Agatha Christie: A Life in Theatre. Julius Green
the most serious moments. The House of Commons is ruined – absolutely ruined nowadays – all the old traditions – (He breaks off) I am wandering from the point.’ At time of the play’s writing 1929’s ‘flapper election’ was yet to come, and Lomax is referring to the tiny number of women MPs who had been returned to Parliament since 1918, when women over thirty were given the right to vote (subject to minimum property qualifications) and women over twenty-one were given the right to stand for Parliament.
The feisty Virginia finds a natural ally in adventurer Anthony Cade, who remarks, ‘Perhaps I was born colour blind. When I see the red light – I can’t help forging ahead. And in the end, you know, that spells disaster. Bound to. (a pause) Quite right, really. That sort of thing is bad for traffic generally.’
When the two eventually but inevitably tie the knot he confesses:
ANTHONY: Darling! I have let you believe such a lot of lies about me. And I have married you under false pretences. What are you going to do about it?
VIRGINIA: Do? Why we will go to Herzoslovakia and play at being kings and queens.
ANTHONY: The average life of a king or queen out there is under four years. They always get assassinated.
VIRGINIA: How marvellous! We’ll have a lot of fun – teaching the brigands not to be brigands, and the assassins not to assassinate and generally improving the moral tone of the country.
Christie’s dialogue is seen to best advantage when presented in dramatic form, and it is notable that, in the plays which are adaptations of novels, it is often an improvement on the equivalent passage in a book from which it is taken; this delightful banter being a case in point. Indeed, her stated frustrations with the need to break up the flow of dialogue in a novel with descriptive passages are never more apparent than in the novel of The Secret of Chimneys itself where, instead of a description of the house, she gives us this: ‘The car passed in through the park gates of Chimneys. Descriptions of that historic place can be found in any guidebook. It is also No 3 in Historic Homes of England, price 21s. On Thursday, coaches come over from Middlingham and view those portions of it which are open to the public. In view of all these facilities, to describe Chimneys would be superfluous.’45
Intriguingly, sections of The Secret of Chimneys are written as though they were themselves part of a playscript. Here is the start of Chapter 10: ‘Inspector Badgeworthy in his office. Time, 8.30am. A tall, portly man, Inspector Badgeworthy, with a heavy regulation tread. Inclined to breathe hard in moments of professional strain …’ And most of the final chapter is written in the present tense, again in the idiom of a playscript:
Scene – Chimneys, 11am Thursday morning.
Johnson, the police constable, with his coat off, digging.
Something in the nature of a funeral feeling seems to be in the air. The friends and relations stand round the grave that Johnson is digging …
The play, like the book, features a character named Herman Isaacstein, who represents the interests of a British oil syndicate. Although his position as a high-powered man of finance is clearly respected by the other characters, they occasionally make reference to him, usually humorously, in a manner typical of the casual anti-semitism of the pre-war upper middle classes. Like that of Hergé, the Belgian creator of boy detective Tintin, Christie’s work was published between the 1920s and the 1970s, spanning and reflecting for popular consumption a century of extraordinary social and political upheaval; and it is important to consider the context in which it was written before passing judgement. Because Christie was still writing in the 1970s it is easy to forget that she was raised an Edwardian and, like Hergé’s, some of her early work contains elements of racial stereotyping that typify her class and the era in which she was writing. Suffice to say that, when Chimneys finally received its stage premiere in Calgary in 2006, certain lines relating to Isaacstein were subtly adjusted to take account of the sensibilities of modern audiences.
For all her efforts to provide audiences with alternative fare, however, Poirot was to continue to weigh heavily on Christie’s theatrical ambitions and, on Broadway as in the West End, the character was to make his debut before his creator. Key to successfully dating Agatha’s correspondence relating to Chimneys (previous misdating has exacerbated the perceived problem of the ‘disappearing play’) are the references to the forthcoming Broadway production of Alibi, starring Charles Laughton, which received its premiere at the Booth Theatre on 8 February 1932. Laughton had already made his own Broadway debut, enjoying a modest success in Payment Deferred, an adaptation of a 1926 C.S. Forester crime novel presented at the Lyceum Theatre at the end of 1931. Payment Deferred was produced by Gilbert Miller, a defiantly independent producer who was a friend of Basil Dean’s and who was later to play a key role in Agatha’s own Broadway success. Broadway was a calling-card for Hollywood for British actors in the 1930s, and Laughton felt that Alibi would provide a notable showcase for him, as it had in London. The play had been successfully revived in repertory, notably at London’s Regent Theatre in 1931, and in the same year the clean-shaven young Austin Trevor, a former ReandeaN player, had improbably played Poirot in British film versions of both Alibi and Black Coffee.
For the Broadway production of Alibi, Laughton teamed up with the notoriously acerbic and bullying Jed Harris, a prolific thirty-two-year-old producer/director whose various Broadway producing successes to date had included journalistic comedy The Front Page at the Times Square Theatre in 1929. Harris, who had changed his name from Jacob Horowitz, purchased a licence for $500 from Hughes Massie at the end of 1931 and engaged John Anderson, a critic on the New York Evening Journal, to revise the script for the American market; a process which Agatha was not involved in but which, from her letters to Max, she was evidently aware of. Authors’ royalties were split three ways, between Christie, Michael Morton and John Anderson, unusually giving Christie herself a minority share in the work.46 The title was also changed, to The Fatal Alibi, and the production was credited as ‘staged by Mr Laughton’ although Harris was closely involved in the rehearsal process.
The cast also notably included Broadway veteran Effie Shannon, but it was Laughton who once again stole the show. The Booth Theatre’s playbill (i.e. programme) shows a moustachioed Laughton in a gaudy pin-striped suit and carnation gurning and waving his hands in the air. ‘Look at me,’ it clearly states.47
The three-act, five-scene acting masterclass that The Murder of Roger Ackroyd had become was not welcomed by the American critics. The New York Times commented, ‘Since Mr Laughton enjoys playing the part, a guileless theatregoer may enjoy watching him. But colourful acting, slightly detached from the flow of narrative, can also temper a drama’s illusion. In the opinion of this department, Mr Laughton’s lithographic performance has that subtle effect. It diverts attention from the play.’48
Legendary Hollywood gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky in his syndicated ‘Tintypes’ column led off an affectionate character sketch with:
Charles Laughton is the latest English actor to invade Broadway and capture the critics and the public – a neat trick. Although movie companies have already tried to entice him to go to Hollywood, little is known about him here. And even less is known about him in London … Is sensitive about his weight. Wants to forget about it and not step on the scales. The wife has a scale in the house and tries to coax him to step on it by placing a piece of cake on the machine … Normally retires between one-thirty and two in the morning. When with Jed Harris between six and seven in the morning …
His nicknames are Fatty, Henry VIII and Pudge and Billy. The wife’s pet name for him can’t be printed.49
The Fatal Alibi ran for only twenty-four performances on Broadway, but it was enough for Laughton to make his mark, and it served its purpose as a springboard for a successful Broadway and Hollywood career. ‘The wife’, of course, was the actress Elsa Lanchester, whose film career was to take off alongside Laughton’s; according to Skolsky, Laughton designed ‘most of her clothes’.
And so Agatha Christie made her Broadway debut; in her own absence, her work processed by not one but two