Curtain Up (43 page)

Here is a unique attempt by Agatha Christie to portray working-class characters who are not domestic staff of some sort in their working environment. They talk about working down a coal mine and the French Revolution, and are familiar with the Internationale. Whilst she has an experienced ear for the banter of domestic staff, though, Christie is as endearingly out of her depth here as she was with the Cockney-accented New York gangsters of
The Clutching Hand
. This sort of material would not have won her any friends at the Royal Court, where the English Stage Company were to lead the new wave of realist
‘kitchen sink' drama only four years later, and Bill's ‘pessimism' would hardly have given Jimmy Porter a run for his money; but it does show that she was not unaware of the directions in which theatre was heading and not unwilling to dip her toe in the water. We are eleven pages into an Agatha Christie play, and so far all we have seen is a road works, while the only characters who have been identified are two workmen, a boarding-house landlady and a police constable.

The idea of all the suspects that we will meet later being seen in the street outside the murder scene is a fascinating theatrical device, but the necessity for an extra set and four extra characters made the whole scene a non-starter from a practical point of view. The copy of the script submitted to the Lord Chamberlain, which was presented to Christie in a gold binding on the play's tenth birthday, includes a version of the Bill and Alf scene, as does the prompt copy of the play held at the V&A, although in the latter it has been torn out and stuck unceremoniously into the back of the script as scrap paper. The V&A's prompt copy is also notable for extensive and witty doodles and observations by a very artistic and clearly rather bored stage manager, unaware that their sketch of ‘Marilyn Monroe hiding in a pile of grapefruit' (think about it!) would one day form part of a priceless museum piece. Meanwhile, the reader's report was thoughtfully removed from the Lord Chamberlain's script before it was presented to Agatha; the report describes the piece as a ‘poor thriller'.
¹¹

The Christie archive also contains a draft script with the play's new title on the cover and ‘Suggested alterations for first scene' written on the first page, followed by a badly typed three-page insert. Bill and Alf are gone, and instead we have a short scene in the snowy London street which simply involves Mrs Casey enlisting the assistance of the police constable. Intriguingly, though, three of the characters who we will see later, including the murderer, still cross the stage, muffled against the cold, in a reduced version of the full-cast dumb show that was included in the previous draft.

The original 1947 radio script for which, of course, location
was not an issue, includes the first murder victim Mrs Lyon and her landlady, as well as a brief appearance by two unnamed workmen, but omits one of the characters who we will later meet in the stage play. The short story, or novella, as published in America, is even closer to the play, but the final character is still to be introduced.

The play's prologue, inevitably, was found to be surplus to requirements, and was abandoned before rehearsals started. It was replaced with a brief, atmospheric (and certainly more economical) soundscape portraying Mrs Lyons' murder, played in darkness before the curtain rises. The resulting two-act, eight-character play is lean and efficient, qualities which enhance its dramatic effectiveness and which have doubtless contributed to its longevity. The brevity of the dramatis personae serves to emphasise the writer's skill in concealing the murderer amongst them, and the fact that the action takes place over a timeframe of only two days serves to heighten the tension.
The Mousetrap
's missing prologue, though, shows a willingness to experiment with form and content for which Christie rarely receives credit.

During the 1950s much of Edmund Cork's work focused on arrangements to enable Agatha to circumvent both punitive income tax and potentially punitive death duties, a strategy encompassing wholesale copyright assignments to a labyrinthine network of trusts and companies. One of the first beneficiaries of these arrangements was her grandson, Mathew, and in August 1951 Cork wrote to Christie confirming arrangements for a trust to which the copyrights of the novel
They Do It with
Mirrors
and the play
Three Blind Mice
were assigned until Mathew's twenty-first birthday, at which point they would become his. Cork added that ‘Peter Saunders is prepared to make a contract with the Trustees for Three Blind Mice [himself and Rosalind] on terms pretty similar to those we obtained for The Hollow. He does not think, however, that he should be called upon to pay the unusually heavy advance we extracted for The Hollow – you will remember I made him pay through the nose as an earnest of his seriousness and sincerity, of which I think we now have ample proof.'
¹²
Saunders had indeed paid an advance
against royalties of £500 to option
The Hollow
, and had also just paid a considerable sum to the Ambassadors to keep the theatre dark for five weeks and enable the play's transfer from the Fortune at the end of its run there. Cork was right that his seriousness and sincerity could not be questioned.

On 3 September 1951, nineteen days before Mathew's eighth birthday, Agatha transferred the rights to
Three Blind Mice
to the trust, and a month later, Saunders acquired the UK play licence from it.
¹³
When he says in his autobiography that Christie gave him the finished script over lunch just after Christmas 1951, he must have known that it was on the way; what is not clear is whether he had seen an earlier draft or whether the play was actually written between November and December 1951, after he had acquired the licence. On 17 September the following year Cork wrote to Christie, ‘I hear from Peter that rehearsals for The Mousetrap are going very well indeed. Mathew is a very lucky boy!'
¹⁴
Mathew was told about his ownership of the rights the following week, on his ninth birthday, but by all accounts was more interested in his new train set. ‘Mathew, of course, was always the most lucky member of the family,' Agatha remarked, ‘and it would be Mathew's gift that turned out the big money winner.'
¹⁵

Legend tells of different estimates given by those involved for the length of West End run that the play would enjoy, although it should not be forgotten that, even if it had not broken all West End records, on the showing of Christie's other plays Mathew's income from residuals would have been considerable. What was to transform the fortunes of the project, though, and give it a head start over all Christie's plays to date, was the involvement from an early stage of two substantial stars: Richard Attenborough and Sheila Sim. The RADA-trained husband and wife team had enjoyed huge popular success and critical acclaim in a series of stage and screen roles, both individually and as a couple. In 1947 Attenborough had appeared in the role of the vicious young gangster Pinkie Brown in the Boulting brothers' film of Graham Greene's
Brighton
Rock
, establishing his status as one of the country's most sought-
after young actors. Although Sheila Sim, who played the role of the young guest-house owner Mollie Ralston to great acclaim, was to leave the company at the end of her eight-month West End contract in order to fulfil a film commitment, Attenborough was to extend his engagement as Sergeant Trotter in the production to almost two years. During the time they were both in the production they also starred as Tommy and Tuppence in a thirteen-part radio adaptation of Christie's
Partners in Crime
, providing the play with invaluable additional publicity.

Max Mallowan writes, ‘The play was fortunate too in having two theatrical stars of the highest magnitude to send it off – Richard Attenborough and his beautiful wife Sheila Sim – both of them lovable and great artists with a faultless sense of timing.'
¹⁶
Attenborough's integrity, says Saunders, ‘was beyond belief. No one dared not give their best when he was there, and they adored him. It was Dickie who started the
Mousetrap
snowball . . . and I have never ceased to be grateful to him.' It was not only Attenborough's agreement to take part, but his obvious and unselfish dedication to the work, that helped to ensure its success. The long-term commitment to, and obvious affection for, the production shown by this giant of stage and screen is arguably the most ringing endorsement of her skills as a playwright that Agatha Christie could have hoped for, and this was not lost on Christie herself. ‘Richard Attenborough and his enchanting wife Sheila Sim played the two leads in the first production,' she recalls. ‘What a beautiful performance they gave. They loved the play, and believed in it and Richard Attenborough gave a great deal of thought to playing his part. I enjoyed the rehearsals – I enjoyed
all
of it.'
¹⁷

The appointment of a director, however, was an altogether less happy process. The man who got the job, Peter Cotes, was one of the most controversial stage directors of the day. The older brother of twin film-makers John and Roy Boulting, he had changed his name to avoid being eclipsed by their success. His parents had both been performers, and he started his career playing the music halls in revue and cabaret. Amongst his own early acting ventures was a small role in the 1943
film
The Gentle Sex
, co-scripted by
Murder at the Vicarage
co-writer Moie Charles and directed by Derrick de Marney. This won him a role in the 1944 tour of Charles'
Tomorrow's Eden
, for which he also worked as assistant to director Irene Hentschel. His controversial 1946 production of
Pick-Up Girl
, a hard-hitting American play by Elsa Shelley about child abuse and venereal disease, opened at his New Lindsey club theatre in Notting Hill, a licence having been declined by the Lord Chamberlain's office because Cotes refused to cut certain lines, including a reference to abortion. Since club theatres were exempt from censorship, they had become notorious for offering a showcase for work rejected by the censor. Astonishingly, seventy-nine-year-old Queen Mary decided to attend the production in the tiny, upstairs theatre space and, following this royal endorsement, the Lord Chamberlain's office had no option but to allow the production to transfer to the West End.

As a result, the following year Binkie Beaumont offered Cotes the direction of the London premiere of
Deep Are the Roots
, a Broadway drama about racial prejudice. He argued with the actors over his interpretation of the piece and was promptly fired; if there was indeed a Tennent blacklist then Cotes was undoubtedly on it. Not surprisingly, in his 1949 book
No Star Nonsense
, an eloquent advocacy of ensemble theatre, he made a point of attacking everything that the West End stood for. A one-man theatrical awkward squad, and no stranger to litigation, Cotes was nonetheless in a different league to Hubert Gregg as a director. Adam Benedick's obituary of Cotes in the
Independent
newspaper describes him as ‘a kind of pathfinder in what are considered by people who did not live through them to have been the darkest days of British theatre, the 1940s and 1950s . . . as long as he ran his own company under his own management he was happy and successful.'
¹⁸

With Peter Saunders, Hubert Gregg and Peter Cotes all offering markedly conflicting first-hand accounts in their books (published in 1972, 1980 and 1993 respectively), it is difficult to establish a definitive sequence of events as regards the appointment of a director for
Three Blind Mice
. It is clear, though, that some
thing was afoot from the outset. According to the chronology offered by Cotes in his book
Thinking Aloud
, he was approached by both Attenborough and Saunders at the end of February 1952. Attenborough and Sim were under contract to film with Cotes' brothers at the time, and according to Cotes this offer followed a lunch between Attenborough and John Boulting, which I believe to be a lunch at the Ivy that Saunders refers to having been present at with these two. It seems logical that Cotes would have been Richard Attenborough's first choice as director; not only was he related to the Attenboroughs' employers, who were releasing them both from their contract so that they could perform in
The Mousetrap
, but Sheila Sim had been directed by Cotes in
Come Back Little Sheba
, which her husband had seen. Having made a name for himself with
Pick-Up Girl
and, more recently,
The Biggest Thief in Town
, Cotes was in all respects a credible director who, having assisted Irene Hentschel earlier in his career, would doubtless take the same serious approach to Christie's work that Hentschel had.

Cotes claims to have read the script and lunched with Saunders at the Carlton, after which casting then proceeded, the majority of those selected being actors who had worked with him before. He makes cryptic mention of the fact that his agent was then ‘called into negotiations' and that there has been ‘no really comprehensive account of how it all started, when heads rolled, directors were chosen, titles changed'.
¹⁹

According to both Hubert Gregg and Peter Saunders, however, Gregg was Saunders' first choice for director. Undeniably it was Gregg who forged the introduction with the Attenboroughs. He was at the time working at the Garrick Theatre as assistant director on
To Dorothy, a Son
, a hugely successful comedy they were starring in. Gregg introduced the couple to Saunders in their dressing room, Attenborough agreed to read the script, and shortly afterwards Saunders lunched with John Boulting and Attenborough at the Ivy. A letter from Saunders to Boulting and Attenborough dated 11 January 1952 offers them the opportunity to invest £1,000 in the production and makes reference to receipt of Attenborough's contract to
appear in it,
²⁰
so Saunders' account of being introduced to Attenborough backstage in February is clearly inaccurate. Attenborough's film schedule meant that a deal had to be done a long time in advance, and a rehearsal date of 15 September was set.