Curtain Up (22 page)

The script for
Peril at End House
was duly delivered, and on 23 November Sullivan paid a further £100 advance against royalties (of between 5 and 10 per cent on different levels of box office income) for an option to produce the play which, if exercised, would also have given him the American rights and a one-third share in any film sale.

The credited producer, however, when the play was eventually staged in 1940, was Ellen Terry's nephew, the film director Herbert Mason.
⁵⁷
Although he had worked as a stage manager, Mason had no track record of presenting West End productions and I suspect that he may have been something of a front man in order for Sullivan to avoid appearing to be self-producing his return to the stage in the role of Poirot. There may also, of course, have been some hope of a film deal arising from the production; as was standard practice, the film rights in the book and play were ‘indissolubly merged'. Mason may well have been a director of Eleven Twenty Three Ltd but, in common with many other theatrical production companies of this era, its company records no longer exist. In any event, the engagement of Charles Landstone as general manager for the production indicates that the nominal producer may not himself have been actively at the helm. Landstone was more than a safe pair of hands, and in 1942 was to become Assistant Drama Director of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), the wartime precursor to the Arts Council. His book
Off-Stage: A Personal Record of the First Twelve Years of State Sponsored Drama in Great Britain
, offers an interesting counterpoint to Basil Dean's book about the work of ENSA.

In January 1940, Cork wrote to Agatha, ‘We will pay your membership dues to the Dramatists Guild. Their organisation has a “closed shop” in America and managers cannot make a contract with any dramatist who is not a member. I have no doubt we shall ultimately have a production of
Peril at End House
. I understand Francis Sullivan's present plan is to take it out in the country about the end of March and to bring it into town towards the end of his option period, which expires in May.'
⁵⁸

Cork was not wrong. On 7 March he wrote:

I was talking to Francis Sullivan this morning. I find he has completed all his arrangements for the Richmond production of
Peril at End House
on April 1st. It is a little unusual that he shouldn't have consulted anybody about them, but he seems to be within his legal rights. I don't know very much
about any of the people that he has got, but he seems to be satisfied that they will give a very good show, and of course if he should happen to be wrong about any of them then they can be changed before the play comes to the West End. AR Whatmore is to produce [i.e. direct] – I don't think he is at all bad, although once again he is not very well known.

Everyone was delighted that you will be able to attend some of the rehearsals. The play is to be read over next Wednesday and obviously rehearsals start on the following Monday, but Sullivan is getting in touch with you himself about the arrangements.
⁵⁹

As artistic head of the Embassy during Alec Rea's tenure, A.R. Whatmore had been instrumental in the West End transfer of
Black Coffee
nine years previously. Sullivan's wife, Danae Gaylen, was one of a number of female stage designers coming to prominence at this time, and she was put in charge of the production's design.

Peril at End House
opened at Richmond and, following a short tour, on 1 May in the West End, at the independently owned Vaudeville Theatre. Despite the play's somewhat cumbersome three-act, seven-scene construction, reviews were encouraging, both at Richmond and in the West End, and it was generally felt that the suspense was sustained, although Sullivan inevitably stole the limelight once again. The
Daily Telegraph
's review, headed ‘FRANCIS SULLIVAN AS POIROT', remarked that ‘The Belgian sleuth has been highly theatricalised and, as impersonated by Francis Sullivan, physically he will be a slight shock to Mrs Christie's admirers. But it is a good performance, in which his charming conceit is admirably justified . . . The play has been effectively produced by A.R. Whatmore.'
⁶⁰

Critics also particularly enjoyed the performances of character actor Ian Fleming (no, not
that
Ian Fleming!) as Captain Hastings and young South African actress Olga Edwardes (later to be known as artist Olga Davenport) in her first West End leading role as ‘Nick' Buckley.

Despite the favourable critical reception, the West End run
only lasted for twenty-three performances, and in this case there can be no mystery as to why. Ten days after it opened, German forces began the invasion by air and land of Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain resigned, enabling Winston Churchill to form a coalition government. Chamberlain, like Akhnaton, had paid the price of advocating a policy of appeasement. As Charles Landstone notes, ‘Any further theatrical activities were interrupted by the end of the “phoney war”. At the time of the German invasion of the Netherlands, I was at the Vaudeville with aspiring actor-manager, Francis Sullivan, with a new Agatha Christie play. The audience melted away, and practically the whole of London theatre closed down for the second time.'
⁶¹
Landstone clearly considered himself to be working for Sullivan rather than Herbert Mason.

A touring production of the play was licensed the following year, but Samuel French Ltd did not enter into their usual agreement for amateur and publishing rights until 1944, and publication was held back until the end of the war. Of the income generated for the writers by the deal with French's (including the usual 50 per cent of amateur licensing income), Ridley's share was payable to ‘Mrs Ridley' and Hughes Massie's to ‘Mrs Cork',
⁶²
a manoeuvre that one suspects probably had less to do with husbandly devotion than with avoiding the attentions of the taxman. Unsurprisingly, the American production that Cork had anticipated did not occur.

Shortly after Ridley completed his adaptation of
Peril at End House
, Frank Vosper's sister, Margery, wrote a very straightforward, one-act, four-hander play called
Tea For Three
, based on Christie's short story ‘Accident'. The story had first been published, under a different title, in the
Sunday Despatch
in 1929 and was subsequently included in Christie's collection
The Listerdale Mystery
in 1934. Following her job as assistant stage manager in the West End run of
Love From a Stranger
, Margery had gone on to work as a literary agent in the Dorothy Allen agency, which she eventually inherited, changing its name to hers at its former owner's insistence. Amongst
Margery's clients was Dorothy L. Sayers, who in 1936 had enjoyed an extraordinary West End hit with
Busman's Honeymoon
, the only stage appearance of ‘gentleman detective' Lord Peter Wimsey, a play co-written with her friend Muriel St Clare Byrne and novelised the following year as the last in the Wimsey series. And with playwriting clients also including Emlyn Williams and John Osborne, the Margery Vosper agency was to become a major force in the West End. As her
Times
obituary remarked, ‘Next to her family the theatre was Margery's life; a dedication largely attributable to her devotion to her famous actor brother, Frank, twelve years her senior, whose tragic death at sea in 1937, when Margery was 25, ended prematurely a brilliant career on stage and screen.'
⁶³
Quite how or why
Tea for Three
came to be written is unclear, but it was published in 1939 in Book Two of Nelson's
Theatrecraft Plays
, a book of one-act plays by various writers, and appears to have been aimed entirely at performance in the amateur market.

The London theatrical calendar in the 1930s had been even busier than in the previous decade. Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence were the hot ticket in Coward's
Tonight at 8.30
, audiences were fascinated by J.B. Priestley's ‘time plays', T.S. Eliot left his dramatic calling card with
Murder in the Cathedral
and, almost a decade after his successful 1929 thriller
Rope
, Patrick Hamilton followed it with
Gas Light
. Compared to now, women playwrights were relatively well represented in the West End. Clemence Dane continued to have work performed, and in 1937 A.P. Herbert's Matrimonial Causes Act finally introduced the divorce legislation anticipated by
A Bill of Divorcement
in 1921. Amongst a number of other women who saw their plays premiered in the West End at this time was Gertrude Jennings, whose 1934 success
Family Affairs
was directed by Auriol Lee, director of the Broadway production of
Love From a Stranger
. But the decade belonged to Dodie Smith, who enjoyed a succession of hits from
Autumn Crocus
in 1931 through to
Dear Octopus
in 1938. The latter, produced by the
fledgling production company H.M. Tennent Ltd and starring John Gielgud, won her particular acclaim and ran for 376 performances at the Queen's Theatre. And just as Christie the novelist was to blossom as a playwright in later life, so Smith the playwright was later also to achieve success as a novelist.

Despite her own disappointments in pursuing her vocation as a playwright, the 1930s had proved a remarkably productive decade for Christie in her day job as a thriller writer. Successfully combining her writing career with accompanying her husband on his archaeological digs, she had published no fewer than seventeen mystery novels, including such classics of the genre as
The Murder at the Vicarage
(1930),
Peril at End House
(1932),
Lord Edgware Dies
(1933),
Murder on the Orient Express
(1934),
The ABC Murders
(1936),
Death on the Nile
(1937) and 1939's
Ten Little Niggers
, which under various titles was to become one of the best-selling novels of all time. It is little wonder that Cork had to explain to Basil Dean that she was rather busy. Agatha's happy marriage to Max, marred only by a miscarriage in 1932, was fulfilling and intellectually stimulating, and in October 1938, they bought Greenway, a classic Georgian house built in 1771 and set in thirty acres of woodland on the banks of the River Dart. Agatha dubbed it, with good reason, ‘The most beautiful place in the world', and it was to become the Mallowans' regular summer retreat.

To some commentators, the decade that began with the Depression, saw the death of the monarch and the abdication crisis, and ended in war, was for Agatha, professionally and personally, her most fulfilling. But for Agatha Christie, playwright, it had been full of frustration and disappointment. In 1940 Christie turned fifty and, despite having penned seven full-length plays encompassing a variety of styles and subjects, had so far seen only one of them performed, and that for an interrupted run of just two months. Her name had, admittedly, frequently been seen by the public on theatre marquees, but most often in the context of its appropriation by egotistical showmen like Charles Laughton, Francis L. Sullivan and Frank Vosper.

The outbreak of war, which had put paid to Arnold Ridley's
Peril at End House
and to Christie's own
A Daughter's a Daughter
, was, however, destined to change everything. Within four years, Agatha Christie would have established herself as a celebrated West End and Broadway playwright in her own right.

The war, inevitably, brought disruption to Agatha's life. Max secured a job at the Directorate of Allied and Foreign Liaison (part of the Intelligence branch of the RAF), working alongside his old friend, Egyptologist Stephen Glanville. The Mallowans lived at a number of London addresses in the early part of the war, including their house at Sheffield Terrace once it had been vacated by tenants, but in March 1941 Glanville introduced them to the stylishly modernist Lawn Road Flats (‘the Isokon Building') in Belsize Park. Here they took up residence alongside a colourful group of emigres, artists and Soviet spies whose acquaintance doubtless broadened Christie's creative, social and political frame of reference and helped to inform her characterisations and plots in what was to be another remarkably productive period of book writing.
¹
In 1942 Max volunteered to head the Cairo branch of the Directorate, where he could make use of his knowledge of Arabic, and he and Agatha were separated for the first time in ten years. In the autumn of 1943 Greenway was requisitioned by the Admiralty for use by the American navy, but Agatha was happily ensconced in Lawn Road Flats, where she dined regularly in the Isobar restaurant in the company of her intellectually stimulating new neighbours. By way of light relief, occasional weekends were spent in Haslemere at the home of Francis L. Sullivan and Danae Gaylen.

In November 1939, two months after the declaration of war, Collins published Christie's masterful mystery
Ten Little Niggers
, which had been serialised in the
Daily Express
that summer. The deeply chilling conceit of the novel is that eight strangers are lured to the only house on an island, only to discover that their unknown and mysteriously absent host is methodically committed to executing each of his guests, as well as the two domestic staff hired for the occasion, in a manner inspired by a popular children's nursery rhyme of the time. Each of the intended victims is exposed as having escaped retribution for previous misdemeanours, so that their deaths appear to represent some sort of vengeful justice. In a delicious detail, a framed copy of the rhyme hangs on the wall, and ten figurines representing the protagonists are also on display. As one by one they meet their fate by an unseen hand, a corresponding figurine is also mysteriously dispensed with. There is no means of escape from the island, and the terrifying conundrum throughout these events is that the killer must be one of the group; as the number of survivors diminishes so too, apparently, does the number of potential suspects.

Several of Christie's books draw their titles from nursery rhymes, and I will not spoil the fun for Christie trivia buffs by providing a list. In this case the rhyme, which was at the time the subject of a garishly illustrated large-format children's book, was drawn from Frank Green's 1869 music hall song of the same title, which in its turn was based on an American song, ‘Ten Little Indians', written by Septimus Winner the previous year.
²
The word ‘nigger', as used in the UK at this time, had not developed the deeply pejorative overtones with which it is now associated, and to most Britons would simply have described, albeit with the inherently patronising overtones of imperialism, the apparently exotic inhabitants of some far-flung corner of the Empire.

Christie's masterpiece of suspense received excellent reviews and its highly theatrical premise made it an obvious candidate for dramatisation. Inevitably it wasn't long before Edmund
Cork started to receive requests from would-be adaptors, and in January 1940 he wrote to Agatha, ‘I think I told you last autumn that Reginald Simpson wanted to make a play of
Ten Little Niggers
and at that time I wasn't quite sure he was the right dramatist to do it. I would rather like to know what your general feeling about dramatising this book is, as I am sure we will have to deal with the question before long as we have both an English and an American manager interested in the idea.'
³
Simpson was a film actor and scriptwriter who had enjoyed some West End success in 1934 with a play co-written with Frank Gregory called
Living Dangerously
. Christie responded immediately, ‘As regards Ten Little Niggers – if anyone is going to dramatise it, I'll have a shot at it myself first!'
⁴

This was clearly the reply that Cork had been hoping for: ‘I am delighted to hear that you are thinking of dramatising Ten Little Niggers yourself – generally speaking, I am all against such valuable professional time as yours being spent on anything so speculative as the drama, but Ten Little Niggers is different.'
⁵

Notwithstanding Hughes Massie's support of
A Daughter's a Daughter
, Cork's reservations may go some way towards explaining Christie's lack of progress as a playwright since signing up with the agency seventeen years previously. Christie and Cork met for lunch to discuss the matter further, and Cork wrote to her afterwards, ‘I would like to say thank you for one of the most heartening of lunches. I feel tremendously enthusiastic about the dramatisation of Ten Little Niggers . . .'
⁶

There are no surviving scripts for
Ten Little Niggers
in the Agatha Christie archive, which is a shame, as Christie undertook substantial rewrites between the first and final drafts and it would be intriguing to be able to see how the material developed. Her wartime separation from her husband, however, means that there are letters from her to him which include details of the mounting of the production itself; and Hughes Massie's Christie archive finally connects with our story in
1940, meaning that this is the first Christie dramatic venture for which we can see a full exchange of correspondence between the playwright and her agent. At this stage in the game, though, there are still no producers' archives in evidence, so the picture we get of the creation of this important production remains frustratingly incomplete.

For Christie, with a drawer full of her own original plays, to stand aside while others adapted
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
,
The Stranger
and
Peril at End House
(although the latter had not yet been performed) must have been deeply frustrating. As she notes in her autobiography, ‘It suddenly occurred to me that if I didn't like the way other people had adapted my books, I should have a shot at adapting them
myself.
It seemed to me that the adaptations of my books to the stage failed because they stuck far too closely to the original book. A detective story is particularly unlike a play, and is so far more difficult to adapt than an ordinary book. It has such an intricate plot, and usually so many characters and false clues, that the thing is bound to become confusing and overladen. What was wanted was
simplification.
'
⁷
Significantly, the second of her own novels that she chose to adapt for the stage was not, strictly speaking, a detective story, and her dramatic instincts in this regard were to prove entirely correct.

The first producer to be approached was her old friend C.B. Cochran, now sixty-eight. As Christie says of the adaptation in her introduction to Peter Saunders'
The Mousetrap Man
, ‘Charles Cochran who was a great friend of mine liked it and wanted to put it on, but his backers were against it. “Impossible,” they said, “to have ten people dying on stage – it would just make audiences roar with laughter.”'
⁸

In mid-April Christie wrote to Cork, ‘Maddening about Cochran. Why will they go round and listen to people? All full of enthusiasm one minute, and just as easily put off the next! I got quite a nice letter from him, but he'd obviously got doubts about it all. Oh well, build no hopes on the theatre! Am looking forward to Peril at End House if the Vaudeville isn't bombed
from Norway first.'
⁹
A few days later, Cork replied, ‘Most certainly Ten Little Niggers haven't gone down the drain. Mr Cochran still says that he is going to do it, and in any other business this, from a man in his position, would be good enough to count on. It is only because it is a theatrical deal that one feels unsure about it.'
¹⁰

In the autumn of 1940 both the Hughes Massie offices and Agatha's London house in Sheffield Terrace experienced narrow escapes from German bombs. On 10 September Cork wrote to Agatha, ‘The raid last night shook us up a bit. Contract books thrown all over the office by the explosion but everyone seems to be carrying on much as usual.'
¹¹
And on 22 October she wrote to Cork, ‘Sheffield Terrace was hit a few days after we left! . . . houses next door and opposite completely flattened – so we would have had a rude awakening had we been there!'
¹²
Five months later, the Mallowans would move to the relative safety of the Lawn Road Flats.

Towards the end of 1942, Bertie Meyer, who had produced
Alibi
fourteen years previously, began to express an interest in Agatha's dramatisation of
Ten Little Niggers
, but felt that changes would be necessary in order for it to go forward to production. In September Christie wrote to Cork, evidently responding to Meyer's suggestions for script changes, ‘As to Ten Little Niggers I don't think I like these cheap comedy effects and silly to build up a love interest unless (quite possible) you end play by Vera and Lombard turning tables on Judge – L having been shamming dead to catch him and being really a hero who risked his life to save natives – this could be managed and would make for a good end – but
I
know how to do it . . . I do not think I want anyone messing about with my play . . . they can back it or leave it!'
¹³
Cork replied immediately, ‘My first thought was that it would be sacrilege to alter Ten Little Niggers as you suggest, but I am coming round to thinking that you could do it – and of course if you did it would make much easier theatre. I have put the idea to Bertie Meyer, and I will let you know what transpires.'
¹⁴

Christie's willingness to make changes had the desired effect. A week later, Cork wrote to her:

I have just had another talk with Mr Bertie Meyer regarding your play Ten Little Niggers. He and his associates are willing to enter into a contract to acquire the British stage rights . . . this is subject to certain alterations being carried out in the script, but it is agreed that you should do these yourself. One of Mr Meyer's associates would like to discuss these alterations with you, and I had thought that this matter might be done over lunch . . . Would you let me know if you want this matter to go forward, and when you would care to have a talk about the alterations?
¹⁵

Because of the very short timeframe between Christie's original undertaking to write the script at the end of January 1940 and Cochran's rejection of it in mid-April, my original thought was that Cochran had simply shied away from the idea of commissioning a script from Christie. But the language in which the involvement of both Cochran and Meyer is discussed by Cork and Christie raises the intriguing prospect that there was an existing script, completed by Christie in less than two months at the beginning of 1940, in which all ten of the visitors to the island end up dead, as they do in the novel. This speed of delivery would not have been atypical of Christie, who is on record as saying that three months is the ideal time in which to write a book, but that a play should take less.
¹⁶
It seems that Cochran and his investors turned down the script on the basis that its original premise was dramatically unfeasible, but that the revised ending, which was clearly Christie's own idea and evolved out of other amendments she had been asked to make, succeeded in bringing Meyer to the table.

The ‘associate' of Bertie Meyer's who Cork is referring to was thirty-four-year-old Barbara Toy, one of the most interesting of the extraordinary cast of characters who Christie came into contact with through her theatre work. Brought up in Sydney, Australia, where her father was the editor of the
Sydney
Bulletin
, she worked in a bookshop as a teenager and later travelled extensively with her husband, a member of the Royal Geographical Society, before drifting apart from him and moving to London in 1935. In an unpublished letter she later said that ‘the biggest influence in my life was my father, whom I adored. We went off on holiday together. There was a great affinity and looking back I realise I had a real father-complex which probably didn't help my relations with other men!'
¹⁷

On arrival in London she made some undistinguished appearances as an actress, the first of these being at the Q Theatre in
The Good Old Days
by Eden and Adelaide Phillpotts, before becoming a stage manager at Richmond Theatre and later working at a film studio in Welwyn Garden City where she met the director Norman Lee. A popular English writer of American-style thrillers, Lee had been a script writer on Hitchcock's 1927 film of Eden Phillpotts' hugely successful play
The Farmer's Wife
. He had gone on to write a number of documentaries, mainly about London life, before turning to writing and directing comedy films. Toy and Lee collaborated, under the pen name Norman Armstrong, on a three-act ‘play of the Merchant Navy',
Lifeline
, which had a run of eighty-five performances at the Duchess Theatre in 1942, produced by the independent management Linnit and Dunfee.
Lifeline
had just closed when Meyer requested that Agatha meet Toy.

At the end of the war Barbara Toy travelled to Germany and Holland to compile a report for ENSA on the state of theatre in the occupied territories. She went on to pen three further plays, all in collaboration with her friend Moie Charles, including a modestly successful adaptation of James Hilton's
Random Harvest
; but in 1950 she would suddenly embark on an extraordinary career change and reinvent herself as a globetrotting solo adventurer, travelling alone to remote corners of the world in a Land Rover she named Pollyanna and writing up her exploits in a series of eight entertaining and highly readable books.