Curtain Up (42 page)

Ironically, an internal memo shows that the Shuberts' lawyers felt that they would not in any case have been able to argue that any performances given after the initial twenty-seven-performance run could be counted as qualifying them for subsidiary participation.
⁸³
In reality, therefore, Saunders had nothing to fear, but it was typical of the Shuberts' vastly superior gamesmanship that they persistently failed to give the inexperienced English producer the one piece of information that would have put him out of his misery.

Saunders had the last laugh, though. In 1956, John Shubert's assurances having proved correct, the Shuberts finally lost their stage rights to
The Hollow
. All ambiguity was thus removed, but by this time Saunders was engaged in a far more exciting Christie Broadway-to-film proposition. And the Shuberts, having driven him to distraction, had not been invited to the party.

The Shubert Organisation is still a major Broadway player and in 2000 celebrated its centenary, one hundred years after the three brothers from Syracuse purchased the lease of the Herald Square Theatre in New York. Lee Shubert's contribution to the Agatha Christie story has often been dismissed as obstructive, partly due to surviving correspondence from UK producers and agents who were embarrassed by their own relative ineptitude when it came to dispassionate business management. Shubert had one big Christie success with
Ten Little Indians
, but let it not be forgotten that he also made great efforts to present more of her work in America. Not only did he present
Hidden Horizon
for its ill-fated Broadway run, but he gave Christie her only commission as a dramatist, displaying considerable patience and courtesy in his efforts to get her to provide rewrites following its world premiere at Martha's Vineyard. And, contrary to received wisdom,
The Hollow
was also presented by the Shuberts in America following its London production, if under a different title.

With
The Hollow
safely up and running at the Fortune, and an enthusiastic new producer delivering the goods, Agatha considered the options for her next dramatic project. Fascinatingly, the first play that her thoughts turned to was
Chimneys
, which had been cancelled at the last moment by Alec Rea's Embassy Theatre twenty years previously.

In August 1951, Christie wrote to Edmund Cork, ‘Have you got an old play of mine called Chimneys, was once going to be done at the Embassy – all about oil concessions. I might bring it up to date.'
¹
Cork responded, ‘I am sending you a copy of Chimneys which Reandco were going to do twenty years ago. Sir St Vincent Troubridge tried it out about three years ago without any success, but as you say recent developments in the oil business do give it a new topical slant.'
²
Four months earlier, Iran's new Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, had precipitated a diplomatic crisis by moving to nationalise his country's oil reserves, largely at the expense of the British-controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Although part of the convoluted plot of
Chimneys
does indeed involve oil concessions, it is doubtful whether audiences would have shared Christie's view that her Buchanesque romp was ‘all about' the subject. Interesting, though, that she felt it could potentially be worked up into something with a contemporary political resonance.

Sir Thomas St Vincent Troubridge's contribution to the promo
tion of Christie's work as a playwright merits more than an endnote. A colourful character who headed the Hughes Massie Drama Department after the war, he was a playwriting collaborator with their client Arnold Ridley, a popular member of the Garrick Club and an entertaining and opinionated correspondent with the press on theatrical matters. He left the company in 1952 to become an examiner of plays in the Lord Chamberlain's office. Passionate about all things dramatic, he was in 1948 a founding member of the Society for Theatre Research, where honorary secretary Jack Reading paid tribute to him in an affectionate poem whose first line runs, ‘Loudly, loudly in the corner Sir St Vincent snores away . . .'
³
His well-researched book about the ‘benefit system', a tradition that operated until the late nineteenth century where the box office from certain theatrical performances was gifted to one of the actors, was published posthumously. The Hughes Massie Agatha Christie archive bears witness to the extent to which Edmund Cork personally managed his agency's relationship with its star client, and this mention of Troubridge gives us a rare glimpse of the endeavours of other Hughes Massie staff working behind the scenes on her behalf.

My attention was grabbed by Cork's reference to the fact that Troubridge had ‘tried it out', which, in the context of the Shubert correspondence referring to a ‘try-out' production of
Towards Zero
, would seem to indicate that
Chimneys
had perhaps been premiered in a small ‘club' theatre somewhere, or even in a repertory theatre, given that the script had already been licensed by the Lord Chamberlain's office. But it seems here that Cork simply means that Troubridge had been trying to interest producers in the play. The piece is very much of its era, and Christie presumably sensed this when she re-read it, as we hear nothing more about the idea. Instead she wrote
The Mousetrap
.

In her autobiography Christie writes, ‘I knew after I had written
The Hollow
that before long I should want to write another play, and if possible, I thought to myself, I was going to write a play that was not adapted from a book. I was going to write a play as a play.'
⁴
In the end, she opted to adapt one of her short stories, ‘Three Blind Mice', which had itself been
adapted from a short radio play of hers of the same title. The latter was part of an evening of programmes celebrating the eightieth birthday of Queen Mary, a new play by Christie having been specifically requested by her when the BBC asked the Palace what they should schedule for the evening. Christie accepted the commission and donated her fee to charity. The original radio broadcast was on the Light Programme on 30 May 1947, four days after Queen Mary's birthday, and on 21 October that year a live television transmission took place of what appears to have been the same script.

The following year Christie adapted the radio play into a short story (a very long one, perhaps more correctly described as a novella) which was first published in the US in
Cosmopolitan
magazine and subsequently serialised in the UK in
Woman's Own
magazine. In 1950 it was published by Dodd, Mead & Co. in America in the collection
Three Blind Mice and Other Stories
. At Christie's insistence the story has never been published in book form in the UK, in order to preserve the secrets of the stage adaptation, although the playscript has been in publication in the UK since 1954.

The process of adapting a short story, rather than a novel, for the stage seems to have suited Christie well. ‘There can be no doubt that I think one of the advantages of
The Mousetrap
, as the stage version of Three Blind Mice was called, has had over other plays is the fact that it was really written from a précis, so that it had to be the bare bones of the skeleton coated with flesh. It was all there in proportion from the first. That made for good construction.'
⁵
It can be no coincidence that her two most successful plays,
The Mousetrap
and
Witness for the Prosecution
, were both adaptations from short stories.

The Mousetrap
once again demonstrates Christie's uncanny knack for subtly capturing the spirit of the age. Mollie Ralston (Mollie had been listed by Agatha as a ‘favourite name' of hers in the Miller family's ‘Album of Confessions' thirty years previously
⁶
) is another feisty young Christie leading lady and, like
Ten Little Niggers
' Vera Claythorne, is not herself untainted by the events of the past. She has inherited Monkswell Manor, a
country house which, with her husband of a year, Giles, she has decided to run as a guest house. They keep chickens and have no staff, and Mollie herself prepares the meals (corned beef) and does the cleaning (crossing the stage with a carpet sweeper at one point, much to the disgruntlement of one of the guests). Giles, meantime, does the sign writing and stokes the boiler, the fuel for which is running low. What we are witnessing is not some country house idyll, but a young couple struggling to set up a business in the post-war age of ration book austerity. ‘There are one or two rather incongruous bits of Victorian furniture,' say Christie's stage directions, ‘and the house looks not so much a period piece, but a house which has been lived in by generations of the same family with dwindling resources.'
⁷
It has to be said that, judging from photographs, Roger Furse's original set design fulfilled this brief more successfully than subsequent reworkings.

The play's subject matter is as hard-hitting as its setting is contemporary, exploring as it does the long-term consequences of child abuse, and inspired by the case of the two O'Neill brothers who were placed under the care of Reginald and Esther Gough of Bank Farm by Newport Borough Council in 1944. A doctor was called to the farm in January of the following year, having been advised that twelve-year-old Dennis O'Neill was having a fit; but when he arrived, he found Dennis dead, clearly malnourished and the victim of repeated physical assaults. The case was extensively reported and resulted in an overhaul of the fostering system. To London audiences in the early 1950s, this scenario would have stirred recent memories of their wartime evacuee children being placed in the care of strangers, and of the inevitable anxieties caused thereby.

As Harold Hobson, former
Sunday Times
drama critic, commented in an article included in the play's fortieth anniversary brochure, ‘I am convinced that
The Mousetrap
would never have achieved the longest run in the history of theatre had it not been, as well as a very exciting story, a parable of the social outlook of our times.'
⁸
To my mind, Christie's particular skill as a playwright lies in her ability deftly to deliver this
in a manner acceptable to the censor, palatable to West End family audiences of the early 1950s and within the considerable constraints of the ‘whodunit' format. Straightforward ‘realism', by contrast, is relatively easy to achieve on stage.

The five guests on Monkswell Manor's opening day are an odd assortment of misfits, including an effeminate young man with an ‘artistic tie' and a young woman ‘of a manly type'; clearly gay and lesbian characters, but sufficiently encoded to meet with the approval of the censor, who in his report describes the guests as a ‘queer lot'.
⁹
The house gets colder and becomes snowbound, and we discover that a murderer is on the loose. As in
Ten Little Niggers
, Christie has created a scenario where an isolated group of strangers is at the mercy of a self-appointed agent of justice. Paranoia mounts and mutual suspicion sets in, even between devoted husband and wife, as this angel of vengeance starts to go about their mission of meting out punishment to those whose past negligence has contributed to the suffering of others. A young detective sergeant perhaps owes something to the role played by the eponymous inspector in J.B. Priestley's seminal 1945 play
An Inspector Calls
; and the unexpected guest whose car has run into a snowdrift, the enigmatic Mr Paravicini, ably fulfils his role of diverting attention from the two characters who really are impersonating someone else.

The single location, eight-hander play that we now know originally included two locations and four extra characters. Early drafts of
Three Blind Mice
held at the Agatha Christie archive include an eleven-page opening scene set in a London street on a foggy day, where we see the immediate aftermath of a murder which is reported on the radio by way of back-story at the start of the play as we now know it. The stage directions read:

Two workmen, Alf and Bill, are sitting by a charcoal brazier – possibly in a little shelter. During their talk people pass along. This can include all the members of the cast. It is very dark and they are seen hardly at all except as moving figures. The men are wrapped up in mufflers, turned up collars, etc. Women, Mollie and Mrs Boyle have head scarves on. The
exception to this is Mr Paravacini, who is conspicuous in his fur lined overcoat and goes along uttering ‘Brrrr' to himself. Bill is a typical pessimistic labourer – Alf is younger and has ideas with which he is pleased.
¹⁰

All the men wear ‘dark overcoats, light mufflers and similar hats', the significance of which will become apparent later. Much of the opening scene is taken up by Alf and Bill's views on life, the universe and everything:

       
ALF: Expect there'll be lots of accidents in this fog.

       
BILL: There's been too many accidents lately. Train accidents, air accidents, road accidents. I don't know what things are coming to.

       
ALF: Nature, that's what it is. The world's over-populated, and accidents is Nature's way of putting it straight, see?

       
BILL: There ain't nothing natural about aeroplanes. 'Ighly complex they are. You wouldn't believe. I got a nephew who's ground staff.

       
ALF: Got a fag?

Bill gives Alf a cigarette, just as a character walks on wearing a muffler; collar up, hat down. Alf's lighter isn't working and he scrounges a match from the passer-by, standing so that the audience's view is obstructed. The passer-by speaks in a whisper and exits whistling ‘Three Blind Mice'. The workmen discuss why the passer-by may have been whistling:

       
ALF: What makes blokes do what they do. Unconscious motivation.

       
BILL: (suspiciously) You been listening to the Third Programme?

       
ALF: I'm a bloke what thinks about things. A chap whistles because he's pleased about somethink. Maybe that young fellow was going to be married.

       
BILL: If so he don't know what's what! If he did he wouldn't whistle.

       
ALF: Or maybe he's got himself a good job.

       
BILL: Wish I'd got a job inside somewhere. Straight – I'd rather be down a ruddy coal mine than here.

Alf then mimics the tune that the passer-by was whistling.

       
ALF: I know that tune. Now whatever is it?

       
BILL: God Save the King?

       
ALF: Nah!

       
BILL: Internationale?

       
ALF: Nah. It's a kid's tune. Nursery rhyme.

       
BILL: Little Jack 'Orner?

       
ALF: Not quite. I'll tell you another thing as I've been thinking about sitting 'ere –
Feet
.

       
BILL: Feet?

       
ALF: 'Eard it on the wireless. Charles Dickens. ‘Tale of Two Cities'. London and Paris they are. All about the French Revolution. And it starts with
feet.
Trampling along. Feet what's coming into your life. And I been thinking this morning. All these feet along here. Where are they going to and where 'ave they come from?

       
BILL: You're barmy.

They find a notebook which the passer-by has dropped, and then Mrs Casey runs on, screaming that her lodger has been murdered . . . by a person who whistled ‘Three Blind Mice' as they left the house. A police constable comes to her assistance.