Agatha Christie: A Life in Theatre. Julius Green
the world of theatre. As is often the case, though, her list of ‘Agatha Christie plays’ makes no distinction between those written by Christie herself and those which are the work of third-party adaptors.
It is autobiographies, rather than biographies, that provide the most fruitful source of published material for the Agatha Christie theatre researcher. In 1972, Agatha wrote the introduction to The Mousetrap Man, the autobiography of Peter Saunders, who produced all of her work in the West End between 1950 and 1962, including her biggest successes. An entertaining and opinionated romp, it gives an interesting, but nonetheless selective, insight into Agatha’s work at the height of her playwriting career, as well as Saunders’ own views on matters such as investors, critics and his fellow producers. In 1977, Agatha’s own autobiography was published posthumously. Written between 1950 and 1965, when she was aged between fifty-nine and seventy-five, it is a compelling read and gives some fascinating insights into her personality and her love of theatre, but is notoriously selective and not always entirely accurate in points of detail and chronology. Because of its focus on her early life, and the fact that her work as a playwright met with success relatively late in her career, it ironically is not the most reliable of sources on the subject. Agatha’s second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan, published his own autobiography, Mallowan’s Memoirs, in the same year. His opinions on his wife’s theatrical efforts are perceptive and insightful, if relatively brief.
In 1980 Hubert Gregg, who directed The Hollow, The Unexpected Guest and a couple of Christie’s later, less successful plays, published Agatha Christie and All That Mousetrap. In this bizarrely self-satisfied and resentful book from a relatively minor player in the story of Christie on stage, Gregg complains that Christie underplayed Peter Saunders’ contribution to her theatrical success in her own autobiography. What Gregg really objected to, of course, was that she had failed to mention his own modest contribution at all. I have had access to a small but very interesting privately held collection of Gregg’s rehearsal scripts and correspondence with Christie, which does not entirely bear out his version of events.
Peter Cotes, the original director of The Mousetrap, uses his 1993 autobiography, Thinking Aloud, to establish (at some length) his own position in respect of his lifelong dispute with Peter Saunders, the play’s producer. In doing so he quotes Gwen Robyns in support, although Robyns was presumably simply repeating information that Cotes had himself given to her. Saunders, Gregg and Cotes between them provide lively and often conflicting first-hand accounts of the production process of Christie’s plays from 1950 onwards, but tend to marginalise the role of Christie herself.
No Christie scholar’s bookshelf is complete without the extraordinary contribution of John Curran, whose meticulous transcriptions from and analyses of her seventy-three notebooks in his own two-volume work, Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks (2009) and Agatha Christie’s Murder in the Making (2011), provide a vital key to Christie’s imaginary world. Largely undated and frequently illegible, these copious, gloriously disorganised, handwritten aides memoires show work in progress as Christie developed ideas for storylines for both her novels and plays. The notebooks themselves are particularly interesting for their outlines of plays that never made it as far as a draft script, and Dr Curran has been unstintingly generous as an expert guide in this respect, sharing his knowledge in a manner that enabled me quickly to locate the particular nuggets that I was seeking. For plays that reached script stage, however, the notebooks are frequently less informative as a source for examining the work’s development than the often numerous versions of the draft scripts themselves, the typed and handwritten amendments made to them, and Christie’s sometimes extremely detailed correspondence with directors and producers as new ideas were explored and incorporated. The draft scripts for Three Blind Mice (which became The Mousetrap) and Witness for the Prosecution, for instance, are full of alterations, insertions, amendments and pencil notes made as she developed the scenarios and characters. We often see quite radical changes to plotting and outcomes taking place before us on the page. The draft scripts are, in effect, the ‘notebooks’ for the plays.
Many of these drafts are held by the Christie Archive Trust, whose collection consists mainly of papers that were removed from Christie’s cherished Devon estate Greenway when it was handed over to the National Trust in 2001, and includes a vast quantity of personal correspondence, as well as the legendary notebooks and drafts of many of the books and plays. The correspondence, mostly between Christie and her second husband Max, at times when he was either away on archaeological work or on wartime military service, gives a fascinating and deeply personal insight into Agatha’s devotion to family, the wide range of her interests and her delightful sense of humour. Almost entirely absent is any reference to her work as a novelist (which, to her, would have been the equivalent of discussing her ‘day job’). She does, however, frequently refer with obvious delight to progress on her numerous theatrical projects. The letters themselves, like the notebooks, are mostly undated (or not fully dated; we are usually told the day of the week) and often illegible; at one point even Max asks if she would mind typing her next epistle. Analysing the correspondence when a line about a play rehearsal could read either ‘it was absolutely marvellous’ or ‘I was absolutely furious’ is a labour-intensive but deeply rewarding operation. Dating the letters is an equally time-consuming process, although made easier by Max’s completely legible and meticulously dated side of the correspondence, where available. Some of the previous mistakes that have been made in documenting Christie’s theatre work have arisen from the misdating of letters, but ironically taking note of their theatrical context is often one of the most accurate ways of identifying the time of writing. When and where certain productions that she refers to were actually staged is, after all, a matter of record. Five key scripts are missing entirely from the archive: Black Coffee, Ten Little Niggers, Appointment with Death, The Hollow and Go Back for Murder; but it more than redeems itself by housing five unpublished and unperformed full-length scripts and a further seven one-act plays, all of them of considerable interest to the historian of her work as a playwright.
One of the many problems with assessing historic play texts is that what we currently accept as the published version may well contain significant changes to the draft that was accepted for production, and equally to the version that was eventually performed in front of the critics following amendments made during the rehearsal process. It is here that the Lord Chamberlain’s Plays collection at the British Library provides an invaluable resource. From 1737 until 1968 all new plays produced in the UK were subject to approval by the Lord Chamberlain’s office, thus effectively conferring a censorship role on a department of the royal household. Almost every play submitted has been retained in the collection, and scripts from the period 1824–1968 are housed at the British Library, referenced through thousands of handwritten index cards. Significantly, the script held in this collection would be exactly that performed on the first night, and thus reviewed by critics, because changes were not permitted once a licence had been issued.
Scripts had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain no later than a week before the first scheduled performance, and to allow for changes to be made right up to the last possible moment they were often sent at very short notice; it has to be said that the Lord Chamberlain’s office seems to have been remarkably good-natured and diligent in processing scripts and responding to them in what were frequently very short timeframes. The result of this was that playwrights effectively self-censored, as nothing could be more catastrophic than to have your play postponed by a last-minute spat with the censor when the production was paid for and in rehearsal. Each play was subject to an Official Examiner’s report on a single sheet of paper, which make for interesting reading and often show the censor in the role of would-be critic. There is also a file of correspondence between the Lord Chamberlain’s office and the producer of each production.
The card index is by play title and the handwritten, 17-volume chronological list of plays submitted for licensing between 1900 and 1968 is similarly far from user-friendly when it comes to identifying works by a particular writer; but amongst the collection’s many Christie treasures is a rare copy of the script for Chimneys, which was cancelled at the last minute in 1931, and some interesting correspondence that gives lie to the assumption that the censor never found cause to interfere with her work.
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