Agatha Christie: A Life in Theatre. Julius Green
A passionate commentator on theatre, and an early advocate of a National Theatre, Dean wrote a highly readable two-part autobiography, in which he remembers Alec Rea’s offer to him to go into business:
had I dreamed for a hundred years I could not have imagined an opportunity more suited to my circumstances … I needed a business manager whom I could trust. My choice fell on E.P. Clift, who was doing an excellent job as manager of the latest garrison theatre at Catterick Camp. He jumped at the chance, and thereafter wove himself in and out of my story with persistent self-interest … Meanwhile Alec [Rea] busied himself with the legal formalities of registering our company, to which he gave the name ReandeaN, always printed with capital letters at either end. People scoffed to see this name at the head of our playbills … Eventually the public came to accept it as the hallmark of an efficient presentation … I felt an urge to replace the ramshackle productions of the wartime theatre by the standards of acting and homogeneity of production in which I had been trained … Inspiring the new company with these ideals would not be easy. Actors trooping back from the battlefields and munitions factories were discomfited, more anxious about future employment than present perfection.33
Rea paid Dean a salary of £20 per week, and set about looking for a theatre to use as a base for their operations. He settled on the St Martin’s, a small and elegant playhouse and London’s newest theatre, built by theatrical manager Bertie Meyer for Lord Willoughby de Broke and opened in 1916. C.B. Cochran had taken a lease on the building but failed to make a success of it and was keen to dispose of it. Rea eventually paid £20,000 for the remaining nineteen and a half years of the lease – as Dean put it, his ‘enthusiasm overcame his business caution’ – and ReandeaN took over the theatre on 11 February 1920.
The new company’s first major success was to be a play by a new female playwright. ‘Still walking the tight-rope between success and failure,’ writes Dean, ‘I decided that my only course was to go forward boldly … so I chose A Bill of Divorcement, a first play by Clemence Dane, a young writer who had already attracted the attention of the literary critics with two early novels. This moving play would have stood no chance of acceptance by a commercial management because the subject of madness was taboo on the London stage.’34 Clemence Dane was the pen name of Winifred Ashton, whose work merits many a chapter in the established histories of female playwriting. The production, directed by Dean himself, was by all accounts an extraordinary one, not least due to the performance of ReandeaN’s ill-fated young starlet Meggie Albanesi, and it ran at the St Martin’s for over four hundred performances. It was also to launch Dane’s career as one of the best known and most prolific women dramatists of the inter-war years. A friend of Noël Coward, who based Blithe Spirit’s Madame Arcati on her, she continued writing plays until her death in 1965.
As with Agatha’s early plays, the issues of the divorce laws and eugenics were primary themes of Dane’s West End debut. Following the First World War the divorce rate in England had quadrupled, fuelled by hurried courtships, enforced separations, wartime adultery (both at home and abroad) and a new-found independence enjoyed by women, not least in the realm of employment. The resulting public and political debate lent renewed urgency to the recommendations of a 1912 Royal Commission, which had suggested a liberalisation of the divorce laws, and Clemence Dane’s 1921 play, set in 1933, controversially considered a future in which some of the proposed reforms had been introduced. As a dramatic exercise, this was not dissimilar to Agatha’s examination of the potential consequences of the fictional ‘Marriage Supervision Bill’ in Eugenia and Eugenics. When, in 1923, the Matrimonial Causes Act removed the additional exacerbating circumstances that women needed to prove in order to obtain a divorce, the immediate result was that the number of cases brought by women rose from 41 per cent to 62 per cent of the total. However, the only grounds for divorce on either side remained proven adultery until the 1937 Matrimonial Causes Act, which additionally allowed for cruelty, desertion or incurable insanity to be cited as reasons. The latter reason, of course, was kept firmly on the agenda by the eugenics movement.35
Dane’s play concerns war veteran Hilary Fairfield, who suddenly returns to his wife and daughter one Christmas Day, having been hospitalised for over seventeen years with mental problems, thought to be shellshock. Citing the ‘incurable insanity’ clause in the fictional new divorce law, his wife Margaret has divorced him and is on the verge of remarriage. His daughter Sydney, meanwhile, is about to marry the son of the local rector. Although he claims to be cured, it comes to light that the mental illness from which Fairfield is suffering is in fact hereditary, and the play’s debate, whilst sympathetic to his predicament, involves a wide-ranging consideration of the issues of women’s rights in the matter of divorce and the ethical implications of knowingly passing on hereditary illness to the next generation. Eventually Sydney, fearful of passing on the illness to her own children, gives up her own aspirations of marriage in order to care for her father, thus liberating her mother to find happiness with a new husband.
Critics and audiences welcomed the play’s bravery and, as Dean’s obituary in The Times summed it up, ‘Basil Dean excelled himself as a director, and his young contract players, Meggie Albanesi and Malcolm Keen, excelled themselves in the roles of the daughter and the father.’36 In Dean’s words, the response to Albanesi’s sensational performance as Sydney was ‘The only instance within my memory of a young actress achieving an international reputation by virtue of her performance in a single play.’37 Three years later the object of Dean’s heartfelt admiration was dead, at the age of twenty-four, most probably as the result of a botched abortion.
Quite what attracted Basil Dean to produce and direct Madge Watts’ The Claimant is unclear. He perhaps hoped to repeat his success promoting the work of a female writer and The Claimant, like A Bill of Divorcement, concerns a man re-entering the family circle after a long absence. But there the similarities end. The play was cleared by the censor on 9 August 1924 for ‘performance at St Martin’s in a few weeks’,38 but actually opened on 9 September at the Queen’s Theatre. It ran for forty-four performances and was not a success, although Madge’s letters from rehearsals to her husband and son are full of theatrical gossip and details of her involvement – clearly encouraged by Dean – in the process of creating the production.39 She stayed in London during rehearsals and frequently visited Agatha and Archie, entertaining them with news of the latest dramas from the rehearsal rooms. Agatha herself attended rehearsals on at least one occasion, and doubtless enjoyed her first experience of the making of professional theatre. She also may well have noted the immaculate work of Marshall’s typing agency in the preparation of her sister’s playscript, and certainly entrusted them with much of her work thereafter.
As for the play itself, it has been said that it is inspired by the notorious case of the ‘Tichborne Claimant’, Roger Tichborne, who having been assumed dead in an 1854 shipwreck, turned up almost twenty years later to claim his inheritance. This resulted in a celebrated 1874 court case, following which the claim was rejected and the ‘claimant’ subsequently imprisoned for perjury. Madge’s play is a relatively light-hearted domestic drama, in which the protagonist abandons his claim and admits his true identity when it is discovered that the man he is impersonating was married, and that if he keeps up the pretence he will thus be unable to marry the young lady with whom he has fallen in love. There is an almost incomprehensible back-story and the central family’s relationships are so labyrinthine that a family tree is included in the script by way of explanation. This relatively trivial affair is a long way from the courtroom drama that gripped the nation in the 1870s. As G.S. Street at the Lord Chamberlain’s office put it, ‘I see no harm in the play. The Tichborne case has inspired many stories; in this case (except for calling the hero Roger) the resemblance is quite remote.’40
The Times, which the week before opening had announced a new play by ‘Mr M.F. Watts’,41 corrected itself with its review headline ‘Woman Dramatist’s new play’ and went on to say
The history of the Tunstall family is a little complicated, even with the aid of a genealogical table kindly issued by the management with the programme … The author, Mrs M.F. Watts is, we take it, new to the stage, and inexperienced dramatists are apt to be over-lavish