Agatha Christie: A Life in Theatre. Julius Green
by Alderman Higgs in Appointment with Death, the ‘not a Red, just pale pink’ Miss Casewell in The Mousetrap, the post-war suspicion of foreigners in Witness for the Prosecution and the persecuted East European immigrants at the centre of Verdict.
Whilst the received wisdom is that Christie’s novels are to a certain extent formulaic, and much scholarly time has been devoted to analysing these alleged formulae, the same most definitely cannot be said of her work as a playwright, and it almost seems that she found herself enjoying greater freedom of expression as a writer in this genre. A repertoire encompassing the edge-of-your-seat chiller Ten Little Niggers, the definitive courtroom drama Witness for the Prosecution, the Rattiganesque psychological drama Verdict and the ‘time play’ Go Back for Murder can hardly be described as formulaic and there is no such thing as a ‘typical’ Agatha Christie play. Despite the enduring perception of her work as little more than an extended game of Cluedo, Christie’s plays tend to be character-led rather than plot-led, and she clearly relishes entrusting the entire momentum of the story-telling to the voices of her ever-colourful dramatis personae. Her dialogue fairly trips off the tongue and is spiced with witticisms and observational comedy frequently worthy of Wilde. In her plays the detectives and police inspectors are usually relegated to minor roles, with the solving of a crime taking second place to the human drama that is being played out. It is as if we come closer to what Christie wants to say as a writer without the dominating presence of Poirot and Marple. With the exception of Poirot’s appearance in Black Coffee, the first play of hers to be produced (in 1930), neither character features in any of her own stage plays, and indeed she removed Poirot from the storyline when undertaking her own adaptations of four of the novels in which he appears, maintaining, doubtless correctly, that he would pull focus on stage.
Explorations of guilt, revenge and justice loom large in Christie’s stage work and are timeless subjects that go back to the very dawn of playwriting, but although the concept of justice and the many forms that it can take is central to many of her plays, the image of the policeman leading away the guilty party in handcuffs is rarely part of her theatrical vocabulary. An inability to escape the past is a recurring theme, and man’s infidelity is often the catalyst for its exploration, a frequently used storyline that some have attributed to the philandering of Christie’s own first husband. In Christie’s work for the stage, the murder itself is usually nothing more than a plot device to move forward the action and to set the scene for Christie’s exploration of the human condition and the dilemmas faced by her characters. ‘Who’ dunit is far less important than ‘Why’.
Agatha was a regular theatregoer from childhood and engaged in theatrical projects from an early age, was hugely theatrically literate and drew on a broad frame of reference from Grand Guignol to Whitehall farce, all of which can be seen in her work. But her lifelong passion was for Shakespeare, and her theatrical vocabulary was defined in particular by an enjoyment and understanding of his works, gained as an audience member and a reader rather than a scholar. In a 1973 letter to The Times she wrote: ‘I have gone to plays from an early age and am a great believer that that is the way one should approach Shakespeare. He wrote to entertain and he wrote for playgoers.’7 And in her autobiography she says,
Shakespeare is ruined for most people by having been made to learn it at school; you should see Shakespeare as it was written to be seen, played on the stage. There you can appreciate it quite young, long before you take in the beauty of the words and the poetry. I took my grandson, Mathew, to Macbeth and The Merry Wives of Windsor when he was, I think, eleven or twelve. He was very appreciative of both, though his comment was unexpected. He turned to me as we came out, and said in an awestruck voice, ‘You know, if I hadn’t known beforehand that that was Shakespeare, I should never have believed it.’ This was clearly meant to be a testimonial to Shakespeare, and I took it as such.8
Agatha and her grandson particularly enjoyed the knockabout comedy of The Merry Wives of Windsor:
In those days it was done, as I am sure it was meant to be, as good old English slapstick – no subtlety about it. The last representation of the Merry Wives I saw – in 1965 – had so much arty production about it that you felt you had travelled very far from a bit of winter sun in Windsor Old Park. Even the laundry basket was no longer a laundry basket, full of dirty washing: it was a mere symbol made of raffia! One cannot really enjoy slapstick farce when it is symbolised. The good old pantomime custard trick will never fail to rouse a roar of laughter, so long as custard appears to be actually applied to a face! To take a small carton with Birds Custard Powder written on it and delicately tap a cheek – well, the symbolism may be there, but the farce is lacking.9
Agatha’s letters to her second husband, Max, during his wartime posting to Cairo are full of enthusiastic descriptions of her visits to the major Shakespearian productions of the day, including those presented by the Old Vic Company at the New Theatre, their London base towards the end of the war. Her critiques of the productions and the performances of the leading classical actors of the day, and her insightful interpretations of the characters’ motivations, display a comprehensive knowledge of the Shakespearian repertoire. She also shows a keen interest in Shakespeare’s craft as a playwright. Commenting on the fact that he did not devise original plots she says, of the era in which he wrote:
I think the playwright was rather like a composer – he had to find a libretto for his art (like a ballet nowadays). ‘I should like to do a setting of Hamlet, or my version of Macbeth etc.’ Inventing a story was not really thought of. ‘What is the argument?’ Claudius asks in Hamlet before the players begin. The argument was a set thing – you then exercised your art on it … I think plays tended to be loose on construction, because they incorporated certain ‘turns’ – like the music halls … He saw a play as a series of scenes in which actors got certain opportunities. Rather like beads on a necklace– the thing to him remained always individual beads strung together.10
Shakespeare’s portrayal of female characters particularly engaged Agatha – ‘All Shakespeare’s women are very definitely characterized – he was feminine enough himself to see men through their eyes’11 – and she was intrigued by Oxford academic A.L. Rowse’s disputed identification of the ‘Dark Lady’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Rowse, in turn, was an admirer of Christie; ‘We must not underrate her literary ambition and accomplishment, as her publishers did, simply because she was the first of detective story writers.’12 Meanwhile, Christie trivia buffs can spend many happy hours identifying the numerous Shakespearian references in the titles and texts of her works. To get the ball rolling, I will pose the question, what were the two plays she wrote that took their titles from Hamlet?
Agatha was as enamoured with the backstage world of theatre as she was with the performance itself. ‘I don’t think, that there is anything that takes you so much away from real things and happenings as the acting world,’ she wrote to Max in 1942.13 ‘It is a world of its own and actors never are thinking of anything but themselves and their lines and their business, and what they are going to wear!’ And she says in her autobiography, ‘I always find it restful to stay with actors in wartime, because to them, acting and the theatrical world are the real world, any other world was not. The war to them was a long drawn-out nightmare that prevented them from going on with their own lives, in the proper way, so their entire talk was of theatrical people, theatrical things, what was going on in the theatrical world, who was going into E.N.S.A. – it was wonderfully refreshing.’14 To Agatha Christie, whose imaginary world has offered a welcome escape for so many, the world of theatre offered one to her.
Agatha shared with her theatrical friends the excitements and disappointments of live performance – ‘Lights that do not go out when the whole point is that that they should go out, and lights that do not go on when the whole point is that they should go on. These are the real agonies of theatre’15 – and in particular the agonies of first nights:
First nights are usually misery, hardly to be borne. One has only two reasons for going to them. One is – a not ignoble motive – that the poor actors have to go through with it, and if it goes badly it is unfair that the author should not