Agatha Christie: A Life in Theatre. Julius Green
and I were poles apart in our reactions to things. I think that from the start that fascinated us. It is the old excitement of “the stranger”.’5 As Christie herself well knew, however, there can be a price to pay for such adventuring. In 1924, when the story was published, she was still living with Archie at Sunningdale and, I believe, about to write the play The Lie.
‘Philomel Cottage’ is an intense and engaging psychological thriller, a battle of wills between two people which examines the extremes to which the power of suggestion can be pushed. There is (technically) no murder and there is no detective to pull focus. The setting is straightforward, there are two central characters and a minimal supporting dramatis personae, and there are echoes of Grand Guignol in its construction. It is, in short, ideal for dramatic adaptation. Which is why Agatha Christie chose to adapt it herself, as her fifth full-length stage play.
The Agatha Christie archive contains two copies of a script called ‘The Stranger’, a three-act play ‘by Agatha Christie’ which carries a typist’s stamp dated 10 March 1932, two years before the short story was to appear in the collection The Listerdale Mystery and three years before Frank Vosper was licensed by Hughes Massie to create his own adaptation. Not that he did.
Vosper, who was nine years younger than Christie, was already an established and popular stage and screen actor and playwright by the time he became involved with the project. He had started his career immediately after the First World War, doing tours of military camps for Basil Dean, and in 1926 scored a hit in the role of Joe Varwell in Eden and Adelaide Phillpotts’ Yellow Sands at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. As a playwright he was known for writing pieces in which he could cast himself in the lead, notably Murder on the Second Floor and People Like Us (both 1929) and Marry at Leisure (1931). Murder on the Second Floor had been a particular success, playing for over 300 performances in London, with Vosper taking the central role of playwright Hugh Bromilow, although when the production transferred to New York with an English cast, Laurence Olivier took over the role. Vosper was an amateur criminologist (he listed his interests in Who’s Who in the Theatre as ‘criminology and blackberrying’), so it was hardly surprising that he found Christie’s psychological study of a serial killer intriguing. Here was a perfect subject for him as a playwright, and one in which he could assay the leading role of a charismatic and attractive villain.
What has been overlooked is that Vosper’s source material for the play that he eventually called Love From a Stranger was not in fact Christie’s short story, but her own unpublished, unperformed full-length play based upon it. Although the script of Love From a Stranger, like the advertising for it at the time, credited the piece as being ‘by Frank Vosper, based on a story by Agatha Christie’, there has always been some disagreement amongst commentators as to whether Christie herself contributed to Vosper’s adaptation. The version submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s office, although it carries Vosper’s address, clearly states ‘by Agatha Christie and Frank Vosper’, and Vosper’s Times obituary categorises the play as a ‘collaboration’ with Christie.6 Gwen Taylor, intriguingly, writes that Christie was ‘helped by Frank Vosper’ to adapt the story into a play.7 But Charles Osborne, who is usually a reliable source on the plays, states categorically, and entirely wrongly, that ‘Other writers on Agatha Christie have described the play as having been adapted jointly by Christie and Vosper. This is incorrect: it was the work of Frank Vosper alone, and the credit for its shape and dialogue must be entirely his.’8
Nothing could, in fact, be further from the truth. Hughes Massie’s summary of the adaptation licence issued to Vosper on 1 February 1935 clearly shows that his play is to be based on both ‘The Stranger’ and ‘Philomel Cottage’, with Christie’s own dramatisation listed first.9 The entire dramatic structure of Vosper’s piece, which interpolates additional scenes prior to the starting point of the short story before leading to the same terrifying denouement, is in fact the uncredited work of Agatha Christie, playwright.
In fact, Christie’s is arguably the better play. Her adaptation is fast-moving, witty and suspenseful, a neat six-hander with three acts of one scene each. Vosper increases the dramatis personae to eight, and divides each act into two scenes. It becomes a long-winded affair in which the leading male role has clearly been built up as a star vehicle for himself, to the detriment of that of the female protagonist, with whose predicament we engage more fully in Christie’s own version. Most significantly, the conceit of two independent young women giving up their London flat following a sweepstake win, and the eponymous ‘stranger’ turning up to look round it as a prospective tenant, as well as the entire ‘love from a stranger’ motif, are all absent from the short story and are intrinsic to Christie’s play. In the short story’s own back-story, our heroine simply inherits her windfall and meets the stranger at a friend’s party.
It doesn’t help in establishing the facts that Christie’s own memory on the subject was unreliable. In 1968 she wrote thus to a Californian student who had requested information about her plays for his thesis: ‘Love from a Stranger was originally a short story written by me called Philomel Cottage. I re-wrote this as a one act play, Love from a Stranger, and agreed to Frank Vosper extending it into a three act play. The two first acts being his, and the third act being principally the one act play as I had written it.’10 Although this is incorrect in its detail, it clearly establishes that she was the first to adapt the story as a play and that Vosper used her own playscript as his source material. Whilst the early sections of Vosper’s play clearly owe their structure to Christie’s adaptation, it is indeed in the final act where the textual similarities are most striking. Here is an extract from Christie’s The Stranger:
GERALD: All the trouble women get, they usually deserve. They’ve no sense – absolutely no sense.
ENID: I expect that’s true sometimes.
GERALD: Born fools, the little angels! (Kisses the tips of his fingers) Woman’s weakness is man’s opportunity. Did Shakespeare say that or did I think of it myself? I believe I thought of it. If so, it’s good, it’s damned good!
ENID: Have some more port? …
GERALD: I’m a remarkable man. I’m – well – different to other men.
ENID: Yes, I think you are.
GERALD: I’ve a lot of power over women for instance. I’ve always had it. I discovered quite young that I could twist women round my little finger. It’s like a useful gift. Boyish – that’s the note they like. Makes them feel maternal. The eternal boy – it fetches every time.11
And the corresponding section in Vosper’s Love From a Stranger:
BRUCE: You’re a sensible girl, aren’t you?
CECILY: How do you mean?
BRUCE: You don’t ‘go on’ at a man. Very few women can say ‘Oh, all right,’ and leave it at that … But, then, most women are fools. (He smiles to himself)
CECILY: (trying to be conversational) Do you think so?
BRUCE: I don’t think, I know – born fools! …
CECILY: Perhaps you’re right.
BRUCE: And women’s weakness is man’s opportunity. Did someone write that, or did I think of it myself? – If I did it’s good, damn good! ‘Women’s weakness is man’s opportunity.’
CECILY: You have extraordinary insight into things. Have some more coffee.
BRUCE: Please … Yes, you’re right, I have great insight. I’ve a lot of power over women. I discovered quite early in life that I could twist women round my little finger. It’s a useful gift.
CECILY: It must be.
BRUCE: Boyish – that’s the note they like – makes them feel sort of maternal … It gets them every time …12
The characters, as it happens, get through three names each, from their first appearance in the story to Vosper’s script via Christie’s. The original story’s female protagonist, Alix Martin, becomes