Читать книгу Agatha Christie: A Life in Theatre - Julius Green - Страница 15

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 Francis L. Sullivan, who will bring to the television screen the famous detective character, Hercule Poirot, originally made a great hit in another Poirot play, Alibi, which he toured for almost a year, and subsequently in the same characterisation in Black Coffee.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.