narrow and paltry it all seems now! Why did I do it? Because everyone does. There’s a reason for you!’

But, however enticing the forbidden fruit, as Nell reminds us, ‘It’s the dull brown earth that endures, not the gay flowers that grow there.’ Feminist writers would no doubt consider the play’s resolution as somehow involving ‘an underlying collusion with patriarchy’, but I believe there is a far more complex appraisal of human emotions going on here than there is in Clemence Dane’s A Bill of Divorcement.

The circumstances of Christie’s own 1928 divorce were, as it happens, every bit as dramatic as something on the West End stage. Following their return from the Grand Tour at the end of 1922, and reunited with Rosalind (who had been left in the care of her grandmother and aunt), Agatha and Archie settled in Sunningdale in Berkshire, eventually moving into a house they bought together, which they named Styles. Agatha bought a two-seater Morris Cowley coupé and took on a secretary, Charlotte Fisher (‘Carlo’), who made a substantial contribution to her employer’s wellbeing in the following years, and whose arrival, amongst other things, coincided with a vast improvement in the typing of Agatha’s draft playscripts.

Agatha’s six-book deal with The Bodley Head ended with The Secret of Chimneys in 1925, and her new agent, Edmund Cork of Hughes Massie, negotiated much-improved terms for her with her new publisher, Collins. The following year Collins published The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which proved to be her biggest success to date. Archie, meanwhile, resumed work in the City. Perhaps the excitement of their round-the-world adventure underlined the relative dullness of the return to normality, or perhaps their wartime separation and lengthy travels in the company of others meant that they had never really got to know each other properly, but in any event Archie the City commuter was no longer Archie the dashing young airman and adventurer. In 1926, following the death of her beloved mother, Agatha spent time at Ashfield in Torquay, where she found the process of clearing out her mother’s belongings enormously stressful. This was exacerbated when Archie arrived and announced that he was in love with Nancy Neele, a younger woman with whom he shared an interest in golf, and wanted Agatha to divorce him. Agatha’s autobiography describes this distressing period of her life with moving sincerity and economy. Clearly to the frustration of many, she offers no detail at all about what happened next. I will keep it brief.

We will never know what exactly motivated Agatha’s sudden decision to abandon her cherished car, take a train to Harrogate and there book into a hotel, in a name similar to that of her husband’s mistress, between 4 and 14 December 1926. Whether it was the result of some sort of stress-induced anxiety attack, or the botched playing-out of a scenario intended to win back her husband, or – as seems most likely – a combination of the two, the only winners at the time were the press, who succeeded in boosting their circulations by drumming up one of the first celebrity media frenzies; an outcome which appears to have surprised and distressed the very private Agatha in equal measure. One of the many who has subsequently perpetuated this intrusive reportage by claiming to ‘provide the answers to the mystery’ is Jared Cade who, in his book Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days (1998), bases his claims on information received from Judith Gardner, the daughter of Agatha’s close friend Nan Kon. Cade incorrectly describes Nan as Agatha’s ‘sister-in-law’, when she was not in fact a relation, but simply Agatha’s sister’s husband’s sister. Cade informs us that Nan told her daughter, amongst other things, that Agatha stayed with her on 3 December, the one night on which her whereabouts is unaccounted for. Biographer Laura Thompson painstakingly employs antique train timetables to disprove this theory and goes on to berate Cade for describing scenes that ‘he cannot possibly know about’, having herself given a detailed and lengthy fictionalised account of events. Surely the biggest flaw in Cade’s theory is that we are asked to assume that the ‘sister-in-law’, Nan, if she did indeed claim that Agatha stayed with her on the night in question, was actually telling the truth.

Following a recuperative sojourn in the Canary Islands with Rosalind and Carlo, Agatha attended a court hearing in April 1928, at which, in order to avoid embarrassment to Nancy Neele, falsified evidence of Archie’s adultery with an unknown party was offered. Agatha was granted the divorce that Archie wanted in October of that year. Unlike in Ten Years, the fact that the couple had a young child proved insufficient to keep them together; Agatha was granted custody of Rosalind. And Archie was never to speak John’s line from The Lie, ‘We’ll both start again – together … Someday – who knows? – happiness may come …’ Archie stuck to his own script, and life on this occasion failed to imitate art.

Christie’s early, unpublished playwriting, much of it very accomplished, takes an often witty and always idiosyncratic look at many of the burning social issues of the day, particularly as they affected women. As Christie herself implies, in the mid-1920s The Lie was undoubtedly ahead of its time, not only in terms of its themes but also of its setting and characters. If a producer had been brave enough to accept it, then the Lord Chamberlain’s office may well have raised objections. The script is perhaps too short, and is by no means perfect in its construction, but with the benefit of a little dramaturgy from an experienced director it could have made for a highly impactful evening of theatre. Had it been performed when it was written, and been presented to the public as Christie’s first play, then the history of Agatha Christie, playwright might have been very different.

As it turned out, though, all her early playwriting efforts were to be upstaged by a moustachioed French detective, who inevitably stole the show as soon as he set foot in front of an audience. Yes, French.

SCENE TWO
Poirot Takes the Stage

By early 1928, at the age of thirty-seven, Agatha had become a best-selling novelist, a media celebrity, a mother and a soon-to-be divorcee. As a playwright she had experimented with a wide variety of genres, including commedia dell’arte, Grand Guignol, American pulp fiction, comedy and passionate domestic drama. Much of her work had touched on socio-political issues such as divorce and eugenics, and some of it had embraced controversial subject matter that would have raised eyebrows in the Lord Chamberlain’s office.

It must have been particularly frustrating for her, then, not only that her sister achieved her West End debut before she did, but also that the first time her own name appeared on a theatre marquee was in relation to another playwright’s less than satisfactory adaptation of one of her detective novels.

In April 1927, touring actor-manager Lionel Bute paid £200 to Hughes Massie for the right to produce an adaptation of Christie’s hugely popular 1926 novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.¹ The script was not yet written at this point, but the chosen adaptor was Michael Morton, a prolific playwright who between 1897 and his death in 1931 would be responsible for numerous dramas and comedies, as well as a number of successful stage thrillers including The Yellow Passport (1914), In the Night Watch (1921) and The Guilty One (1923). Since the archives of Hughes Massie in relation to the agency’s dealings with Christie do not commence until 1940, it is difficult to establish why Morton was chosen as the adaptor, and indeed whether it was Bute or Hughes Massie who commissioned the play. Given Christie’s penchant for playwriting, it seems odd that the job wasn’t given to her, particularly as it is highly likely that she had herself by this time delivered an original play featuring Poirot and called After Dinner; although the engagement of an adaptor may well have been due to the reluctance of Hughes Massie’s Edmund Cork to see his novelists spending their time writing plays. The £200 Bute paid was by way of an advance against royalties, which were to be paid at between 5 and 15 per cent on different levels of box office income. Morton was to share this royalty income 50/50 with Christie, a ratio that would become standard with respect to third-party stage adaptations of her work.

In 1921 Bute had created Lionel Bute Ltd, ‘to send out on tour London successes played by first rate artists’. As an actor-manager he saw himself as having his performers’ ‘artistic as well as their material welfare at heart, and he would be deeply hurt if anyone regarded the firm as merely commercial’.² He was a popular character whose troupe affectionately adopted the motto ‘Bute-iful plays Bute-ifully acted’. A sort of touring repertory company, Lionel Bute’s players enjoyed great success throughout the 1920s, with up to five units on the road simultaneously.

Hughes Massie had given Bute until 1 November 1928 to produce the play or lose his £200, but for some reason in February 1928 he assigned his licence to the West End impresario Bertie Meyer. Bute presumably felt that his chances on tour would be enhanced by a West End production (the remit of his company was, after all, to tour ‘London successes’) but that he needed a heavyweight partner in order to achieve this. Once Morton had delivered the script, he therefore seems to have gone about finding a business partner with the resources to create a West End production, but in a deal that would still give him the ability subsequently to tour the title. There are no records of the detail of this arrangement, but the West End programme, whilst stating that it is presented by ‘B.A. Meyer’, notes in the small print that it is ‘produced by arrangement with Lionel Bute’.³ It also notes that the actor Norman V. Norman (playing Roger Ackroyd) appears ‘by permission of Basil Dean’, Dean having allowed him an early release from Margaret Kennedy’s Come With Me.

Bertie Meyer, the man who built the St Martin’s Theatre, had originally been a tea planter in Ceylon. Whilst on a visit to London in 1902, he became engaged to Dorothy Grimston, daughter of celebrated actress Mrs Kendal, and having married into a theatrical dynasty, decided to apply his business acumen to theatrical matters. As a French speaker, he was engaged in a management role by the company presenting Réjane’s 1903 London season at the Garrick Theatre, where the actress who was later to so impress the young Agatha in Paris scored a great hit. Continuing with the French theme, he himself presented the legendary Coquelin in his defining role as Cyrano at the Shaftesbury Theatre in 1905. His marriage to Dorothy didn’t last, but his love affair with theatre did and, following these early successes, he went on to become one of the most respected London producers and theatre managers of the day. In 1927 he enjoyed a big hit with Edgar Wallace’s The Terror at the Lyceum Theatre, a drama which, like much of the hugely popular crime novelist’s work for the stage, owed a substantial debt to Grand Guignol.

Meyer’s two big coups in the production of the stage version of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which – after the issue of its licence but before the script’s submission to the Lord Chamberlain’s office – had been retitled Alibi by its adaptor, were the engagement of Gerald du Maurier to direct and Charles Laughton to play Poirot. Du Maurier, one of the most respected actors and directors of the day, was the son of the novelist George du Maurier (of Trilby fame) and the father of novelist Daphne du Maurier, who was herself to enjoy three West End hits as a playwright in the 1940s. Gerald du Maurier, who had been knighted in 1922, is credited with having masterminded Edgar Wallace’s first big West End success, The Ringer, a melodramatic adaptation of his 1925 novel The Gaunt Stranger. Engaged as director of The Ringer, du Maurier was generous with his dramaturgical assistance in the preparation of the script, which generosity Wallace reciprocated by sharing his royalty income with him. Wallace even revised the original novel and reissued it as The Ringer, taking on board the lessons learned from du Maurier. We should note in passing that, during the play’s successful 1926 run at Wyndham’s Theatre, Wallace had jumped on the bandwagon of press speculation about Christie’s disappearance by contributing a piece on the subject to the Daily Mail at the height of the furore.

With Meyer as producer and du Maurier as director, the credentials of the team responsible for the production of Alibi were promising. All that remained was to cast the role of Poirot, who had already appeared in four novels and a book of short stories, for what was to be the character’s stage debut. In February 1928 Meyer had produced A Man With Red Hair at the Little Theatre; in this gruesome shocker, adapted from a Hugh Walpole novel by Benn Levy, the leading role of the grotesque sadist Crispin was played to great acclaim by a twenty-eight-year-old RADA graduate, Charles Laughton, ‘a very gargoyle of obscene desires’ according to the Observer critic.⁴ The production ran for only seventy-nine performances, but served as the springboard to Laughton’s distinguished acting career. Although borrowing from the Little Theatre’s Grand Guignol repertoire of horrors, this play lacked the essential larkiness of the genre, and Meyer decided to replace it with a successful revival of ‘London’s Grand Guignol’ itself, taking a large advertisement for the season in the programme for Alibi.

Despite his recent critical success in A Man With Red Hair, Laughton was by no means the obvious choice for the role of Poirot. Too young, and physically too portly, there was also the problem that he was now associated in people’s minds with the unsavoury Crispin. Christie herself was more concerned with changes to the storyline and characterisation made by Michael Morton. As she states in her autobiography:

Alibi, the first play to be produced from one of my books – the Murder Of Roger Ackroyd – was adapted by Michael Morton. He was a practised hand at adapting plays. I much disliked his first suggestion, which was to take about twenty years off Poirot’s age, call him Beau Poirot and have lots of girls in love with him … I strongly objected to having his personality completely changed. In the end, with Gerald Du Maurier backing me up, we settled on removing that excellent character Caroline, the doctor’s sister, and replacing her with a young and attractive girl … I resented the removal of Caroline a good deal.⁵

In a 1961 Sunday Times interview Christie comments, ‘I disliked Poirot being made into a young man, and having a sort of sentimental love affair. Charles Laughton played Poirot extremely well, but it was made into rather a sentimental part.’⁶ And in her introduction to Peter Saunders’ The Mousetrap Man, she remarks that Laughton was ‘entirely unlike Hercule Poirot but a wonderful actor’.⁷ Christie herself believed that Miss Marple, who was to make her first print appearance in 1930’s The Murder at the Vicarage, may have been inspired by the discarded character of Caroline, ‘an acidulated spinster, full of curiosity, knowing everything, hearing everything; the complete detective service in the home’.⁸

The frustrations of the rehearsal process were many for the would-be playwright: ‘I had no idea when it was first suggested what terrible suffering you go through with plays, owing to the alterations made in them.’⁹ In the end, ‘Beau Poirot’ remained in the version of the script licensed for performance by the Lord Chamberlain, but perhaps the biggest surprise is that Christie appears not to have made any objection to her famous Belgian creation being referred to as French.¹⁰

In the event the cast, which also included ‘Lady Tree’ (Helen Maud Holt – Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s widow) as Mrs Ackroyd, acquitted themselves well and the play, though attracting only mediocre reviews, enjoyed a successful run of 250 performances. It opened at the Prince of Wales Theatre on 15 May 1928, a few weeks after the initial court hearing relating to Agatha’s divorce, and transferred to the Haymarket on 20 August, where it ran until the end of the year. On 6 August Lionel Bute opened a touring production at the Grand Theatre, Swansea, with the ensemble temporarily renamed ‘Lionel Bute and B.A. Meyer’s Company’.¹¹

The play itself suffered from the fact that the impact of the book’s denouement relies on a device that is simply not transferable from page to stage. And the script’s obvious shortcomings appear only to have been emphasised by Laughton’s consciously stellar performance. As playwright St. John Ervine put it, reviewing for the Observer:

This is an actor. Let me not be afraid to use superlatives. Mr Laughton is about to become a great actor. I hereby announce to the world that this young man, whose age is less than thirty, is likely to be as fine a character actor as Coquelin. He has the most malleable body and pliable face of any actor I know. He acts with his mind and with his body. He knows that he has a face and he acts with it. He acts with his hands and with his legs and feet, and I should not be at all astonished to find that if his boots were removed, each one of his toes would be acting hard. He seizes the stage and firmly controls the audience. He fills me with a sense of his power, and makes me intensely aware of him from the moment he comes on to the stage until the moment he leaves it … The play begins badly but steadily improves; the first two scenes, which are dull and slow, might be telescoped … Mr Laughton, however, added so much to the part of Poirot that the play seemed far bigger than it is. I am about to repeat myself. Mr Laughton, I say, is an actor. The whole of the cast is excellent. They must pardon me if I do no more than note their names … It was Mr Laughton’s night. An actor, ladies and gentlemen.¹²

Laughton was the first of numerous actors to appropriate the role of Poirot as a vehicle for their own talents, and Christie herself was disconcerted by the manner in which the character pulled focus on stage. The function of a detective, after all, is to observe; and in a detective novel the reader is invited to join the detective in this process. On film, camera angles and editing can focus the audience’s attention on specific characters and events. But on stage the audience is liable to be distracted from the observational process by the detective’s constant presence in their line of vision. Ironically, rather than observing what the detective is observing (as in a book or a film), they end up observing the detective; especially if a particularly flamboyant actor has commandeered the role.

For all its frustrations, the process was hugely enjoyable for Agatha, as it had been for her sister. Agatha, of course, had no one at home at this time other than her nine-year-old daughter to share her excitement with, but the following interview in The Star gives an insight into the enjoyment she derived from her involvement in the production of Alibi (it is interesting to note that, even at this early stage, a play not actually written by Agatha Christie is referred to as an ‘Agatha Christie play’):

‘It’s all great fun!’ Such was the enthusiastic comment with which Agatha Christie today greeted a ‘Star’ woman who went along to the flower-like Kensington home of the novelist-playwright to see how she felt about last night’s production of her play, ‘Alibi’.

This new piece at the Prince Of Wales theatre, in which Charles Laughton has made so great a hit as the famous fictional detective Hercule Poirot, is the first Agatha Christie play to be staged. It has been dramatised by Michael Morton from the Christie novel called The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd. Mrs Christie confessed today that this was not her idea of a title at all, ‘I wanted to call the book “The man who grew vegetable marrows” but nobody would let me!’ she said sadly.¹³

Christie goes on to reiterate her own interest in playwriting. ‘Certainly I hope to write more plays – now! … I have not actually got one begun, and I am not sure whether my next work will be a novel or a play.’ Her beloved dog Peter was at rehearsals with her. ‘He is such a sensible dog, and knows everybody connected with the play, and sometimes at rehearsals he has taken orders from Sir Gerald Du Maurier.’

Impressively, on 5 July 1928, less than two months after this interview, Christie’s own dramatisation of her 1925 novel The Secret of Chimneys came back from the Marshall’s typing bureau.¹⁴ Her response as a playwright to seeing Poirot on stage was thus to adapt a book in which he did not feature. One of her notebooks (that now numbered 67) contains some thoughts on the adaptation, which she called simply Chimneys, and there is nothing in these notes or the chronology of the surrounding material to indicate that the play itself could not have been written between May and July 1928. I suspect that nothing would have pleased her more than to see this Buchanesque romp, with its echoes of Arthur B. Reeve, presented as her own first work for the stage. But ironically it would be Poirot who was to facilitate her own playwriting debut.

Christie’s own world and the post-war world around her were changing, and the certainties of her Victorian and Edwardian upbringing were being challenged on all fronts. In 1922 Stalin became General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. 1924 had seen the short-lived first Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald, while 1926 had brought the disruption of a general strike. On 2 July 1928 the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act finally enabled women to vote on the same basis as men and, as a result of the election in May the following year (dubbed ‘the flapper election’ in recognition of the newly enfranchised young female voters), MacDonald again became Prime Minister.

Throughout the ‘Roaring Twenties’ London’s entertainment scene thrived as never before, and amongst the numerous women playwrights who found a voice alongside Clemence Dane in the West End were Gertrude Jennings, Adelaide Phillpotts (in collaboration with her father) and Basil Dean’s latest discovery, Margaret Kennedy. Meanwhile the public’s appetite for thrillers remained unabated, and at the end of the decade audiences flocked to the West End premieres of Patrick Hamilton’s Rope, Murder on the Second Floor (a hit for writer/director/actor Frank Vosper), Emlyn Williams’ A Murder Has Been Arranged, and Edgar Wallace’s On the Spot (starring Charles Laughton). No one in theatreland yet fully appreciated the significance of the British premiere, at the Piccadilly Theatre on 27 September 1928, of The Jazz Singer – the first ‘talkie’; and the long-term economic impact of the 1929 Wall Street Crash had yet to be felt.

In October 1928 the Christies’ divorce was finalised and Archie married Nancy Neele, although it was agreed that Agatha would continue to use ‘Christie’ as her nom de plume. That autumn, she travelled on the Orient Express and visited Baghdad and the archaeological dig at Ur, staying as a guest of the renowned archaeologist Leonard Woolley and his wife Katharine. Edmund Cork had been working hard on her behalf, and the year also saw her sign lucrative new contracts with publishers Collins (in the UK) and Dodd, Mead & Co. (in America). Agatha’s wayward older brother Monty died in 1929, and at the end of the year she was invited back to Ur where she was introduced to the archaeologist Max Mallowan. Although Max was fourteen years her junior, the pair fell in love. There was an undoubted intellectual meeting of minds that had been notably absent with Archie, but it is clear from their letters to each other that Agatha and Max’s mutual devotion went far deeper than that, and on 11 September 1930 they married in Edinburgh. Max was obliged to return to Ur without Agatha that winter, but in subsequent years she was to accompany her husband on his expeditions. As his reputation as an archaeologist grew she became a valued contributor to his work, cataloguing and photographing artefacts as they were unearthed. A few years after their marriage Max and Agatha bought a house in London, 58 Sheffield Terrace on Campden Hill, with another, Winterbrook House in Wallingford, as a weekend retreat. But Agatha was to spend the first winter of her second marriage alone with her daughter.

It was at this moment that, suddenly and unexpectedly, Agatha made her debut as a playwright. Although she herself clearly had hopes for her 1928 adaptation of The Secret of Chimneys, the success of Alibi had inevitably popularised the idea of Poirot on stage, and After Dinner, a play she had written some years previously featuring the Belgian sleuth, was consequently now in demand. It is not clear exactly when After Dinner dates from. Her autobiography is vague and inaccurate about this play on a number of levels (including its original title, the theatre that premiered it and the length of its run), while her introduction to The Mousetrap Man dates it as 1927. However, John Curran in an entertaining article for Crime and Detective Stories magazine makes a persuasive argument for it having actually been written in 1922, based partly on a meticulous chronology of Captain Hastings’ love life.¹⁵ The history of the play’s production does nothing to contradict this theory, and the script lodged with the Lord Chamberlain is quite clearly an early work, very different from the heavily revised version that was eventually published by Alfred Ashley and Son in 1934. The script is not typed by the Marshall’s agency, which she used for Chimneys in 1928, does not carry a Hughes Massie label and, intriguingly, includes the note ‘Left and Right are seen from the point of view of the audience’; a very basic error corrected in The Clutching Hand and The Lie, in both of which Christie makes a point of stating, unnecessarily, that stage directions are given from the point of view of the actors. This would not only appear to suggest that After Dinner is Christie’s first full-length stage play, but, given that The Clutching Hand may well pre-date 1922, could indicate that its origins are even earlier than Dr Curran has deduced.

According to Christie’s autobiography, at the time of Alibi ‘I had already written a detective play of my own, I can’t remember exactly when. It was not approved of by Hughes Massie; in fact they suggested it would be better to forget it entirely, so I didn’t press on with it … It was a conventional spy thriller, and although full of clichés it was not, I think, at all bad. Then, in due course, it came into its own. A friend of mine from Sunningdale days, Mr Burman, who was connected with the Royalty Theatre, suggested to me that it might perhaps be produced.’¹⁶

It seems likely that Christie presented the play to her new agency when she joined them in 1923 and they discouraged their valuable new signing from getting involved with dramatic distractions. Believing that the project had been abandoned, she rescued the character of Tredwell the butler from Sir Claud Amory’s house Abbotts Cleve in After Dinner, and relocated him to Lord Caterham’s house Chimneys, where he made his debut two years later in The Secret of Chimneys. By 1930 he had also appeared at Chimneys in the novel The Seven Dials Mystery (1929); but audiences for Agatha’s debut play now found the familiar character in his originally intended location.

The 650-seat Royalty Theatre in Dean Street, which had hosted the West End transfer from the Hampstead Everyman of Noël Coward’s The Vortex in 1924, would indeed have been a suitable home for After Dinner, and a Mr L.E. Berman was staging work there at that time. But in the end the producer who took the play on was Alec Rea, who in partnership with Basil Dean had produced Madge’s play The Claimant. The Hughes Massie paperwork relating to Rea’s licence is headed ‘not our sale. For reference only’ and lists the deal as having been done ‘by L.E. Berman’, whose Shaftesbury Avenue address appears on a recently discovered typescript of the play.¹⁷ It seems that Christie’s friend Berman had approached Rea directly with a copy of the play which he must have had in his possession since the early 1920s, thus accounting for the fact that it had not been updated or retyped. Alibi had suddenly put a premium on a Poirot play written by Christie herself and, in a wonderful piece of opportunism, Berman appears to have taken the initiative and presented the script to one of London’s leading producers. One can only imagine that, at the time, Edmund Cork was less than delighted by this development.

The ReandeaN company, which had become one of the West End’s leading producing managements, had experienced a high-profile rollercoaster of success and failure in equal measure. In 1925 Alec Rea had terminated his contract with Basil Dean, appointing the company’s business manager, E.P. Clift, in his place and continuing to trade under the banner of Reandco. Dean’s hectic personal life (a close friendship with the tragic Meggie Albanesi, a divorce and a remarriage), an ill-advised and short-lived attempt by him to juggle the joint managing directorship of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane with his ReandeaN responsibilities, and his not always successful attempts to balance the demands of the company’s ever-growing production portfolio with the need to provide a programme of work for the St Martin’s Theatre, had tested the patience of his mild-mannered business partner to breaking point.

The ending of ReandeaN was not a good thing for either partner, says Basil Dean in his autobiography:

Alec Rea, its financial head, loved the theatre, not because he was a playwright manqué, not because of some professional diva whose interests he sought to advance, but for its own sake. Yet he never really understood it, and his judgement of plays was poor, as the subsequent record shows. He was suspicious of plays breaking fresh ground, especially if they revealed leftist tendencies, a surprising trait in a member of a distinguished Liberal family. His rejection of Shaw’s Heartbreak House was a case in point. Generally speaking, the plays he produced during the remainder of his tenancy of the St Martin’s Theatre with Paul Clift as his manager, lacked distinction and brought only limited commercial success. Yet he deserves high place in the annals of the English Theatre, for as Patrick Hastings [an MP and barrister who wrote plays produced by ReandeaN] pointed out in his autobiography: ‘ReandeaN was virtually the last organised management under a private patron.’

The parting was largely my fault. I should have restrained my impatience to conquer on so many fields at once … When all’s said I owe Alec Rea an incalculable debt, for without his warm friendship and loyal support during my early struggles I might not have achieved anything very much.¹⁸

After the end of ReandeaN, Alec Rea and Basil Dean continued to be linked by a number of joint business ventures, but the partnership was effectively over. Rea’s new company, Reandco, continued its involvement with the St Martin’s and then, in September 1930, announced that it had also taken over the lease of the Embassy Theatre in Swiss Cottage and was establishing a repertory company there, a move that was widely welcomed in the theatrical community. Sydney W. Carroll, who two years later was himself to found the Regents Park Open Air Theatre, wrote in the Daily Telegraph, under the heading ‘Latest Repertory Idea’,

Keep both eyes on the Embassy Theatre, Swiss Cottage, Hampstead. It is a beacon flaming on the heights that overlook London. It can only be seen, at the moment, gallantly flickering through the fog. But when the mists break and the sky grows clear the blaze will be apparent to all theatre lovers, brilliant and leaping to the sky … It is a Repertory venture, and out of repertory and repertory alone will come salvation for modern theatre. The Embassy has recently been taken over by Alec L. Rea, a manager who has been creditably associated with the repertory movement for years, first chairman of the Liverpool Repertory Company, a position he held for six years, and who, in conjunction with Basil Dean, has been identified with some of the most notable and distinguished productions in the West-end theatre of recent years.

Mr Rea believes, as I do, that actors must be properly and thoroughly trained. They must get constant exercise in their craft. And repertory, with its quick succession of different experiences in play by play, offers the young actor and actress the ideal and only public opportunity for a thorough practical grounding in the actor’s art. Nothing is more deadening to the mind, the soul, and the sensibilities of a player than to be compelled to enact the same role night after night for months …

Mr Rea is ambitious of finding, with the aid of the Embassy, new players, new dramatists with original ideas. He hopes after the fashion of Miss Horniman at Manchester to found a school of young playwrights. He has catholic tastes and aspirations. His arms embrace equally both classic and commercial. He will do his best to encourage both highbrow and box-office alternately in the hope of making a unison ultimately between them …¹⁹

The Embassy Theatre had opened in 1928 in a building that had originally housed the Hampstead Conservatoire of Music. It initially operated as a ‘try-out house’, much like the ‘Q’ Theatre at Kew Bridge, giving often challenging plays a run of a fortnight in the hope that they might prove attractive to West End managements; but prior to Rea’s takeover its programming had become increasingly ad hoc. The short-lived Everyman Theatre in nearby Hampstead had served much the same purpose from 1920 to 1926, and had enjoyed a number of West End transfers before a succession of box office failures forced its closure; and it is the Everyman that Christie erroneously credits in her autobiography as the theatre which premiered her own play. Such theatres always found it difficult to maintain a permanent company of actors on the salaries they could offer, and it was Rea’s commitment to establishing a full-time team of players at the Embassy in a proper two-weekly repertory system that endeared him to the theatrical establishment.

The permanent ensemble of performers, who Sydney W. Carroll described as ‘remarkably talented’, included Joyce Bland, Judy Menteath, Francis L. Sullivan, John Boxer and Donald Wolfit, all of whom were to appear in Christie’s play, and Andre van Gyseghem, who directed it. Robert Donat also appeared regularly, though not in this particular production, and further performers were engaged on a show-by-show basis as required. ‘These facts,’ concludes Carroll, ‘are of sufficient importance and interest to justify circulation all over Greater London. Already, I understand, people are coming from considerable distances to see the art of these players, and my own experience of their work leads me cordially to recommend them to the public patronage.’

Rea’s creative partner in the venture was A.R. Whatmore, who had been running the Hull Repertory Theatre Company to great acclaim for the previous six years. And, of course, if any of the productions did merit a West End transfer, then Rea still owned the lease on the St Martin’s, so such a thing would be easy enough to facilitate.

Agatha’s excitement at being included in the opening season of this widely publicised venture was justified. In an early November 1930 letter to Max, who had returned to the excavations at Ur, she wrote: ‘Very exciting – I heard this morning an aged play of mine is going to be done at the Embassy Theatre for a fortnight with the chance of being given West End production by the Reandco – of course nothing may come of it – but it’s exciting anyway – shall have to go to town for a rehearsal or two end of November, I suspect – I wish you were here to share the fun (and the agony when things go wrong and everyone forgets their part!!) But it’s awfully fun all the same.’²⁰

After Dinner was licensed to Reandco on 18 November 1930, for a two-week try-out at the Embassy Theatre within three months, with a West End option to be taken up within six weeks of the Embassy production on payment of £100. The Lord Chamberlain’s office issued a licence on 4 December to the play – which was now called Black Coffee, the title having been changed by hand on the script they received²¹ and the production opened on 8 December. To today’s theatre producers these lead-times would seem unfeasible, but with a permanent company on retainer, and rehearsing the next show whilst playing the current one, the repertory system allowed for the confirmation of future programming to be left until the very last minute. The extraordinary logistics of scheduling in the London and regional repertory theatres and London ‘try-out’ theatres at this time, and the manner in which they constantly fed new productions into the West End system alongside a seemingly inexhaustible supply of new plays generated by the West End’s own managements, all of it without the benefit of a penny of public subsidy, makes the operation of today’s theatre industry look positively leisurely.

On 26 November Agatha wrote to Max from Ashfield: ‘“After Dinner” or (according to my Sunday Times which seems to know more than I do!) “Black Coffee” – comes on on Dec 8th so I will have to go up to town for rehearsals next week … Six eminent detective story writers have been asked to broadcast again – we’re all getting together on December 5th to plan the thing out a bit – Me, Dorothy Sayers, Clemence Dane, Anthony Berkeley EC Bentley and Freeman Wills Croft … all rather fun.’²²

Here she is referring to a project which was to be broadcast on the radio in early 1931, in which members of the Detection Club created a sort of literary game of consequences, each writing and broadcasting an episode of a crime story which was to be aired over a number of weeks. The Detection Club, comprising the elite of British crime writers, had undertaken a similar project with great success in 1930, and the authors contributed their income from the BBC to the club’s coffers.

In 1928 Clemence Dane had co-authored with Helen Simpson the first of two crime novels she was to pen, Enter Sir John, about an actress wrongly convicted of murder. Filmed as Murder! by Alfred Hitchcock in 1930, it earned Dane a place in the Detection Club. I do hope that Agatha and Clemence Dane did actually meet on 5 December. The successful forty-two-year-old playwright who had just published her first detective novel and the successful forty-year-old detective novelist, who was about to have her own first play performed, would have got on well, I think. Clemence Dane’s name appears on a reading list of Agatha’s in one of her notebooks.

The opening night of Black Coffee at the Embassy was a success. Although Max was absent, Agatha’s sister Madge was in the audience, just as Agatha had been for The Claimant six years previously, and with Madge was her husband, James, along with his sister Nan and her husband George Kon. Agatha wrote to Max two days after the opening:

Oh it has all been fun – Black Coffee. I mean it was fun going to rehearsals and everything went splendidly on the night itself except that when the girl said (in great agitation!): ‘This door won’t open!’ it immediately did! Something like that always happens on a first night. They had a larger audience … than they’ve ever had before, and the Repertory Company were so pleased … The girl was awfully good – couldn’t have had anyone better – well, let us hope ‘something will come of it’ as they say – preferably in May. The Reandco have an option for six months. I do hope they take it up. This week has been simply hectic.²³

The actress she so admired playing the role of Lucia Amory was Joyce Bland, who had just completed a busy and successful season at Stratford. Agatha was wrong about the length of the West End option; Reandco actually had six weeks in which to take it up, and they did, although a log-jam of productions at the St Martin’s meant that, following the two-week run at the Embassy in December 1930, the play would not appear in the West End until the following April.

Although there is a sub-plot relating to spies, and a remarkably prescient storyline relating to weapons of mass destruction created by ‘disintegration of the atom’, Black Coffee is, to all intents and purposes, an efficient and well-crafted, if relatively simple, country house murder mystery. It engages both some of the plot devices and some of the characters – not only Poirot but also Captain Hastings and Inspector Japp – who, at the most likely time of the play’s writing, had just been introduced to the public in Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Black Coffee thus ticks all the boxes for a ‘typical Agatha Christie play’ and, ironically, was both the first and last that she wrote in this idiom.

As with Alibi, Christie’s own principal concern was with the portrayal of Poirot. Although she ultimately preferred Francis L. Sullivan’s interpretation to Charles Laughton’s, she laments in her autobiography, ‘It always seems strange to me that whoever plays Poirot is always an outsize man. Charles Laughton had plenty of avoirdupois, and Francis Sullivan was broad, thick and about 6’2” tall.’²⁴

Sullivan, like Laughton, saw Poirot as an ideal vehicle for his talents, and had actually first performed the role in the post-West End tour of Alibi. In fact he made something of a career of being the poor man’s Charles Laughton, not only taking over his role in Alibi but also starring in a 1942 revival of A Man With Red Hair. Sullivan would receive his final ‘review’ in 1956 in the form of his Times obituary, which opined, ‘Corpulence, sharp eyes embedded in florid features, and a deep, plummy voice suited him admirably for the part of the suave but foxy lawyer. He was generally too much of a caricature to be unrelievedly sinister, and though he was sometimes cast as a comic, his talents were wasted if there was no streak of evil in the part. His acting had a wider range than his exaggerated physique might suggest. He was an obvious choice for Bottom, and perhaps for Mr Bumble, but not for Hercule Poirot …’²⁵

Although Christie had objected to the amorous antics of a French ‘Beau Poirot’ in Alibi, she was not above introducing an element of romantic frisson when it came to her own portrayal of her Belgian sleuth. Here are the final moments of Alibi, as performed by Charles Laughton:

CARYL (softly) I don’t care what anyone says, you will always be “Beau Poirot” to me! (holds out her hand) Good-night!

POIROT: (Taking both her hands, kisses first one, then the other) Good-bye. (Still holding her hands) Believe me, Mees

Caryl, I do everything possible to be of service to you!

(drops her hands)

(CARYL goes out)

Good-bye!

POIROT stands at the open window looking out after her as the Curtain slowly falls.²⁶

And here are the not dissimilar final moments of Black Coffee, written several years before Alibi, in the original script approved by the Lord Chamberlain and performed by Francis L. Sullivan at the Embassy:

LUCIA: M Poirot – (she holds out both hands to him)

Do not think that I shall ever forget …

(Lucia raises her face. Poirot kisses her.)

(She goes back to Richard [her husband]. Lucia and Richard go out together … Poirot mechanically straightens things on the centre table but with his eyes fixed on the door through which Lucia has passed.)

POIROT: Neither – shall I – forget.²⁷

Reviews from the Embassy, as with Alibi, inevitably focused largely on the interpretation of Poirot. ‘Mr Sullivan is obviously very happy in the part, and his contribution to the evening’s entertainment is a considerable one,’ said The Times.²⁸ Amongst the other characters are Dr Carelli – played at the Embassy by Donald Wolfit – the archetypal Christie ‘unexpected guest’ who has echoes in The Mousetrap’s Mr Paravicini; and, more interestingly, a wittily executed portrayal of a young ‘flapper’ girl, the murder victim’s niece. The flapper phenomenon was at its height in 1922, as a generation of young women threw off the restrictions of the Victorian and Edwardian era and defined their own agenda in terms of fashion, entertainment and social interaction with men. The sexual revolution of the 1920s, in its subversion of what went before it, was arguably far more radical than anything that happened in the 1960s, and although Agatha herself would have been a decade too old to qualify as a flapper or to embrace their style and philosophy, there is a distinct affection in her writing for what they stood for, albeit informed by her trademark observational humour. In Black Coffee, Barbara Amory is described as ‘an extremely modern young woman of twenty-one’. She dances to records on the gramophone and flirts mercilessly with Hastings, describing him as ‘pre-war’ (‘Victorian’ in the original script) and exhorting him to ‘come and be vamped’. When criticised by her aunt for the brightness of her lipstick, she responds, ‘take it from me, a girl simply can’t have too much red on her lips. She never knows how much she is going to lose in the taxi coming home.’

When the play did finally open in the West End, at the St Martin’s Theatre, it was in a much-changed production. Christie had undertaken rewrites, as she had felt that her ‘aged’ play seemed out of date when she saw it at the Embassy. ‘Have been working very hard on Black Coffee. Some scenes were a little old fashioned, I thought,’²⁹ she wrote to Max. Tricks she uses in order to achieve a more ‘contemporary’ feel include a joke about the brand-name vitamins Bemax, which were advertised widely in 1930. The script published by Arthur Ashley in 1934 included these changes, along with the following more straight-laced version of the final scene:

LUCIA: (Down to Poirot, takes his hand, she also has Richard’s hand) M.Poirot, do not think I shall forget – ever.

POIROT: Neither shall I forget (kisses her hand.)

(Lucia and Richard go out together through window. [Poirot] follows them to window, and calls out after them.)

POIROT: Bless you, mes enfants! Ah-h!

(Moves to the fireplace, clicks his tongue and straightens the spill vases.)³⁰

At the Embassy, Black Coffee had been directed by Andre van Gyseghem, a radical young director who, as a RADA-trained actor, had worked for the theatre’s creative head A.R. Whatmore in his previous post at the Hull Repertory Theatre. A leading light of the Workers’ Theatre Movement, van Gyseghem was to become a member of the Communist Party and a frequent visitor to the Soviet Union, and later penned a surprisingly readable book entitled Theatre in Soviet Russia (1943). The West End production of Black Coffee was redirected by Oxford-educated Douglas Clarke-Smith, an actor-director who appears to have had no association with the Embassy, but who had cut his teeth at Birmingham Rep after distinguished service in the First World War, and who went on to direct over twenty productions for pioneering touring group the Lena Ashwell Players, the peacetime incarnation of the company that had provided entertainment for the troops throughout the conflict.

As well as a new director, all but one of the supporting cast to Sullivan’s Poirot were also new to the piece. Joyce Bland was amongst those who were replaced, along with van Gyseghem himself, who had doubled his directing duties with the small but significant role of Edward Raynor. Given that the delay in transferring had allowed for the luxury of a new rehearsal period, the Embassy had clearly decided not to commit too many of their core ensemble to a potentially lengthy West End run. On 9 April 1931, the day Alec Rea presented the West End premiere of Black Coffee, The Times was listing attractions at thirty-one West End theatres, including revivals of Shaw’s Man and Superman at the Court, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler at the Fortune and Somerset Maugham’s The Circle at the Vaudeville. At the Queen’s Theatre, Rudolf Besier’s The Barretts of Wimpole Street, directed by Barry Jackson, was advertising itself as ‘London’s Longest Run’ (which, of the productions then running in London, it was; it went on to complete 530 performances).

In the end, Black Coffee itself was to enjoy only a very short West End run. Reviews of the new production were not unfavourable, and the Observer’s influential Ivor Brown noted, ‘Mr Francis Sullivan prudently refraining from a Charles Laughton pastiche does not tie the “character” labels all over the part, but plays it quietly and firmly, trusting that the story will do its own work of entertainment.’ But he concluded, ‘Black Coffee is supposed to be a strong stimulant and powerful enemy of sleep. I found the title optimistic.’³¹

Reandco soon found that they needed the St Martin’s in order to gain a West End foothold for another production; as The Times reported: ‘In order that Messrs. Reandco may present Mr Ronald Jeans’s new play Lean Harvest at the St Martin’s Theatre on Thursday next, Mrs Agatha Christie’s play Black Coffee will be transferred on Monday to the Wimbledon Theatre, and on the following Monday, May 11, it will resume its interrupted run at the Little Theatre.’³² Although Reandco owned the lease on the St Martin’s, Bertie Meyer remained the building’s licensee on behalf of its freeholders, the Willoughby de Broke family. Having enjoyed a successful association with the Little Theatre as a producer, he was doubtless instrumental in facilitating Black Coffee’s transfer there, although he was not directly involved with the production. Black Coffee was sent away from the West End to Wimbledon in order to fill an unsatisfactory week’s gap between its scheduling at the St Martin’s and the Little. But the production never really recovered from this disruption, and closed on 13 June.

Between the St Martin’s and the Little Theatre, Black Coffee had completed a total of sixty-seven West End performances over two months, which was, at least, slightly longer than The Claimant’s run. It was to be more than twenty years until the premiere of the next Christie play that was not based on one of her novels.

Agatha herself had missed her West End debut as a playwright in order to join her new husband at the archaeological dig in Ur. In the autumn of 1931 Max Mallowan relocated his archaeological work in Iraq to Nineveh, and at Christmas Agatha hurried home in the hope of catching the premiere of Chimneys, which Reandco had now scheduled for a December opening at the Embassy, clearly in the hope of enabling a West End transfer as they had done the previous year with Black Coffee.

The fate of Chimneys has taken on an almost mythical status amongst Christie scholars as a ‘play that never was’. Having been advertised as opening at the Embassy, gone into rehearsal and been licensed by the Lord Chamberlain, it suddenly disappeared from their schedule, apparently without explanation. It was not heard of again until it was unearthed by Canadian director John Paul Fishbach in 2001 and given its world premiere in Calgary in 2003, almost twenty-eight years after Christie’s death. As is often the case with matters theatrical, however, the reality of the ‘Chimneys mystery’ was far more prosaic than may at first appear, and those previously attempting to establish the facts of the matter may have enjoyed more success if Agatha had dated her letters with the year as well as the day and month. Once her letters are placed in the correct sequence, the order of events surrounding the cancelled production becomes apparent.

There are in fact no fewer than four copies of the script amongst Christie’s papers, all of them very similar. Three of these are duplicates, two clearly dated 5 July 1928 by the Marshall’s typing agency stamp and carrying Agatha’s address in Ashfield, Torquay. The unstamped duplicate carries the Hughes Massie label and has been annotated in pencil by the actress playing the role of Bundle. The fourth copy includes some slight variations in the typescript and handwritten notes by Agatha, and has the Hughes Massie address handwritten on it. The first point to establish, therefore, is that the script itself never actually ‘disappeared’, even if the scheduled premiere production appears to have done; assuming that Fishbach’s copy is now amongst those at the archive, we know of at least four other ‘originals’, including the one lodged with the Lord Chamberlain’s office. Hughes Massie’s records show that Reandco acquired the rights in the play as early as 22 April 1931, shortly after the opening of their West End run of Black Coffee, for production at the Embassy Theatre within six months of signature and with a West End option to be taken up within six weeks of the Embassy production.³³ This time the sale had been co-ordinated by Hughes Massie themselves. As was standard practice, the royalties payable by the Embassy, as a small repertory theatre, were at the reduced rate of 5 per cent of box office income. Although the scheduling of the production would be subject to the vagaries of the repertory system and its short lead times, Reandco clearly wanted to ensure that the next Christie play would appear as part of their own repertoire rather than someone else’s.

The Times of Thursday 19 November 1931 duly announced that ‘The next production at the Embassy Theatre will be Chimneys, by Agatha Christie, which Mr A.R. Whatmore will produce [i.e. direct] on Thursday 1 December.’ This was slightly outside their six-month option period, but that would not have been an issue for a management of good standing who had given Christie her West End premiere, and an informal extension of the option had doubtless been negotiated. Based on the previous year’s experience, Rea and Whatmore clearly felt that a pre-Christmas Christie at the Embassy was a good formula for box-office success.

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

Viewers will be the first to see this Agatha Christie play, which has never previously been performed anywhere. Francis L. Sullivan, who will bring to the television screen the famous detective character, Hercule Poirot, originally made a great hit in another Poirot play, Alibi, which he toured for almost a year, and subsequently in the same characterisation in Black Coffee. In addition to being familiar to theatre audiences in New York, London and Stratford upon Avon, he has appeared in a number of films, amongst them Jew Suss, Great Expectations, Chu Chin Chow and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The character of Poirot is one of his favourite parts, and with the exception of a notable portrayal by Charles Laughton, the character has been almost permanently associated with him for the past six years.³

A myth has grown up that the play was actually written by Christie for television and, as such, is her only work for the medium. The contractual trail, however, makes it clear that she originally wrote it for theatrical presentation, and that it was subsequently sold to the BBC for the princely sum of £4, and simply broadcast as written. The BBC Television Service had been established at Alexandra Palace the previous year, and the broadcasting of drama was in its infancy, so the straightforward live transmission of a short stage script would have been entirely in keeping with the methodologies of the day.

Significantly, the script itself does not immediately lend itself to presentation as part of a variety bill, either in the context of a gala event or a music hall presentation. It is a gentle four-hander concerning a love triangle and the redeployment to murderous purpose of the cyanide being used to destroy a wasp’s nest. Poirot is at his most contemplative and unshowy. There is nothing at all ‘Guignol’ about the piece, and the murder is prevented before it can actually take place. It is almost as if Christie had deliberately undermined the brief that she had been given in order to avoid Poirot being reduced to a music hall turn. Yet, although Christie herself had no interest in television – far from being a pioneering dramatist in the medium, she positively disliked it – all of these qualities in the script make the piece perfectly suited to presentation as a television studio drama. It seems likely that it was Sullivan himself who identified and promoted this opportunity, thereby securing himself a place in history as television’s first Poirot.

A 1949 letter from Edmund Cork to Christie’s American agent, Harold Ober, provides an interesting postscript to the Wasp’s Nest affair. ‘The Mallowans have just gone off to Baghdad for five months, and Agatha has left me with her power of Attorney and instructions not to trouble her about any business matter!’ says Cork, before going on to discuss the issue of an American offer for Poirot television rights. He advises Ober against accepting the deal due to problems that Christie was experiencing with the American tax authorities, and also because ‘television is so much in its infancy that there is the danger that rights may be disposed of now for trifling royalties that would otherwise be extremely valuable in the future – I believe many mistakes were made in the early days of movies.’⁴

This remarkably prescient advice undoubtedly paved the way for more lucrative deals in the future and is an insight into the dilemmas faced by those responsible at the time for licensing intellectual property rights in the ‘new media’ of radio, film and television; not dissimilar to the challenges currently faced by those licensing work for use on the similarly unknown quantity of the internet. There had also been an enquiry about Sullivan reprising The Wasp’s Nest on television in the USA. Cork continues:

I think, however, I ought to explain the personal background. Francis Sullivan is a close friend of the author of many years standing, and The Wasp’s Nest, which was originally a short story written in 1928, was dramatised for Sullivan to appear in at a charity matinee in 1932. He has always regarded the play as more or less his, although in point of fact he has no rights in it, and the author received the fee when it was televised by the BBC in 1937. Sullivan, like many successful actors, is a most temperamental person, and makes the most of his personal standing with Agatha whenever we have had to refuse him his own way. He is certainly making a lot of excitement over this proposed production … and while I do not want to influence you in any way, it might make life momentarily simpler if Larry Sullivan got his way!

I shall leave it to television historians to establish whether the production actually took place, as we return to the world of theatre, but I do rather like Cork’s frank appraisal of Francis L. Sullivan, who was widely known as ‘Larry’ (though the ‘L’ in his name actually stood for ‘Loftus’).

The next full-length play based on Christie’s work to receive a West End production was Love From a Stranger, which opened at the New Theatre on 31 March 1936 for a relatively successful run of 149 performances, and was purportedly adapted by Frank Vosper from her short story ‘Philomel Cottage’.

The story itself was first published in the Grand Magazine in November 1924, and was included in the collection The Listerdale Mystery ten years later. It is the gripping and dramatic tale of a woman who unexpectedly inherits a sizeable sum of money, effectively liberating her to reject her uninspiring and prevaricating suitor in favour of an alliance with a man who she has just met and about whose background she knows nothing. They settle in the country, in apparently blissful surroundings, but her new husband turns out to be a notorious wife murderer and she, it appears, is intended to be his next victim. In an astonishingly tense final scene she manages to outwit him and turn the tables by herself pretending to be a killer. The short story picks up the narrative at the point where they have moved into Philomel Cottage and are apparently living in wedded bliss. The two-hander denouement and country cottage location are echoed in one of Christie’s four scripts for radio, 1948’s Butter In a Lordly Dish; and the mythical serial wife murderer Bluebeard, who featured in one of Agatha’s youthful dramatic enterprises, would again be the inspiration for a villain in her 1954 radio script Personal Call. As for the story’s premise, the excitement of striking up a relationship with a stranger is a sensation that was not unfamiliar to Christie herself; in her autobiography she observes, ‘Archie and I were poles apart in our reactions to things. I think that from the start that fascinated us. It is the old excitement of “the stranger”.’⁵ As Christie herself well knew, however, there can be a price to pay for such adventuring. In 1924, when the story was published, she was still living with Archie at Sunningdale and, I believe, about to write the play The Lie.

‘Philomel Cottage’ is an intense and engaging psychological thriller, a battle of wills between two people which examines the extremes to which the power of suggestion can be pushed. There is (technically) no murder and there is no detective to pull focus. The setting is straightforward, there are two central characters and a minimal supporting dramatis personae, and there are echoes of Grand Guignol in its construction. It is, in short, ideal for dramatic adaptation. Which is why Agatha Christie chose to adapt it herself, as her fifth full-length stage play.

The Agatha Christie archive contains two copies of a script called ‘The Stranger’, a three-act play ‘by Agatha Christie’ which carries a typist’s stamp dated 10 March 1932, two years before the short story was to appear in the collection The Listerdale Mystery and three years before Frank Vosper was licensed by Hughes Massie to create his own adaptation. Not that he did.

Vosper, who was nine years younger than Christie, was already an established and popular stage and screen actor and playwright by the time he became involved with the project. He had started his career immediately after the First World War, doing tours of military camps for Basil Dean, and in 1926 scored a hit in the role of Joe Varwell in Eden and Adelaide Phillpotts’ Yellow Sands at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. As a playwright he was known for writing pieces in which he could cast himself in the lead, notably Murder on the Second Floor and People Like Us (both 1929) and Marry at Leisure (1931). Murder on the Second Floor had been a particular success, playing for over 300 performances in London, with Vosper taking the central role of playwright Hugh Bromilow, although when the production transferred to New York with an English cast, Laurence Olivier took over the role. Vosper was an amateur criminologist (he listed his interests in Who’s Who in the Theatre as ‘criminology and blackberrying’), so it was hardly surprising that he found Christie’s psychological study of a serial killer intriguing. Here was a perfect subject for him as a playwright, and one in which he could assay the leading role of a charismatic and attractive villain.

What has been overlooked is that Vosper’s source material for the play that he eventually called Love From a Stranger was not in fact Christie’s short story, but her own unpublished, unperformed full-length play based upon it. Although the script of Love From a Stranger, like the advertising for it at the time, credited the piece as being ‘by Frank Vosper, based on a story by Agatha Christie’, there has always been some disagreement amongst commentators as to whether Christie herself contributed to Vosper’s adaptation. The version submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s office, although it carries Vosper’s address, clearly states ‘by Agatha Christie and Frank Vosper’, and Vosper’s Times obituary categorises the play as a ‘collaboration’ with Christie.⁶ Gwen Taylor, intriguingly, writes that Christie was ‘helped by Frank Vosper’ to adapt the story into a play.⁷ But Charles Osborne, who is usually a reliable source on the plays, states categorically, and entirely wrongly, that ‘Other writers on Agatha Christie have described the play as having been adapted jointly by Christie and Vosper. This is incorrect: it was the work of Frank Vosper alone, and the credit for its shape and dialogue must be entirely his.’⁸

Nothing could, in fact, be further from the truth. Hughes Massie’s summary of the adaptation licence issued to Vosper on 1 February 1935 clearly shows that his play is to be based on both ‘The Stranger’ and ‘Philomel Cottage’, with Christie’s own dramatisation listed first.⁹ The entire dramatic structure of Vosper’s piece, which interpolates additional scenes prior to the starting point of the short story before leading to the same terrifying denouement, is in fact the uncredited work of Agatha Christie, playwright.

In fact, Christie’s is arguably the better play. Her adaptation is fast-moving, witty and suspenseful, a neat six-hander with three acts of one scene each. Vosper increases the dramatis personae to eight, and divides each act into two scenes. It becomes a long-winded affair in which the leading male role has clearly been built up as a star vehicle for himself, to the detriment of that of the female protagonist, with whose predicament we engage more fully in Christie’s own version. Most significantly, the conceit of two independent young women giving up their London flat following a sweepstake win, and the eponymous ‘stranger’ turning up to look round it as a prospective tenant, as well as the entire ‘love from a stranger’ motif, are all absent from the short story and are intrinsic to Christie’s play. In the short story’s own back-story, our heroine simply inherits her windfall and meets the stranger at a friend’s party.

It doesn’t help in establishing the facts that Christie’s own memory on the subject was unreliable. In 1968 she wrote thus to a Californian student who had requested information about her plays for his thesis: ‘Love from a Stranger was originally a short story written by me called Philomel Cottage. I re-wrote this as a one act play, Love from a Stranger, and agreed to Frank Vosper extending it into a three act play. The two first acts being his, and the third act being principally the one act play as I had written it.’¹⁰ Although this is incorrect in its detail, it clearly establishes that she was the first to adapt the story as a play and that Vosper used her own playscript as his source material. Whilst the early sections of Vosper’s play clearly owe their structure to Christie’s adaptation, it is indeed in the final act where the textual similarities are most striking. Here is an extract from Christie’s The Stranger:

GERALD: All the trouble women get, they usually deserve. They’ve no sense – absolutely no sense.

ENID: I expect that’s true sometimes.

GERALD: Born fools, the little angels! (Kisses the tips of his fingers) Woman’s weakness is man’s opportunity. Did Shakespeare say that or did I think of it myself? I believe I thought of it. If so, it’s good, it’s damned good!

ENID: Have some more port? …

GERALD: I’m a remarkable man. I’m – well – different to other men.

ENID: Yes, I think you are.

GERALD: I’ve a lot of power over women for instance. I’ve always had it. I discovered quite young that I could twist women round my little finger. It’s like a useful gift. Boyish – that’s the note they like. Makes them feel maternal. The eternal boy – it fetches every time.¹¹

And the corresponding section in Vosper’s Love From a Stranger:

BRUCE: You’re a sensible girl, aren’t you?

CECILY: How do you mean?

BRUCE: You don’t ‘go on’ at a man. Very few women can say ‘Oh, all right,’ and leave it at that … But, then, most women are fools. (He smiles to himself)

CECILY: (trying to be conversational) Do you think so?

BRUCE: I don’t think, I know – born fools! …

CECILY: Perhaps you’re right.

BRUCE: And women’s weakness is man’s opportunity. Did someone write that, or did I think of it myself? – If I did it’s good, damn good! ‘Women’s weakness is man’s opportunity.’

CECILY: You have extraordinary insight into things. Have some more coffee.

BRUCE: Please … Yes, you’re right, I have great insight. I’ve a lot of power over women. I discovered quite early in life that I could twist women round my little finger. It’s a useful gift.

CECILY: It must be.

BRUCE: Boyish – that’s the note they like – makes them feel sort of maternal … It gets them every time …¹²

The characters, as it happens, get through three names each, from their first appearance in the story to Vosper’s script via Christie’s. The original story’s female protagonist, Alix Martin, becomes Enid Bradshaw in Christie’s play and Cecily Harrington in Vosper’s. The abandoned suitor, who, in another echo of Christie’s own experience, becomes an abandoned fiancé in both her dramatisation and Vosper’s, similarly morphs from Dick Windyford to Dick Lane to Nigel Lawrence, and the story’s murderous husband, Gerald Martin, becomes Gerald Strange and eventually Bruce Lovell. Enid’s female friend Doris West, a character introduced in Christie’s play, becomes Cecily’s friend Mavis Wilson in Vosper’s. Christie’s script keeps the cast to an absolute minimum: Enid Bradshaw, Doris, the two men in Enid’s life and a pessimistic but highly entertaining housekeeper in each of her London and country properties. The two housekeepers, Mrs Huggins and Mrs Birch, each outdo the other in their condemnation of the male sex, and are particularly sorely missed in Vosper’s script, which clumsily introduces a gardener from the original story, and adds a maid, a doctor and an unnecessary comic aunt to the cast list.

Mrs Huggins is clearly cast from the same mould as Stevens in Eugenia and Eugenics:

MAVIS: According to you Mrs Huggins, married life is a continuous battle.

MRS HUGGINS: And so it is, Miss. With one party always defeated. And what I say is this – take care as you’re the winning party from the start!

She goes on to sing to herself, ‘tunelessly’ and prophetically, ‘It brings you but trouble and danger to listen to Love from a stranger’, thereby giving Vosper the title of his version of the play. When Enid arrives at Philomel Cottage, the idyll is somewhat undermined by the presence of Mrs Birch, who ‘has none of Mrs Huggins’ cheerful pessimism’ and who has discovered that her own husband is a bigamist.

Since the Hughes Massie correspondence archives relating to Christie’s work do not commence until 1940, quite how or why Christie handed over her script and the credit for it to Vosper, not to mention 50 per cent of the theatrical royalty and film rights income, is unclear. One can imagine, though, that he may have been approached about playing the role of Strange and made his own authorship a condition of his involvement. Like Laughton and Sullivan before him, Vosper evidently saw Christie’s work as a vehicle for advancing his own career, and in engaging with it as such inadvertently conspired to delay and compromise the arrival of an interesting new female playwriting voice.

Vosper’s option gave him a year to write the piece and get it produced in the West End but, as he neared completion of the script, an unexpected problem arose. Thirty-six-year-old actor/writer Vosper was a friend of thirty-year-old actor/writer Emlyn Williams, who tells the extraordinary story in his autobiography of being invited to dinner at Vosper’s house late in 1935:

One night we were at Frank Vosper’s house in St John’s Wood. I liked him more and more, for his generous character and for the sensitive talent under the buffoonery. He mentioned that he was in the middle of writing a new play. I mentioned that I was too and he asked me how mine was getting on …

‘What’s yours about, or aren’t you telling?

‘Oh, it’s another murder play …’

He looked at me. ‘Really? So’s mine.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘Based on an Agatha Christie short story.’ That sounded safe.

‘A detective play like Alibi?’

‘Oh no, not a mystery. I’ve turned it round so I could base it on the Patrick Mahon case.’

I stared at him. He went on. ‘D’you remember it? He cut the woman up and no-one would believe it, he was such a charmer.’

I had to say something. ‘Mine’s about a charmer too, who cuts up a woman.’

It was his turn to stare. ‘Is there a girl who falls for him?’

‘Yes.’

‘What are you calling yours?’

I told him.

‘Good title. Mine’s Love From a Stranger.’

That was a good title too. They were interchangeable. Then he said, ‘Are you by any chance writing a part for yourself?’

‘Yes.’

‘So am I. Who d’you have in mind for the girl’s part?’

‘A star if possible,’ I said, ‘emotional but with restraint. Edna Best, for instance.’

‘I’ve just written asking her if she’ll read my play when it’s finished.’

Another silence. Then he beamed and added, ‘Just as well we like each other. We need a drink.’¹³

And so started the astonishing parallel histories of Emlyn Williams’ breakthrough play, Night Must Fall, and Vosper’s Christie adaptation. Perhaps as a result of this conversation, Vosper appears not to have pursued the Patrick Mahon angle. Mahon was a killer notorious for having dismembered his victim in a gruesome 1924 murder case, and although this aspect of the murder in question adds a dramatic frisson to Night Must Fall, it would have been an unnecessary embellishment to Christie’s work. Nonetheless, from their beginnings in Scotland to their eventual Broadway presentations, the two plays continued to dog each other’s progress.

That both writers should have been in pursuit of zEdna Best to play the female lead in their plays was not surprising. Best had been the talk of the town ten years previously when she appeared alongside Noël Coward (replaced soon after opening by John Gielgud) in Margaret Kennedy’s The Constant Nymph, produced, directed and co-adapted from Kennedy’s novel of adolescent sexuality by Basil Dean. She had previously been part of the regular ReandeaN ensemble, playing Meggie Albanesi’s twin sister in Lilies of the Field in 1923. ‘Two of the most popular young actresses of the day’, according to Dean, although Best, he observed, was ‘always true to the limitation of her own talent’.¹⁴ The fact that in 1935 she chose Vosper’s play rather than Williams’ may have had something to do with the fact that they had worked together the previous year in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much. But although Vosper had secured his leading lady of choice, he himself was not in the cast when the production’s pre-West End tour opened in the spring of 1935. On 17 March the Observer had announced that ‘Miss Edna Best and Mr Frank Vosper are to appear together in Love From a Stranger by Mr Vosper and Miss Agatha Christie’, but on 7 April it carried the news that ‘Mr Frank Vosper has given up the leading man’s part in his play, written in collaboration with Miss Agatha Christie, Love From a Stranger. The two chief parts will be played by Mr Basil Sydney and Miss Edna Best.’ The way that Christie’s contribution to the script is acknowledged in these reports is notable; she is credited as joint author of the play rather than simply the writer of a story from which it is adapted. It is unclear what led to this very late change of plan on Vosper’s part; it may be that his instincts told him that the script needed more work and that he felt he could better fulfil his role as writer from a position in the stalls. Basil Sydney, his substitute, was a British film and stage actor who had spent much of his career on Broadway.

The licensing records for Love From a Stranger in the Hughes Massie ledgers are incomplete, but in April 1935 The Stage announced that ‘Hugh Beaumont, of the firm of Moss Empires and Howard & Wyndham Tours Ltd, is busily engaged upon three new productions. One is “Love From A Stranger” by Frank Vosper and Agatha Christie.’¹⁵ There is also reference in the files to correspondence with ‘H M Tennent’;¹⁶ Harry Tennent, along with Beaumont, had set up Moss Empires and Howard & Wyndham Tours Ltd in 1933 to provide touring productions for the theatre-owning chains that were later to form a cornerstone of the notorious cartel that became known as ‘the Group’. And so it was that Hugh ‘Binkie’ Beaumont, of whom we will hear a great deal more, became one of the first producers of plays from the work of Agatha Christie, although one suspects that twenty-six-year-old Beaumont may have been more attracted by Vosper’s charms than by Christie’s talent.

According to Williams, ‘the Stage announced that “Emlyn Williams’ new thriller Night Must Fall will open on 29 April at the King’s Theatre, Edinburgh. On the same evening, Frank Vosper’s new thriller Love From a Stranger will open at the King’s Glasgow.” For one bemused moment I thought the two plays were opening not only on the same night, but in the same theatre.’¹⁷ Love from a Stranger actually premiered at the Theatre Royal Birmingham the previous week, but both plays were well received in Scotland, and Vosper’s cast, and Scottish director Campbell Gullan, were praised by critics. Although Vosper himself did not appear, his sister Margery played the role of the feisty maid Edith and, intriguingly, the dramatis personae included a ninth character, a female role listed simply as ‘A Stranger’, who appears in no versions of the script other than that for this first tour.¹⁸

‘Whichever play got to London first would kill the other, and nothing to be done about it,’ concluded Williams. It seemed to him for a moment that both productions might be competing for a potential West End slot at the Duchess Theatre but, following a short tour, Vosper and Beaumont decided that Vosper should spend some time on rewrites and should re-rehearse the production with himself in the leading role, as had originally been intended. J.B. Priestley was running the Duchess independently of the big theatre-owning cartels at the time, and Night Must Fall opened there on 31 May 1935, running for 436 performances before transferring to London’s Cambridge Theatre where it ran for a further 205. The production was Williams’ first big success as a playwright.

On Sunday 2 February 1936, the revamped version of Love From a Stranger was presented for one performance at Wyndham’s Theatre, with Vosper taking the role of Bruce Lovell and his sister Margery demoted to assistant stage manager. The new production was directed by Murray MacDonald and, in the absence of Edna Best, who was presumably no longer available, the role of Cecily was played by Marie Ney, who had appeared alongside Best in The Constant Nymph. At this time it was common practice to present one-off performances of new plays on Sundays in West End theatres in the hope of securing them a future life. In The Stage’s review of this presentation by one of the ‘Sunday societies’, the 1930 Players, it commented, ‘in the desirable event of the play being put into an evening bill it should be played by the same cast … the play, effectively produced [i.e. directed] by Murray Macdonald, was enthusiastically received by an audience which included many well-known theatrical folk.’¹⁹ This showcase performance had the desired effect: nine days later, Moss Empires and Howard & Wyndham Tours Ltd took up the West End option, opening it at one of their parent company’s own theatres, the New in St Martin’s Lane, on 31 March 1936.

The production was very well reviewed. Ivor Brown in the Observer remarked that ‘this play soon sails away into those profusions of homicidal mania and sadistic frenzy which are the cordials and sweetmeats of this curious age.’ He felt that Vosper’s performance maybe gave the game away too soon: ‘it is unwise to make us so early certain that Lovell is fully qualified for the chairmanship of the United Society of Operative Homicides and Dirty Workers. Or else he should declare himself straight away, as the author-actor of “Night Must Fall” has done.’ But he was full of praise for the ‘authentic and tremendous suspense about the struggle between Bruce and his captive wife’, admiring Vosper’s ‘very clever performance, a first rate study of disintegration’, and Marie Ney’s ‘charming and persuasive picture of the fluttering and rather foolish young woman … with a very powerful grip on the second half of her part, when the amorous lady becomes the Amazon and fiercely fights for her life with wit and grit, since tooth and claw are of no avail.’²⁰

The Times reserved its praise primarily for the final scene, the acting of which ‘could scarcely be bettered’, although it observed that the ‘whole play is an elaborate approach’ to this moment.²¹ Muriel Aked made the most of the gratuitous comedy role of Auntie Loo-Loo and the Daily Herald, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail were prominent in the general chorus of approval. The production moved to the Queen’s Theatre (the owners of which later became major shareholders in H.M. Tennent Ltd) and played for a total of 149 performances; a respectable run, but significantly less successful than Alibi. A month after it opened in the West End, members of the cast could be heard performing live extracts from Love From a Stranger on BBC Radio’s Regional Programme.

Sadly Vosper, like Laughton before him, could not resist the lure of Broadway. On 21 September 1936, he led an American cast, including Jessie Royce Landis (later a Hitchcock regular) as Cecily, in a new production at the Erlanger Theatre, Philadelphia, produced by former press agent Alex Yokel, who had recently enjoyed a huge hit as a producer with Three Men On a Horse. The Broadway production of Love From a Stranger was directed by British former actress Auriol Lee, who had been successful as the director of a number of West End productions, recently and most notably a three-year run of Merton Hodge’s The Wind and the Rain, co-produced by Alec Rea and Moss Empires and Howard & Wyndham Tours Ltd. On 29 September, Love From a Stranger starring Frank Vosper opened at Broadway’s Fulton Theatre. The previous night, Night Must Fall starring Emlyn Williams had opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.

Critics were, understandably, bemused by this sudden influx of British psychopaths. The Daily News commented:

I don’t know how you feel about murder plays, but if you are interested in collecting this season’s crop then you may have both of these for all of me. I shall not be using either of them again …

Frank Vosper is both author and star of Love From A Stranger, which he took from a story by Agatha Christie. Like young Mr Williams of Night Must Fall he rather fancies himself, I gather, in roles of violent contrast and psychological significance …

It might be wiser in the future to import only the last acts of English murder-melodramas; in fact to import the last acts of three such murder-melodramas simultaneously and then, after rewriting them enough to provide a slight continuity, produce them all on one evening as parts of the same thriller.²²

Vosper had chosen Christie’s work as the vehicle for his Broadway acting debut and, like Laughton and Sullivan, was relentless in his self-promotion. The title page of the playbill is clear that this is ‘A new play by Frank Vosper from a story by Agatha Christie’, with his own name in significantly larger type than hers; and the playbill’s text notes:

Frank Vosper adapted Love From a Stranger from an Agatha Christie story as a result of his interest in criminology, a hobby that has long occupied his off-stage moments. He created his present role in the successful production of the drama in London, where he is one of the ranking stage and screen favourites. The account of Mr Vosper’s writing and acting activities takes up two and a half columns in Who’s Who in the Theatre. A remarkable feat, considering he is still in his thirties. He has played in Shaw, Shakespeare, Pirandello at the Haymarket and Old Vic, and countless British movies.²³

The New York Times, however, felt that ‘Mr Vosper has taken this tale from one of Agatha Christie’s stories, and has spun it out to dangerous length … as the leading player Mr Vosper gives the part the works. His interpretation of Bluebeard is a head-holding, shoulder-straightening, partly ranting person instead of a cool and calm characterization that would have seemed more dangerous.’²⁴

The New York Evening Journal concurred: ‘Mr Actor Vosper is in fact almost as disastrous as Mr Author Vosper … until he gets to the aforementioned last act. Until that horror-ridden business he and his fellow players work pretty hard over a play that is so flagrantly inert that I half expected the actors to resort to sticking pins in it. Or, anyway, into the audience.’²⁵

The aforementioned inertia is entirely the result of Vosper’s own unnecessary embellishments of Christie’s original script. Christie’s piece is anything but overblown. It is economical in the extreme, and wastes no time in getting to its deadly point. This is perhaps why she herself remembered it as a one-act play, although she had in fact provided two neatly and wittily executed opening acts. She in any case claimed the denouement as being largely her own work, and it was this element of the play that won critical approval and, in the Grand Guignol tradition, allegedly saw audience members fainting on both sides of the Atlantic.

Love From a Stranger closed at the Fulton after only twenty-nine performances, and Christie’s name had now been associated with two Broadway flops, neither of her own making. It can have been little consolation to Vosper that Night Must Fall only ran for sixty-four; his Broadway acting debut had been an ignominious failure.

Four months later, under the headline ‘Actor Missing from Liner’, The Times ran the story that

Mr Frank Vosper, the stage and film actor and author, was missing from the French liner Paris when she arrived at Plymouth on Saturday from New York. It is believed that Mr Vosper, who was 37, was lost overboard. He was one of several present at an ‘end of voyage party’ in the cabin of Miss Muriel Oxford, aged 22, who won the title ‘Miss Europe’ in 1935, in a beauty contest, and had been undergoing film tests in Hollywood … there is no question of a love affair between herself and Mr Vosper.’²⁶

There certainly was ‘no question’ of such an affair. Vosper’s lover, the twenty-three-year-old actor Peter Willes, later to be a TV producer and friend of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell, was also at the party.

Vosper was short-sighted and may have been drinking, but the location of the porthole he appears to have fallen through in relation to the cabin balcony on which he had apparently been standing alone, seemed to rule out an accident, leading to speculation that he had taken his own life. It seems unlikely that any interaction at the party between Willes and Oxford would have triggered this, but one wonders how the slightly inebriated star, having just made a humiliating exit from Broadway, might have responded to the news of Hollywood’s apparent interest in the ebullient young beauty queen. The press went to town on the story, skirting around the issue of Vosper and Willes’ relationship (homosexuality was not decriminalised in England until 1967), but, after the body was washed up near Eastbourne with one leg and a quantity of cash missing, the coroner returned an open verdict. And so shall we.

Unusually, Collins themselves published Love From a Stranger in both hardback and paperback in 1936, while Samuel French issued their standard ‘acting’ edition for amateurs and repertory companies – with both of which it enjoyed enormous popularity – the following year. In 1937 Basil Rathbone played Gerald Lovell in the first film version of Love From a Stranger and in 1938 Edna Best reprised the role of Cecily on television, playing opposite Bernard Lee.

Christie’s original version of the play appears never to have been performed although, intriguingly, a script called L’Inconnu, with her credited as sole writer, was registered with the French Society of Dramatic Authors in 1935, two months before the UK premiere of Vosper’s version. It was translated by popular French actor Pierre Palau for presentation at the Théâtre Des Deux Masques in Paris, but it is unclear whether the production actually took place.²⁷ In a strange postscript, playwright Louise Page wrote yet another stage adaptation of the story in 2010, which was performed at the Mill at Sonning Theatre under the title of Vosper’s version. Perhaps the people who licensed it were unaware of the two copies of ‘The Stranger by Agatha Christie’ held in the Agatha Christie archive. As her first exercise in expanding a short story for the stage rather than, as had been the case with Chimneys, compressing a novel, it is arguably the best constructed of the five full-length plays that she had written by 1932. Under the circumstances, a third adaptation seems somewhat surplus to requirements.

Christie followed the same model of expanding a short story for what I believe to have been her next full-length script, although like so many of her writings it is, frustratingly, undated. The Mysterious Mr Quin is a collection of short stories published in 1930, having originally appeared in magazines throughout the previous decade, which centre on the enigmatic Harley Quin. Quin’s brief and almost spiritual interventions enable his more corporeal friend, Mr Satterthwaite, to resolve a number of problems and mysteries. Although the setting of the stories is contemporary, the elusive protagonist is inspired by the mythical Harlequin figure which featured in Agatha’s family’s china cabinet and in her script A Masque from Italy. Amongst the stories is ‘The Dead Harlequin’, first published in the American magazine Detective Fiction Weekly in 1929, although neither Quin nor Satterthwaite is technically a detective. The play Someone at the Window expands at length upon the plot of ‘The Dead Harlequin’ but abandons the characters of both Mr Quin and Satterthwaite.

This is the first of many instances where Christie’s dramatisations of her previously published work exclude what appears to be the pivotal character. Following Black Coffee, she never wrote another full-length play featuring Poirot, and her four stage adaptations of novels in which he appears exclude him completely. Similarly, following Superintendent Battle’s appearance in Chimneys, she cut the role when next adapting a work in which he featured, and although it seems that Christie was not averse to the idea of Miss Marple on stage, she herself never wrote a Marple play. In the case of Harley Quin, the very act of physicalising the character would have undermined his spiritual essence. In 1928 there had been a poorly executed film based on one of the stories, and one can well imagine that her worst nightmare would have been the image of Francis L. Sullivan lumbering around a stage in a Harlequin costume.

The Agatha Christie archive holds two loose-leaf draft copies of the script of Someone at the Window; one, which is a duplicate of the other, contains a small number of handwritten amendments. There is also a bound final version which appears to be professionally typed, although there is no agency date stamp in evidence. The address of Lawn Road Flats in Belsize Park, where Christie lived in the early 1940s, has been handwritten on the cover, and another name and address has been heavily crossed out. On close examination, it is that of L.E. Berman, who sold the licence for Black Coffee to the Embassy Theatre, and seems effectively to have been Christie’s play agent at this time.

The play is a 175-page epic, and is Christie’s first theatrical experiment with the themes of time and memory, later to be explored more fully in 1960’s Go Back for Murder. An intriguing two-hander prologue is set in a first class railway carriage in January 1934, following which there is a two-act flashback to ‘the big hall at Carnforth Castle’ in 1919 (very deliberately post-war), and a third-act return to June 1934 in London. In this context, it is a not unreasonable assumption that 1934 is the year of writing, although we should not rule out that it takes place in the past or indeed, being Agatha Christie, in an imaginative leap to the future.

In the opening scene, the two characters who meet in the railway carriage disagree about the potential healing qualities of time:

FRANK: … Time gives you a new angle of vision – the true angle.

SYLVIA: I see what you mean.

FRANK: Doesn’t it help you?

SYLVIA: No, in my case facts were facts.

FRANK: You’re looking at it as it appeared then. I want you to look at it now.

SYLVIA: Nothing can help me but forgetfulness.

FRANK: You can’t forget to order. You can thrust a thing down out of sight – but it’s there still – growing in the dark.²⁸

On a lighter note the artist Frank, who is endearingly described as ‘a big simple looking likeable young man – rather like a friendly dog that hopes it is welcome but is not quite sure about it’, regrets the passing of the Victorian age: ‘I’d love to have lived in the days of good old Victorian melodrama with the heroine turned out into the snow, and a thorough-paced villain with a black moustache. It must have been fun. They did have fun – the Victorians. They had something we haven’t got nowadays – gusto – enjoyment of life.’

The play is brimming with witty banter and social commentary about inter-war Britain, courtesy largely of a pair of society grandes dames who we meet when we go back in time to Carnforth Castle. Mrs Quantock, who is married to a colonel, and her friend Lady Emily, delight in making candid observations about relations between the sexes:

MRS QUANTOCK: My experience of life has taught me that you can trust nothing and no one. Always expect the worst and you’ll be surprised how often you’re right … Take Arthur now – in the regiment he was considered a perfect martinet – but if any woman were to come to him with a hard luck story – why he’d be as soft as butter. He’s much too soft-hearted.

LADY EMILY: It is a good thing he has you to look after him.

MRS QUANTOCK: It takes a woman to see through women. Men say ‘Poor little woman, all the others are so down on her.’

The bitter governess, here in conversation with the seventeen-year-old lady of the house, is similarly cynical on the subject:

MISS GREY: You’ve been living in a fairy tale all your life. (She speaks with real bitterness) You’ve been sheltered and protected. You’ve gone about believing fine things about men and women. Now your eyes are opened and you can see what life is really like. Ugly – ugly. It’s everyone for himself and the devil take the hindermost. Love a man and believe in him – he’ll let you down every time. You’ve got to use the whip. Treat him like dirt, trample on him, don’t ever let him think he’s got you. Life’s a dirty business – a sordid ugly business. You can’t afford to play fair if you want to win. It’s cheat or go under – down into darkness …

SYLVIA: Don’t – don’t … I feel as though you were thrusting me into a prison – away from the sun and the air.

MISS GREY: Not at all. I’m introducing you to real life.

The final, two-scene act brings us back to 1934 and is set in an art gallery and at the house of an art collector, the locations of the short story. Art is a major theme of the piece, and Christie’s observations on the art world are perceptive and informed. It was the impresario C.B. Cochran who nurtured her own interest in art in her late teens, after a childhood being dragged reluctantly around galleries: ‘Charles Cochran had a great love of painting. When I first saw his Degas picture of ballet girls it stirred something in me that I had not known existed.’²⁹ In the following extract, Mrs Quantock and Lady Emily gossip about life as they inspect an exhibition of modern paintings. I include it for no other reason than that it is a wonderfully well-written and witty piece of theatrical dialogue and, as nobody has ever seen it performed on a stage, it seems a shame not to share it …

MRS QUANTOCK: I hope Arthur won’t keep us waiting. I’m surprised he’s not here. There’s one thing to be said for military men – they do know the meaning of punctuality. These young people are past anything … No manners … No consideration for others. They come down to breakfast at all times of the morning.

LADY EMILY: And the girls’ nails! Too terrible! Just like blood!

MRS QUANTOCK: (inspecting a picture severely through a lorgnette) ‘The Cafe Beauvier’. All these modern pictures are exactly alike.

LADY EMILY: What I say is, there is so much that is depressing in the world. Why paint it? These very peculiar looking men and women sitting at curious angles – where is there any beauty? That’s what I want to know.

MRS QUANTOCK: You heard about the Logans’ butler?

LADY EMILY: Yes, most distressing. Why, they trusted the man completely. (Consults catalogue) ‘Meadow in Dorset’. What a very odd looking cow. They came back unexpectedly, I suppose?

MRS QUANTOCK: Yes, and found his wife and six children occupying the best bedroom, and the wife wearing one of Mary Logan’s tea gowns.

LADY EMILY: No!

MRS QUANTOCK: A fact I assure you. ‘Spring in Provence’. Nonsense – not in the least like it. I’ve been to Provence.

LADY EMILY: What people suffer through their servants.

MRS QUANTOCK: Did I tell you about the housemaid that came to see me? Quite a nice respectable looking young woman. She asked me how many there were in family and if there were any young gentlemen. I said there was the general and myself and our two young nephews. And do you know what she had the impertinence to say?

LADY EMILY: No, dear.

MRS QUANTOCK: She said. Very well, I’ll come on Tuesday. But seeing there are young gentlemen, I’ll have a bolt on my bedroom door, please. I said, you’ll have no such thing for you won’t have a bedroom in my house. The impudence of the girl.

LADY EMILY: ‘La Nuit Blanche’. Dear, dear the bed looks very comfortable. Mrs. Lewis has had to get rid of her nurse. The woman simply wouldn’t allow her to come into her own nursery. Said she had entire charge and wouldn’t brook interference. Interference from the child’s own mother!

MRS QUANTOCK: Amy Lewis is a fool – always was. Look how she’s mismanaged that husband of hers.

LADY EMILY: He behaved very badly.

MRS QUANTOCK: I’ve no patience with women whose husbands behave badly. It’s a woman’s job to see that a man behaves properly. Do you think I would have stood any nonsense from Arthur?

LADY EMILY: But, we can’t all be like you, Maud. You’ve such a force of character.

MRS QUANTOCK: Men have got to be looked after. Left to himself a man always behaves badly. It’s only natural.

LADY EMILY: Everything seems very odd nowadays. Midge tells me that young people – people of different sexes – can go away and stay at hotels and positively nothing happens.

MRS QUANTOCK: I can well believe it. This generation has no virility.

LADY EMILY: It seems so unnatural.

MRS QUANTOCK: Of course it’s unnatural. Why, when I was a girl, if I had gone away for a week-end with a young man – Not that my parents would have permitted it for a minute – I repeat if I had gone away with a young man – everything would have happened.

(Examines wall)

This young man can’t paint a horse. I expect he lives in a nasty unhealthy studio and never goes into the country.

LADY EMILY: I expect you’re right, dear. That cow over there was most peculiar. I couldn’t even be sure if it was a cow or a bull.

MRS QUANTOCK: People shouldn’t try and paint nature when they know nothing about it. ‘The Dead Harlequin’. Very confusing – all these squares and diamonds. Nobody studies composition nowadays. There should be proper grouping in a picture – light and shade.

LADY EMILY: How right you are, Maud. I was very artistic as a girl. I used to do flower painting when I was at school in Paris.

MRS QUANTOCK: You sang, too, Emily.

LADY EMILY: Oh, I only had a very small voice.

MRS QUANTOCK: Nobody sings nowadays. They turn on that atrocious wireless. Even expect you to play Bridge with some annoying American voice wailing about Bloo-oos, or else a dreadful lecture on pond life – or some nonsense about Geneva.

LADY EMILY: What do you think about the League of Nations?

MRS QUANTOCK: What every sensible person thinks. (looks at catalogue) ‘Three Women’. H’m. I suppose you could call them women at a pinch.

LADY EMILY: Their faces seem to have been squeezed sideways and they’ve got no tops to their heads. Even an artist can’t think women look like that.

(Enter MIDGE … a charming young woman with great assurance of manner.)

MIDGE: Hullo, darlings. Fancy finding you here. (looks at picture) Oo-er, scrumptious. That’s amusing. I say, the man can paint, can’t he?

LADY EMILY: They’re all so ugly.

MIDGE: Ugly? Oh, no, they’re not. They’re marvellous. Do you think that rather attractive-looking man is the artist?

MRS QUANTOCK: Very likely. He looks very odd.

MIDGE: I thought he looked rather nice. So alive. Like his pictures.

LADY EMILY: Do you call these women alive?

MIDGE: I know. One looks at these pictures and one says no women were ever like that and then one goes out into the street and one suddenly sees people that remind one of the pictures.

MRS QUANTOCK: I don’t.

Thank you for indulging me with that lengthy quotation; I hope that you found it as entertaining as I do.

Someone at the Window is a theatrically ambitious piece with a colourful sixteen-person dramatis personae, and as such would not have been immediately attractive to repertory theatres of the time. It is, sadly, let down slightly by the clumsy staging of the murder at a fancy dress ball and a rather contrived and rushed ending. The murderers plot and carry out their plan in front of the audience; this is not a whodunit, but a ‘will-they-get-away with it’. Plodding police investigations undertaken in the middle of the play by Inspector Rice and Sergeant Dwyer only serve to slow down the action. They conclude, as the murderers intended, that the victim committed suicide as a result of shellshock sustained in the First World War, but the murderers’ plan to inherit a fortune goes unexpectedly askew when the victim’s young wife gives birth to an heir after his death.

There is no reference to Someone at the Window in Christie’s autobiography, in her correspondence or in the licensing records of Hughes Massie, although her notebooks do contain some work in progress. The final script appears to be ‘performance ready’, but was never submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s office, and neither does there appear to be any record of it having been tried out by one of the club theatres, where the audience had to sign up as members and which therefore did not require a licence. Unlike other unperformed work of hers, she appears not to have returned to it, reworked it or lobbied for its production. She perhaps appreciated that its dramatic construction rendered it unattractively cumbersome as a production proposition. With its loss, sadly, we have in my opinion been deprived of some of her best dialogue for the stage.

One work which Christie did return to was the similarly lengthy Akhnaton, her remarkable historical drama about the idealistic pharaoh, father of Tutankhamun. Akhnaton, who dreams of ‘a kingdom where people dwell in peace and brotherhood’ and spends much of his time composing poetry, attempts to promote a pacifist philosophy and to unite the polytheist Egyptians under one god; policies which inevitably do not go down well with either the army or the priesthood. The action of the play takes place over seventeen years, moving from Thebes to Akhnaton’s purpose-built Utopia, the City of the Horizon, and involves a cast of twenty-two named roles, including an Ethiopian dwarf, not to mention scribes, soldiers and other extras, as well as a spectacular parade featuring ‘wild animals in cages’ and ‘beautiful nearly nude girls’.

Christie commentators tend to be united in their praise for the piece; including even biographer Laura Thompson, who is generally dismissive of her work for the theatre. In the absence of a response from critics, Charles Osborne sums it up well: ‘Akhnaton is, in fact, a fascinating play. It deals in a complex way with a number of issues: with the difference between superstition and reverence; the danger of rash iconoclasm, the value of the arts, the nature of love, the conflicts set up by the concept of loyalty, and the tragedy apparently inherent in the inevitability of change. Yet Akhnaton is no didactic tract, but a drama of ruthless logic and theatrical power, its characters sharply delineated, its arguments humanized and convincingly set forth.’³⁰

The play, eventually published in 1973 and not performed in Agatha’s lifetime, is usually dated as having been written in 1937. The earliest surviving copy is clearly stamped by the Marshall’s typing agency as having been completed on 12 August of that year, and the ancient Egyptian subject matter certainly makes sense in the context of her involvement with the archaeological community since her marriage to Max Mallowan. In introductory material written for its publication, Christie refers to the date of its writing as 1937,³¹ although thirty-six years later she may well simply have been using the date on the typescript’s cover as an aide memoire.

Mallowan himself touches briefly but perceptively on a small number of Agatha’s plays in a chapter towards the end of his autobiographical Mallowan’s Memoirs, published in 1977, a year after her death. Akhnaton, he says, is

Agatha’s most beautiful and profound play … brilliant in its delineation of character, tense with drama … The play moves around the person of the idealist king, a religious fanatic, obsessed with the love of truth and beauty, hopelessly impractical, doomed to suffering and martyrdom, but intense in faith and never disillusioned in spite of the shattering of all his dreams … In no other play by Agatha has there been, in my opinion, so sharp a delineation of the characters; every one of whom is portrayed in depth and set off as a foil, one against the other … the characters themselves are here submitted to exceptionally penetrating analytical treatment, because they are not merely subservient to the denouement of a murder plot, but each one is a prime agent in the development of a real historical drama.³²

Mallowan appreciates the play’s classical dramatic construction – ‘the play moves to its finale like an Aeschylean drama’ and, like other commentators on the piece, notes its contemporary relevance: ‘Egypt between 1375 and 1358 BC is but a reflection of the world today, a recurrent and eternal tragedy’. He does, however, appreciate why theatrical producers might hesitate. ‘Good judges of the theatre have deemed it beautiful, but would-be promoters are daunted by the frightening thought of an expensive setting and a large cast.’

Max introduced Agatha to Howard Carter at Luxor in 1931, describing the man who discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 as ‘a sardonic and entertaining character with whom we used to play bridge at the Winter Palace hotel’, and also to his friend Stephen Glanville, another leading Egyptologist who later became Provost of King’s College Cambridge and who Max claims offered Agatha guidance relating to source material for her historical drama. However, although Agatha’s new-found archaeological connections were understandably instrumental in the realisation of the script for Akhnaton that we now know, there are some ambiguities about the play’s inception that indicate that it may have had an earlier existence. In her autobiography, Agatha credits Glanville at some length for his assistance with the 1944 novel Death Comes as the End, which is set in ancient Egypt, but not with having helped her with Akhnaton. This may, of course, simply be because the play had not been published when she finished writing her autobiography, and she did not want to confuse readers with detail about its creation. She refers to it only twice, on the first occasion noting that ‘I also wrote a historical play about Akhnaton. I liked it enormously. John Gielgud was later kind enough to write to me. He said it had interesting points, but was far too expensive to produce and had not enough humour. I had not connected humour with Akhnaton, but I saw that I was wrong. Egypt was just as full of humour as anywhere else – so was life at any time or place – and tragedy had its humour too.’³³

Despite the notoriously inaccurate chronology of Agatha’s autobiography, not least when it comes to her plays, one thing it tends to be very clear on is which part of her life she spent with Archie and which with Max. Her first mention of Akhnaton occurs very much in the former section of the book, in a sequence where she is recounting her activities after returning from the Grand Tour in 1922 and before her divorce. Immediately before this she mentions ‘the play about incest’ (i.e. The Lie) and there is no link with her second husband or his archaeological interests. To me, this indicates that she is placing the origins of Akhnaton in the pre-Max era of the mid-1920s. Agatha was of course no stranger to Egypt prior to meeting Max and his friends, having spent some time in Cairo with her mother as a seventeen-year-old, although one suspects that she was more interested in potential suitors than mummified Pharoahs during this particular visit. She notes that Gielgud wrote to her ‘later’, and this handwritten letter, dated simply ‘Friday evening’, was doubtless in response to the version of the script that was typed up in 1937 and which may well by then have benefited from Stephen Glanville’s input; Gielgud writes from an address in St John’s Wood which he occupied between 1935 and 1938. Gielgud felt that Akhnaton requires ‘a terrific production in a big theatre with a great deal of pageantry. Personally I think it would have a great deal better chance of success if it was simplified and so made possible to do in a smaller way.’³⁴

Agatha was a great admirer of Gielgud, but although he appeared in various screen adaptations of her work (and the novel Sleeping Murder even involves a visit to one of his stage performances), they never met and he never appeared in one of her plays. Gielgud later became both personally and professionally linked with the H.M. Tennent theatrical empire, and would have been unlikely to put his name to a production by Peter Saunders, Christie’s producer at the height of her playwriting career. Max invited him to speak at Agatha’s memorial service, but he was unable to do so.

As well as its dating, there is a further mystery surrounding the script that Gielgud was responding to. In 1926 Thornton Butterworth published a verse play called Akhnaton by Adelaide Phillpotts, the daughter of Agatha’s mentor Eden Phillpotts. There are striking similarities between Adelaide Phillpotts’ play and Christie’s, over and above the fact that they clearly share source material.

The story of Adelaide Phillpotts is a fascinating one, and would easily fill a book in its own right. An accomplished writer, and the author of forty-two novels, plays and books of poetry, her autobiography, Reverie, was published in 1981 when she was eighty-five, under her married name Adelaide Ross. It tells of her childhood in Torquay, where attending the local theatre was a highlight, her early naïve attempts at playwriting, finishing school in Paris, her adventures in London as a young woman where she became an admirer of Lilian Baylis’ Shakepeare productions at the Old Vic, and her various playwriting collaborations with her father, particularly the 1926 success Yellow Sands. It also makes reference, without recrimination, to the incestuous attentions that her father paid her from an early age, and to the oppressive closeness of both their personal and professional lives, until she finally married, despite his protestations, at the age of fifty-five. After which he never spoke to her again. ‘As to Father,’ concludes Adelaide simply, ‘he should be judged, as he wished, and it must be favourably, by his works.’³⁵

Writing of her life in London in 1925, Adelaide says, ‘I spent several hours in the British Museum Reading-room, where I procured books, recommended by Arthur Weigall, concerning the life and times of Pharaoh Akhnaton, about whom Father had urged me to write a blank verse play – a splendid theme which I had promised to attempt.’³⁶ Weigall was an Egyptologist and theatre set designer who in 1910 had authored the book The Life and Times of Akhnaton, Pharoah of Egypt. Publisher Thornton Butterworth’s Times advertisement for a ‘new and revised edition’ in 1922 trumpeted, ‘“the world’s first idealist” … “the most remarkable figure in the history of the world” … such are some of the praises given to the young Pharaoh of over 3,000 years ago whose strange and pathetic story is here told by the distinguished Egyptologist, Mr Weigall’.³⁷ The author was part of a team that he believed had discovered the mummified remains of Akhnaton, although from my necessarily brief dip into Egyptology it appears that correctly identifying and dating ancient Egyptian remains is a challenge equal only to that of establishing a chronology for the work of Agatha Christie. I suspect that Weigall’s archaic and occasionally melodramatic prose style may have influenced that adopted by Agatha in writing her own play.

Like Agatha’s play, Adelaide’s was never performed, but it was well reviewed in the February 1927 edition of The Bookman:

Some thirty-three hundred years separate the periods of Akhnaton and Yellow Sands. Yet two characters are common to each play – the Pharoah of the one and the socialist of the other. During the war they would have been described – and derided – as Pacifists; in these less disruptive days they may be accepted as idealists … This has not been written to gratify historical or archaeological curiosity, but to display the character and difficulties of a ruler who dared to place himself in opposition to the powerful priestly and military castes of his period. Akhnaton is seen in conflict with all types, from the father he succeeded to the scullions of his kitchen, and in every varied circumstance his character is depicted with unfailing consistency and ever-growing charm. But it is not merely on her interpretation of Akhnaton that Miss Phillpotts is to be congratulated; her sketches of the general Horemheb, of the aggressive sculptor Bek, and of the subtle and wavering High Priest are also drawn with a firm hand. And many of her episodes have a high dramatic quality, which culminates in a scene of great tensity in the tomb of Akhnaton fifteen years after his death. What theatrical producer will enrich the intellectual and moral life of the nation by an adequate performance of this remarkable play?

Eden Phillpotts was delighted by his daughter’s play. He wrote to her from Torquay, ‘My darling dear, I love to have the dedication of the Akhnaton and am very proud to think that you dedicated it to me. It will be my most cherished possession after your dear self and I shall value it beyond measure,’³⁸ and, ‘I gave Mrs Shaw Akhnaton and she was very pleased with the gift and I hope will tell me what she thought of it.’³⁹

Adelaide’s and Agatha’s plays, of course, share much the same cast list of historical characters and both use as their ultimate source material translations of the Armana letters, a remarkable collection of around three hundred ancient Egyptian diplomatic letters, carved on tablets and discovered by locals in the late 1880s. Whilst Adelaide meticulously credits her sources, however, Agatha does not; so it is difficult to tell where they end and her own invention begins. Adelaide’s play is written in accomplished blank verse and Agatha’s in a sort of poetic prose that makes it completely different in style from any of her other writing. Whilst Adelaide’s is arguably the more accomplished literary work, Agatha’s is definitely the more satisfactory as a piece of drama, with more developed intrigue and conflict amongst the courtiers, the dramatic licence of the introduction of the then newsworthy character of Tutankhamun (played as a young adult rather than the child that he would then have been) and, for good measure, a climactic poisoning and suicide (although there is no mystery as to how or why).

Amongst the striking parallels between the plays are the use of Akhnaton’s coffin inscription as his death speech. In Adelaide’s version,

I breathe the sweet breath of thy mouth,

And I behold thy beauty every day …

Oh call my name unto eternity

And it shall never fail (Akhnaton falls back dying)⁴⁰

And in Agatha’s,

I breathe the sweet breath which comes from thy mouth … Call upon my name to all eternity and it shall never fail (he dies)⁴¹

Immediately after this, both plays feature an epilogue set in Akhnaton’s tomb, in which people are erasing Akhnaton’s name and someone gives a speech. In Adelaide’s version,

… A ghost with Amon’s dread wrath upon thy head – eternally forgotten by God and man.

(Priests, raising their torches) Amen! Amen! Amen!

And in Agatha’s,

… So let this criminal be forgotten and let him disappear from the memory of men … (a murmur of assent goes up from the People)

There is a scene in Adelaide’s version where a sequence of messengers read out letters bringing news of military calamity from the far reaches of the empire. In Agatha’s version of what is effectively the same scene, there are no messengers but Akhnaton’s general Horemheb reads out the letters himself. In both cases, the readings are interrupted by a comment from Horemheb. In Adelaide’s version,

My lord, troops disembarked at Simyra

And Byblos, could be quickly marched to Tunip

In Agatha’s,

My lord, it is not too late, Byblos and Simyra are still loyal. We can disembark troops at these ports, march inland to Tunip.

Again, the source material (credited by Adelaide but not by Agatha) is clearly the same, so the similarities in the phraseology are less remarkable than the dramatic construction of an intervention by Horemheb with these words. But perhaps even more notable are some similarities in stage directions. Adelaide: ‘The high priest … with shaven head, wearing a linen gown …’; Agatha: ‘The high priest … his head is closely shaven and he wears a linen robe …’

So, what to make of all this? On one level it may appear that in writing Akhnaton Christie simply ‘did a Vosper’ on the work of her mentor’s daughter. But when Christie’s own play finally saw the light of day in 1973, Adelaide was still very much alive (she died, aged ninety-seven, in 1993); and Christie is unlikely to have allowed its publication in the knowledge that she had consciously borrowed from another living writer’s work. It has to be said, too, that each writer puts her own very distinctive touches into the story. Adelaide includes the characters of Akhnaton’s and Queen Nefertiti’s two daughters, who some historians believe he took as additional wives, with the following exchange between father and daughter as one of them is married off to a young prince:

AKHNATON … I think thou art still a child?

MERYTATON: A woman, my lord.

AKHNATON: Then art thou willing to be wed?

MERYTATON: No sire,

If husband gained mean father lost. But, yes,

If I may keep them both

Christie, on the other hand, explores in some detail the relationship between the artistic, poetry-reciting Akhnaton and his muscular general, Horemheb. One wonders what the Lord Chamberlain’s office would have made of this exchange between the two men:

AKHNATON: (after looking at him a minute) I like you, Horemheb … (Pause) I love you. You have a true simple heart without evil in it. You believe what you have been brought up to believe. You are like a tree. (Touches his arm) How strong your arm is. (Looks affectionately at Horemheb) How firm you stand. Yes, like a tree. And I – I am blown upon by every wind of Heaven. (wildly) Who am I? What am I? (sees Horemheb staring) I see, good Horemheb, that you think I am mad!

HOREMHEB: (embarrassed) No, indeed, Highness. I realize that you have great thoughts – too difficult for me to understand.

As it happens, Adelaide’s was not the first verse play on the subject by a female writer. In 1920 The Wisdom of Akhnaton by A.E. Grantham (Alexandra Ethelreda von Herder) had been published by The Bodley Head, the company that in the same year gave Christie her publishing debut. Grantham’s introduction cites the Amura tablets as her source and advocates the relevance of Akhnaton’s philosophy:

There was no room for greed or hate and war in this conception of man’s destiny; no occasion for those ugly and gratuitous rivalries which make human history such a never-ending tragedy … never has mankind stood in direr need of a real faith in the indestructability and the supreme beauty of this great Pharaoh’s ideals of light and loveliness in life … the episode chosen for dramatisation is the conflict between the claims of peace and war and Akhnaton’s successful struggle to make his people acquiesce in his policy of peace.⁴²

The Bodley Head’s Times advertisement for Grantham’s The Wisdom of Akhnaton read, ‘A remarkable play about Akhnaton, the father of Tutankhamen, and the Pharoah who tried to establish the pure monotheistic religion of Aton and a religion of Love and Peace thirteen hundred years before Christ … this is one of the few works of fiction ever written about the Egypt of those days, which are now being made to live again so vividly by Lord Carnarvon’s discoveries.’⁴³

Despite covering approximately the same period of history and including several of the same characters, however, there are no echoes of Grantham’s work in either Adelaide’s or Agatha’s, a fact which only serves to highlight further the similarities between those of Eden Phillpotts’ two protégées. Whilst Grantham chooses to halt the story at the point where Akhnaton has been ‘successful in his struggle to make his people acquiesce in a policy of peace’, both Adelaide and Agatha go on to show Akhnaton’s ultimately tragic failure. In doing so they are not, in my view, opposed to the value of striving for Akhnaton’s aspirations, even against all the odds and in the face of human nature.

During the First World War, Adelaide had worked for Charles Ogden’s Cambridge Magazine, which controversially gave a balanced view of events by publishing throughout the conflict translated versions of foreign press articles, as well as pieces by writers such as Shaw and Arnold Bennett. By the early 1920s, newspapers were full of reports of the latest archaeological finds in Egypt, and Egyptologists were front page celebrities as they continued to unveil the ‘secrets of the tombs’. Western writers and intellectuals were intrigued by the lessons that could be learned from this ancient culture, particularly in a world still reeling from the devastation of war, and it is little wonder that the Phillpotts circle found the pacifist philosophy of Akhnaton in particular worth exploring, and that at least two female playwrights, A.E. Grantham and Adelaide Phillpotts, thought him a worthy subject for a verse play.

It thus seems plausible that Agatha’s autobiography could well be correct in appearing to date the origins of her own Akhnaton play to the mid-1920s, and that it may have been, at least initially, the product of this post-war zeitgeist and her association with Eden Phillpotts rather than her more specific interest in archaeology in the 1930s. It may even be that it was Phillpotts himself who suggested the idea to Agatha, just as he had to his daughter. Even if one dismisses the similarities between Agatha’s Akhnaton play and Adelaide’s as pure coincidence, there seems to me to be a Phillpotts stamp on the project that is hard to ignore.

In a further twist to the tale, in 1934 Adelaide Phillpotts and her friend and writing partner Jan Stewart wrote a three-act murder mystery play, which was performed in repertory at Northampton. It was called The Wasps’ Nest.⁴⁴ Like Christie’s at that time unperformed 1932 one-act play of the same title, it revolves around the destruction of a wasp’s nest in a country house and the murderous application of the cyanide used to achieve this. Although the outcome is entirely different, it contains some remarkably similar plot devices to Christie’s story, and shares a storyline about a woman returning to her previous lover having abandoned him in favour of another man.

Did Agatha read Adelaide’s 1926 Akhnaton play? Did Adelaide read Agatha’s 1928 ‘Wasp’s Nest’ short story in the Daily Mail? We do know that Agatha and Adelaide exchanged some affectionate correspondence in the late 1960s, in which the two old ladies charmingly reminisced about their Torquay childhoods and shared news of family and friends.⁴⁵ There is no mention at all of matters Egyptian. Or of wasps.

Another long-term playwriting project of Christie’s was the compelling domestic drama, A Daughter’s a Daughter, which she wrote in the 1930s but which was not to receive its premiere until 1956. Taking its title from the saying, ‘Your son’s a son till he gets a wife, but a daughter’s a daughter all your life’, it concerns the friction between a widow, Anne Prentice, and her adult daughter, Sarah, as each in turn contrives to destroy the other’s opportunities to find fulfilment in love. As with The Lie and The Stranger, we see a young woman torn between a dull but reliable suitor and the excitement of a potentially more dangerous liaison.

In the third week of March 1939, a letter from Bernard Merivale, Edmund Cork’s business partner at Hughes Massie, landed on the desk of Basil Dean.

Dear Basil Dean,

I would be very glad if you would read the enclosed play by Agatha Christie.

The play has nothing whatever to do with Poirot or crime solution. It impresses me as being another manifestation of this author’s undoubted genius.

I would be very interested to know your reaction.⁴⁶

Dean appears to have responded positively although, sadly, his side of the correspondence is in the missing early years of Hughes Massie’s Christie archive. Merivale acknowledged his ‘interesting letter’ about the play, and on 5 April Agatha sent Dean a handwritten note from Sheffield Terrace:

Dear Mr Dean,

I should be so pleased if you could lunch here on Wednesday 12th 1.15. I should be most interested to hear your ideas about A Daughter’s a Daughter.

Yours sincerely,

Agatha Christie⁴⁷

There is no record of what took place at this lunch, although it seems that Dean suggested various alterations to the script. The sudden death of Merivale interrupted the correspondence, and put the matter into the hands of Cork, who wrote to Dean in late May:

We really ought to have written to you regarding the Agatha Christie play … I am afraid the insistent demand for her literary work has prevented Mrs Christie from doing any work on A Daughter’s A Daughter, and there doesn’t seem any prospect of her being able to get down to possible alterations in the immediate future, but perhaps I may come and see you about it on your return from America.⁴⁸

It is interesting that Hughes Massie should have approached Basil Dean about this project rather than his former business partner, Alec Rea, who had produced Black Coffee. But as well as being a producer, Dean had a track record of successfully directing work by women playwrights, including Clemence Dane and Margaret Kennedy, both of whose playwriting careers he had effectively launched. And although Rea had co-produced The Claimant with Dean, it was Dean, as director, with whom Agatha’s sister had had the working relationship. Madge had invited Dean to lunch as recently as 1937,⁴⁹ although there is no indication as to how he responded to this suggestion, or as to what Madge’s agenda was in making it. She had possibly hoped to interest him in an updated version of Oranges and Lemons, for which there are some handwritten notes on the script; Junius adds the air force to the army and navy in summarising the list of ‘essential’ government expenditures, and ‘Bolshevists’ are now described as ‘Communists’.⁵⁰

The move to Dean, then, was a logical one for Agatha, and was vindicated when, undeterred by her own lassitude, he appeared to be on the brink of pulling an extraordinary piece of potential casting out of the bag. In June 1939 Cork wrote to Dean, ‘The pressure of her literary work made it difficult for Agatha Christie to get down to the alterations in A Daughter’s a Daughter, but your exciting news about Miss Lawrence’s interest enabled us to persuade her to do so, and I have great pleasure in sending you the revised script herewith. I shall look forward keenly to developments.’⁵¹

Gertrude Lawrence had become the talk of the town for her 1936 partnership with Noël Coward in his Tonight at 8.30 playlets, and her interest in the role of Ann Prentice certainly had the desired effect. The revised script cleverly specified Ann’s age as thirty-nine, as against Lawrence’s forty-one, and in her covering letter to Dean Christie wrote,

I return the play. I have completely rewritten the third act, following the scene order you suggested and I really do think it is a great improvement … I still feel that Sarah’s rudeness ought to arise spontaneously – like a jealous and undisciplined child, and that any deliberate ‘trick’ on her part does make her an ‘unpleasant character’ which she should not be. However, it may seem different when played.

I think I’m by now quite incapable of doing any more to it – so if you feel it needs further alterations, I suggest you do them and tell me what you have done!’⁵²

This last suggestion is not as extraordinary as it seems. Dean’s input on Margaret Kennedy’s stage version of her novel The Constant Nymph had, after all, been sufficiently substantial to earn him a co-writing credit.

Although Christie had used the pen name Mary Westmacott for her non-crime novels Giant’s Bread (1930) and the semi-autobiographical Unfinished Portrait (1934), there was at this stage, as we can see from the wide frame of reference of her dramatic work, no indication that the name Agatha Christie, as a playwright, was necessarily going to be associated exclusively with the crime genre. Indeed, the Christie archive’s copies of the 1930s version of A Daughter’s a Daughter state clearly that it is ‘by Agatha Christie’. And so it was that, in mid-August 1939, Agatha Christie seemed poised to have her passionate, witty and cleverly constructed drama about the conflict between mother and daughter presented in the West End. Undoubtedly her finest work for the stage, and compared by surprised critics to the work of Rattigan at its eventual West End premiere thirty-three years after her death, it was to have been produced and directed by the man who launched the playwriting careers of Clemence Dane and Margaret Kennedy and seems likely to have starred one of the most popular actresses of the day. Within three weeks, though, Britain had declared war on Germany, and the story of Agatha Christie, playwright, was to take a very different turn.

The next we hear about A Daughter’s a Daughter is in a letter from Cork to Christie in January 1942: ‘I was on to Basil Dean the other day about A Daughter’s a Daughter and he asks me to tell you that he still hopes to be able to do the play, but that all his plans have been disorganised by E.N.S.A. What he asks now is that we give him another month in which to make a definite proposal.’⁵³

Dean’s passionate commitment to his work as the co-founder of the Entertainments National Service Association, which provided entertainment of all varieties to British troops during the war, is well documented, not least by himself in his very readable 1956 book The Theatre at War. Although Cork, in correspondence with Agatha, still appeared to be holding out some hope of achieving a production of A Daughter’s a Daughter as late as 1943, it was not to be, and the play would not be heard of again until the 1950s.

A Daughter’s a Daughter was not the only Christie theatrical project to be interrupted by the war. In July 1938 Agatha had entered into an agreement with Arnold Ridley, another Hughes Massie client, allowing him to adapt her 1932 Poirot novel Peril at End House for the stage.⁵⁴ Hughes Massie’s records refer to the licence granted to Ridley as a ‘collaboration agreement’,⁵⁵ a description which might more correctly have been applied to that granted to Frank Vosper; it is clear though that in this instance Christie was the ‘author’ and Ridley the ‘adaptor’. At this stage it was agreed that royalty income was to be split 50/50, although Hughes Massie would later take half of Ridley’s share, possibly as a result of some sort of ‘buyout’. A month later, Francis L. Sullivan’s company, Eleven Twenty Three Ltd, paid an advance against royalties of £100 to commission a script from Ridley for delivery by the end of September.⁵⁶ Given the promptness of Sullivan’s arrival on the scene, it seems likely that he had been involved in the deal from the outset. In any event, whoever’s idea it was, a Ridley adaptation of a Christie novel with Sullivan as Poirot certainly had commercial potential.

Ridley was, on the face of it, an ideal adaptor for Christie. He had begun his career as an actor, joining Birmingham Rep after the First World War, in which he was wounded at the Somme. He continued to act in plays and films, and occasionally to direct for the stage, once his playwriting career took off with the enormously successful 1925 melodrama, The Ghost Train. The original production of The Ghost Train played 655 performances and, having opened at the St Martin’s, transferred to three further West End theatres. It is perhaps ironic that this enormously busy and successful playwright and actor, who fought in both world wars and was awarded an OBE for service to theatre, is best remembered for his role as Private Godfrey in the television comedy series Dad’s Army.

The script for Peril at End House was duly delivered, and on 23 November Sullivan paid a further £100 advance against royalties (of between 5 and 10 per cent on different levels of box office income) for an option to produce the play which, if exercised, would also have given him the American rights and a one-third share in any film sale.

The credited producer, however, when the play was eventually staged in 1940, was Ellen Terry’s nephew, the film director Herbert Mason.⁵⁷ Although he had worked as a stage manager, Mason had no track record of presenting West End productions and I suspect that he may have been something of a front man in order for Sullivan to avoid appearing to be self-producing his return to the stage in the role of Poirot. There may also, of course, have been some hope of a film deal arising from the production; as was standard practice, the film rights in the book and play were ‘indissolubly merged’. Mason may well have been a director of Eleven Twenty Three Ltd but, in common with many other theatrical production companies of this era, its company records no longer exist. In any event, the engagement of Charles Landstone as general manager for the production indicates that the nominal producer may not himself have been actively at the helm. Landstone was more than a safe pair of hands, and in 1942 was to become Assistant Drama Director of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), the wartime precursor to the Arts Council. His book Off-Stage: A Personal Record of the First Twelve Years of State Sponsored Drama in Great Britain, offers an interesting counterpoint to Basil Dean’s book about the work of ENSA.

In January 1940, Cork wrote to Agatha, ‘We will pay your membership dues to the Dramatists Guild. Their organisation has a “closed shop” in America and managers cannot make a contract with any dramatist who is not a member. I have no doubt we shall ultimately have a production of Peril at End House. I understand Francis Sullivan’s present plan is to take it out in the country about the end of March and to bring it into town towards the end of his option period, which expires in May.’⁵⁸

Cork was not wrong. On 7 March he wrote:

I was talking to Francis Sullivan this morning. I find he has completed all his arrangements for the Richmond production of Peril at End House on April 1st. It is a little unusual that he shouldn’t have consulted anybody about them, but he seems to be within his legal rights. I don’t know very much about any of the people that he has got, but he seems to be satisfied that they will give a very good show, and of course if he should happen to be wrong about any of them then they can be changed before the play comes to the West End. AR Whatmore is to produce [i.e. direct] – I don’t think he is at all bad, although once again he is not very well known.

Everyone was delighted that you will be able to attend some of the rehearsals. The play is to be read over next Wednesday and obviously rehearsals start on the following Monday, but Sullivan is getting in touch with you himself about the arrangements.⁵⁹

As artistic head of the Embassy during Alec Rea’s tenure, A.R. Whatmore had been instrumental in the West End transfer of Black Coffee nine years previously. Sullivan’s wife, Danae Gaylen, was one of a number of female stage designers coming to prominence at this time, and she was put in charge of the production’s design.

Peril at End House opened at Richmond and, following a short tour, on 1 May in the West End, at the independently owned Vaudeville Theatre. Despite the play’s somewhat cumbersome three-act, seven-scene construction, reviews were encouraging, both at Richmond and in the West End, and it was generally felt that the suspense was sustained, although Sullivan inevitably stole the limelight once again. The Daily Telegraph’s review, headed ‘FRANCIS SULLIVAN AS POIROT’, remarked that ‘The Belgian sleuth has been highly theatricalised and, as impersonated by Francis Sullivan, physically he will be a slight shock to Mrs Christie’s admirers. But it is a good performance, in which his charming conceit is admirably justified … The play has been effectively produced by A.R. Whatmore.’⁶⁰

Critics also particularly enjoyed the performances of character actor Ian Fleming (no, not that Ian Fleming!) as Captain Hastings and young South African actress Olga Edwardes (later to be known as artist Olga Davenport) in her first West End leading role as ‘Nick’ Buckley.

Despite the favourable critical reception, the West End run only lasted for twenty-three performances, and in this case there can be no mystery as to why. Ten days after it opened, German forces began the invasion by air and land of Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain resigned, enabling Winston Churchill to form a coalition government. Chamberlain, like Akhnaton, had paid the price of advocating a policy of appeasement. As Charles Landstone notes, ‘Any further theatrical activities were interrupted by the end of the “phoney war”. At the time of the German invasion of the Netherlands, I was at the Vaudeville with aspiring actor-manager, Francis Sullivan, with a new Agatha Christie play. The audience melted away, and practically the whole of London theatre closed down for the second time.’⁶¹ Landstone clearly considered himself to be working for Sullivan rather than Herbert Mason.

A touring production of the play was licensed the following year, but Samuel French Ltd did not enter into their usual agreement for amateur and publishing rights until 1944, and publication was held back until the end of the war. Of the income generated for the writers by the deal with French’s (including the usual 50 per cent of amateur licensing income), Ridley’s share was payable to ‘Mrs Ridley’ and Hughes Massie’s to ‘Mrs Cork’,⁶² a manoeuvre that one suspects probably had less to do with husbandly devotion than with avoiding the attentions of the taxman. Unsurprisingly, the American production that Cork had anticipated did not occur.

Shortly after Ridley completed his adaptation of Peril at End House, Frank Vosper’s sister, Margery, wrote a very straightforward, one-act, four-hander play called Tea For Three, based on Christie’s short story ‘Accident’. The story had first been published, under a different title, in the Sunday Despatch in 1929 and was subsequently included in Christie’s collection The Listerdale Mystery in 1934. Following her job as assistant stage manager in the West End run of Love From a Stranger, Margery had gone on to work as a literary agent in the Dorothy Allen agency, which she eventually inherited, changing its name to hers at its former owner’s insistence. Amongst Margery’s clients was Dorothy L. Sayers, who in 1936 had enjoyed an extraordinary West End hit with Busman’s Honeymoon, the only stage appearance of ‘gentleman detective’ Lord Peter Wimsey, a play co-written with her friend Muriel St Clare Byrne and novelised the following year as the last in the Wimsey series. And with playwriting clients also including Emlyn Williams and John Osborne, the Margery Vosper agency was to become a major force in the West End. As her Times obituary remarked, ‘Next to her family the theatre was Margery’s life; a dedication largely attributable to her devotion to her famous actor brother, Frank, twelve years her senior, whose tragic death at sea in 1937, when Margery was 25, ended prematurely a brilliant career on stage and screen.’⁶³ Quite how or why Tea for Three came to be written is unclear, but it was published in 1939 in Book Two of Nelson’s Theatrecraft Plays, a book of one-act plays by various writers, and appears to have been aimed entirely at performance in the amateur market.

The London theatrical calendar in the 1930s had been even busier than in the previous decade. Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence were the hot ticket in Tonight at 8.30, audiences were fascinated by J.B. Priestley’s ‘time plays’, T.S. Eliot left his dramatic calling card with Murder in the Cathedral and, almost a decade after his successful 1929 thriller Rope, Patrick Hamilton followed it with Gas Light. Compared to now, women playwrights were relatively well represented in the West End. Clemence Dane continued to have work performed, and in 1937 A.P. Herbert’s Matrimonial Causes Act finally introduced the divorce legislation anticipated by A Bill of Divorcement in 1921. Amongst a number of other women who saw their plays premiered in the West End at this time was Gertrude Jennings, whose 1934 success Family Affairs was directed by Auriol Lee, director of the Broadway production of Love From a Stranger. But the decade belonged to Dodie Smith, who enjoyed a succession of hits from Autumn Crocus in 1931 through to Dear Octopus in 1938. The latter, produced by the fledgling production company H.M. Tennent Ltd and starring John Gielgud, won her particular acclaim and ran for 376 performances at the Queen’s Theatre. And just as Christie the novelist was to blossom as a playwright in later life, so Smith the playwright was later also to achieve success as a novelist.

Despite her own disappointments in pursuing her vocation as a playwright, the 1930s had proved a remarkably productive decade for Christie in her day job as a thriller writer. Successfully combining her writing career with accompanying her husband on his archaeological digs, she had published no fewer than seventeen mystery novels, including such classics of the genre as The Murder at the Vicarage (1930), Peril at End House (1932), Lord Edgware Dies (1933), Murder on the Orient Express (1934), The ABC Murders (1936), Death on the Nile (1937) and 1939’s Ten Little Niggers, which under various titles was to become one of the best-selling novels of all time. It is little wonder that Cork had to explain to Basil Dean that she was rather busy. Agatha’s happy marriage to Max, marred only by a miscarriage in 1932, was fulfilling and intellectually stimulating, and in October 1938, they bought Greenway, a classic Georgian house built in 1771 and set in thirty acres of woodland on the banks of the River Dart. Agatha dubbed it, with good reason, ‘The most beautiful place in the world’, and it was to become the Mallowans’ regular summer retreat.

To some commentators, the decade that began with the Depression, saw the death of the monarch and the abdication crisis, and ended in war, was for Agatha, professionally and personally, her most fulfilling. But for Agatha Christie, playwright, it had been full of frustration and disappointment. In 1940 Christie turned fifty and, despite having penned seven full-length plays encompassing a variety of styles and subjects, had so far seen only one of them performed, and that for an interrupted West End run of just two months. Her name had, admittedly, frequently been seen by the public on theatre marquees, but most often in the context of its appropriation by egotistical showmen like Charles Laughton, Francis L. Sullivan and Frank Vosper.

The outbreak of war, which had put paid to Arnold Ridley’s Peril at End House and to Christie’s own A Daughter’s a Daughter, was however destined to change everything. Within four years, Agatha Christie would have established herself as a celebrated West End and Broadway playwright in her own right.

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