Agatha Christie: A Life in Theatre. Julius Green
the play comes to the West End. AR Whatmore is to produce [i.e. direct] – I don’t think he is at all bad, although once again he is not very well known.
Everyone was delighted that you will be able to attend some of the rehearsals. The play is to be read over next Wednesday and obviously rehearsals start on the following Monday, but Sullivan is getting in touch with you himself about the arrangements.59
As artistic head of the Embassy during Alec Rea’s tenure, A.R. Whatmore had been instrumental in the West End transfer of Black Coffee nine years previously. Sullivan’s wife, Danae Gaylen, was one of a number of female stage designers coming to prominence at this time, and she was put in charge of the production’s design.
Peril at End House opened at Richmond and, following a short tour, on 1 May in the West End, at the independently owned Vaudeville Theatre. Despite the play’s somewhat cumbersome three-act, seven-scene construction, reviews were encouraging, both at Richmond and in the West End, and it was generally felt that the suspense was sustained, although Sullivan inevitably stole the limelight once again. The Daily Telegraph’s review, headed ‘FRANCIS SULLIVAN AS POIROT’, remarked that ‘The Belgian sleuth has been highly theatricalised and, as impersonated by Francis Sullivan, physically he will be a slight shock to Mrs Christie’s admirers. But it is a good performance, in which his charming conceit is admirably justified … The play has been effectively produced by A.R. Whatmore.’60
Critics also particularly enjoyed the performances of character actor Ian Fleming (no, not that Ian Fleming!) as Captain Hastings and young South African actress Olga Edwardes (later to be known as artist Olga Davenport) in her first West End leading role as ‘Nick’ Buckley.
Despite the favourable critical reception, the West End run only lasted for twenty-three performances, and in this case there can be no mystery as to why. Ten days after it opened, German forces began the invasion by air and land of Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain resigned, enabling Winston Churchill to form a coalition government. Chamberlain, like Akhnaton, had paid the price of advocating a policy of appeasement. As Charles Landstone notes, ‘Any further theatrical activities were interrupted by the end of the “phoney war”. At the time of the German invasion of the Netherlands, I was at the Vaudeville with aspiring actor-manager, Francis Sullivan, with a new Agatha Christie play. The audience melted away, and practically the whole of London theatre closed down for the second time.’61 Landstone clearly considered himself to be working for Sullivan rather than Herbert Mason.
A touring production of the play was licensed the following year, but Samuel French Ltd did not enter into their usual agreement for amateur and publishing rights until 1944, and publication was held back until the end of the war. Of the income generated for the writers by the deal with French’s (including the usual 50 per cent of amateur licensing income), Ridley’s share was payable to ‘Mrs Ridley’ and Hughes Massie’s to ‘Mrs Cork’,62 a manoeuvre that one suspects probably had less to do with husbandly devotion than with avoiding the attentions of the taxman. Unsurprisingly, the American production that Cork had anticipated did not occur.
Shortly after Ridley completed his adaptation of Peril at End House, Frank Vosper’s sister, Margery, wrote a very straightforward, one-act, four-hander play called Tea For Three, based on Christie’s short story ‘Accident’. The story had first been published, under a different title, in the Sunday Despatch in 1929 and was subsequently included in Christie’s collection The Listerdale Mystery in 1934. Following her job as assistant stage manager in the West End run of Love From a Stranger, Margery had gone on to work as a literary agent in the Dorothy Allen agency, which she eventually inherited, changing its name to hers at its former owner’s insistence. Amongst Margery’s clients was Dorothy L. Sayers, who in 1936 had enjoyed an extraordinary West End hit with Busman’s Honeymoon, the only stage appearance of ‘gentleman detective’ Lord Peter Wimsey, a play co-written with her friend Muriel St Clare Byrne and novelised the following year as the last in the Wimsey series. And with playwriting clients also including Emlyn Williams and John Osborne, the Margery Vosper agency was to become a major force in the West End. As her Times obituary remarked, ‘Next to her family the theatre was Margery’s life; a dedication largely attributable to her devotion to her famous actor brother, Frank, twelve years her senior, whose tragic death at sea in 1937, when Margery was 25, ended prematurely a brilliant career on stage and screen.’63 Quite how or why Tea for Three came to be written is unclear, but it was published in 1939 in Book Two of Nelson’s Theatrecraft Plays, a book of one-act plays by various writers, and appears to have been aimed entirely at performance in the amateur market.
The London theatrical calendar in the 1930s had been even busier than in the previous decade. Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence were the hot ticket in Tonight at 8.30, audiences were fascinated by J.B. Priestley’s ‘time plays’, T.S. Eliot left his dramatic calling card with Murder in the Cathedral and, almost a decade after his successful 1929 thriller Rope, Patrick Hamilton followed it with Gas Light. Compared to now, women playwrights were relatively well represented in the West End. Clemence Dane continued to have work performed, and in 1937 A.P. Herbert’s Matrimonial Causes Act finally introduced the divorce legislation anticipated by A Bill of Divorcement in 1921. Amongst a number of other women who saw their plays premiered in the West End at this time was Gertrude Jennings, whose 1934 success Family Affairs was directed by Auriol Lee, director of the Broadway production of Love From a Stranger. But the decade belonged to Dodie Smith, who enjoyed a succession of hits from Autumn Crocus in 1931 through to Dear Octopus in 1938. The latter, produced by the fledgling production company H.M. Tennent Ltd and starring John Gielgud, won her particular acclaim and ran for 376 performances at the Queen’s Theatre. And just as Christie the novelist was to blossom as a playwright in later life, so Smith the playwright was later also to achieve success as a novelist.
Despite her own disappointments in pursuing her vocation as a playwright, the 1930s had proved a remarkably productive decade for Christie in her day job as a thriller writer. Successfully combining her writing career with accompanying her husband on his archaeological digs, she had published no fewer than seventeen mystery novels, including such classics of the genre as The Murder at the Vicarage (1930), Peril at End House (1932), Lord Edgware Dies (1933), Murder on the Orient Express (1934), The ABC Murders (1936), Death on the Nile (1937) and 1939’s Ten Little Niggers, which under various titles was to become one of the best-selling novels of all time. It is little wonder that Cork had to explain to Basil Dean that she was rather busy. Agatha’s happy marriage to Max, marred only by a miscarriage in 1932, was fulfilling and intellectually stimulating, and in October 1938, they bought Greenway, a classic Georgian house built in 1771 and set in thirty acres of woodland on the banks of the River Dart. Agatha dubbed it, with good reason, ‘The most beautiful place in the world’, and it was to become the Mallowans’ regular summer retreat.
To some commentators, the decade that began with the Depression, saw the death of the monarch and the abdication crisis, and ended in war, was for Agatha, professionally and personally, her most fulfilling. But for Agatha Christie, playwright, it had been full of frustration and disappointment. In 1940 Christie turned fifty and, despite having penned seven full-length plays encompassing a variety of styles and subjects, had so far seen only one of them performed, and that for an interrupted West End run of just two months. Her name had, admittedly, frequently been seen by the public on theatre marquees, but most often in the context of its appropriation by egotistical showmen like Charles Laughton, Francis L. Sullivan and Frank Vosper.
The outbreak of war, which had put paid to Arnold Ridley’s Peril at End House and to Christie’s own A Daughter’s a Daughter, was however destined to change everything. Within four years, Agatha Christie would have established herself as a celebrated West End and Broadway playwright in her own right.
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