Curtain Up (27 page)

Most importantly, as the production playbill remarked, this was Agatha Christie's ‘first play of her own writing to be presented in this country'. For one glorious week there were productions running simultaneously in the West End and on Broadway. Legendary
New York Times
cartoonist Al Hirschfeld drew caricatures of the play's ten protagonists, which ran across the top of two pages. Agatha Christie, playwright, had not only arrived, but was suddenly big business. The London run had been a great success, but following its Broadway premiere it was immediately clear that her classic suspense drama was desitined to become a truly global phenomenon.

Options for professional productions had already been sold for a number of overseas territories during the war, including some that were under Nazi occupation at the time. On 13 November 1944 a licence was issued to the Czech-born film
actor Herbert Lom, who had moved to the UK in 1939, to produce the play ‘in Czechoslovakia for five years from the liberation of Czechoslovakia or from the cessation of hostilities in Europe whichever is the earlier'.
⁶⁴
On 1 December 1944 the Finnish and Swedish rights – and those for Norway and Denmark from the date of ‘liberation or the cessation of hostilities in Europe, whichever is earlier'
⁶⁵
– were sold to the Finnish director Arvid Englind for five years from the date of agreement. Interestingly, Hughes Massie had allowed for the eventuality that hostilities might cease without the territories concerned actually having been liberated. In support of the continued effort to make them so, ENSA was licensed on 23 June 1944 to undertake a six-week tour, and
Ten Little Niggers
followed
Love From a Stranger
into the fray. The play had already become a forces favourite, with a special performance in London attended by Montgomery; and a group of Dutch prisoners of war even staged their own dramatisation at Buchenwald concentration camp.

In September 1945 Hughes Massie took an advertisement in
The Stage
newspaper:

TEN LITTLE NIGGERS

As played at the St James's Theatre, London; Broadhurst Theatre, New York; Theatre Maringy, Paris; Stockholm, Brussels and Buenos Aires

NOW AVAILABLE FOR REPERTORY

Apply: Hughes Massie
⁶⁶

Amongst a number of high-profile repertory productions of
Ten Little Niggers
in the 1940s were those staged at the Embassy Theatre (1948) and the Theatre Royal Stratford East (1949). The Embassy, which in the 1930s had staged controversial plays addressing the ‘colour question', evidently had no issue with the play's title.

This was just the beginning of what was to prove an extremely lucrative international and repertory market for Christie's work, and it was her world-wide appeal, as
evidenced by Hughes Massie's voluminous licensing records, that within two decades was to confirm her position as without question the most performed female playwright in history. Although many of her contemporaries, including Clemence Dane, Dodie Smith and Enid Bagnold saw their work premiere both in the West End and on Broadway, none of them come close to achieving Christie's lasting domestic and international success at all levels of production. Even the plays of hers that were to fare less well in the West End and on Broadway went on to carve a lucrative niche in secondary touring and repertory markets, trading on the reputation of their more successful counterparts. And all of this was masterminded by Edmund Cork, as it slowly dawned on him that the licensing of subsidiary rights of Christie's work for the stage, if properly managed, could be a substantial revenue source for both his client and his agency.

When Hughes Massie placed their advertisement, six weeks after the surrender of Japan finally ended the Second World War, Agatha Christie had just celebrated her fifty-fifth birthday. She rightly saw
Ten Little Niggers
as the turning point in her playwriting career, and later wrote to Rosalind:

I remember when I had hopes of Ten Little Niggers being put on – Charles Cochran was mad about it – naturally I was very excited however his backers refused point blank to put up the cash – they were united in their opinion that it would be a terrible flop – laughed off the stage – one after another of the characters being killed off – the silliest plot they'd ever heard of – Cochran was very angry but he couldn't win them over – when Bertie Meyer put it on quite unexpectedly a couple of years later, he was furious. Nobody laughed at everyone getting killed. Irene Hentschel produced it beautifully. It played at the St James Theatre till that was bombed in the war and then shifted to the Cambridge. All theatrical things are a pure gamble.
⁶⁷

For Christie, though, the theatrical gamble wasn't over, and
there were to be some bitter disappointments before her position as the most successful female playwright of all time became unassailable.

The triumphant progress of
Ten Little Niggers
was marred for Christie by the failure of three further full-length plays that she wrote, and that were premiered, during the war: her own adaptations of her novels
Death on the Nile
,
Appointment with Death
and
Towards Zero
.

Christie remained enormously productive as a novelist during this period; between 1939's
Ten Little Niggers
and 1945's
Sparkling Cyanide
, she penned a further nine books, including such classics as
Evil Under the Sun
,
The Body in the Library
and
Five Little Pigs
. The year of 1944 alone saw the publication of
Towards Zero
,
Death Comes as the End
(the Egyptian historical mystery which benefited from the advice of Stephen Glanville) and a new Mary Westmacott novel,
Absent in the Spring
. Yet, while she rarely mentions her work as a novelist in her correspondence, her wartime letters to Max are brimming with news of her latest theatrical ventures, and of her close involvement in the process of nurturing them from page to stage. She also reports on her own frequent visits to the theatre in London where she enjoyed many of the great Shakespearian productions of the day, including those given by the Old Vic Company when it returned from its Blitz-imposed exile in Burnley to play at the New Theatre. Her commentaries on these productions are insightful and demonstrate a playwright's appreciation of the craft.

Given the volume of her own theatre work at this time, the frequent illegibility of her writing and her failure to date the majority of her correspondence, it is hardly surprising that disentangling her wartime theatrical activity has not been a priority for biographers who, in any case, tend to marginalise her work for the stage. The resulting picture, inevitably, has tended to be somewhat inaccurate. Her letters contained so much news of casting, rehearsals, rewrites and opening nights on tour and in the West End that even Max became confused. ‘Now pay attention,' she chided him in October 1943, ‘Ten Little Niggers is not the Sullivan play! Allan Jeayes is playing the judge.'
¹

Ten Little Niggers
was, of course, Christie's main theatre project throughout this period. As we have seen, the first draft was written in early 1940 and it eventually played in the West End between November 1943 and July 1944. A simultaneous touring production, commencing in April 1944 and for which Agatha attended rehearsals, was again directed by Irene Hentschel and presented by Meyer, Farndale and the PES. It starred Arthur Wontner as Wargrave, well known to the public for his 1930s film portrayals of Sherlock Holmes, in a performance that Agatha felt was even better than that of Allan Jeayes. The Shuberts' Broadway production ran from June 1944 to January 1945 at the Broadhurst Theatre, continuing at the Plymouth Theatre until June 1945, and their US tour was on the road for two years from the autumn of 1944. The three further novel dramatisations that ran parallel with all this may well have been an exciting prospect for Christie at the time, but they ultimately did her reputation as a dramatist no favours with producers, actors or critics. Given her intense book writing schedule during this period, she may perhaps have been spreading her playwriting skills rather thin.

The dramatisation of
Death on the Nile
, which turned out to be a massively time-consuming and frustrating project, had originally been conceived as another vehicle for Francis L. Sullivan, following the ill-fated
Peril at End House
. The first
title to be discussed with Sullivan for this purpose was
Triangle at Rhodes
, a Poirot novella originally published in the
Strand Magazine
in 1936, and in the four-novella collection
Murder in the Mews
the following year. It was a sort of prototype for the 1941 novel
Evil Under the Sun
, but Edmund Cork clearly had reservations about its suitability for stage adaptation. In September 1942 he wrote to Agatha at Lawn Road, ‘I read Triangle At Rhodes last night. It certainly is a perfectly marvellous dramatic situation and would probably make just as good a play as any of them, but it is not the later, highly characterised Poirot, is it?'
²
Agatha wrote back, ‘I feel rather “anti” Poirot play.'
³
As she later explained with reference to
Black Coffee
, in a letter to a researcher, ‘After seeing that and the previous plays dramatised from my books I decided, quite definitely that Hercule Poirot was utterly unsuited to appear in any detective play, because a detective must be necessarily the onlooker and observer, and can only succeed if he abandons detection for positive action. That is, he should not be in a detective play but in a thriller.'
⁴

Unsurprisingly, the less ‘characterised' Poirot did not suit Sullivan himself, and in October Cork wrote:

Francis Sullivan came in to see me yesterday. I gather that he is not so keen on the Triangle at Rhodes idea, but he is very keen to make an arrangement for a play based on Death On The Nile, if the difficulties can be overcome. The complication that we particularly wanted to avoid was not to involve another Poirot subject while the present negotiations regarding a blanket Poirot film contract are in hand, but I find that Sullivan was more favourably inclined towards your idea of having the Poirot part played by say, a rather fleshy canon, as he would then enter into the action more, and even come under suspicion.
⁵

Agatha described to Max the moment when she persuaded her friend Sullivan to abandon Poirot, ‘leading him gently to the idea of Death On The Nile without Poirot – suggested
instead a retired Barrister – a solicitor – a diplomat – a clergyman – canon or bishop. And suddenly he bit! His eyes half closed – “oh yes – purple silk front and a large cross” He saw it, you see. Not the speaking part – the
appearance
! I bet you whoever played Hamlet argued a good deal as to whether to play it in a hat or not!'
⁶
Sullivan, as it happens, was at the time once again following in the footsteps of Charles Laughton by appearing in a short-lived revival of Laughton's 1928
succès d'estime
,
A Man With Red Hair
, produced by himself at the Ambassadors Theatre, directed by
Black Coffee
's Andre van Gyseghem and designed by Danae Gaylen. The
Times
reviewer felt that Sullivan's performance was no match for Laughton's.

The 1937 Poirot novel
Death on the Nile
confusingly shares a title with a 1934 short story featuring portly investigator Mr Parker Pyne, whose declared aim in life is to resolve unhappiness. Elements of this story are to be found in both the
Death on the Nile
novel and the 1938 Poirot novel
Appointment with Death
, and all of this material finds its ultimate source in a Nile cruise undertaken by Agatha and Max in 1933. Christie is likely to have been mightily relieved that Sullivan was not insistent on reprising his theatrical party piece as Poirot, and the character of the ‘fleshy canon' who replaced him in the play (variously named in different versions of the script, but originally known as Canon Pennefather) perhaps owes more to Parker Pyne than to Poirot. Christie's notes indicate that she had in fact experimented with adapting the original Parker Pyne short story for the stage, a venture from which Parker Pyne himself appears to have been similarly absent. The major significance of the switch from Poirot to Pennefather is that, as a character unknown to the audience, he can, as Sullivan himself noted, be portrayed as morally ambiguous and thus himself fall under suspicion in a way that Poirot couldn't.

By the end of 1942 the script, entitled
Moon on the Nile
, had been written; it is clearly an adaptation of the novel
Death on the Nile
, although without Poirot and with a much reduced, conflated and renamed dramatis personae. Amongst
the absentees from the stage version are novelist Salome Otterbourne, who Christie had originally put down in her notes as ‘Mrs Pooper – cheap novelist', a joke at her own expense (Max and Agatha referred to each other for reasons unknown as ‘Mr and Mrs Puper'). The dramatisation benefits instead from the introduction of the formidable Miss ffoliot-ffoulkes, one of a number of Bracknellesque
grande dame
characters which Christie drew particularly well for the stage. Agatha wrote to Max, ‘I have finished the Death From [sic] the Nile play. Larry very keen for it – I think I've written him quite a good part as Canon Pennefather – a kind of budding Archbishop of Canterbury and Sir W. Beveridge rolled into one!'
⁷
The Beveridge Report, the foundation of the post-war Welfare State, had been published the previous week, and Canon Pennefather is raising funds for what his niece describes as ‘some wonderful scheme for rebuilding a new England – self-supporting communities and industries – a kind of Christianised Soviet it seems to me'.
⁸
Agatha's letter continues, ‘Sidney Smith [a distinguished archaeologist friend of the Mallowans] has lent me some books with good illustrations of Abu Simbel for Danae to enjoy herself with for the scenery.'

On Christmas Eve Cork wrote to Christie, ‘I had a long session with the solicitor representing Mr Sullivan and the people who are going in with him on Moon on the Nile, and I am glad to say that we reached a consensus without giving up anything that mattered to us.'
⁹
Three weeks later, Sullivan's company Eleven Twenty Three Ltd paid £100 for a licence for the UK and its colonies, to be exercised within one year.
¹⁰
A Broadway option could be taken up within two months of a London opening and, again provided the play was produced in London, Sullivan would benefit to the extent of one-third of the proceeds of any film sale of the original novel. Significantly, Sullivan did not pay a commissioning fee, as he had done to Arnold Ridley for
Peril at End House
, although the play had clearly been written at his behest. It was not, as has been implied elsewhere, a script that Christie took ‘off the shelf' for
him, and neither, as has also been suggested, did it pre-date the novel.

In February 1943 Agatha wrote to Max, ‘Larry's play will, I feel, go on – as I believe either he or Danae put up some of the money – Do hope it will be a success as I have convinced him that
I
characterise my books much better than Ridley.'
¹¹
But then, a week later, ‘Dead silence from Larry Sullivan but then Danae is getting on with the scenery – am now thinking of . . . a play about a WAAF (. . . spy drama!)'
¹²
It seems that
Moon on the Nile
was being developed during Agatha's regular weekend visits to the Sullivans' house in Haslemere, which was to inspire the country house setting of her 1946 novel
The Hollow
.

In the event, it was to be a year before the play, now retitled
Hidden Horizon
, opened for a short ‘try-out' production at Dundee Repertory Theatre. Christie's choice of titles, both the original and the replacement, is indicative of how she wished to avoid the characterisation of her stage work as thrillers. On one of the Christie archive's copies of the script, carrying Sullivan's address and presumably dating from some time in 1942, the title
Moon on the Nile
has been crossed out and ‘Hidden Horizon' written in by hand. The phrase has echoes of Akhnaton's ‘City of the Horizon' and is mentioned in Act One of the play in this exchange between Canon Pennefather and the tormented Jackie as the Nile steamship cruiser
Lotus
, on which they are both passengers, is about to set sail:

       
CANON PENNEFATHER: We shall be starting in a minute or two. Ahead of us is what the old Egyptians called the hidden horizon.

       
JACKIE: (thoughtfully) Hidden Horizon.
¹³

Hidden Horizon
, like the novel
Towards Zero
which was published six months after the play's premiere, concerns a love triangle involving one man and two women, with all three protagonists present. The shipboard setting provides a claustro
phobic, self-contained scenario that allows for the dramatis personae
to intermingle in similarly isolated, if far less ominous, surroundings to those in
Ten Little Niggers
. Several of the characters are motivated by their financial circumstances: as well as Pennefather, for whom fundraising is a priority, those on board include a man who has spent years unsuccessfully seeking employment, a young woman who has been removed from the school and friends she loved as a result of her father losing his money, a doctor who has escaped his country after watching his hopes of an egalitarian society being destroyed by foreign investors, a maid who fears for her livelihood and a young communist who is concealing his aristocratic background. Christie considers these matters as someone whose own upbringing was affected by the financial instability caused by her father's death and who, at time of writing, was unable to draw on any of her American earnings due to a debilitating dispute with the tax authorities there.

Similarly to
Ten Little Niggers
, the ending of the stage adaptation was to prove particularly contentious. The original
Moon on the Nile
script sees the character of Jacqueline de Severac exit with a knife, clearly to take her own life as she does in the novel, and apparently with the endorsement of Canon Pennefather:

Police are heard off . . .

       
JACKIE: I feel so alone – so bewildered . . . I don't know . . . Ah! (snatches up dagger) (Springs back triumphantly, watching him. He does not move. She stares at him in a bewildered way) Did you know I was going to do that?

       
CANON: Yes, I knew.

       
JACKIE: And you didn't try to stop me?