Читать книгу Curtain Up: Agatha Christie: A Life in Theatre - Julius Green - Страница 14

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(drops her hands)

(CARYL goes out)

Good-bye!

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

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

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

Do not think that I shall ever forget …

(Lucia raises her face. Poirot kisses her.)

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

POIROT: Neither – shall I – forget.²⁷

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scene – Chimneys, 11am Thursday morning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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