Agatha Christie: A Life in Theatre. Julius Green
terms of its themes but also of its setting and characters. If a producer had been brave enough to accept it, then the Lord Chamberlain’s office may well have raised objections. The script is perhaps too short, and is by no means perfect in its construction, but with the benefit of a little dramaturgy from an experienced director it could have made for a highly impactful evening of theatre. Had it been performed when it was written, and been presented to the public as Christie’s first play, then the history of Agatha Christie, playwright might have been very different.
As it turned out, though, all her early playwriting efforts were to be upstaged by a moustachioed French detective, who inevitably stole the show as soon as he set foot in front of an audience. Yes, French.
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