Curtain Up (46 page)

In 1999 The National Theatre included
The Mousetrap
in its ‘100 Plays of the Century', and the resulting ‘platform' performance in the Cottesloe Theatre on 30 March that year remains to this day the only occasion on which the words of Agatha Christie, playwright, have been spoken on stage at the National, although her most enduring play's title does get the occasional mention, much to the amusement of audiences for
Hamlet
.

The exploitation of residual rights in
The Mousetrap
has inevitably followed an unusual pattern, given the continuing West End run. Amateur and repertory rights have never been released in the UK, although there have been numerous productions throughout the world, including a successful run in Paris, a twenty-six-year run in Toronto and regular presentations in Shanghai and other Chinese cities. John Mills led the cast in a production presented by Saunders for British troops in Germany in 1954, and a major UK tour was launched in the play's sixtieth year, as were celebratory productions in sixty cities across the globe. The film rights to
The Mousetrap
were sold in 1956, but with the proviso that no film can actually be shown until after the end of the West End run. Quite how successful a film of
The Mousetrap
would be is open to question; the premise of the play is essentially theatrical, and it does not have the cinematic potential of much of Christie's other stage work. The concern, then, is presumably less that
a film would give away the play's ending (the audience's cooperation in this regard is enlisted in a nightly curtain speech) and more that it would risk damaging the reputation of a successful theatrical brand.

The same fears also led to a very considered strategy for the play's American production. After the debacles of
Towards Zero
,
Hidden Horizon
and
The Suspects
, a conscious decision was taken by Cork and Saunders not to expose the piece to Broadway audiences and critics. Max Mallowan identifies its very Englishness as one of the characteristics that has led to the play becoming a tourist attraction in London, and there can be no doubt that this quality in Christie's work was a contributing factor to the failure of three successive American productions. As many transatlantic theatrical producers have discovered to their cost, England and America can all too often be two countries divided by a common language, and in the case of
The Mousetrap
this caution was probably justified.
Ten Little Indians
had demonstrated that some of Christie's plays could enjoy even greater success in New York than in London. But not all of them. Her biggest Broadway triumph, as it happens, was still ahead of her, and the fact that
The Mousetrap
had not been sprung on Broadway in the interim was doubtless a contributing factor to her ultimate theatrical success there.

Given his careful nurturing of
The Mousetrap
, Saunders came to believe, not unreasonably, that full ownership of the project should, as far as possible, be vested in himself. After two and a half years at the Ambassadors he had renegotiated the rental terms and entered into a long-term occupancy deal with its owners. As
The Stage
reported, Saunders ‘expects The Mousetrap to run for another year. When it finishes he will present a new Christie play.'
⁴²
In 1958, with the play showing no signs of finishing, he acquired the long lease on the theatre. As well as becoming his own landlord, Saunders made outright purchases of a number of the play's residual rights and bought out several of its investors including Richard Attenborough, who had eventually taken a 10 per cent stake in the production for £500, and who used the money from its sale to help finance his film
Gandhi
. In 1969 Saunders even bought out Mathew Prichard, paying a substantial sum for the ongoing rights in the play; although a quirk of UK copyright law stipulates that any rights assigned prior to 1956 revert to the writer's ‘residuary legatee' twenty-five years after their death, meaning that in 2001 Rosalind found herself to be the beneficiary of the royalties, her mother having assigned them to Matthew in 1951. At this point, Rosalind could technically have closed the show, but a new deal was done with Sir Stephen Waley-Cohen, who had bought the production from Saunders on his retirement in 1994, and since then the author's royalties have been assigned to a trust which distributes the income to arts charities. Cotes was thus not the only one to receive an offer to relinquish his ongoing interest, and whilst he might arguably have negotiated (and, no doubt, received) a better price than he was offered, he perhaps should not have taken it quite as personally as he did.

Cotes was a legendarily spiky customer, but it has to be said that on paper he was an inspired choice for the direction of
The Mousetrap
. Like Saunders, he was a maverick who flew in the face of ‘the Firm' and ‘the Group', and it is a shame that the two of them fell out. An apparent truce between the two men came to an abrupt end when Saunders published his autobiography
The Mousetrap Man
in 1972. In this he strongly implies that Cotes was negligent in his duties towards the production and that, having effectively been left holding the baby by the absentee director during the production's pre-London tour, he was himself responsible for its artistic as well as its financial success. Cotes put this down to ‘the frustrated-director complex in Saunders's make-up'
⁴³
and took the opportunity to set the record straight, as he saw it, when interviewed by Gwen Robyns for her 1978 Christie biography. He goes on to justify his position at some length in his own book, and includes a number of bizarrely scrappy appendices giving evidence in support of his own version of events. During this period Saunders' and Cotes' solicitors were in regular correspondence, and in 1985 Saunders wrote to the theatre critic, Jack Tinker, ‘I am enjoying myself running up Mr Cotes' legal bills.'
⁴⁴

This forty-five-year dispute between director and producer was the only cloud to sully the production's otherwise triumphant progress. It was Saunders who was to have the last laugh. In 1992, as part of a strategy to ensure that there were no loose ends for his successors, he wrote to Cotes' agent to say that, according to their original 1952 contract, Cotes was allowed to direct any post-London tour or to ‘be compensated, at my option, with £50'. He added, ‘I am enclosing a cheque for £50 as a release from my obligation.'
⁴⁵
Cotes does not mention this in his book. In the end, the tour that started in the production's sixtieth anniversary year was to run concurrently with the London production, not after it. It was, in my view, incorrectly advertised as the production's ‘first national tour'. It was actually the second. The first was in 1952 and was directed by Peter Cotes.

So what really lay at the root of all this bitterness? Cotes' contract states that after the opening in Nottingham he would ‘from time to time arrange to see the show and call rehearsals at times to be mutually agreed upon whenever this may be deemed necessary and advisable'.
⁴⁶
Although he appears to have done the absolute bare minimum to fulfil this obligation, he could not actually have been accused of breach of contract, and Saunders knew this. It would have been, and in some quarters still is, standard practice for a director with other commitments to leave the rehearsals of a production after opening in the hands of an assistant, who in this case would have been the ‘stage director', or senior member of the stage management team, Tony Huntly-Gordon. According to Saunders, Cotes tried to have Huntly-Gordon fired on the first day of rehearsals,
⁴⁷
although he ended up staying with the production for twenty-one years.

We must remember that Cotes only got the job at the very last minute, when John Fernald pulled out, even though there had evidently been previous negotiations with him. This is reflected in the fact that Cotes' contract allows him to work evenings only during the first week of rehearsals, as he had evidently been unable to reschedule an existing commitment.
This lack of availability in the first week may well have been the reason why initial negotiations with Cotes broke down, but with two weeks to go until rehearsals were due to start, Saunders had no option but to agree to this unusual arrangement. Attenborough was available from 15 September and the production was due to open in Nottingham on 6 October. Saunders may well have felt, with some justification, that having accommodated Cotes' schedule in this way he should have gone the extra mile to attend the production during the early weeks of its tour. As a man of absolute integrity, though, Saunders never used the fact that Cotes had not been present for much of the first week of rehearsals against him. That was an agreed point of contract, and as such not a legitimate part of the argument.

More significant, though, in my view, is part of the letter of engagement which Saunders sent to Cotes on 30 August 1952, the day on which he had agreed to take over from Fernald. ‘As, however, you have not used the peculiar circumstances to increase your terms,' he wrote, ‘the terms I suggest are rather better than arranged. I hope you will treat this as a friendly gesture of appreciation.'
⁴⁸
Saunders' appreciation of the fact that Cotes did not take the opportunity of this last-minute offer to hold him to ransom took the form of an offer to increase his royalty on box office receipts from 1 per cent to 1.5 per cent once the production was in profit. Interestingly, Saunders sent the letter, including full details of the deal, to Cotes himself rather than to his agent, Eric Glass.

Two days later, Cotes responded in a handwritten message on BBC notepaper,

My dear Peter,

Thanks for your letter the contents of which I deeply appreciate; not because of the value of the additional small percentage, but because of the thought, made doubly touching by the fact that it was spontaneous. So often in the theatre one gets one's behind kicked as reciprocation for doing one's best and not throwing one's weight about or refusing to
exploit a situation; it is because of that fact that your little thought becomes both gracious and unique.
⁴⁹

This amiable initial exchange between the two notorious long-term adversaries goes, I believe, a long way towards explaining subsequent events. Saunders had not only agreed to Cotes' part-time attendance in the first week of rehearsals but had, completely voluntarily, offered an increment on his royalty as a spontaneous gesture of good will. As it is still a going concern, I have not seen the accounts for
The Mousetrap
, but received wisdom is that it was already in profit by the end of its pre-West End tour, and my assumption would be that Cotes' bonus would have been payable out of Saunders' own share of profits, so as not to raise any eyebrows amongst investors. Again, this was not something that could legitimately be used against Cotes in the ensuing flow of correspondence or in print, as it was an agreed point of contract. Saunders may well also have felt that it exposed a softness on his part which did not sit comfortably with his carefully cultivated image as the no-nonsense producer. So although Cotes' paltry attendance record may not technically have put him in breach of contract, and Saunders' removal of his name from the advertising certainly did, it is easy to empathise with Saunders' extreme disappointment that his gesture of good will did not result in an enhanced commitment to the project from its director. Cotes, on the other hand, may well have resented the fact that he was a last-minute choice, after previous negotiations with him appear to have broken down; something that he in turn would not have wanted to be made public.

On the sixth anniversary of the production, Christie herself displayed typical magnanimity by sending both Peter Cotes and Hubert Gregg specially bound copies of the script, with inscriptions thanking each them for their work. Of Saunders she wrote, ‘He certainly is “the Mousetrap Man”.
I
wrote it – but he put it on . . . and believed in it . . . We've all three been lucky – the Authoress – the schoolboy – and THE MOUSETRAP MAN.'
⁵⁰

Witness for the Prosecution
is Agatha Christie's undisputed theatrical masterpiece. This accomplished three-act courtroom drama with its classic ‘quadruple twist' ending sets the benchmark for the genre and is a bold departure from her previous plays. In plotting terms it is another variation on the theme of female revenge on the philandering male, and once again it is a woman who is at the centre of events. It is also Christie's most detailed examination of the concept of justice in all its forms. Like
The Mousetrap
,
Witness for the Prosecution
is expanded from a short story, although a much shorter one than ‘Three Blind Mice'. First published as ‘Traitor Hands' in January 1925 in
Flynn's Weekly
in the USA, it was subsequently retitled and included in the short story collections
The Hound of Death
(published in the UK in 1933) and
The Witness for the Prosecution
(published in the USA in 1948).

It was Peter Saunders who came up with the idea of turning the story into a play, and of centring the piece on the courtroom, which is only briefly referred to in the story. He first suggested it to Christie in the summer of 1951 on one of his regular visits to Greenway, where he ‘felt completely at home, and was now one of the family', but she was not immediately taken with the idea. Once
The Mousetrap
had opened Saunders reminded her of it again, and she responded that if he wanted a play of
Witness for the Prosecution
then he should write it himself.
And that is exactly what he did. ‘Every night,' he recalls, ‘I would go to bed and set the alarm clock for three in the morning because it was at this time I felt freshest. And, on a portable typewriter in bed, I wrote the play based on her short story.'
¹

Saunders eventually presented Christie with the fruits of his labours, and his perseverance had the desired effect. Six weeks later (as Saunders remembers it) or three weeks later (as Christie remembers it) she presented him with her own version. Sadly, there appears to be no copy of Saunders' script either in the Agatha Christie archive or amongst Saunders' own papers; that would indeed be a historic document to unearth. Whether there are any traces of Saunders' work in the play as we now know it we can only speculate. I believe not, as there is a great deal of correspondence between Saunders and Christie as she develops her own script from its first draft, and no reference at all is made to Saunders' version.

In 1978, two years after Christie's death, a courtroom drama called
Scales of Justice
, which takes its inspiration from a court case in which a naturalised German sued a popular MP for allegedly instigating his internment during the First World War, would open at Perth repertory theatre.
²
It was directed by Joan Knight, who had been a notable resident director on
The Mousetrap
. And it was written by Peter Saunders. The play is a workmanlike affair that deals with an intriguing subject, and is stylistically so dissimilar to Christie's work that it comprehensively allays any suspicion that Saunders' own hand may be evident in the finished script of
Witness for the Prosecution
. Bizarrely, though, a short story version of
Witness for the Prosecution
, written by and credited to Saunders, was serialised in the
Daily Express
in February 1956, a year after the London production closed, under the heading ‘the thriller by Agatha Christie'.
³

The play itself concerns a charming young man, Leonard Vole, who is arrested for the murder of an elderly spinster who has left him her fortune in her will. His solicitor, Mayhew, enlists the help of flamboyant barrister Sir Wilfred Robarts, and they meet with both Vole and his enigmatic East Berliner wife, Romaine, who hesitatingly confirms his alibi. The action then moves from
Robarts' chambers to Vole's trial at the Old Bailey, where most of the rest of the play is set. In tense, tightly written and authentic courtroom scenes a series of witnesses give evidence, culminating in the star witness for the prosecution who, shockingly, turns out to be none other than Romaine. She gives evidence against Vole which appears to incriminate him and to destroy the case for the defence; but, the same evening, a mysterious woman visits Robarts and Mayhew and sells them letters that will enable them to demonstrate that Romaine is lying. In a thrilling courtroom denouement, Romaine is discredited and Vole acquitted. And then, in the last two pages, there are no fewer than four truly astonishing twists to the tale, an extraordinary and audacious piece of playwriting that trumps even the revelations at the end of
The Mousetrap
. Although the short story's premise and basic plot are the same as the play's, the original does not actually take place in a courtroom, and as such does not feature the character of Robarts. Romaine is Viennese in the pre-war short story, and her reinvention as an East German in 1950s Britain cleverly tips the scales against her. And, most importantly, the short story does not feature the play's final killer twist.

The Agatha Christie archive has more work in progress for
Witness for the Prosecution
than for any of Christie's other plays, and amongst the Saunders papers there is a lengthy correspondence between Christie and her producer; she writes care of the British School of Archaeology in Baghdad (it being that time of year when she joined her husband at the Nimrud excavations), and for once uses a typewriter for most of her letters, so there is not the usual battle to decipher her handwriting. The script material in the archive appears to reflect the issues being discussed in the correspondence quite closely, so it is a safe assumption that these were Christie's working papers on the play while she was away with Max on the annual dig.

What appears to be some sort of master working copy bears the short story's revised title, ‘The Witness for the Prosecution', but with the word ‘The' crossed out. The title typed in the text is actually ‘Hostile Witness' although this, too, has been crossed
out. In 1964 Saunders was to be involved in the creation of another courtroom drama, a play by Old Bailey official and television writer Jack Roffey, which was originally conceived as a vehicle for Margaret Lockwood (although she never appeared in it). It was given the title
Hostile Witness
.

Across the front of the draft script Agatha has scribbled the words ‘legal fun to be added!' Saunders had only managed to convince her to write the play by assuring her that he would enlist the services of an expert consultant to ensure the authenticity of the legal aspects of the story. The first person Saunders approached about this was Leo Genn, the film and stage star who, after a pre-war stint in the Old Vic Company, had come to prominence in a small role in Olivier's 1944 film of
Henry V
and the following year had taken Broadway by storm in Lillian Hellman's
Another Part of the Forest
. In 1951 he had been nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for
Quo Vadis
; but for now it was his Cambridge law degree that was of particular interest. Prior to the war, Genn had combined his show-business career with work as a barrister, and after it had served as an assistant prosecutor at the Belsen trial.
⁴
But now he was concentrating on his acting career and, in the end, felt that a practising barrister would be better placed to assist Saunders and Christie. In his place he recommended Humphrey Tilling.

Tilling and his wife Sue were both leading lights of Canterbury's ‘Old Stagers', founded in 1842 and reputedly the world's oldest amateur dramatics society. Sue's obituary in the
Daily Telegraph
notes that her husband ‘was one of the best amateur actors of his day and could easily have pursued a professional career. For financial reasons he entered the bar instead, but remained the linchpin of the Old Stagers until his death in 1991.'
⁵
Tilling's role in bringing legal authenticity to the piece was clearly greatly appreciated by Agatha; she refers to a barrister attending rehearsals, although much of this work was actually done in advance and communicated to her in Iraq by Peter Saunders. It has to be said that Tilling's suggested interpolations on occasion appear to have strayed somewhat beyond his advisory remit, but that when this occurred Christie rejected
his tamperings. A note of thanks to Saunders from Genn appears to indicate that he received payment of some kind, but there is no correspondence with Tilling on file and he is not credited for his contribution to the piece, although one assumes that he was remunerated for it.

Christie herself made no attempt to conceal that she received some expert advice for this element of the play, and neither should she have. She also refers to having read ‘quantities of the
Famous Trials
series' before she started writing, by which she must mean the
Notable British Trials
books published by William Hodge & Co.; a regular editor of which was fellow playwright Fryn Tennyson Jesse, whose
A Pin To See the Peepshow
was to take Peter Cotes on his ill-fated expedition to New York. As well as ensuring that Christie herself was properly briefed, Saunders was also keen to educate himself and the rest of the creative team about both legal procedures and the play's location in the Central Criminal Court (the Old Bailey) and, to this end, his files contain correspondence with the court's officers and a judge. He himself attended some of the trial of notorious serial killer John Christie, and he made arrangements for director Wallace Douglas and designer Michael Weight to make reconnaissance visits to the Old Bailey as well.

In Christie's first draft, the play opens with a couple of legal clerks tidying up Mayhew's office, and bantering about the outcomes of trials in a manner not dissimilar to that adopted by two female characters in Christie's 1948 radio play
Butter in a Lordly Dish
. The clerks' somewhat irreverent exchanges right at the start of the piece have the same sort of effect as when we first meet Bill and Alf in
The Mousetrap
. Sadly, like their counterparts in
The Mousetrap
, the two clerks were ultimately destined for the wastepaper basket, in this case to be replaced by a Chief Clerk and a female typist. Here, the two original clerks offer odds on the outcome for Vole:

       
2ND CLERK: Well, reading between the lines and all the rest of it, it seems a clear case. I don't see who else could have done the old girl in.

       
1ST CLERK: No, shouldn't think he's got a hope. What's the starting price?

       
2ND CLERK: 5 to 1 against acquittal, 3 to 1 against Broadmoor.

       
1ST CLERK: Not taking those odds. 50 to 1 is more like it.

       
2ND CLERK: Ah, you wait until old Wilfred Windbag gets up and starts addressing the jury bringing in all the psychologists to say he was dropped on his head as a child, or sang too long in the choir, and was much too fond of his mother!

       
1ST CLERK: Live like fighting cocks at Broadmoor, so I've heard.

       
2ND CLERK: Well, what'll you bet?

       
1ST CLERK: He isn't arrested yet so he doesn't come under starter's orders. No arrest, no bet.
⁶

One of the biggest problems with Christie's original draft was that the opening scene was set in the office of the solicitor, Mayhew. Mayhew meets Vole on his own, telephones the barrister Sir Wilfred (here called Sir Giles) Robarts QC, and is then visited by Romaine. He is well into his conversation with Vole's wife when he is joined by Robarts. In this scenario Robarts does not appear until page 23, and in one version he is on his way to play golf at Christie's old haunt, Sunningdale, and is dressed for it; ‘I can give you ten minutes,' he declares. The issue here, as pointed out by both of the production's legal consultants, was that a QC would never visit a solicitor. The resulting relocation of the first scene to Robarts' chambers means that Robarts of necessity was on stage right from the start of the play, hosting the initial interviews with both Vole (who Mayhew brings to see him) and Romaine. We thus have this quirk of legal etiquette to thank for the fact that the role of Robarts became so dominant in the play.

In the original script we also see that DI Hearne started life as DI Warren, and the now familiar shock ending is on a three-page insert. On the dramatis personae, which lists only fifteen of the eventual thirty characters, Christie larkily suggests ‘Anna Lias' as the name of the actress to be credited with
playing a role which is actually another character in disguise. On a page of handwritten notes, she adds:

Suggestions on Act I

If it is wanted to be longer – work up scene between Romaine and Sir Wilfred. Depends rather on who is cast as Sir W – what type he is.

Tentative Mayhew is small, dry humour, rather old fashioned –

Wilfred – big – bombastic – dramatic changes of voice and mood – a bit of a windbag?

They must be a contrast to each other.

Hubert Gregg, as always, places himself at the centre of events:

In 1953, Peter Saunders gave me the script of the next Christie and offered me the direction of it. It was, I think, her best . . . I made a few suggestions after reading the play. Principally I felt that, in the climate of the day, it would be wrong if crime should be left paying a dividend. (Subsequently, to my astonishment, Agatha claimed that she insisted – above everything – upon retaining her own ending.) I outlined what I thought should happen and Christie incorporated the idea . . .
Witness for the Prosecution
is the one Christie play I am sorry I didn't direct. I had other plans and they turned out not so well. I suggested Wallace Douglas to Peter. He was an old theatre friend . . . Wally was grateful to me and said so. His success with
Witness
led to his being invited to tackle other whodunits – and, who knows, perhaps to his long association with the comedies at the Whitehall.
⁷