Curtain Up (33 page)

On 14 September, the Shuberts' press agent Claude Greneker issued a press release: ‘Agatha Christie, famed mystery writer who was last represented on Broadway by
Ten Little Indians
, will have another of her spine-tinglers on the boards when
Hidden Horizon
is presented here on Thursday, September 19th, at the Plymouth Theatre. It is being produced by Messrs. Shubert in association with Albert de Courville with the latter also in charge of the direction, this being precisely the same set up responsible for
Ten Little Indians
.'
⁶⁴
On opening night, though, the
New York Times
announced, ‘Fabricating popular mystery yarns is quite a hobby with Agatha Christie, who likes to dramatise them too. Her first attempt along these lines was
Ten Little Indians
produced by the Shuberts and Albert de Courville for a run of 424 performances here. Devoted admirers of Miss Christie, this same combination will launch unveil her latest effort
Hidden Horizon
at the Plymouth tonight. Theatres are so scarce these days that it can remain there only until
Present Laughter
is ready to open October 28 . . .'
⁶⁵
For Reandco finding a West End theatre had been a genuine problem. But it is hard to believe that the Shuberts,
who owned much of Broadway, could not have properly accommodated the play had they really wanted to. The fact is that they didn't.

Halliwell Hobbes, who had played Wargrave to great acclaim in
Ten Little Indians
, was cast in the role of Archdeacon Pennyfeather, and Diana Barrymore as Jacqueline de Severac. Daughter of John Barrymore, she had played the lead in the short-lived Broadway production of Daphne du Maurier's
Rebecca
, which Clarence Derwent (director of the Martha's Vineyard
Towards Zero
) had directed the previous year. Her playbill biography reads, ‘Carrying the banner of the Theatre's Royal Family beginning with Louisa Drew, Diana Barrymore is well on her way to etching her own insignia on that famous escutcheon.'
⁶⁶
Other playbill biographies show that, for a number of the male participants in the production, this was their first engagement since wartime military service. One only wishes that the outcome could have been happier for all concerned.

As it turns out, the production did not last even for the five and a half weeks for which it had been scheduled.
Hidden Horizon
is not, on any level, intended to be a ‘spine tingler', and leading audiences and critics to believe that it was had raised false expectations. The
New York Post
described the production as a ‘tragic fiasco'.
⁶⁷
The
Herald Tribune
felt that ‘There are more unwitting laughs than calculated thrills in
Hidden Horizon
. . . Admirers of Mrs Christie will find little of the suspense and none of the staccato action which endowed
Ten Little Indians
with a modicum of excitement.'
⁶⁸
The
New Yorker
, however, found one redeeming feature: ‘The only thing, in fact, that pleased me even mildly was that somehow, in transplanting her work to the stage, Mrs Christie was persuaded to leave out her Belgian detective called Hercule Poirot, probably the most irritating little collection of mannerisms in the literature of gore.'
⁶⁹
In retrospect, it is perhaps hardly surprising that Broadway audiences were bemused by the sight of American actors portraying the carefully observed idiosyncrasies of Brits abroad, and I can well imagine that,
in the absence of
Ten Little Indians
' suspense and ‘staccato action', the script into which Christie had put so much thought simply didn't translate. It was, almost literally, laughed off the stage.

Hidden Horizon
closed on Broadway after twelve performances, having run for a week and a half, and must have been a fiasco indeed for the Shuberts thereby to sacrifice the residual rights in which they would have participated had it run for two weeks more. The remaining four weeks until the opening of
Present Laughter
were filled by Basil Rathbone in a two-hander play. There are no accounts for
Hidden Horizon
on file in the Shubert archive, but the papers of the great American stage actress and producer Katharine Cornell, held at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, contain a complete set. Although not credited as a co-producer, it may well have been that the ‘first lady of theater', who had played Sydney Fairfield in the 1921 Broadway production of Clemence Dane's
A Bill of Divorcement
and had subsequently found fame for her Broadway role in
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
, was an investor in the project. We see from these documents that the production cost $26,111.89 to mount and incurred a further $10,359.96 of losses during its short run, resulting in a total loss of $36,471.85.
⁷⁰

Christie's critical reputation as a playwright was in tatters on both sides of the Atlantic but, thanks to the convoluted machinations of agents and producers, a lucrative long-term secondary market had been secured for
Murder on the Nile
. With its cast of thirteen and its easily achievable setting in the ship's lounge (unlike the scenically ambitious outdoor locations of
Towards Zero
and
Appointment with Death
, it was effectively a drawing room drama despite its exotic location), the play was to become an enduringly popular mainstay of the touring, repertory and amateur circuits. Without her astonishing ‘alternative' ending, and rebranded from her more imaginative original title to be recognisably derived from the similarly named novel, the piece was fundamentally an undemanding whodunit that made it attractive to those of limited talent and
resources. It was, in short, a prime example of what came to be regarded as a ‘typical' Agatha Christie play, although in fact it was no such thing, and it thrived in markets (and productions) which inevitably undermined her aspirations of acceptance as a serious dramatist by the critical and theatrical communities.

In April 1947 Samuel French Ltd entered into their usual agreement to publish the script and deal with amateur licensing (in return for 50 per cent of licensing income) and in October Cork wrote to Ober: ‘Although this play [
Murder on the Nile
] had no great run in the West End of London, it is now proving extremely popular in repertory and stock in this country, and it might also be a good road and stock proposition in the US. There will be no objection to change of title and reasonable rewriting.'
⁷¹
Six months later, Hughes Massie announced in
The Stage
:

NOW RELEASED FOR REP

MURDER ON THE NILE By Agatha Christie

Undiminished in popularity TEN LITTLE NIGGERS

By Agatha Christie

LOVE FROM A STRANGER

By Agatha Christie and Frank Vosper

PERIL AT END HOUSE By Agatha Christie and Arnold Ridley

Repertory rights from Hughes Massie & Co
⁷²

Whilst, as we have seen, the claim to joint authorship for the dramatisation of
Love From a Stranger
was justified (although that for
Peril at End House
was not), the motivation here was clearly not to set the record straight but simply to improve the saleability of the plays by putting Christie's name first in each case. This deliberate, and continuous, blurring of the lines by her own agent, and indeed by producers, regarding the authorship of the plays only served further to damage Christie's reputation in the theatrical community. A number of the third-party adaptations that carry her name are mark
edly inferior to her own work, and where her own writing for the stage was concerned there would always be the assumption, or at least the suspicion, that other parties were involved. It is critically important to an appreciation of Christie as a playwright that a proper distinction is made between her own plays and those written by others who borrowed her name.

As it happens, the next ‘Agatha Christie' play to open in the West End was to be yet another third-party adaptation, in this case of her 1930 novel
The Murder at the Vicarage
, the first to feature Miss Marple. Throughout the 1940s Christie had toyed with a number of ideas for plays of her own. As well as the possible play about the WAAF that she had referred to in a letter to Max, her notebooks from this period show that she was considering a number of other ideas for the stage. There are musings on the subject of a potential adaptation of the Poirot novel
Three Act Tragedy
(1934), as well as of
Triangle at Rhodes
, both considered as potential Sullivan vehicles before
Death on the Nile
was settled on; and, more interestingly, a play on the Harlequin theme (possibly even a ballet). ‘R Helpmann?' she suggests, next to this, being a great admirer of the popular and ceaselessly energetic British-based Australian actor-dancer Robert Helpmann. She was absolutely right; there could not have been better casting for the role of Harlequin.
⁷³

Another idea was for an original play on ‘moral issues involving husband and wife' with a plot revolving around a woman who is proved innocent of a crime (unspecified) but who turns out to be guilty, a device later used to great effect with respect to a husband in
Witness for the Prosecution
. There are also notes for an adaptation of the 1933 Parker Pyne short story ‘The House at Shiraz', with a vastly enhanced back-story and potentially a new title. Like her sketch for a dramatisation of the Parker Pyne version of
Death on the Nile
, it seemingly dispenses with the character of Parker Pyne himself. Under consideration as well were two original plays, one about a love
triangle involving a squadron leader (Max's official rank in Cairo) and the other,
Command Performance
, about an actor (Francis L. Sullivan?) holidaying in either Rhodes, Egypt or Petra, who entraps a villain by becoming a decoy.
⁷⁴
Christie's enthusiasm for playwriting must have been buoyed up by the success of
Ten Little Niggers
, and this veritable smorgasbord of ideas demonstrates a vivid dramatic imagination, all of it seemingly unencumbered (after the initial work on Sullivan's behalf) by the restrictions of the detective story format.

However, it is testament to the degree to which her playwriting aspirations must have been set back by the accumulated frustrations of
Towards Zero
,
Appointment with Death
and
Murder on the Nile
that she appears to have put up no resistance to the idea of Barbara Toy and her friend Moie Charles adapting
The Murder at the Vicarage
. A licence for them to do so was duly issued at the end of 1948, with the usual 50/50 royalty split between the adaptors and Christie (Toy and Charles in turn dividing their share equally), and a six-month deadline for them to complete the work.
⁷⁵

This apparent willingness to see the book dramatised by others was all the more surprising given that, almost ten years earlier, Christie had seriously considered adapting the novel for the stage herself. In the summer of 1939, right in the middle of her agents' attempts to interest Basil Dean in
A Daughter's a Daughter
, she had written directly to Dean in an attempt to interest him in the idea: ‘Dear Basil Dean, I am sending you Murder at the Vicarage to see what you think of a village murder play – with elderly spinster detective.'
⁷⁶
She goes on to explain how the dramatis personae could be reduced and altered for the stage before concluding, ‘am hoping to tackle Mother and Daughter play soon.' We don't know how Dean responded, but the idea was clearly still current when, on Christmas Eve 1942, at the conclusion of a letter to Christie about
Ten Little Niggers
, Cork wrote, ‘No news yet about either the Vicarage or a Daughter's a Daughter, but I think something should come of both these matters so that 1943 may be a really dramatic year.'
⁷⁷

Although Christie cut Poirot, Battle, Parker Pyne and even
Harley Quin from dramatisations, or notes for dramatisations, of the stories, she seems to have been keen at this point to experiment with the idea of Miss Marple on stage. Perhaps she felt that the character of the elderly spinster was less likely to pull focus than the others, an instinct in which she was quite possibly right. She may also have been reassured by the fact that the role would have been exempt from the interpretations of Laughton, Sullivan and the other flamboyant male actors who had appropriated her work as vehicles for their talents (at least, one hopes it would!).

The six-month deadline proved academic. Moie Charles and Barbara Toy appear to have delivered the script within a month, indicating that there may have been some preliminary discussions and work before the adaptation licence was issued. In any event, by late January 1949 Christie was sending Cork her notes on the script: ‘On the whole I think a very good job has been made of it. It still has the rather too cosy novelish atmosphere of “Let's sit down and wonder whodunit” – but I never could see how that could be avoided in this particular book . . . I do feel it would add greatly to the interest if Lawrence and Anna could have a moment or two of passionate love making in the first scene of all . . . I do
not
like Miss Marple fainting at the end. It is, it really is,
corny
. Just done for the curtain – and absolutely untypical of her. No, that really cannot be.'
⁷⁸
Having spent a decade dealing with requests for script changes from Basil Dean, Francis L. Sullivan, Bertie Meyer and Lee Shubert, it must have given Agatha a moment of satisfaction to have been giving notes to a playwright; not least the one from whom she herself had taken notes regarding
Ten Little Niggers
.

On 2 March Cork wrote to explain that, despite the end of hostilities, Christie's theatrical projects were once again the victim of unfortunate scheduling with respect to matters military: ‘The arrangements for Murder at the Vicarage have been delayed somewhat as Bertie Meyer is now in Germany where he is touring the production of Ten Little Niggers for the Army of Occupation.' The involvement of Barbara Toy inevitably made
Meyer the producer of choice and, in fairness, he had nurtured
Ten Little Niggers
from page to stage with great diligence, and had at least acted promptly and efficiently to ensure a West End run for
Appointment with Death
(unlike his counterparts entrusted with
Murder on the Nile
). In September 1949 he duly entered into a licence to present
Murder at the Vicarage
(now without its ‘
The
') on fairly standard terms. Meyer surrounded himself with co-producers on this occasion, amongst them Ted Kavanagh, creator of the BBC Radio comedy
ITMA
, who had set up his own production company in 1944, and the People's Entertainment Society. This trio of producers had toured Moie Charles and Barbara Toy's stage adaptation of James Hilton's novel
Random Harvest
the previous year, although they had been unable to find a West End home for it.