Curtain Up (31 page)

Superintendent Battle, for whom this was his last appearance in a novel, is absent from the play's dramatis personae,
and local CID man Inspector Leach is left to do the honours. A cast of thirteen take part in the three-act drama (totalling five scenes), which takes place over a period of eight days. Intriguingly, the piece is set in the open air, on the terrace and in the garden of the house and on the adjacent cliff path. We see a garden wall, a large rock at the top of the cliff and a sea view across to the hotel on the other side of the bay. Audrey, the play's female protagonist, regularly encounters the failed suicide Angus McWhirter on the cliff path, where they engage in discussions about issues of mortality:

       
ANGUS: . . . If life holds nothing worth living for – the only sensible thing is to get out.

       
AUDREY: Oh no – oh no! I don't want to believe that . . . one's life might be valuable.

       
ANGUS: A man's the best judge of that himself.

       
AUDREY: I meant valuable to someone else.

       
ANGUS: If a man's all that valuable to someone else, I doubt that he'd want to commit suicide at all. His natural vanity would prevent it.

       
AUDREY: One's life might be valuable to someone one had never seen.

       
ANGUS: I'd be interested to hear how you make that out?

       
AUDREY: I'm being stupid, perhaps, but it seems to me that life is a little like a play – everyone has a part.

       
ANGUS: (quoting rather sententiously) ‘All the world's a stage and every man a player'. Is that your meaning?

       
AUDREY: (Smiling) Oh, I know that Shakespeare put it a good deal better. What I'm trying to say is – (breaks off)

How difficult it is to put one's ideas into words.

       
ANGUS: Go on. I'd be interested to hear just what you have in mind.

       
AUDREY: (slowly and with difficulty) The actors in a play depend on each other – and so does the action of the play. If a man decides to make a final exit, shall we say, in the
first act – what's to happen in the third act when he has perhaps a small, but very important part – only a few lines, perhaps, but without them the play goes to pieces – the action is meaningless – all because a small part actor who didn't think his part sufficiently important, has walked out on the Company.

Following this, of course, McWhirter goes on to play a significant role in the story's resolution. Anyone familiar with Gerald Verner's 1956 drawing-room set adaptation of the novel will immediately recognise that this is an entirely different play. Verner's eleven characters, only six of which are shared with Christie's version, include Battle but not McWhirter. Christie's work is a far more dramatically ambitious piece on all levels, but one can see why the Shuberts were perplexed by it.

A check in the
New York Times
archive for 1945 quickly revealed where and when the try-out production of their new Christie script, as doctored by Robert Harris, had taken place: ‘Towards Zero, another murder mystery by Agatha Christie, will be tested for the Shuberts by Arthur J. Beckhard on Martha's Vineyard on September 11. Clarence Derwent is directing the cast, which includes Elfrida Derwent, Althea Murphy, Shirley Collier, Rand Elliot, Ned Payne, Esther Mitchell and J.P. Wilson.'
⁴⁷
Arthur J. Beckhard was a prolific producer-director and Martha's Vineyard resident, who regularly promoted seasons and Broadway try-outs at the Playhouse there. London-born Clarence Derwent was a respected actor and director who carved a successful early career in the UK before moving to America where, from 1946 to 1952, he was President of American Actors' Equity, which still gives out an annual award he set up to recognise the work of ‘supporting' actors on Broadway; their UK counterpart also presents an award for supporting actors in his name in the West End. Earlier in the year Derwent had directed Diana Barrymore in the short-lived Broadway premiere of Daphne du Maurier's
Rebecca
, and his wife,
Elfrida Derwent, played Lady Tressilian in his production of
Towards Zero
.

The
New York Times
appears to have got the date of the production wrong by a week; it seems that the world premiere of Agatha Christie's
Towards Zero
actually took place at Martha's Vineyard Playhouse on Tuesday 4 September 1945, two days after the formal surrender of Japan, following the unleashing on Hiroshima and Nagasaki of weapons of mass destruction not dissimilar to those described by Christie in
Black Coffee
over two decades previously. The
Martha's Vineyard Gazette
of 7 September provides, as far as I know, the only critical appraisal of this unique theatrical event. Under the headline ‘A New Mystery Play: Characteristic Touches of popular writer Make an Engrossing Play' it ran the following review:

A new Agatha Christie mystery play,
Towards Zero
, is this week's production at Martha's Vineyard Playhouse, on East Chop . . . The action takes place on the walled terrace of Lady Tressilian's house, Gull's Nest, on the high coastal rocks of a place called Salt Creek, the atmosphere of which is excellently realized by the stage setting of Pamella Judson-Styles . . .

As so often in Agatha Christie stories, the apparent facts do not coincide with the real facts, which is the sort of mystification the reader or the audience can follow with suspense and see resolved with a sense of surprise and satisfaction . . . The title of the play derives from exchanges of philosophy between Audrey and a roving Scot named McWhirter, who appears from time to time on the coastal path . . . Events move, it is pointed out, towards a zero hour of murder, with people gathered from different places as if by appointment . . . The play has been well staged by Clarence Derwent, and the cast is good.
⁴⁸

Given that this was presumably the doctored version, of which there appears to be no surviving copy, it seems not to
have differed significantly from the script delivered by Christie in December the previous year. It is notable the care with which the complex exterior setting appears to have been executed for what was evidently intended in the first instance as a one-week run, and the detailed description of this set in Christie's script provides the answer to another little mystery. The Agatha Christie archive contains a small, beautifully executed watercolour which recreates in every detail the play's setting as specified by Christie. On the back of it is written ‘Sketch of Scene – Towards Zero', but until the discovery of this script there was no explanation for it. The picture bears no relation to Gerald Verner's 1956 script and, whilst it is not a technical design drawing for a set, it is completely uninhabited and is an artist's impression specifically of the relevant buildings and landscape rather than of a moment from the novel. Now that we know what it portrays, my belief is that Christie commissioned the painting so that she could visualise the unusual layout of the stage while she was writing and plan the characters' positions on it and their entrances and exits. It is signed ‘H. Francis Clarke' (or possibly Clark with a smudge), offering the intriguing prospect that it may have been the work of the distinguished landscape architect Frank Clark, who was resident in Hampstead (not far from Christie's Lawn Road address) at this time.

It was to the Martha's Vineyard production that Shubert is referring in his letter to Christie of the following month, expressing his hope that she herself will now undertake the necessary changes. Ober was tasked with establishing exactly what was needed, and at the end of November wrote to Cork to say that Shubert and, interestingly, de Courville both thought that ‘the denoument is abrupt and does not play well. They feel that Mrs Mallowan could with very little rewriting handle this scene more adroitly.'
⁴⁹
A week later he followed this up with

I had a discussion a couple of days ago with Shubert and de Courville regarding the Towards Zero contract . . . De
Courville, as a matter of fact, urged that we try to get Mrs Mallowan to come over here and work on revisions of the play and I am glad to see that this is in the realm of possibility. I think the difficulty could also be solved by having the play tried out in England first. You will have had by now my letter saying that neither de Courville nor Shubert want any drastic alterations and they do not want to change the character of the play. It has been difficult, however, to get them to be very specific about what they feel is the matter with it. They gave the play a stock try-out [another reference to the Martha's Vineyard production] and they simply feel that the denouement is abrupt and does not play well. If this is so it would be apparent in an English try-out and Mrs Mallowan could fix the script over there.
⁵⁰

He goes on to suggest that, English rights being reserved to Christie, Bertie Meyer could perhaps offer the Shuberts a co-production in London. Changes, however, were not forthcoming from Agatha, and she did not take up the Shuberts' apparently generous offer of a trip to New York to carry out the work.

After the frenzied activity of the war, Agatha was now reunited with Max and with Greenway; the former unscathed by his contribution to the air force's work in North Africa, the latter with the colourful addition of a mural depicting the American navy's war effort, painted by one of its wartime residents. Clement Attlee's Labour Party, with its full-blooded commitment to the introduction of a Welfare State, had swept Churchill from power after the end of hostilities in Europe. It was a time of austerity and of change and Agatha, like many of her contemporaries, seems to have been afflicted with post-war doldrums. Despite the safe return of Max, the war had taken its toll on her family, with the loss in October 1944 of her son-in-law Hubert Prichard, just at the moment when she had been rushing to complete the script of
Towards Zero
. Now was a time for taking stock and looking to the future rather than tidying up loose ends from wartime projects.
The Shuberts' licence was extended to enable them to open on Broadway by 1 October 1946, but it was not to be, and Agatha Christie's play of
Towards Zero
was never seen or heard of again.

One of the conditions of the contract extension on
Towards Zero
negotiated by Ober was that the Shuberts were obliged to put
Hidden Horizon
, now incorporating some changes that they had requested in Act Three, into production in the meantime. The eventual fate of
Hidden Horizon
thus appears to have been dictated more by contractual considerations than by any genuine enthusiasm for the piece on the part of either its British or American producers. In order to understand the motivations of those concerned it is necessary to appreciate the huge premium that the licensing system placed on achieving a West End (and, in America, a Broadway) production. The originating producer in the UK would secure the rights to a new play by paying an advance against the writer's royalty income (typically £100 against 10 per cent of box office sales). This would give the producer a specified period (usually one year) in which to secure a West End opening (often following a pre-West End tour or provincial ‘try-out'). The option period could usually be extended in return for a further advance payment, provided that no other managements were competing for the licence. Having opened in the West End, the licensee would have the right themselves to produce the work in Great Britain, Ireland and various dominions, colonies and dependencies for a period of seven years in return for the agreed royalty payments. They would also have the right to sub-license in these territories and would have first option to acquire for sub-licence the American rights, retaining a share of the author's income from any such deals.

In the case of
Hidden Horizon
, for instance, if Reandco had produced in the West End, exercised the American option and then sub-licensed to a Broadway producer, they would have received 40 per cent of Christie's royalties. The West End production would also have entitled them to a third of her
income from the play in other overseas territories. In this instance, a commission was deductible from Reandco's share and payable to Sullivan's company Eleven Twenty Three Ltd who had, with Hughes Massie's co-operation, assigned their original licence to Reandco.

Having opened in the West End, the producer would also benefit from the sale of film rights if this took place within the seven-year period, in this case receiving a third of income from the sale of either the play or the original novel,
Death on the Nile
. During the seven-year period, the producer would also receive a share (in this case 40 per cent) of the author's income from amateur, repertory, broadcasting and television rights in Britain and associated territories. A sub-licence issued by the originating West End producer to an American producer would similarly give them a timeframe in which to produce on Broadway, following which the American producer would be entitled to a share of the British producer's income from a film sale and from American sub-licensing, in particular to stock (i.e. repertory) theatres. These financial incentives offered to the originating West End producer and their Broadway counterpart were deemed to be fair recompense for the publicity that these particularly high-profile productions would bring to the work, thereby enhancing its attraction to film studios (for which a Broadway run was particularly important), repertory, touring, stock and amateur companies. They also gave the producers concerned a vested interest in assisting the writer's agent with maximising the various potential income streams from it during the seven-year duration of the original licence. Arrangements not dissimilar to these remain custom and practice in the licensing of stage works to this day. Edmund Cork was no fool, and he understood the nuances of the game very well.