Curtain Up (37 page)

Saunders arranged to introduce Gregg to Christie over lunch at the Carlton Grill, at what was also to be his own first meeting with her. The venue was Saunders' suggestion and Agatha was accompanied by Max, along with Rosalind – who had remarried the previous year – and her new husband Anthony Hicks. Trained in Oriental Studies and as a barrister, although he never practised, Hicks was to provide a calm, reassuring and trusted voice in the conduct of the family's business affairs,
and became a valued advisor to Cork in the management of the ever-growing Christie brand.

‘Everything depended on the impression I made, and no First Night has ever made me feel so terrified,' confesses Saunders.
¹⁵
To an extent he had already proved himself with his commitment to the tour of
Murder at the Vicarage
, but the real hurdle was Gregg's lack of credibility as a director, not to mention the fact that Saunders had persuaded him to take on the role of Cristow as well, offering him prominent ‘star' billing on the production's publicity.

Both Saunders and Gregg recall the fateful meeting in great detail. I will opt for Saunders' account:

Her husband, Professor Max Mallowan, said very little, but this wonderfully kind man must have known the strain I was under. Anthony Hicks, her son-in-law, tried to ease things by talking on every subject under the sun, from the political situation to the difficulty of telling the difference between claret and burgundy. Agatha's daughter, Rosalind, frankly frightened me. I was to learn what enormous fun she is. But she would be the first to agree that she looks very forbidding in certain circumstances, and I felt at the time she was keeping a careful watch on me in case I slipped my hand into Agatha's handbag and knocked off her purse . . . Agatha of course was her usual shy self.

The meeting apparently went well despite a faux pas from Gregg, when he claimed to have preferred the ‘book' of
Black Coffee
to the play. This would have been doubly embarrassing for Saunders, who had optioned the touring rights to
Black Coffee
two weeks before he signed the West End contract for
The Hollow
. Evidently designed as a follow-up to the successful tour of
Murder at the Vicarage
, his new production of
Black Coffee
went on the road in 1951 starring Kenneth Kent as Poirot, and doubtless provided a useful source of regular income for Saunders to balance the initially unpredictable fortunes of
The Hollow
. RADA-trained Kent had been a
pre-war stalwart of the Old Vic Company, and appears to have been the ‘go to' performer when casting the role of Napoleon on stage, resulting in his appearance in the role in no fewer than four productions. Casting a Napoleon as Poirot arguably has some logic to it, and he had also played Professor Challenger in Saunders' ill-fated Conan Doyle adaptation.

Once plans were under way for
The Hollow
, Saunders also took a West End option on
Black Coffee
, possibly by way of an insurance policy.
¹⁶
In the end, the option was never exercised, as matters had begun to develop rapidly in new directions; but Christie took the opportunity to update the twenty-year-old script for the tour, and this forms the basis of the current ‘acting edition'. Saunders makes no mention of the
Black Coffee
tour. Gregg does, which makes sense as it was running when he was working on
The Hollow
; but Gregg in turn makes no mention of the fact that Saunders' first ‘Christie' was
Murder at the Vicarage
.

As Bertie Meyer had predicted, casting
The Hollow
was to be no easy task. Whilst the characters themselves are well drawn, none of them has sufficient stage time to be a really attractive vehicle for a star actor. Gregg, of course, saw this as a sign of Christie's lack of experience as a playwright. I think it more likely to have been a sign of her extensive experience of dealing with star actors, and of her dislike of the manner in which they had been inclined to hijack her work when given the opportunity to do so. According to Saunders, his friend the actors' agent Dorothy Mather, of the company Film Rights, said, ‘I have read the script and I beg you, dear Peter, not to put this play on. It is awful.'
¹⁷
As it happens, she greatly enjoyed the production when she saw it on tour and provided two actors when some of the cast were replaced prior to the West End.

At this point, though, financing
The Hollow
proved no easier than casting it. In the absence of ‘substantial resources' of his own, Saunders initially approached ‘the Group', in the form of Howard & Wyndham, hoping that their involvement might also help to secure crucial pre-West End touring dates. But, although
they had been happy enough to back Meyer's production of
Murder at the Vicarage
, for a production with Saunders at the helm they declined.

Undeterred, Saunders next approached the Arts Council.
The Hollow
was to be produced in 1951, the year of the Festival of Britain. Running from May to September, to mark the centenary of 1851's Great Exhibition, the Festival was intended to celebrate Britain's contribution to the arts, science and technology, with the opening of the newly built Royal Festival Hall as its centrepiece. The Arts Council of Great Britain, the post-war successor to CEMA, was a sponsor of several key events, and had encouraged theatre producers to apply for funding or guarantees against loss. Saunders claims that the council of the Society of West End Theatre Managers delayed relaying this invitation to the society's full membership, which resulted in his application being submitted too late. In reality, although Saunders made a good case for the inclusion of
The Hollow
as a funded Festival event, his application was roundly rejected. The Arts Council's secretary general, Mary Glasgow, wrote advising him that the Arts Council felt that ‘a single play on that scale is one that should be able to pay its way as an ordinary commercial proposition without any subsidy, and that it has not, in their opinion, any strong Festival appeal.'
¹⁸
This was the same Arts Council that had unblushingly endorsed Binkie Beaumont's hardly uncommercial endeavours; but Binkie had ensured his future by bedazzling John Maynard Keynes, one of its founding fathers, with his particular brand of theatrical stardust way back in the CEMA days.

Like many books with such titles, Methuen Drama's
Modern British Playwriting: the 1950s
makes no mention of Christie's contribution as a playwright. But it does contain an interesting interview with Anthony Field, finance director of the Arts Council from 1957 to 1985. The interviewer asks, ‘When you first started, what were the criteria on which you were assessing [theatre]?' Field responds, ‘Well a number of us evolved this over my early years, and if an organisation applied to us for
a grant and say it was for a drama company presenting Agatha Christie plays on the end of the pier in Blackpool, it would go to the drama department, and the drama department would say, you know, “We're not interested: Agatha Christie plays, end of the pier, you know, that should pay for itself”, so it would never come to our finance department at all . . .'
¹⁹

I have no axe to grind with Field, who in his lifetime did enormous good as a promoter and advocate of both commercial and subsidised theatre, and in any case is here discussing the assessment methods of the Arts Council drama department rather than necessarily his own. What is instructive, though, is the equation of Agatha Christie with ‘end of the pier' and the assumption that her work is automatically disqualified for funding. Field, as it happens, was responsible for persuading the Arts Council to help fund the young Cameron Mackintosh's 1978 production of
My Fair Lady
, originally staged in collaboration with the Haymarket Theatre in Leicester.
²⁰
One can only assume that Mackintosh would have had less luck with the Arts Council ten years earlier when, aged twenty-two, he was producing tours of
Black Coffee
,
Murder at the Vicarage
,
Love From a Stranger
and
Witness for the Prosecution
, and giving interviews declaring his intention to tour Christie plays every year.
²¹
The fact is that Saunders' spirited attempt to garner Arts Council funding never stood a chance, not because it was an inherently commercial endeavour (which it wasn't), but because of the name of the playwright. The Arts Council's ethic, as it turned out, was very different from that of the People's Entertainment Society.

With his options running out, Saunders decided to swallow his pride and approach the one man who could ‘command' a star to appear in the play. ‘I wrote to Binkie Beaumont and asked if I could come and see him on business.'
²²
At the ensuing meeting, Beaumont was courtesy itself. ‘He made me feel I was the only person in the world who mattered at that moment,' says Saunders, and he promised to co-produce and find a star if he liked the play. But, of course, he didn't. This was probably the first time that a play with Agatha Christie's
name on it had been across Binkie's desk since he and H.M. Tennent had programmed the
Love From a Stranger
tour into Howard & Wyndham theatres.

The official line on Beaumont's rejection of
The Hollow
is given in Richard Huggett's biography of the ‘Eminence Grise of the West End'. Huggett's obsequious prose is symptomatic of the reverence in which Beaumont's name is held to this day in certain theatrical circles:

He was, at all times, rather less concerned with making money than in doing plays which interested and excited him, plays which offered splendid opportunities to his favourite actors and stars, plays which would add lustre to the Firm's image. In short, it had to be a Tennent play, a category which it would be difficult to define, but was always easy to recognise. Anything which he felt did not qualify would be turned down instantly no matter how much money it was likely to make. Many of these were produced by rival managements with great success but Binkie was unresentful for he had little professional jealousy. He turned down an offer to do Agatha Christie's first play [sic],
The Hollow
, and thus lost the chance of making history with
The Mousetrap
, a fact which Peter Saunders has related with some relish, and considerable detail, in his book,
The Mousetrap Man
. Binkie didn't mind. It wasn't a Tennent play and thus he would have no interest in it.
²³

I suspect, however, that equally important was the fact that the brusque and businesslike Saunders was not a ‘Binkie' producer; Beaumont had been happy enough to work with Frank Vosper on
Love From a Stranger
.

Whilst it might have improved Christie's credibility within the industry to be included in Tennents' rosta of women playwrights, which included Daphne du Maurier, Lillian Hellman and Dodie Smith, Beaumont's rejection of
The Hollow
proved to be a lucky escape for Saunders, who was thereby saved from being the junior partner in all future Christie projects.
Without help from Tennents, the Group or the Arts Council, Saunders was forced to produce and raise the finance for the project himself, which ultimately proved to be the best thing that could have happened to him. His company's repertoire of thrillers and comedies had in the end proved impossible to pass off as even partly ‘educational', and entertainment tax exemption had thus been forfeited. This meant, though, that he was permitted to distribute profits to investors. And with this business model in mind, he now set about raising funds from a small group of family, friends and business associates. All of whom were about to make a great deal of money.

Meanwhile, an inspired piece of novelty casting had solved the problem of finding a star to lead the piece. Born in the British colony of Basutoland (now Lesotho), the Paris-trained actress and comedienne Jeanne de Casalis had started her stage career in New York and France before moving to London in 1921. Her lasting claim to fame was the creation, in 1931, of the hair-brained radio character Mrs Feather, reviewed thus in her
Times
obituary:

Mrs Feather, whose adventures continued throughout the 1930s, provided a flawless reflection of the surface of life as lived by a particular type of woman at a particular social level; while Jeanne de Casalis's invention did not attempt to probe the deeper mysteries of the feminine character, it gaily and truthfully surveyed social activities and attitudes. Some of Mrs Feather's charm can be found in
Mrs Feather's Diary
, which Jeanne de Casalis published in 1936, but the printed page does not convey the intonations, the polish and the precision of timing and technique which she brought to her radio monologues.
²⁴

Casting a performer known to the public principally for a comic radio role was a high-risk strategy, and Max Mallowan for one, was not enamoured with the production's leading lady, describing her as ‘that celebrated comedienne Jeanne de Casalis, who acted throughout as the Queen Bee, to the detri
ment of the hive'.
²⁵
He was, as it happens, no more taken with Cicely Courtneidge's interpretation in a later revival, remarking that her performance ‘reminded me how often a production is a battle between the playwright and the actor, and how difficult it is for the producer [i.e. director] to reconcile the two. When he succeeds, he deserves an artistic triumph.' But de Casalis proved a box office draw and, once she had settled into the role, turned out to be an accomplished performer who served the project well.

In January 1951, Christie, responding to a newspaper announcement of the forthcoming production, complained to Edmund Cork, ‘Don't like the “thriller” and “whodunnit” publicity – I understood Peter Saunders was
not
approaching it that way. If he does this
play
will be a disappointment to people – Definitely
not
a thriller.'
²⁶
Cork duly relayed this to Saunders, who responded,