Agatha Christie: A Life in Theatre

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 Francis L. Sullivan, who will bring to the television screen the famous detective character, Hercule Poirot, originally made a great hit in another Poirot play, Alibi, which he toured for almost a year, and subsequently in the same characterisation in Black Coffee.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