Curtain Up (16 page)

The Fatal Alibi
ran for only twenty-four performances on Broadway, but it was enough for Laughton to make his mark, and it served its purpose as a springboard for a successful Broadway and Hollywood career. ‘The wife', of course, was the actress Elsa Lanchester, whose film career was to take off
alongside Laughton's; according to Skolsky, Laughton designed ‘most of her clothes'.

And so Agatha Christie made her Broadway debut; in her own absence, her work processed by not one but two adaptors, and with her ‘French' detective once again stealing the limelight. Later in 1932 he would appear in Paris in yet another re-adaptation of
Alibi
, this time by French dramatist Jacques Deval. With
Black Coffee
Christie had, however, finally seen her own work reach the West End stage, albeit for a very brief run. It was to be over a decade before another of her own plays was to be produced, a decade in which adaptors misleadingly continued to keep her name on theatrical marquees on both sides of the Atlantic, and in which she herself wrote four further full-length scripts, none of which were to achieve West End productions in her lifetime.

Charles Laughton made his Broadway exit as Poirot on 1 March 1932, and six weeks later Hughes Massie issued Francis L. Sullivan with a licence for a new Poirot stage script written by Christie herself.
¹
This was a one act play (or ‘Sketch' as it was titled) based on the short story ‘The Wasp's Nest', which had been published in the
Daily Mail
in November 1928. The licence allowed Sullivan to perform the piece at a ‘royal charity matinee' in June 1932, which appears to have been the purpose for which it was written, and to present it at London's Arts Theatre. It also gave him the right to perform it as a ‘music hall' act, in return for 10 per cent of his income therefrom; the concept of a Poirot play featuring on a variety bill is indicative of the theatrical curiosity that the character had rapidly become.

On Tuesday 7 June 1932 the King and Queen attended a gala matinee in aid of the British Hospital in Paris at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane.
²
The production consisted of a variety of numbers and sketches, in one of which Gerald du Maurier caused much hilarity by playing the role of a non-speaking butler. This may well have been the event for which
The Wasp's Nest
was originally written, although it did not in fact form part of the programme. Neither did it turn up at the Arts Theatre or on the music hall stage, although in 1937 it was broadcast live by BBC television, with Sullivan as Poirot. Also in the cast were Douglas Clarke-Smith, who had directed
the West End transfer of
Black Coffee
, and Wallace Douglas, who would go on to direct the London premiere of
Witness for the Prosecution.
The broadcast took place on 18 June at 3.35 p.m., with the
Radio Times
announcing that

Viewers will be the first to see this Agatha Christie play, which has never previously been performed anywhere. Francis L. Sullivan, who will bring to the television screen the famous detective character, Hercule Poirot, originally made a great hit in another Poirot play,
Alibi
, which he toured for almost a year, and subsequently in the same characterisation in
Black Coffee.
In addition to being familiar to theatre audiences in New York, London and Stratford upon Avon, he has appeared in a number of films, amongst them
Jew Suss
,
Great Expectations
,
Chu Chin Chow
and
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
. The character of Poirot is one of his favourite parts, and with the exception of a notable portrayal by Charles Laughton, the character has been almost permanently associated with him for the past six years.
³

A myth has grown up that the play was actually written by Christie for television and, as such, is her only work for the medium. The contractual trail, however, makes it clear that she originally wrote it for theatrical presentation, and that it was subsequently sold to the BBC for the princely sum of £4, and simply broadcast as written. The BBC Television Service had been established at Alexandra Palace the previous year, and the broadcasting of drama was in its infancy, so the straightforward live transmission of a short stage script would have been entirely in keeping with the methodologies of the day.

Significantly, the script itself does not immediately lend itself to presentation as part of a variety bill, either in the context of a gala event or a music hall presentation. It is a gentle four-hander concerning a love triangle and the redeployment to murderous purpose of the cyanide being used to destroy a wasp's nest. Poirot is at his most contemplative and unshowy. There is nothing at all ‘Guignol' about the piece, and the murder
is prevented before it can actually take place. It is almost as if Christie had deliberately undermined the brief that she had been given in order to avoid Poirot being reduced to a music hall turn. Yet, although Christie herself had no interest in television – far from being a pioneering dramatist in the medium, she positively disliked it – all of these qualities in the script make the piece perfectly suited to presentation as a television studio drama. It seems likely that it was Sullivan himself who identified and promoted this opportunity, thereby securing himself a place in history as television's first Poirot.

A 1949 letter from Edmund Cork to Christie's American agent, Harold Ober, provides an interesting postscript to the
Wasp's Nest
affair. ‘The Mallowans have just gone off to Baghdad for five months, and Agatha has left me with her power of Attorney and instructions not to trouble her about any business matter!' says Cork, before going on to discuss the issue of an American offer for Poirot television rights. He advises Ober against accepting the deal due to problems that Christie was experiencing with the American tax authorities, and also because ‘television is so much in its infancy that there is the danger that rights may be disposed of now for trifling royalties that would otherwise be extremely valuable in the future – I believe many mistakes were made in the early days of movies.'
⁴

This remarkably prescient advice undoubtedly paved the way for more lucrative deals in the future and is an insight into the dilemmas faced by those responsible at the time for licensing intellectual property rights in the ‘new media' of radio, film and television; not dissimilar to the challenges currently faced by those licensing work for use on the similarly unknown quantity of the internet. There had also been an enquiry about Sullivan reprising
The Wasp's Nest
on television in the USA. Cork continues:

I think, however, I ought to explain the personal background. Francis Sullivan is a close friend of the author of many years standing, and The Wasp's Nest, which was originally a short story written in 1928, was dramatised for Sullivan to appear
in at a charity matinee in 1932. He has always regarded the play as more or less his, although in point of fact he has no rights in it, and the author received the fee when it was televised by the BBC in 1937. Sullivan, like many successful actors, is a most temperamental person, and makes the most of his personal standing with Agatha whenever we have had to refuse him his own way. He is certainly making a lot of excitement over this proposed production . . . and while I do not want to influence you in any way, it might make life momentarily simpler if Larry Sullivan got his way!

I shall leave it to television historians to establish whether the production actually took place, as we return to the world of theatre, but I do rather like Cork's frank appraisal of Francis L. Sullivan, who was widely known as ‘Larry' (though the ‘L' in his name actually stood for ‘Loftus').

The next full-length play based on Christie's work to receive a West End production was
Love From a Stranger
, which opened at the New Theatre on 31 March 1936 for a relatively successful run of 149 performances, and was purportedly adapted by Frank Vosper from her short story ‘Philomel Cottage'
.

The story itself was first published in the
Grand Magazine
in November 1924, and was included in the collection
The Listerdale Mystery
ten years later. It is the gripping and dramatic tale of a woman who unexpectedly inherits a sizeable sum of money, effectively liberating her to reject her uninspiring and prevaricating suitor in favour of an alliance with a man who she has just met and about whose background she knows nothing. They settle in the country, in apparently blissful surroundings, but her new husband turns out to be a notorious wife murderer and she, it appears, is intended to be his next victim. In an astonishingly tense final scene she manages to outwit him and turn the tables by herself pretending to be a killer. The short story picks up the narrative at the point where they have moved into Philomel Cottage and are apparently living in wedded bliss. The two-hander denouement and country cottage location are echoed in one of Christie's four scripts for
radio, 1948's
Butter In a Lordly Dish
; and the mythical serial wife murderer Bluebeard, who featured in one of Agatha's youthful dramatic enterprises, would again be the inspiration for a villain in her 1954 radio script
Personal Call.
As for the story's premise, the excitement of striking up a relationship with a stranger is a sensation that was not unfamiliar to Christie herself; in her autobiography she observes, ‘Archie 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
: