Agatha Christie: A Life in Theatre. Julius Green
who is persuaded to communicate with the spirit of a dead child. The outcome is marvellously gory, as a curtain is pulled back to reveal that ‘Simone is lying on the marble floor in a pool of blood which is dripping down the steps.’27 This would be a gripping coup de théâtre, but it does not make for a satisfactory short story. The dialogue, which in the story simply appears to have had speech marks put around it, works well when spoken but not when read, and the highly theatrical denouement, when briefly described on the page, goes for nothing. We don’t know whether the play was submitted for performance, but in these early days Agatha found it a lot easier to get her work published than produced, so this is likely to have accounted for the change of format.28
Agatha also continued to write one-act plays on themes that seem likely to have been suggested by the writings of George Bernard Shaw, but which latterly sound as if they may also have been informed by her own experiences as a wife and mother. Ten Years concerns a couple who have lived together as man and wife on the basis that they will review their relationship after a ten-year trial period. Elliot, the husband, is an author who has begun to enjoy some success, here talking to his lawyer, Rogers:
ROGERS: I fancy your – early views – were rather unpopular.
ELLIOT: Oh! They gained me a sort of notoriety. But unorthodoxy is for the young, Rogers – the young who imagine they’re going to remake the world on their own improved pattern. As we go on in life we find that the old pattern is not so bad after all! …
… I admit that my one aim then was to free the world from many of its existing conventions which I considered hampering and degrading. You may have heard that I met my – that I met Desiree when she was studying art in Paris. She too held unorthodox views. We both agreed in condemning the convention of marriage, which seemed to us then an ignoble bondage. Instead we favoured what is known as the ten years marriage system.29
When the time comes, however, Desiree decides that, despite having been entirely faithful for ten years, she wants to leave Elliot and set up home with another male friend.
DESIREE: I’ve been a good wife and mother – but – I’m still young. Young enough to feel the divine fire, and long for it. I’m only thirty-three, remember. And something cries out in me – for more life! I want romance – passion – fire – the things we had once and can never have again. I want to feel the first exquisite thrill of mingled fear and joy. I want the beginning of love – not its end. I don’t want peace and security, and calm affection. I want to live – to live my life – not yours.
This comes as a shock to Elliot, who believes that the ten-year experiment has been a success. He and Desiree argue over custody of their child and, in a sentimental ending, resolve to stay together for the child’s sake.
Marmalade Moon is another four-hander one-act play, this time a comedy reminiscent of Noël Coward. As usual with most of these early, unpublished works, the typescript is undated, the author’s name is not given, and the researcher has to turn detective, scouring the script for contemporary references, or comparing stylistic traits or even paper quality, typefaces and layouts with other works the dates of which are known. In this case, it seems likely that the play predates Coward’s Private Lives by several years, although the scenario is not dissimilar to his 1930 comedy about a divorced couple reuniting during their honeymoons with their new spouses.
There are two versions of the script in the Christie archive, Marmalade Moon being a slightly amended version of the earlier New Moon. The location is a continental hotel, the second draft rationalising the first’s two settings into a more user-friendly single one. Here we meet two couples, one celebrating their honeymoon and the other the first anniversary of their divorce. In this extract, the divorced man offers some words of wisdom to the female honeymooner:
BRANDON: As a matter of fact, I’m here to commemorate my wife’s divorce.
SYLVIA: Who from?
BRANDON: Regrettably, but inevitably, myself. She didn’t start threatening soon enough. She just went (flicking his fingers)– like that. That’s why I advised you to start threatening now. Then you may not have to leave later.
SYLVIA: Since you seem so frank about it, perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling me why your wife left you?
BRANDON: (lightly) – You mean why I left my wife. Certainly. We couldn’t agree on how to pronounce ‘Wagner’. She would call him ‘Oo-agner’. She was an American. They said it was incompatibility of temperament. Anyway, I never loved her.
SYLVIA: Oh dear!
BRANDON: Yes, it distressed me greatly, in fact, almost as much as her quite indecent mispronunciation of Wagner! (slight pause, then seriously) But perhaps the real trouble was that neither of us would give in to the other. In married life you have to have a master – or a mistress.30
Again, there are echoes of Shaw’s preface to Getting Married, in which he asserts, ‘the sole and sufficient reason why people should be granted a divorce is that they want one’, and indeed to the play Getting Married itself, which involves a couple who are hesitant to marry and another who are divorced. In Agatha’s play, as in Shaw’s, the happy outcome follows a traditional dramatic convention. The newlyweds split up and then reunite, and the divorced couple are eventually reconciled. In the first version, New Moon, Brandon concludes, ‘This is just the beginning of a new era of our married life – a new moon.’ In the wittily retitled Marmalade Moon he states, ‘This is just the beginning of a new era of our married life – our second honeymoon! Our Marmalade Moon. That’s it – a little less sweet, perhaps, but a lot less sticky, and a thousand times more satisfying!’
It is not clear for what purpose the four playlets Teddy Bear, Marmalade Moon, Eugenia and Eugenics and Ten Years were intended; it may be that they were designed to be Guignol comic interludes. They appear to have been written over a number of years, but in terms of their subject matter they share a frame of reference informed by Shavian explorations of the theme of marriage. If performed together the effect would not have been dissimilar to Noël Coward’s popular 1936 short play compilations Tonight at 8.30.
Agatha’s early playwriting experiments demonstrate a natural aptitude in a variety of styles, but she had yet to see any of her work reach the stage. Then, in 1924, her sister Madge (or, perhaps, a clever agent working on her behalf) suddenly raised the stakes by somehow persuading impresario Basil Dean to produce her own full-length play, The Claimant, in the West End. Madge’s penning of short stories for magazines had ceased when she married the wealthy and quietly charming businessman James Watts and moved into his impressive Victorian mansion Abney Hall, near Manchester. Meanwhile, Agatha’s career as a writer had been successfully launched with three novels in three years for The Bodley Head. But now, suddenly, it was Madge’s name that was in lights, albeit the non-gender specific name ‘M.F. Watts’ under which she now wrote. ‘Awfully exciting about her play!’ Agatha wrote to her mother from the Grand Tour in May 1922. ‘And I shall be furious if she arrives “on film” before I do! It seems as though there was such a thing as an agent who is some good.’31
Basil Dean, who at this time was in his mid-thirties, had abandoned a career on the Stock Exchange in favour of training as an actor in repertory at Manchester, before becoming the first director of the Liverpool Repertory Theatre (later Liverpool Playhouse). During the First World War, in which he became a captain in the Cheshire Regiment, he had been director of the Entertainment Branch of the Navy and Army Canteen Board, supervising fifteen theatres and ten touring companies. Such experience served him well when he set up a theatrical production company in partnership with businessman Alec Rea, one of the principal sponsors of the Liverpool Rep project. As the Theatre Royal Windsor’s Curtain Up magazine commented: ‘One of the great men of the theatre of our time, Basil Dean began his remarkable career as a West End producer and manager in 1919 in partnership with Alec Rea. For the twenty years between 1919 and 1939, which at the beginning saw Galsworthy at his height and later Priestley at his prime, Basil Dean held a position in the West End theatre quite as powerful and influential as any of the big London managements