Curtain Up (19 page)

       
LADY EMILY: It is a good thing he has you to look after him.

       
MRS QUANTOCK: It takes a woman to see through women.
Men say ‘Poor little woman, all the others are so down on her.'

The bitter governess, here in conversation with the seventeen-year-old lady of the house, is similarly cynical on the subject:

       
MISS GREY: You've been living in a fairy tale all your life. (She speaks with real bitterness) You've been sheltered and protected. You've gone about believing fine things about men and women. Now your eyes are opened and you can see what life is really like. Ugly – ugly. It's everyone for himself and the devil take the hindermost. Love a man and believe in him – he'll let you down every time. You've got to use the whip. Treat him like dirt, trample on him, don't ever let him think he's got you. Life's a dirty business – a sordid ugly business. You can't afford to play fair if you want to win. It's cheat or go under – down into darkness . . .

       
SYLVIA: Don't – don't . . . I feel as though you were thrusting me into a prison – away from the sun and the air.

       
MISS GREY: Not at all. I'm introducing you to real life.

The final, two-scene act brings us back to 1934 and is set in an art gallery and at the house of an art collector, the locations of the short story. Art is a major theme of the piece, and Christie's observations on the art world are perceptive and informed. It was the impresario C.B. Cochran who nurtured her own interest in art in her late teens, after a childhood being dragged reluctantly around galleries: ‘Charles Cochran had a great love of painting. When I first saw his Degas picture of ballet girls it stirred something in me that I had not known existed.'
²⁹
In the following extract, Mrs Quantock and Lady Emily gossip about life as they inspect an exhibition of modern paintings. I include it for no other reason than that it is a wonderfully well-written and witty piece of theatrical dialogue and, as nobody has ever seen it performed on a stage, it seems a shame not to share it . . .

       
MRS QUANTOCK: I hope Arthur won't keep us waiting. I'm surprised he's not here. There's one thing to be said for military men – they do know the meaning of punctuality. These young people are past anything . . . No manners . . . No consideration for others. They come down to breakfast at all times of the morning.

       
LADY EMILY: And the girls' nails! Too terrible! Just like blood!

       
MRS QUANTOCK: (inspecting a picture severely through a lorgnette) ‘The Cafe Beauvier'. All these modern pictures are exactly alike.

       
LADY EMILY: What I say is, there is so much that is depressing in the world. Why paint it? These very peculiar looking men and women sitting at curious angles – where is there any
beauty
? That's what I want to know.

       
MRS QUANTOCK: You heard about the Logans' butler?

       
LADY EMILY: Yes, most distressing. Why, they trusted the man completely. (Consults catalogue) ‘Meadow in Dorset'. What a very
odd
looking cow. They came back unexpectedly, I suppose?

       
MRS QUANTOCK: Yes, and found his wife and six children occupying the best bedroom, and the wife wearing one of Mary Logan's tea gowns.

       
LADY EMILY: No!

       
MRS QUANTOCK: A fact I assure you. ‘Spring in Provence'. Nonsense – not in the least like it. I've been to Provence.

       
LADY EMILY: What people
suffer
through their servants.

       
MRS QUANTOCK: Did I tell you about the housemaid that came to see me? Quite a nice respectable looking young woman. She asked me how many there were in family and if there were any young gentlemen. I said there was the general and myself and our two young nephews. And do you know what she had the impertinence to say?

       
LADY EMILY: No, dear.

       
MRS QUANTOCK: She said. Very well, I'll come on Tuesday. But seeing there are young gentlemen, I'll have a bolt on my bedroom door, please. I said, you'll have no such thing
for you won't have a bedroom in
my
house. The impudence of the girl.

       
LADY EMILY: ‘La Nuit Blanche'. Dear, dear the bed looks very comfortable. Mrs. Lewis has had to get rid of her nurse. The woman simply wouldn't allow her to come into her own nursery. Said she had entire charge and wouldn't brook interference. Interference from the child's own mother!

       
MRS QUANTOCK: Amy Lewis is a fool – always was. Look how she's mismanaged that husband of hers.

       
LADY EMILY: He behaved very badly.

       
MRS QUANTOCK: I've no patience with women whose husbands behave badly. It's a woman's job to see that a man behaves properly. Do you think I would have stood any nonsense from Arthur?

       
LADY EMILY: But, we can't all be like you, Maud. You've such a force of character.

       
MRS QUANTOCK: Men have got to be looked after. Left to himself a man always behaves badly. It's only natural.

       
LADY EMILY: Everything seems very odd nowadays. Midge tells me that young people – people of different sexes – can go away and stay at hotels and positively
nothing happens
.

       
MRS QUANTOCK: I can well believe it. This generation has no virility.

       
LADY EMILY: It seems so unnatural.

       
MRS QUANTOCK: Of course it's unnatural. Why, when I was a girl, if I had gone away for a week-end with a young man – Not that my parents would have permitted it for a minute – I repeat
if
I had gone away with a young man – everything would have happened.

       
(Examines wall)

This young man can't paint a horse. I expect he lives in a nasty unhealthy studio and never goes into the country.

       
LADY EMILY: I expect you're right, dear. That cow over there was most peculiar. I couldn't even be sure if it was a cow or a bull.

       
MRS QUANTOCK: People shouldn't try and paint nature when they know nothing about it. ‘The Dead Harlequin'. Very confusing – all these squares and diamonds. Nobody studies composition nowadays. There should be proper grouping in a picture – light and shade.

       
LADY EMILY: How right you are, Maud. I was very artistic as a girl. I used to do flower painting when I was at school in Paris.

       
MRS QUANTOCK: You sang, too, Emily.

       
LADY EMILY: Oh, I only had a very small voice.

       
MRS QUANTOCK: Nobody sings nowadays. They turn on that atrocious wireless. Even expect you to play Bridge with some annoying American voice wailing about Bloo-oos, or else a dreadful lecture on pond life – or some nonsense about Geneva.

       
LADY EMILY: What do you think about the League of Nations?

       
MRS QUANTOCK: What every sensible person thinks. (looks at catalogue) ‘Three Women'. H'm. I suppose you
could
call them women at a pinch.

       
LADY EMILY: Their faces seem to have been squeezed sideways and they've got no tops to their heads. Even an artist can't think women look like that.

       
(Enter MIDGE . . . a charming young woman with great assurance of manner.)

       
MIDGE: Hullo, darlings. Fancy finding you here. (looks at picture) Oo-er, scrumptious. That's amusing. I say, the man can paint, can't he?

       
LADY EMILY: They're all so ugly.

       
MIDGE: Ugly? Oh, no, they're not. They're marvellous. Do you think that rather attractive-looking man is the artist?

       
MRS QUANTOCK: Very likely. He looks very odd.

       
MIDGE: I thought he looked rather nice. So alive. Like his pictures.

       
LADY EMILY: Do you call these women alive?

       
MIDGE: I know. One looks at these pictures and one says no women were ever like that and then one goes out into the
street and one suddenly sees people that remind one of the pictures.

       
MRS QUANTOCK: I don't.

Thank you for indulging me with that lengthy quotation; I hope that you found it as entertaining as I do.

Someone at the Window
is a theatrically ambitious piece with a colourful sixteen-person dramatis personae, and as such would not have been immediately attractive to repertory theatres of the time. It is, sadly, let down slightly by the clumsy staging of the murder at a fancy dress ball and a rather contrived and rushed ending. The murderers plot and carry out their plan in front of the audience; this is not a whodunit, but a ‘will-they-get-away with it'. Plodding police investigations undertaken in the middle of the play by Inspector Rice and Sergeant Dwyer only serve to slow down the action. They conclude, as the murderers intended, that the victim committed suicide as a result of shellshock sustained in the First World War, but the murderers' plan to inherit a fortune goes unexpectedly askew when the victim's young wife gives birth to an heir after his death.

There is no reference to
Someone at the Window
in Christie's autobiography, in her correspondence or in the licensing records of Hughes Massie, although her notebooks do contain some work in progress. The final script appears to be ‘performance ready', but was never submitted to the Lord Chamberlain's office, and neither does there appear to be any record of it having been tried out by one of the club theatres, where the audience had to sign up as members and which therefore did not require a licence. Unlike other unperformed work of hers, she appears not to have returned to it, reworked it or lobbied for its production. She perhaps appreciated that its dramatic construction rendered it unattractively cumbersome as a production proposition. With its loss, sadly, we have in my opinion been deprived of some of her best dialogue for the stage.

One work which Christie did return to was the similarly lengthy
Akhnaton
, her remarkable historical drama about the idealistic pharaoh, father of Tutankhamun. Akhnaton, who dreams of ‘a kingdom where people dwell in peace and brotherhood' and spends much of his time composing poetry, attempts to promote a pacifist philosophy and to unite the polytheist Egyptians under one god; policies which inevitably do not go down well with either the army or the priesthood. The action of the play takes place over seventeen years, moving from Thebes to Akhnaton's purpose-built Utopia, the City of the Horizon, and involves a cast of twenty-two named roles, including an Ethiopian dwarf, not to mention scribes, soldiers and other extras, as well as a spectacular parade featuring ‘wild animals in cages' and ‘beautiful nearly nude girls'.

Christie commentators tend to be united in their praise for the piece. Even biographer Laura Thompson, who is generally dismissive of her work for the theatre, singles it out. In the absence of a response from critics, Charles Osborne sums it up well: ‘
Akhnaton
is, in fact, a fascinating play. It deals in a complex way with a number of issues: with the difference between superstition and reverence; the danger of rash iconoclasm, the value of the arts, the nature of love, the conflicts set up by the concept of loyalty, and the tragedy apparently inherent in the inevitability of change. Yet
Akhnaton
is no didactic tract, but a drama of ruthless logic and theatrical power, its characters sharply delineated, its arguments humanized and convincingly set forth.'
³⁰

The play, eventually published in 1973 and not performed in Agatha's lifetime, is usually dated as having been written in 1937. The earliest surviving copy is clearly stamped by the Marshall's typing agency as having been completed on 12 August of that year, and the ancient Egyptian subject matter certainly makes sense in the context of her involvement with the archaeological community since her marriage to Max Mallowan. In introductory material written for its publication, Christie refers to the date of its writing as 1937,
³¹
although thirty-six years later she may well simply have been using the date on the typescript's cover as an
aide memoire.

Mallowan himself touches briefly but perceptively on a small number of Agatha's plays in a chapter towards the end of his autobiographical
Mallowan's Memoirs
, published in 1977, a year after her death.
Akhnaton
, he says, is

Agatha's most beautiful and profound play . . . brilliant in its delineation of character, tense with drama . . . The play moves around the person of the idealist king, a religious fanatic, obsessed with the love of truth and beauty, hopelessly impractical, doomed to suffering and martyrdom, but intense in faith and never disillusioned in spite of the shattering of all his dreams . . . In no other play by Agatha has there been, in my opinion, so sharp a delineation of the characters; every one of whom is portrayed in depth and set off as a foil, one against the other . . . the characters themselves are here submitted to exceptionally penetrating analytical treatment, because they are not merely subservient to the denouement of a murder plot, but each one is a prime agent in the development of a real historical drama.
³²