Agatha Christie: A Life in Theatre

Dear Mr Dean,

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

Yours sincerely,

Agatha Christie47

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cork was not wrong. On 7 March he wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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