Agatha Christie: A Life in Theatre
On Sunday 2 February 1936, the revamped version of Love From a Stranger was presented for one performance at Wyndham’s Theatre, with Vosper taking the role of Bruce Lovell and his sister Margery demoted to assistant stage manager. The new production was directed by Murray MacDonald and, in the absence of Edna Best, who was presumably no longer available, the role of Cecily was played by Marie Ney, who had appeared alongside Best in The Constant Nymph. At this time it was common practice to present one-off performances of new plays on Sundays in West End theatres in the hope of securing them a future life. In The Stage’s review of this presentation by one of the ‘Sunday societies’, the 1930 Players, it commented, ‘in the desirable event of the play being put into an evening bill it should be played by the same cast … the play, effectively produced [i.e. directed] by Murray Macdonald, was enthusiastically received by an audience which included many well-known theatrical folk.’19 This showcase performance had the desired effect: nine days later, Moss Empires and Howard & Wyndham Tours Ltd took up the West End option, opening it at one of their parent company’s own theatres, the New in St Martin’s Lane, on 31 March 1936.
The production was very well reviewed. Ivor Brown in the Observer remarked that ‘this play soon sails away into those profusions of homicidal mania and sadistic frenzy which are the cordials and sweetmeats of this curious age.’ He felt that Vosper’s performance maybe gave the game away too soon: ‘it is unwise to make us so early certain that Lovell is fully qualified for the chairmanship of the United Society of Operative Homicides and Dirty Workers. Or else he should declare himself straight away, as the author-actor of “Night Must Fall” has done.’ But he was full of praise for the ‘authentic and tremendous suspense about the struggle between Bruce and his captive wife’, admiring Vosper’s ‘very clever performance, a first rate study of disintegration’, and Marie Ney’s ‘charming and persuasive picture of the fluttering and rather foolish young woman … with a very powerful grip on the second half of her part, when the amorous lady becomes the Amazon and fiercely fights for her life with wit and grit, since tooth and claw are of no avail.’20
The Times reserved its praise primarily for the final scene, the acting of which ‘could scarcely be bettered’, although it observed that the ‘whole play is an elaborate approach’ to this moment.21 Muriel Aked made the most of the gratuitous comedy role of Auntie Loo-Loo and the Daily Herald, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail were prominent in the general chorus of approval. The production moved to the Queen’s Theatre (the owners of which later became major shareholders in H.M. Tennent Ltd) and played for a total of 149 performances; a respectable run, but significantly less successful than Alibi. A month after it opened in the West End, members of the cast could be heard performing live extracts from Love From a Stranger on BBC Radio’s Regional Programme.
Sadly Vosper, like Laughton before him, could not resist the lure of Broadway. On 21 September 1936, he led an American cast, including Jessie Royce Landis (later a Hitchcock regular) as Cecily, in a new production at the Erlanger Theatre, Philadelphia, produced by former press agent Alex Yokel, who had recently enjoyed a huge hit as a producer with Three Men On a Horse. The Broadway production of Love From a Stranger was directed by British former actress Auriol Lee, who had been successful as the director of a number of West End productions, recently and most notably a three-year run of Merton Hodge’s The Wind and the Rain, co-produced by Alec Rea and Moss Empires and Howard & Wyndham Tours Ltd. On 29 September, Love From a Stranger starring Frank Vosper opened at Broadway’s Fulton Theatre. The previous night, Night Must Fall starring Emlyn Williams had opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.
Critics were, understandably, bemused by this sudden influx of British psychopaths. The Daily News commented:
I don’t know how you feel about murder plays, but if you are interested in collecting this season’s crop then you may have both of these for all of me. I shall not be using either of them again …
Frank Vosper is both author and star of Love From A Stranger, which he took from a story by Agatha Christie. Like young Mr Williams of Night Must Fall he rather fancies himself, I gather, in roles of violent contrast and psychological significance …
It might be wiser in the future to import only the last acts of English murder-melodramas; in fact to import the last acts of three such murder-melodramas simultaneously and then, after rewriting them enough to provide a slight continuity, produce them all on one evening as parts of the same thriller.22
Vosper had chosen Christie’s work as the vehicle for his Broadway acting debut and, like Laughton and Sullivan, was relentless in his self-promotion. The title page of the playbill is clear that this is ‘A new play by Frank Vosper from a story by Agatha Christie’, with his own name in significantly larger type than hers; and the playbill’s text notes:
Frank Vosper adapted Love From a Stranger from an Agatha Christie story as a result of his interest in criminology, a hobby that has long occupied his off-stage moments. He created his present role in the successful production of the drama in London, where he is one of the ranking stage and screen favourites. The account of Mr Vosper’s writing and acting activities takes up two and a half columns in Who’s Who in the Theatre. A remarkable feat, considering he is still in his thirties. He has played in Shaw, Shakespeare, Pirandello at the Haymarket and Old Vic, and countless British movies.23
The New York Times, however, felt that ‘Mr Vosper has taken this tale from one of Agatha Christie’s stories, and has spun it out to dangerous length … as the leading player Mr Vosper gives the part the works. His interpretation of Bluebeard is a head-holding, shoulder-straightening, partly ranting person instead of a cool and calm characterization that would have seemed more dangerous.’24
The New York Evening Journal concurred: ‘Mr Actor Vosper is in fact almost as disastrous as Mr Author Vosper … until he gets to the aforementioned last act. Until that horror-ridden business he and his fellow players work pretty hard over a play that is so flagrantly inert that I half expected the actors to resort to sticking pins in it. Or, anyway, into the audience.’25
The aforementioned inertia is entirely the result of Vosper’s own unnecessary embellishments of Christie’s original script. Christie’s piece is anything but overblown. It is economical in the extreme, and wastes no time in getting to its deadly point. This is perhaps why she herself remembered it as a one-act play, although she had in fact provided two neatly and wittily executed opening acts. She in any case claimed the denouement as being largely her own work, and it was this element of the play that won critical approval and, in the Grand Guignol tradition, allegedly saw audience members fainting on both sides of the Atlantic.
Love From a Stranger closed at the Fulton after only twenty-nine performances, and Christie’s name had now been associated with two Broadway flops, neither of her own making. It can have been little consolation to Vosper that Night Must Fall only ran for sixty-four; his Broadway acting debut had been an ignominious failure.
Four months later, under the headline ‘Actor Missing from Liner’, The Times ran the story that
Mr Frank Vosper, the stage and film actor and author, was missing from the French liner Paris when she arrived at Plymouth on Saturday from New York. It is believed that Mr Vosper, who was 37, was lost overboard. He was one of several present at an ‘end of voyage party’ in the cabin of Miss Muriel Oxford, aged 22, who won the title ‘Miss Europe’ in 1935, in a beauty contest, and had been undergoing film tests in Hollywood … there is no question of a love affair between herself and Mr Vosper.’26
There certainly was ‘no question’ of such an affair. Vosper’s lover, the twenty-three-year-old actor Peter Willes, later to be a TV producer and friend of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell, was also at the party.
Vosper was short-sighted and may have been drinking, but the location of the porthole he appears to have fallen through in relation to the cabin balcony on which he had apparently been standing alone, seemed to rule out an accident, leading to speculation that he had taken his own life. It seems unlikely that any interaction at the party between Willes and Oxford would have triggered this, but one wonders how the slightly inebriated star, having just made a humiliating exit from Broadway, might have responded to the news of Hollywood’s apparent interest in the ebullient young beauty queen. The press went to town on the story, skirting around the issue of Vosper and Willes’ relationship (homosexuality was not decriminalised in England until 1967), but, after the body was washed up near Eastbourne with one leg and a quantity of cash missing, the coroner returned an open verdict. And so shall we.
Unusually, Collins themselves published Love From a Stranger in both hardback and paperback in 1936, while Samuel French issued their standard ‘acting’ edition for amateurs and repertory companies – with both of which it enjoyed enormous popularity – the following year. In 1937 Basil Rathbone played Gerald Lovell in the first film version of Love From a Stranger and in 1938 Edna Best reprised the role of Cecily on television, playing opposite Bernard Lee.
Christie’s original version of the play appears never to have been performed although, intriguingly, a script called L’Inconnu, with her credited as sole writer, was registered with the French Society of Dramatic Authors in 1935, two months before the UK premiere of Vosper’s version. It was translated by popular French actor Pierre Palau for presentation at the Théâtre Des Deux Masques in Paris, but it is unclear whether the production actually took place.27 In a strange postscript, playwright Louise Page wrote yet another stage adaptation of the story in 2010, which was performed at the Mill at Sonning Theatre under the title of Vosper’s version. Perhaps the people who licensed it were unaware of the two copies of ‘The Stranger by Agatha Christie’ held in the Agatha Christie archive. As her first exercise in expanding a short story for the stage rather than, as had been the case with Chimneys, compressing a novel, it is arguably the best constructed of the five full-length plays that she had written by 1932. Under the circumstances, a third adaptation seems somewhat surplus to requirements.
Christie followed the same model of expanding a short story for what I believe to have been her next full-length script, although like so many of her writings it is, frustratingly, undated. The Mysterious Mr Quin is a collection of short stories published in 1930, having originally appeared in magazines throughout the previous decade, which centre on the enigmatic Harley Quin. Quin’s brief and almost spiritual interventions enable his more corporeal friend, Mr Satterthwaite, to resolve a number of problems and mysteries. Although the setting of the stories is contemporary, the elusive protagonist is inspired by the mythical Harlequin figure which featured in Agatha’s family’s china cabinet and in her script A Masque from Italy. Amongst the stories is ‘The Dead Harlequin’, first published in the American magazine Detective Fiction Weekly in 1929, although neither Quin nor Satterthwaite is technically a detective. The play Someone at the Window expands at length upon the plot of ‘The Dead Harlequin’ but abandons the characters of both Mr Quin and Satterthwaite.
This is the first of many instances where Christie’s dramatisations of her previously published work exclude what appears to be the pivotal character. Following Black Coffee, she never wrote another full-length play featuring Poirot, and her four stage adaptations of novels in which he appears exclude him completely. Similarly, following Superintendent Battle’s appearance in Chimneys, she cut the role when next adapting a work in which he featured, and although it seems that Christie was not averse to the idea of Miss Marple on stage, she herself never wrote a Marple play. In the case of Harley Quin, the very act of physicalising the character would have undermined his spiritual essence. In 1928 there had been a poorly executed film based on one of the stories, and one can well imagine that her worst nightmare would have been the image of Francis L. Sullivan lumbering around a stage in a Harlequin costume.
The Agatha Christie archive holds two loose-leaf draft copies of the script of Someone at the Window; one, which is a duplicate of the other, contains a small number of handwritten amendments. There is also a bound final version which appears to be professionally typed, although there is no agency date stamp in evidence. The address of Lawn Road Flats in Belsize Park, where Christie lived in the early 1940s, has been handwritten on the cover, and another name and address has been heavily crossed out. On close examination, it is that of L.E. Berman, who sold the licence for Black Coffee to the Embassy Theatre, and seems effectively to have been Christie’s play agent at this time.
The play is a 175-page epic, and is Christie’s first theatrical experiment with the themes of time and memory, later to be explored more fully in 1960’s Go Back for Murder. An intriguing two-hander prologue is set in a first class railway carriage in January 1934, following which there is a two-act flashback to ‘the big hall at Carnforth Castle’ in 1919 (very deliberately post-war), and a third-act return to June 1934 in London. In this context, it is a not unreasonable assumption that 1934 is the year of writing, although we should not rule out that it takes place in the past or indeed, being Agatha Christie, in an imaginative leap to the future.
In the opening scene, the two characters who meet in the railway carriage disagree about the potential healing qualities of time:
FRANK: … Time gives you a new angle of vision – the true angle.
SYLVIA: I see what you mean.
FRANK: Doesn’t it help you?
SYLVIA: No, in my case facts were facts.
FRANK: You’re looking at it as it appeared then. I want you to look at it now.
SYLVIA: Nothing can help me but forgetfulness.
FRANK: You can’t forget to order. You can thrust a thing down out of sight – but it’s there still – growing in the dark.28
On a lighter note the artist Frank, who is endearingly described as ‘a big simple looking likeable young man – rather like a friendly dog that hopes it is welcome but is not quite sure about it’, regrets the passing of the Victorian age: ‘I’d love to have lived in the days of good old Victorian melodrama with the heroine turned out into the snow, and a thorough-paced villain with a black moustache. It must have been fun. They did have fun – the Victorians. They had something we haven’t got nowadays – gusto – enjoyment of life.’
The play is brimming with witty banter and social commentary about inter-war Britain, courtesy largely of a pair of society grandes dames who we meet when we go back in time to Carnforth Castle. Mrs Quantock, who is married to a colonel, and her friend Lady Emily, delight in making candid observations about relations between the sexes:
MRS QUANTOCK: My experience of life has taught me that you can trust nothing and no one. Always expect the worst and you’ll be surprised how often you’re right … Take Arthur now – in the regiment he was considered a perfect martinet – but if any woman were to come to him with a hard luck story – why he’d be as soft as butter. He’s much too soft-hearted.
LADY EMILY: It is a good thing he has you to look after him.
MRS QUANTOCK: It takes a woman to see through women. Men say ‘Poor little woman, all the others are so down on her.’
The bitter governess, here in conversation with the seventeen-year-old lady of the house, is similarly cynical on the subject:
MISS GREY: You’ve been living in a fairy tale all your life. (She speaks with real bitterness) You’ve been sheltered and protected. You’ve gone about believing fine things about men and women. Now your eyes are opened and you can see what life is really like. Ugly – ugly. It’s everyone for himself and the devil take the hindermost. Love a man and believe in him – he’ll let you down every time. You’ve got to use the whip. Treat him like dirt, trample on him, don’t ever let him think he’s got you. Life’s a dirty business – a sordid ugly business. You can’t afford to play fair if you want to win. It’s cheat or go under – down into darkness …
SYLVIA: Don’t – don’t … I feel as though you were thrusting me into a prison – away from the sun and the air.
MISS GREY: Not at all. I’m introducing you to real life.
The final, two-scene act brings us back to 1934 and is set in an art gallery and at the house of an art collector, the locations of the short story. Art is a major theme of the piece, and Christie’s observations on the art world are perceptive and informed. It was the impresario C.B. Cochran who nurtured her own interest in art in her late teens, after a childhood being dragged reluctantly around galleries: ‘Charles Cochran had a great love of painting. When I first saw his Degas picture of ballet girls it stirred something in me that I had not known existed.’29 In the following extract, Mrs Quantock and Lady Emily gossip about life as they inspect an exhibition of modern paintings. I include it for no other reason than that it is a wonderfully well-written and witty piece of theatrical dialogue and, as nobody has ever seen it performed on a stage, it seems a shame not to share it …
MRS QUANTOCK: I hope Arthur won’t keep us waiting. I’m surprised he’s not here. There’s one thing to be said for military men – they do know the meaning of punctuality. These young people are past anything … No manners … No consideration for others. They come down to breakfast at all times of the morning.
LADY EMILY: And the girls’ nails! Too terrible! Just like blood!
MRS QUANTOCK: (inspecting a picture severely through a lorgnette) ‘The Cafe Beauvier’. All these modern pictures are exactly alike.
LADY EMILY: What I say is, there is so much that is depressing in the world. Why paint it? These very peculiar looking men and women sitting at curious angles – where is there any beauty? That’s what I want to know.
MRS QUANTOCK: You heard about the Logans’ butler?
LADY EMILY: Yes, most distressing. Why, they trusted the man completely. (Consults catalogue) ‘Meadow in Dorset’. What a very odd looking cow. They came back unexpectedly, I suppose?
MRS QUANTOCK: Yes, and found his wife and six children occupying the best bedroom, and the wife wearing one of Mary Logan’s tea gowns.
LADY EMILY: No!
MRS QUANTOCK: A fact I assure you. ‘Spring in Provence’. Nonsense – not in the least like it. I’ve been to Provence.
LADY EMILY: What people suffer through their servants.
MRS QUANTOCK: Did I tell you about the housemaid that came to see me? Quite a nice respectable looking young woman. She asked me how many there were in family and if there were any young gentlemen. I said there was the general and myself and our two young nephews. And do you know what she had the impertinence to say?
LADY EMILY: No, dear.
MRS QUANTOCK: She said. Very well, I’ll come on Tuesday. But seeing there are young gentlemen, I’ll have a bolt on my bedroom door, please. I said, you’ll have no such thing for you won’t have a bedroom in my house. The impudence of the girl.
LADY EMILY: ‘La Nuit Blanche’. Dear, dear the bed looks very comfortable. Mrs. Lewis has had to get rid of her nurse. The woman simply wouldn’t allow her to come into her own nursery. Said she had entire charge and wouldn’t brook interference. Interference from the child’s own mother!
MRS QUANTOCK: Amy Lewis is a fool – always was. Look how she’s mismanaged that husband of hers.
LADY EMILY: He behaved very badly.
MRS QUANTOCK: I’ve no patience with women whose husbands behave badly. It’s a woman’s job to see that a man behaves properly. Do you think I would have stood any nonsense from Arthur?
LADY EMILY: But, we can’t all be like you, Maud. You’ve such a force of character.
MRS QUANTOCK: Men have got to be looked after. Left to himself a man always behaves badly. It’s only natural.
LADY EMILY: Everything seems very odd nowadays. Midge tells me that young people – people of different sexes – can go away and stay at hotels and positively nothing happens.
MRS QUANTOCK: I can well believe it. This generation has no virility.
LADY EMILY: It seems so unnatural.
MRS QUANTOCK: Of course it’s unnatural. Why, when I was a girl, if I had gone away for a week-end with a young man – Not that my parents would have permitted it for a minute – I repeat if I had gone away with a young man – everything would have happened.
(Examines wall)
This young man can’t paint a horse. I expect he lives in a nasty unhealthy studio and never goes into the country.
LADY EMILY: I expect you’re right, dear. That cow over there was most peculiar. I couldn’t even be sure if it was a cow or a bull.
MRS QUANTOCK: People shouldn’t try and paint nature when they know nothing about it. ‘The Dead Harlequin’. Very confusing – all these squares and diamonds. Nobody studies composition nowadays. There should be proper grouping in a picture – light and shade.
LADY EMILY: How right you are, Maud. I was very artistic as a girl. I used to do flower painting when I was at school in Paris.
MRS QUANTOCK: You sang, too, Emily.
LADY EMILY: Oh, I only had a very small voice.
MRS QUANTOCK: Nobody sings nowadays. They turn on that atrocious wireless. Even expect you to play Bridge with some annoying American voice wailing about Bloo-oos, or else a dreadful lecture on pond life – or some nonsense about Geneva.
LADY EMILY: What do you think about the League of Nations?
MRS QUANTOCK: What every sensible person thinks. (looks at catalogue) ‘Three Women’. H’m. I suppose you could call them women at a pinch.
LADY EMILY: Their faces seem to have been squeezed sideways and they’ve got no tops to their heads. Even an artist can’t think women look like that.
(Enter MIDGE … a charming young woman with great assurance of manner.)
MIDGE: Hullo, darlings. Fancy finding you here. (looks at picture) Oo-er, scrumptious. That’s amusing. I say, the man can paint, can’t he?
LADY EMILY: They’re all so ugly.
MIDGE: Ugly? Oh, no, they’re not. They’re marvellous. Do you think that rather attractive-looking man is the artist?
MRS QUANTOCK: Very likely. He looks very odd.
MIDGE: I thought he looked rather nice. So alive. Like his pictures.
LADY EMILY: Do you call these women alive?
MIDGE: I know. One looks at these pictures and one says no women were ever like that and then one goes out into the street and one suddenly sees people that remind one of the pictures.
MRS QUANTOCK: I don’t.
Thank you for indulging me with that lengthy quotation; I hope that you found it as entertaining as I do.
Someone at the Window is a theatrically ambitious piece with a colourful sixteen-person dramatis personae, and as such would not have been immediately attractive to repertory theatres of the time. It is, sadly, let down slightly by the clumsy staging of the murder at a fancy dress ball and a rather contrived and rushed ending. The murderers plot and carry out their plan in front of the audience; this is not a whodunit, but a ‘will-they-get-away with it’. Plodding police investigations undertaken in the middle of the play by Inspector Rice and Sergeant Dwyer only serve to slow down the action. They conclude, as the murderers intended, that the victim committed suicide as a result of shellshock sustained in the First World War, but the murderers’ plan to inherit a fortune goes unexpectedly askew when the victim’s young wife gives birth to an heir after his death.