Curtain Up (21 page)

       
HOREMHEB: (embarrassed) No, indeed, Highness. I realize that you have great thoughts – too difficult for me to understand.

As it happens, Adelaide's was not the first verse play on the subject by a female writer. In 1920
The Wisdom of Akhnaton
by A.E. Grantham (Alexandra Ethelreda von Herder) had been published by The Bodley Head, the company that in the same year gave Christie her publishing debut. Grantham's introduction
cites the Amura tablets as her source and advocates the relevance of Akhnaton's philosophy:

There was no room for greed or hate and war in this conception of man's destiny; no occasion for those ugly and gratuitous rivalries which make human history such a never-ending tragedy . . . never has mankind stood in direr need of a real faith in the indestructability and the supreme beauty of this great Pharaoh's ideals of light and loveliness in life . . . the episode chosen for dramatisation is the conflict between the claims of peace and war and Akhnaton's successful struggle to make his people acquiesce in his policy of peace.
⁴²

The Bodley Head's
Times
advertisement for Grantham's
The Wisdom of Akhnaton
read, ‘A remarkable play about Akhnaton, the father of Tutankhamen, and the Pharoah who tried to establish the pure monotheistic religion of Aton and a religion of Love and Peace thirteen hundred years before Christ . . . this is one of the few works of fiction ever written about the Egypt of those days, which are now being made to live again so vividly by Lord Carnarvon's discoveries.'
⁴³

Despite covering approximately the same period of history and including several of the same characters, however, there are no echoes of Grantham's work in either Adelaide's or Agatha's, a fact which only serves to highlight further the similarities between those of Eden Phillpotts' two protégées. Whilst Grantham chooses to halt the story at the point where Akhnaton has been ‘successful in his struggle to make his people acquiesce in a policy of peace', both Adelaide and Agatha go on to show Akhnaton's ultimately tragic failure. In doing so they are not, in my view, opposed to the value of striving for Akhnaton's aspirations, even against all the odds and in the face of human nature.

During the First World War, Adelaide had worked for Charles Ogden's
Cambridge Magazine
, which controversially gave a balanced view of events by publishing throughout the conflict translated versions of foreign press articles, as well as pieces
by writers such as Shaw and Arnold Bennett. By the early 1920s, newspapers were full of reports of the latest archaeological finds in Egypt, and Egyptologists were front page celebrities as they continued to unveil the ‘secrets of the tombs'. Western writers and intellectuals were intrigued by the lessons that could be learned from this ancient culture, particularly in a world still reeling from the devastation of war, and it is little wonder that the Phillpotts circle found the pacifist philosophy of Akhnaton in particular worth exploring, and that at least two female playwrights, A.E. Grantham and Adelaide Phillpotts, thought him a worthy subject for a verse play.

It thus seems plausible that Agatha's autobiography could well be correct in appearing to date the origins of her own Akhnaton play to the mid-1920s, and that it may have been, at least initially, the product of this post-war zeitgeist and her association with Eden Phillpotts rather than her more specific interest in archaeology in the 1930s. It may even be that it was Phillpotts himself who suggested the idea to Agatha, just as he had to his daughter. Even if one dismisses the similarities between Agatha's Akhnaton play and Adelaide's as pure coincidence, there seems to me to be a Phillpotts stamp on the project that is hard to ignore.

In a further twist to the tale, in 1934 Adelaide Phillpotts and her friend and writing partner Jan Stewart wrote a three-act murder mystery play, which was performed in repertory at Northampton. It was called
The Wasps' Nest
.
⁴⁴
Like Christie's at that time unperformed 1932 one-act play of the same title, it revolves around the destruction of a wasp's nest in a country house and the murderous application of the cyanide used to achieve this. Although the outcome is entirely different, it contains some remarkably similar plot devices to Christie's story, and shares a storyline about a woman returning to her previous lover having abandoned him in favour of another man.

Did Agatha read Adelaide's 1926 Akhnaton play? Did
Adelaide read Agatha's 1928 ‘Wasp's Nest' short story in the
Daily Mail
? We do know that Agatha and Adelaide exchanged some affectionate correspondence in the late 1960s, in which the two old ladies charmingly reminisced about their Torquay childhoods and shared news of family and friends.
⁴⁵
There is no mention at all of matters Egyptian. Or of wasps.

Another long-term playwriting project of Christie's was the compelling domestic drama,
A Daughter's a Daughter
, which she wrote in the 1930s but which was not to receive its premiere until 1956. Taking its title from the saying, ‘Your son's a son till he gets a wife, but a daughter's a daughter all your life', it concerns the friction between a widow, Anne Prentice, and her adult daughter, Sarah, as each in turn contrives to destroy the other's opportunities to find fulfilment in love. As with
The Lie
and
The Stranger
, we see a young woman torn between a dull but reliable suitor and the excitement of a potentially more dangerous liaison.

In the third week of March 1939, a letter from Bernard Merivale, Edmund Cork's business partner at Hughes Massie, landed on the desk of Basil Dean.

Dear Basil Dean,

I would be very glad if you would read the enclosed play by Agatha Christie.

The play has nothing whatever to do with Poirot or crime solution. It impresses me as being another manifestation of this author's undoubted genius.

I would be very interested to know your reaction.
⁴⁶

Dean appears to have responded positively although, sadly, his side of the correspondence is in the missing early years of Hughes Massie's Christie archive. Merivale acknowledged his ‘interesting letter' about the play, and on 5 April Agatha sent Dean a handwritten note from Sheffield Terrace:

Dear Mr Dean,

I should be so pleased if you could lunch here on Wednesday 12th 1.15. I should be most interested to hear your ideas about A Daughter's a Daughter.

Yours sincerely,

Agatha Christie
⁴⁷

There is no record of what took place at this lunch, although it seems that Dean suggested various alterations to the script. The sudden death of Merivale interrupted the correspondence, and put the matter into the hands of Cork, who wrote to Dean in late May:

We really ought to have written to you regarding the Agatha Christie play . . . I am afraid the insistent demand for her literary work has prevented Mrs Christie from doing any work on A Daughter's A Daughter, and there doesn't seem any prospect of her being able to get down to possible alterations in the immediate future, but perhaps I may come and see you about it on your return from America.
⁴⁸

It is interesting that Hughes Massie should have approached Basil Dean about this project rather than his former business partner, Alec Rea, who had produced
Black Coffee
. But as well as being a producer, Dean had a track record of successfully directing work by women playwrights, including Clemence Dane and Margaret Kennedy, both of whose playwriting careers he had effectively launched. And although Rea had co-produced
The Claimant
with Dean, it was Dean, as director, with whom Agatha's sister had had the working relationship. Madge had invited Dean to lunch as recently as 1937,
⁴⁹
although there is no indication as to how he responded to this suggestion, or as to what Madge's agenda was in making it. She had possibly hoped to interest him in an updated version of
Oranges and Lemons
, for which there are some handwritten notes on the script; Junius adds the air force to the army and navy in summarising the list of ‘essen
tial' government expenditures, and ‘Bolshevists' are now described as ‘Communists'.
⁵⁰

The move to Dean, then, was a logical one for Agatha, and was vindicated when, undeterred by her own lassitude, he appeared to be on the brink of pulling an extraordinary piece of potential casting out of the bag. In June 1939 Cork wrote to Dean, ‘The pressure of her literary work made it difficult for Agatha Christie to get down to the alterations in A Daughter's a Daughter, but your exciting news about Miss Lawrence's interest enabled us to persuade her to do so, and I have great pleasure in sending you the revised script herewith. I shall look forward keenly to developments.'
⁵¹

Gertrude Lawrence had become the talk of the town for her 1936 partnership with Noël Coward in his
Tonight at 8.30
playlets, and her interest in the role of Ann Prentice certainly had the desired effect. The revised script cleverly specified Ann's age as thirty-nine, as against Lawrence's forty-one, and in her covering letter to Dean Christie wrote,

I return the play. I have completely rewritten the third act, following the scene order you suggested and I really do think it is a great improvement . . . I still feel that Sarah's rudeness ought to arise spontaneously – like a jealous and undisciplined child, and that any deliberate ‘trick' on her part does make her an ‘unpleasant character' which she should not be. However, it may seem different when played.

I think I'm by now quite incapable of doing any more to it – so if you feel it needs further alterations, I suggest you do them and tell me what you have done!'
⁵²

This last suggestion is not as extraordinary as it seems. Dean's input on Margaret Kennedy's stage version of her novel
The Constant Nymph
had, after all, been sufficiently substantial to earn him a co-writing credit.

Although Christie had used the pen name Mary Westmacott for her non-crime novels
Giant's Bread
(1930) and the semi-autobiographical
Unfinished Portrait
(1934), there was
at this stage, as we can see from the wide frame of reference of her dramatic work, no indication that the name Agatha Christie, as a playwright, was necessarily going to be associated exclusively with the crime genre. Indeed, the Christie archive's copies of the 1930s version of
A Daughter's a Daughter
state clearly that it is ‘by Agatha Christie'. And so it was that, in mid-August 1939, Agatha Christie seemed poised to have her passionate, witty and cleverly constructed drama about the conflict between mother and daughter presented in the West End. Undoubtedly her finest work for the stage, and compared by surprised critics to the work of Rattigan at its eventual West End premiere thirty-three years after her death, it was to have been produced and directed by the man who launched the playwriting careers of Clemence Dane and Margaret Kennedy and seems likely to have starred one of the most popular actresses of the day. Within three weeks, though, Britain had declared war on Germany, and the story of Agatha Christie, playwright, was to take a very different turn.

The next we hear about
A Daughter's a Daughter
is in a letter from Cork to Christie in January 1942: ‘I was on to Basil Dean the other day about A Daughter's a Daughter and he asks me to tell you that he still hopes to be able to do the play, but that all his plans have been disorganised by E.N.S.A. What he asks now is that we give him another month in which to make a definite proposal.'
⁵³

Dean's passionate commitment to his work as the co-founder of the Entertainments National Service Association, which provided entertainment of all varieties to British troops during the war, is well documented, not least by himself in his very readable 1956 book
The Theatre at War
. Although Cork, in correspondence with Agatha, still appeared to be holding out some hope of achieving a production of
A Daughter's a Daughter
as late as 1943, it was not to be, and the play would not be heard of again until the 1950s.

A Daughter's a Daughter
was not the only Christie theatrical project to be interrupted by the war. In July 1938 Agatha had
entered into an agreement with Arnold Ridley, another Hughes Massie client, allowing him to adapt her 1932 Poirot novel
Peril at End House
for the stage.
⁵⁴
Hughes Massie's records refer to the licence granted to Ridley as a ‘collaboration agreement',
⁵⁵
a description which might more correctly have been applied to that granted to Frank Vosper; it is clear though that in this instance Christie was the ‘author' and Ridley the ‘adaptor'. At this stage it was agreed that royalty income was to be split 50/50, although Hughes Massie would later take half of Ridley's share, possibly as a result of some sort of ‘buy-out'. A month later, Francis L. Sullivan's company, Eleven Twenty Three Ltd, paid an advance against royalties of £100 to commission a script from Ridley for delivery by the end of September.
⁵⁶
Given the promptness of Sullivan's arrival on the scene, it seems likely that he had been involved in the deal from the outset. In any event, whoever's idea it was, a Ridley adaptation of a Christie novel with Sullivan as Poirot certainly had commercial potential.

Ridley was, on the face of it, an ideal adaptor for Christie. He had begun his career as an actor, joining Birmingham Rep after the First World War, in which he was wounded at the Somme. He continued to act in plays and films, and occasionally to direct for the stage, once his playwriting career took off with the enormously successful 1925 melodrama
The Ghost Train
. The original production of
The Ghost Train
played 655 performances and, having opened at the St Martin's, transferred to three further West End theatres. It is perhaps ironic that this enormously busy and successful playwright and actor, who fought in both world wars and was awarded an OBE for service to theatre, is best remembered for his role as Private Godfrey in the television comedy series
Dad's Army
.