Curtain Up (32 page)

Following their failure to find a West End home for the play, Reandco's West End option for
Hidden Horizon
had duly been allowed to lapse on 16 October 1945, but two weeks later a new licence was issued to them on rather different terms. Alec Rea had by now become a substantial producing force in his own right, and Cork saw no advantage in falling
out of favour with him, given his continued interest in Christie's work. Reandco's prevarication had forfeited them their share of income from a film sale and various other secondary licences, although they retained post-West End touring rights, and in the new deal Christie was, unusually, entitled to 20 per cent of profits to the producer arising out of the licence.
⁵¹
All this was the price of Cork's continued patience.

Most significantly, as a special condition of the arrangement whereby they had been allowed to sell an American option to the Shuberts without themselves having presented the play in the West End, any income generated thereby for Reandco would be held in an escrow account by Hughes Massie until they themselves had staged a West End production. Reandco's new licence contained the usual provision for an American option to be taken up after the West End opening. So, with the most powerful theatre organisation on earth already holding a licence for a Broadway production, Reandco had the biggest possible incentive to achieve a West End run for the play, exercise their American option and cash in their share of the income from a likely Broadway run. Cork's strategy in reinstating Reandco's entitlement to 40 per cent of Christie's Broadway income may at first seem questionable but, as internal Shubert correspondence shows, they were, unsurprisingly, reluctant to exercise their option on an English play if that play had not been deemed worthy of a West End run. And in any case the boost to secondary markets for the play that a West End run would bring was evidently deemed worth the sacrifice by Cork. The renegotiated licence issued to Reandco in October 1945 is the first time that we see the play referred to as ‘Murder on the Nile'
⁵²
– the play's third title, for what was to be its third production. For this incarnation Reandco continued to share producing credits with Barry O'Brien.

In the circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising that the eventual West End production of
Murder on the Nile
appears to have been something of a half-hearted affair, doubtless
motivated principally by Reandco's desire to secure a share of the American income and the sale of a sub-licence for the post-West End touring rights in the piece; ‘direct from the West End' carried a certain cachet then, as it does now. The production opened at the Ambassadors Theatre on 19 March 1946, more than two years after it had premiered in Dundee. It ran for six weeks. This was not, as has previously been assumed, because it failed at the box office, but because it had been specifically booked in for a limited season while, according to
The Stage
, the cast of the long-running popular revue
Sweeter and Lower
took a holiday and rehearsed for the opening of its sequel
Sweetest and Lowest
.

The cast of
Murder on the Nile
was largely that which had appeared in the previous year's tour, and the director was once again Oxford-educated Claud Gurney – a safe pair of hands but no Irene Hentschel. Contrary to some accounts, the role of Miss ffoliott-ffoulkes was played not by Helen Hayes, who later portrayed Miss Marple on American TV, but by the more elderly British actress Helen Haye. Having provided ‘Oriental singing' in both Dundee and on tour, Mischa de la Motte was no longer with the company, and the highly regarded Vivienne Bennett (who had appeared in the 1937 television broadcast of Emlyn Williams'
Night Must Fall
) had taken over the role of Jacqueline de Severac. But the most significant change was that the man for whom the play had been written was himself no longer in it. Francis L. Sullivan was either not available or simply didn't fancy a six-week run, and Father Borrowdale (as he was now named) was played by character actor David Horne. The next we hear of Sullivan is from Cork at the end of the following year, with regard to the possibility of him appearing in an American tour of
Alibi
. Mrs Sullivan's scenery was retained for
Murder on the Nile
and continued to receive good reviews, although for the most part the play and the actors didn't.

The Times
led off the critical drubbing: ‘Once more the “Who did it?” piece, and this time in its crudest form. Motives are distributed amongst passengers in the Observation Saloon of
the Nile Steamer as lightly as though they were raffle tickets, and none of those who receive one has the personality to make us wish that he or she will or will not be the winner or loser . . . we cannot help hoping that it will turn out to be the parson who, whether as a platitudinous Father Confessor or a highly ratiocinative amateur detective, is no end of a bore.'
⁵³
To save you looking it up, as I had to, ratiocination is the process of logical reasoning.

The
Daily Mail
put it even more bluntly: ‘If even my gullible old eyes can spot successively the future assassin, the accomplice, and even the method of murder in
Murder on the Nile
, something is wrong. Indeed, it is a hard job to find much right with Agatha Christie's new thriller . . . the company in general seems to suffer from a lack of spirit, natural enough in the circumstances, yet something which I found myself catching.'
⁵⁴

The
Observer
's Ivor Brown, whose wartime household income had been swelled by royalties from the West End and touring productions of
Ten Little Niggers
, was less condemnatory:

As far as plot (intricate of course) is concerned, the new Agatha Christie play might as well have tipped its corpses into the Nile. But Egypt offers the scene painter a better chance (nicely taken by Danae Gaylen) . . . The piece has the proper excitements of its hard-worked kind; a weakness lies in the blending of the usual mystery-mechanism with unusual human emotion. We have come to take our murders lightly in this kind of theatre; consequently a serious ending, with the guilty party nobly declining an obvious suicide at sacerdotal urgence, the better to find salvation via the scaffold, is too momentous a finale for so light a morsel of playmaking . . . Mr David Horne, as a detectively-minded Anglican priest, persuasively mixes clues and canonicals . . .
⁵⁵

The Stage
noticed that ‘Father Borrowdale has a good deal in common with his Chestertonian counterpart Father Brown.
David Horne, playing a part that has been taken on tour by Francis Sullivan, very skilfully suggests, both in appearance and manner, this subtly contrived pillar of the High Church.'
⁵⁶
The
Daily Telegraph
noted that whilst ‘not a vintage Christie' the production was ‘likely to fill the Ambassadors Theatre for some time to come';
⁵⁷
in fact it didn't, simply because of the limited engagement at the theatre. For some reason Rea does not appear to have advertised the fact that this was a limited season, but on 27 April, as scheduled, the production moved aside to enable
Sweetest and Lowest
to open. Two days previously,
The Stage
had announced that touring producer D. Rewse-White had secured the UK touring rights from Reandco and that a tour would commence in July; the deal had doubtless been brokered by co-producer Barry O'Brien, who booked touring dates for Rewse-White. The previous week Reandco had taken up their American option and thereby secured their share of any income from a Broadway production. The intentionally brief West End run of
Murder on the Nile
at least appears to have served its purpose in certain respects.

Murder on the Nile
opened two weeks after the closure – having clocked up a record-breaking 1,998 performances – of Noël Coward's
Blithe Spirit
. Coward's
Private Lives
was in its second year at the Apollo, and the Old Vic Company, led by Olivier and Richardson, were playing
Henry IV Part One
at the New Theatre. Competing for the attention of Shakespeare audiences, the irrepressible Donald Wolfit could be seen in a repertoire of the Bard's work at the Winter Garden Theatre. On a lighter note, Lupino Lane was appearing in
Me and My Girl
at the Victoria Palace, and it was the last chance to see Bud Flanagan in
Cinderella
at the Adelphi. Esther McCracken's
No Medals
was in its second year at the Vaudeville and Mary Hayley Bell's
Duet for Two Hands
was enjoying success at the Lyric, co-produced by Jack Buchanan and the People's Entertainment Society.

Six weeks after
Murder on the Nile
closed, Reandco, in co-production with the increasingly ubiquitous H.M. Tennent
Ltd, opened another Christie play which ran for 289 performances at the West End's Apollo Theatre. On this occasion, the Christies concerned were Dorothy and Campbell Christie; Campbell, the younger brother of Agatha's former husband, enjoyed a successful playwriting partnership with his wife. They had already seen two of their plays performed in the West End, including 1935's ‘comedy thriller'
Someone at the Door
, which appears to have been written at exactly the time when Agatha herself was penning the similarly titled
Someone at the Window
. Now, in 1946,
Grand National Night
was to be Dorothy and Campbell Christie's first big success, and would be followed by a number of other plays including
Carrington VC
and
The Touch of Fear
. Agatha had remained on friendly terms with Campbell, a well-known wit with a distinguished record of military service, following her divorce from Archie; but it must nonetheless have rankled somewhat to see her own producer score such an apparently effortless hit for a part-time writer. When in 1963 Campbell was found dead in his gas-filled kitchen at the age of sixty-nine, a hugely respectful
Times
obituary quoted his view on state subsidy for the arts as being ‘Why pay people to put plays on that audiences don't want to see?'
⁵⁸

Given
Murder on the Nile
's undistinguished West End premiere, it seems extraordinary that the Shuberts decided to proceed with a Broadway production at all. In early July 1946 J.J. Shubert wrote to brother Lee, in one of the terse internal memos that characterised the organisation: ‘I notice you have Hidden Horizon which must be produced by September 30, 1946; also Towards Zero by October 1, 1946. Are you going to do anything about producing these plays?'
⁵⁹
Their company had so far invested $10,000 in acquiring options on them, so the question was a legitimate one.

The Shuberts' paper trail on
Hidden Horizon
makes that for
Ten Little Indians
look relatively straightforward; this is largely due to their having been licensed by Reandco, who at the time were themselves about to lose their licence for failing to produce in the West End. The Shuberts' ever-diligent
lawyers had spotted that Reandco would have no film or American stock rights to pass on if they themselves had failed to produce in the West End, and a side agreement with Christie to secure their position in this regard was therefore required, reassuring the Shuberts that in the event that Reandco's own licence lapsed, they would still receive 25 per cent of income from a film sale and 50 per cent of income from stock licences if they produced the play on Broadway. That, along with tortuous dealings with the Dramatists Guild and de Courville, numerous assignments and warranties that were required from the various parties (going back as far as Sullivan's Eleven Twenty Three Ltd) and a number of requests to extend the date on the Broadway licence, kept the Shuberts' lawyers and the Ober office busy for almost six months.

Eventually, on 27 July 1945, an exasperated Ober wrote to Lee Shubert himself (‘Shubert, as you know, is a difficult man,' he had commented to Cork two weeks earlier
⁶⁰
): ‘With painstaking care we have gotten all the supplementary documents which your legal department thought necessary . . . Now I am constantly getting enquiries from our London office, wanting to know what the status of the contract is. I am afraid, therefore, that unless the contracts are returned to us fully executed by Friday, August 3rd, we will have to withdraw the play and make other arrangements for its production.'
⁶¹
Shubert signed the contract on 1 August.

The final extension on the
Hidden Horizon
licence granted to the Shuberts, to 30 September 1946, was allegedly in order to ensure de Courville's own availability to direct.
⁶²
Throughout all this, there was clearly still some hope on the Shuberts' part that Christie might come up with the desired script amendments on
Towards Zero
, and it has to be said that Lee Shubert remained remarkably sanguine in the face of her continued refusal to do so. Finally, with licences for both plays about to run out and no further extensions on offer, the Shuberts must have decided that, of the two scripts as they stood,
Hidden Horizon
was the better bet. This was their last opportunity to present a work from the writer of the hit
Ten Little Indians
while that production was still relatively fresh in people's minds and, despite the poor critical response in London, they booked the play into the Plymouth Theatre from 19 September.

Interestingly, the Shuberts either decided against, or were not given the option to use, the title under which the play had finally premiered in the West End and, as with the West End production, it was only booked to run for a very short limited season. Over the summer, the American press had been monitoring the lack of New York theatre availability with interest; and on 30 August the
New York Times
had noted that both
Hidden Horizon
and a production of
Cyrano de Bergerac
were seeking theatres, adding that if they had to become ‘stop gap shows' (i.e. occupying a theatre temporarily between other bookings) there would be no trouble finding transfer houses for them if they were hits: ‘There is a tradition in the theatre forbidding any hit to go homeless.'
⁶³