Agatha Christie: A Life in Theatre

SCENE TWO

Poirot Takes the Stage

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.