Agatha Christie: A Life in Theatre. Julius Green
as to how he responded to this suggestion, or as to what Madge’s agenda was in making it. She had possibly hoped to interest him in an updated version of Oranges and Lemons, for which there are some handwritten notes on the script; Junius adds the air force to the army and navy in summarising the list of ‘essential’ government expenditures, and ‘Bolshevists’ are now described as ‘Communists’.50
The move to Dean, then, was a logical one for Agatha, and was vindicated when, undeterred by her own lassitude, he appeared to be on the brink of pulling an extraordinary piece of potential casting out of the bag. In June 1939 Cork wrote to Dean, ‘The pressure of her literary work made it difficult for Agatha Christie to get down to the alterations in A Daughter’s a Daughter, but your exciting news about Miss Lawrence’s interest enabled us to persuade her to do so, and I have great pleasure in sending you the revised script herewith. I shall look forward keenly to developments.’51
Gertrude Lawrence had become the talk of the town for her 1936 partnership with Noël Coward in his Tonight at 8.30 playlets, and her interest in the role of Ann Prentice certainly had the desired effect. The revised script cleverly specified Ann’s age as thirty-nine, as against Lawrence’s forty-one, and in her covering letter to Dean Christie wrote,
I return the play. I have completely rewritten the third act, following the scene order you suggested and I really do think it is a great improvement … I still feel that Sarah’s rudeness ought to arise spontaneously – like a jealous and undisciplined child, and that any deliberate ‘trick’ on her part does make her an ‘unpleasant character’ which she should not be. However, it may seem different when played.
I think I’m by now quite incapable of doing any more to it – so if you feel it needs further alterations, I suggest you do them and tell me what you have done!’52
This last suggestion is not as extraordinary as it seems. Dean’s input on Margaret Kennedy’s stage version of her novel The Constant Nymph had, after all, been sufficiently substantial to earn him a co-writing credit.
Although Christie had used the pen name Mary Westmacott for her non-crime novels Giant’s Bread (1930) and the semi-autobiographical Unfinished Portrait (1934), there was at this stage, as we can see from the wide frame of reference of her dramatic work, no indication that the name Agatha Christie, as a playwright, was necessarily going to be associated exclusively with the crime genre. Indeed, the Christie archive’s copies of the 1930s version of A Daughter’s a Daughter state clearly that it is ‘by Agatha Christie’. And so it was that, in mid-August 1939, Agatha Christie seemed poised to have her passionate, witty and cleverly constructed drama about the conflict between mother and daughter presented in the West End. Undoubtedly her finest work for the stage, and compared by surprised critics to the work of Rattigan at its eventual West End premiere thirty-three years after her death, it was to have been produced and directed by the man who launched the playwriting careers of Clemence Dane and Margaret Kennedy and seems likely to have starred one of the most popular actresses of the day. Within three weeks, though, Britain had declared war on Germany, and the story of Agatha Christie, playwright, was to take a very different turn.
The next we hear about A Daughter’s a Daughter is in a letter from Cork to Christie in January 1942: ‘I was on to Basil Dean the other day about A Daughter’s a Daughter and he asks me to tell you that he still hopes to be able to do the play, but that all his plans have been disorganised by E.N.S.A. What he asks now is that we give him another month in which to make a definite proposal.’53
Dean’s passionate commitment to his work as the co-founder of the Entertainments National Service Association, which provided entertainment of all varieties to British troops during the war, is well documented, not least by himself in his very readable 1956 book The Theatre at War. Although Cork, in correspondence with Agatha, still appeared to be holding out some hope of achieving a production of A Daughter’s a Daughter as late as 1943, it was not to be, and the play would not be heard of again until the 1950s.
A Daughter’s a Daughter was not the only Christie theatrical project to be interrupted by the war. In July 1938 Agatha had entered into an agreement with Arnold Ridley, another Hughes Massie client, allowing him to adapt her 1932 Poirot novel Peril at End House for the stage.54 Hughes Massie’s records refer to the licence granted to Ridley as a ‘collaboration agreement’,55 a description which might more correctly have been applied to that granted to Frank Vosper; it is clear though that in this instance Christie was the ‘author’ and Ridley the ‘adaptor’. At this stage it was agreed that royalty income was to be split 50/50, although Hughes Massie would later take half of Ridley’s share, possibly as a result of some sort of ‘buyout’. A month later, Francis L. Sullivan’s company, Eleven Twenty Three Ltd, paid an advance against royalties of £100 to commission a script from Ridley for delivery by the end of September.56 Given the promptness of Sullivan’s arrival on the scene, it seems likely that he had been involved in the deal from the outset. In any event, whoever’s idea it was, a Ridley adaptation of a Christie novel with Sullivan as Poirot certainly had commercial potential.
Ridley was, on the face of it, an ideal adaptor for Christie. He had begun his career as an actor, joining Birmingham Rep after the First World War, in which he was wounded at the Somme. He continued to act in plays and films, and occasionally to direct for the stage, once his playwriting career took off with the enormously successful 1925 melodrama, The Ghost Train. The original production of The Ghost Train played 655 performances and, having opened at the St Martin’s, transferred to three further West End theatres. It is perhaps ironic that this enormously busy and successful playwright and actor, who fought in both world wars and was awarded an OBE for service to theatre, is best remembered for his role as Private Godfrey in the television comedy series Dad’s Army.
The script for Peril at End House was duly delivered, and on 23 November Sullivan paid a further £100 advance against royalties (of between 5 and 10 per cent on different levels of box office income) for an option to produce the play which, if exercised, would also have given him the American rights and a one-third share in any film sale.
The credited producer, however, when the play was eventually staged in 1940, was Ellen Terry’s nephew, the film director Herbert Mason.57 Although he had worked as a stage manager, Mason had no track record of presenting West End productions and I suspect that he may have been something of a front man in order for Sullivan to avoid appearing to be self-producing his return to the stage in the role of Poirot. There may also, of course, have been some hope of a film deal arising from the production; as was standard practice, the film rights in the book and play were ‘indissolubly merged’. Mason may well have been a director of Eleven Twenty Three Ltd but, in common with many other theatrical production companies of this era, its company records no longer exist. In any event, the engagement of Charles Landstone as general manager for the production indicates that the nominal producer may not himself have been actively at the helm. Landstone was more than a safe pair of hands, and in 1942 was to become Assistant Drama Director of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), the wartime precursor to the Arts Council. His book Off-Stage: A Personal Record of the First Twelve Years of State Sponsored Drama in Great Britain, offers an interesting counterpoint to Basil Dean’s book about the work of ENSA.
In January 1940, Cork wrote to Agatha, ‘We will pay your membership dues to the Dramatists Guild. Their organisation has a “closed shop” in America and managers cannot make a contract with any dramatist who is not a member. I have no doubt we shall ultimately have a production of Peril at End House. I understand Francis Sullivan’s present plan is to take it out in the country about the end of March and to bring it into town towards the end of his option period, which expires in May.’58
Cork was not wrong. On 7 March he wrote:
I was talking to Francis Sullivan this morning. I find he has completed all his arrangements for the Richmond production of Peril at End House on April 1st. It is a little unusual that he shouldn’t have consulted anybody about them, but he seems to be within his legal rights. I don’t know very much about any of the people