Agatha Christie: A Life in Theatre. Julius Green
lease on the St Martin’s, Bertie Meyer remained the building’s licensee on behalf of its freeholders, the Willoughby de Broke family. Having enjoyed a successful association with the Little Theatre as a producer, he was doubtless instrumental in facilitating Black Coffee’s transfer there, although he was not directly involved with the production. Black Coffee was sent away from the West End to Wimbledon in order to fill an unsatisfactory week’s gap between its scheduling at the St Martin’s and the Little. But the production never really recovered from this disruption, and closed on 13 June.
Between the St Martin’s and the Little Theatre, Black Coffee had completed a total of sixty-seven West End performances over two months, which was, at least, slightly longer than The Claimant’s run. It was to be more than twenty years until the premiere of the next Christie play that was not based on one of her novels.
Agatha herself had missed her West End debut as a playwright in order to join her new husband at the archaeological dig in Ur. In the autumn of 1931 Max Mallowan relocated his archaeological work in Iraq to Nineveh, and at Christmas Agatha hurried home in the hope of catching the premiere of Chimneys, which Reandco had now scheduled for a December opening at the Embassy, clearly in the hope of enabling a West End transfer as they had done the previous year with Black Coffee.
The fate of Chimneys has taken on an almost mythical status amongst Christie scholars as a ‘play that never was’. Having been advertised as opening at the Embassy, gone into rehearsal and been licensed by the Lord Chamberlain, it suddenly disappeared from their schedule, apparently without explanation. It was not heard of again until it was unearthed by Canadian director John Paul Fishbach in 2001 and given its world premiere in Calgary in 2003, almost twenty-eight years after Christie’s death. As is often the case with matters theatrical, however, the reality of the ‘Chimneys mystery’ was far more prosaic than may at first appear, and those previously attempting to establish the facts of the matter may have enjoyed more success if Agatha had dated her letters with the year as well as the day and month. Once her letters are placed in the correct sequence, the order of events surrounding the cancelled production becomes apparent.
There are in fact no fewer than four copies of the script amongst Christie’s papers, all of them very similar. Three of these are duplicates, two clearly dated 5 July 1928 by the Marshall’s typing agency stamp and carrying Agatha’s address in Ashfield, Torquay. The unstamped duplicate carries the Hughes Massie label and has been annotated in pencil by the actress playing the role of Bundle. The fourth copy includes some slight variations in the typescript and handwritten notes by Agatha, and has the Hughes Massie address handwritten on it. The first point to establish, therefore, is that the script itself never actually ‘disappeared’, even if the scheduled premiere production appears to have done; assuming that Fishbach’s copy is now amongst those at the archive, we know of at least four other ‘originals’, including the one lodged with the Lord Chamberlain’s office. Hughes Massie’s records show that Reandco acquired the rights in the play as early as 22 April 1931, shortly after the opening of their West End run of Black Coffee, for production at the Embassy Theatre within six months of signature and with a West End option to be taken up within six weeks of the Embassy production.33 This time the sale had been co-ordinated by Hughes Massie themselves. As was standard practice, the royalties payable by the Embassy, as a small repertory theatre, were at the reduced rate of 5 per cent of box office income. Although the scheduling of the production would be subject to the vagaries of the repertory system and its short lead times, Reandco clearly wanted to ensure that the next Christie play would appear as part of their own repertoire rather than someone else’s.
The Times of Thursday 19 November 1931 duly announced that ‘The next production at the Embassy Theatre will be Chimneys, by Agatha Christie, which Mr A.R. Whatmore will produce [i.e. direct] on Thursday 1 December.’ This was slightly outside their six-month option period, but that would not have been an issue for a management of good standing who had given Christie her West End premiere, and an informal extension of the option had doubtless been negotiated. Based on the previous year’s experience, Rea and Whatmore clearly felt that a pre-Christmas Christie at the Embassy was a good formula for box-office success.
On the same day as The Times’s announcement, Chimneys arrived at the Lord Chamberlain’s office. Act One of the script submitted to the Lord Chamberlain is clearly from a different copy of the play to the rest of it, and includes rehearsal notes written in pencil apparently by the actor playing Lord Caterham.34 Interestingly, the list of characters at the front shows evidence of what appears to have been an earlier attempt to cast the production, with ‘Wolfit’ pencilled in as one of two suggestions for George Lomax and ‘Sullivan’ for Superintendent Battle. Neither of these were still under contract to the Embassy repertory company by the time the play went into production – Donald Wolfit was by then touring Canada with Barry Jackson’s company. ‘Boxer’ (John Boxer) is pencilled in as Bill Eversleigh and Agatha’s favourite, ‘Joyce’ (Joyce Bland), as feisty heroine Virginia Revel, and it is fairly safe to assume that these two were cast in these roles when Chimneys finally went into rehearsal, particularly as they were both appearing in the Embassy’s previous production, Britannia of Billingsgate – Bland in a small role no doubt in order to allow her to prepare for her leading role in Chimneys. A note next to the role of Anthony Cade says ‘Oliver’ or perhaps ‘Clive’. I don’t know who this is, but I’m sorry to disappoint those who believe that ‘Olivier’ may have been been considered for the production.
Writing to Max from a bug-infested train on her journey back from Nineveh in early December, Agatha, having just seen the 19 November copy of The Times, probably in a hotel lobby, laments:
Darling – I am horribly disappointed, Just seen in the Times that Chimneys began December 1st, so I shall just miss it. I did want to hear how this child of mine sounded on the stage. I could have gone on the Saturday convoy because my passport came back in time and then I’d have got home on the Friday and could have seen the last night Saturday. What I ought to have done was wired to Carlo … 8th or 1st? I’ve been getting out of my good telegraphy habits lately – with bad results! If she had had any sense she would have wired the date to me!35
Agatha had commenced her journey too late to return by Saturday 12 December, which would have been the last night of a run commencing on 1 December. In reality, under a two-weekly repertory system, with Britannia of Billingsgate having opened on 10 November and announcing in its programme, ‘Change of programme every fortnight’ and ‘production in preparation: Chimneys, a new play by Agatha Christie’,36 the scheduled opening date for Chimneys would originally have been Tuesday 24 November (the date for which it was licensed by the Lord Chamberlain’s office). But in the event the unexpected success of Britannia, a new comedy by Jope Slade and Sewell Stokes about a charwoman at a film studio who ‘walks on’ in a film and is such a hit that she later becomes a famous character actress, meant that it had been extended for a week at the Embassy and was thought worth transferring to the St Martin’s thereafter. Chimneys was therefore pushed to 1 December by the extended run at the Embassy, rather than being brought forward as Agatha seemed to believe it had been. It could only ever have opened on 8 December if there was another production scheduled between Britannia and it, which clearly there wasn’t.
Agatha arrived in Istanbul in mid-December, writing to Max, ‘Am now at Tokatlian [hotel] … looked at Times of Dec 7th and “Mary Broome” is on at the Embassy!! So perhaps I shall see Chimneys after all? Or did it go off after a week? All bookshops etc are closed of course – so can’t get any other papers.’37
Mary Broome, featuring Robert Donat and Joyce Bland, had indeed followed Britannia of Billingsgate into the Embassy on 1 December instead of Chimneys. With the transfer of Britannia to the St Martin’s went, presumably, the majority of the cast who would have been in rehearsal for Chimneys. The ‘extension’ of Britannia at the Embassy for a week would have helped to buy some time in respect of organising a new cast for Chimneys and was announced on the same day as the news that Chimneys was to follow it into the Embassy, so the original intention still seems to have