Curtain Up (59 page)

       
SARAH: That's what I think.

       
LAWRENCE: I don't like girls much – silly, fluffy crude little things. You're different, Sarah. You've got a mind – and a body, rather a nice body. (Pause) You don't bore me.

       
SARAH: Am I supposed to be grateful for that? Perhaps you bore me.

       
LAWRENCE: (Softly and with meaning) Do I?

       
SARAH: (A little breathless) No – you don't . . . You are a beast!

       
LAWRENCE: Yes, and you like me for it. I can give you a good deal, Sarah. It's not only that I can afford to wrap minks and fox furs around that adorable body, to hang jewels on your white skin. I can show you life, Sarah, I can teach you to feel. I can show you the depths and heights of human emotion. All life is experience.

       
SARAH: (Fascinated) Yes – I suppose that's true.

       
LAWRENCE: What do you know of life? Less than nothing. I can take you places, sordid horrible places, where you'll see life running fierce and dark, where you can feel –
feel
– till being alive is a dark ecstasy!

       
SARAH: (Pulling away from him) I think – I'm rather afraid of you.

       
LAWRENCE: I hope you are, you enjoy that feeling, don't you?
⁶⁴

Ann, who has cancelled her remarriage plans in order not to upset her daughter, has also started living life on the edge: ‘She's got far more boyfriends than I have and she's never home until dawn,' Sarah tells Lawrence. The stage directions inform us that in Act Two ‘Ann is quite metamorphosed. Her
eyebrows are plucked, her hair is dressed in an exaggerated style and is touched up so that the colour is slightly brighter. She is restless and vivacious in manner and is dressed in the latest fashion.' ‘I've become shockingly gay,' she remarks. ‘After all, there's no need to be a frump just because one's middle-aged, is there?' The flat, too, has been ‘redecorated in a modern style – plastic curtains and chromium chairs. There is a cocktail bar built in.'

Amongst the men Ann brings home is the flamboyant Basil, who is not unrelated to
The Mousetrap
's Christopher Wren, and who talks enthusiastically about interior design and going to the ballet. ‘It's no good, Mother, I don't like your pansy friend,' says Sarah. ‘Oh but darling, he's very amusing. So marvellously spiteful about people,' comes the response. Ann's next gentleman caller (who we never actually meet) is Nigel. ‘He's one of mother's specials – a he-man back from the Malay Straits,' says Sarah, who, alone with her mother's friend Dame Laura, confides in her:

       
SARAH: Mother's in a flat spin from morning to night.

       
DAME LAURA: She's a good-looking woman.

       
SARAH: Oh, she's frightfully attractive. She's got lots of boyfriends. Some of them are a bit lousy, but I don't like to interfere. After all, the poor pet must enjoy herself before it's too late.

       
DAME LAURA: I suppose to you life ends at fifty.

       
SARAH: Well it must be awful when your face goes and your figure, and nobody wants to take you out any more. I hope I shall die at thirty-nine.

       
DAME LAURA: I remember you saying something like that a couple of years ago. But the age limit has gone up. It was twenty-nine then.

       
SARAH: It must be awful to be old.

       
DAME LAURA: No, it's very comfortable.

In an extraordinary scene of sustained discomfort in Act Two, Ann's former suitor Richard visits her with his new young wife,
Doris, who is described as ‘pleasant, conventional and distinctly provincial'. The scene's opening stage directions read, ‘Ann compares her own elegance favourably with Doris's provincial appearance. Doris, who has been a little jealous of this unknown Mrs Prentice, thinks “why, she's quite old.” Richard thinks, looking at Ann: “she wouldn't really have done for me.” He is quite besotted with his Doris.' The three of them engage in a brilliantly tortuous conversation about Richard and Doris's life in the country, where they have an Aga and keep dogs, find it difficult to engage servants (‘They're talking about importing foreigners,' says Doris, ‘Poles, I believe, are quite pleasant') and, worst of all, Richard has taken up golf. The talk turns to flowers, and Ann comments, ‘I don't object to our labelling the garden varieties, but I do think the wild flowers might be allowed to grow in peace keeping their own secrets – or just being known by their local names – Ragged Robin – Traveller's Joy – Love-in-a-Mist – Love-Lies-Bleeding.' Ann is disconcerted to find that she is no longer attracted to Richard.

Sarah, having destroyed her own mother's hopes of happiness, discusses her own situation with Dame Laura:

       
SARAH: I'm getting awfully tired of doing nothing.

       
DAME LAURA: Not thinking of getting married?

       
SARAH: I'm not keen on getting married. It always seems to turn out so rottenly.

       
DAME LAURA: Not always.

       
SARAH: Most of my friends seem to have come croppers. Of course if you marry someone with pots of money, I suppose it's all right.

       
DAME LAURA: That's your view?

       
SARAH: Well it's really the only sensible one. Love's all right, but, after all, it's only based on sexual attraction and that never lasts . . . the only sensible thing is to marry someone really well off.

       
DAME LAURA: That mightn't last either.

       
SARAH: I suppose money does come and go a bit these days.

       
DAME LAURA: I didn't mean that. I meant that the pleasure of being rich is like sexual attraction. One gets used to it. It wears off like everything else.

Sarah eventually introduces Dame Laura to Lawrence, but her disapproval is as evident as Edith's:

       
DAME LAURA: I was broadcasting yesterday.

       
SARAH: Oh, that must be marvellous! What about?

       
DAME LAURA: The stability of marriage.

       
LAWRENCE: Surely it is the impermanence of marriage nowadays which constitutes its greatest charm?

       
SARAH: Lawrence has been married a good deal.

       
LAWRENCE: Only three times, Sarah.

       
DAME LAURA: Are you a mass poisoner, Mr Steene?

       
SARAH: Oh no, he sheds them in the divorce courts.

Not surprisingly, Sarah's decision to marry Lawrence turns out disastrously, and at the end of the play neither mother nor daughter has succeeded in finding happiness. This is all about as far removed from a country house whodunit as it is possible to get, and yet it is very much in keeping with Christie's preoccupations as a playwright and is a fine example of her abilities to explore serious subjects through the medium.

Basil Dean had hoped to cast Gertrude Lawrence as Ann in 1939, and in 1951 there was some excitement when Saunders thought he might be able to interest distinguished classical stage actress Fay Compton, who had played Ophelia opposite both John Gielgud and John Barrymore; but in the end Cork reported that Compton ‘could not see herself in A Daughter's a Daughter, and as Peter Saunders does not want to do it unless he can get absolutely the right casting, this matter has not moved much'.
⁶⁵
Cork's own suggestion, Martita Hunt, best known as Miss Havisham in David Lean's 1949 film of
Great Expectations
, was dismissed by Christie as ‘not at all right'; a ‘smart, sophisticated' actress, she thought, but not a sufficiently ‘soft and sympathetic' one.
⁶⁶

After the Fay Compton setback,
A Daughter's a Daughter
appears to have gone on to the back burner again until it suddenly appeared, reworked as a novel, in 1952; this makes it, incidentally, the only Christie novel to be based on a play, rather than the other way round. In publishing it, however, Christie opted to issue it as a work by Mary Westmacott, the pen name which she had adopted for a series of non-crime novels that, in her own theatrical terminology, might be described as ‘domestic dramas'. As Max Mallowan notes:

Agatha's success as a writer of detective fiction had one disadvantage, in that her publisher discouraged her if she ever expressed a desire to work in some other literary medium. No other writer of detection has written in that form for so long . . . Nevertheless the time came when Agatha insisted on release and began writing under the name Mary Westmacott . . . As Mary Westmacott, Agatha was able to embark on many themes in which she was interested. Music, drama, the psychology of ambition, the problems of artists . . . But I think that in this form of writing the true release came in that it gave her freedom to range over characters in depth, freed from the constriction of the detective plot to which every personality had to be subordinated.
⁶⁷

The novelised
A Daughter's a Daughter
starts with the earlier scenario of Sarah on a skiing holiday, indicating that as a piece of writing it pre-dates the changes made to the play; although Gerry (in this case with a ‘G') is not, even jokingly, anti-semitic. This was the fifth Westmacott title and the second to be published by Heinemann, Collins having lost the franchise when they opted out of publishing 1947's
The Rose and the Yew Tree
. In a piece written to mark her mother's centenary, Rosalind commented:

The Mary Westmacott books have been described as romantic novels but I don't think it is really a fair assessment. They are not ‘love stories' in the general sense of the term, and
they certainly have no happy endings. They are, I believe, about love in some of its most powerful and destructive forms. The possessive love of a mother for her child, or a child for its mother in both
Giant's Bread
(1930) and
Unfinished Portrait
(1944). The battle between the widowed mother and her grown-up daughter in
A Daughter's a Daughter
. A girl's obsession with her younger sister in
The Burden
and the closeness of love to hate – the Burden in this story being the weight of one person's love on someone else.
⁶⁸

In a
Sunday Times
interview in 1961, Agatha herself commented of the Westmacott novels that ‘I enjoy thinking of a detective story, planning it, but when it comes to write it, it is like going to work every day, like having a job. Writing detective stories is your job, and it is a job, but writing the others feels pleasant.'
⁶⁹
This is very similar to the way she compared her work on detective novels with the pleasure she derived from her playwriting, and biographer Laura Thompson, who devotes much of her book to exploring the thesis that the Westmacott novels provided a ‘door that opened into her most private and precious imaginative garden', might have done well to pay equal attention to Christie's plays, rather than dismissing them as ‘lightweight things on the whole'.

In the Westmacott books Agatha takes refuge in her alter ego to explore some of the more painful themes of her own life, particularly in the second book, 1934's
Unfinished Portrait
. Separating the work of ‘Westmacott' from that written by ‘Agatha Christie' ensured that, in so doing, the expectations of the latter's readers were not subverted. In her work as a dramatist, however, where her words were effectively spoken by her characters rather than herself, she felt no need for such distancing. Agatha Christie, playwright, was free to explore whatever themes, subtexts and dramatic constructions she wished, and the result was that the stage sometimes became a battlefield between her aspirations as a writer and the expectations of her audiences and producers.

Ironically, the one piece that could have conclusively defined Christie's work as a playwright on her own terms had now been published as a novel under the Westmacott name, so when it was finally performed there was no option but to promote the stage version as a Westmacott work as well. This had plainly never been Christie's intention, and even the revised early 1950s typescript states that
A Daughter's a Daughter
is a play ‘by Agatha Christie'. Only when it was submitted to the Lord Chamberlain's office in 1956, four years after the novelisation, did the play become credited to Westmacott.
⁷⁰
The true identity of Westmacott had in fact been revealed in 1949, much to Christie's distress, by the
Sunday Times
' Atticus column which, appropriately enough, was written at that time by former secret agent Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart. Readers of the novel are therefore likely to have been well aware of its true authorship, although Christie herself persisted with the pretence, issuing a sixth and final novel in the Westmacott name,
The Burden
, in 1956.

In May 1955, Edmund Cork wrote to Christie to confirm that her tickets had been reserved for the Queen's visit to
Witness for the Prosecution
at the Theatre Royal Windsor and with some updates about the proposed film of
Spider's Web
for Margaret Lockwood. He also mentions that ‘The woman director who is so keen on A Daughter's a Daughter is Chloe Gibson. I don't know her work very well, but I understand she has come on wonderfully during the last year or so. Probably you know all about her, as she hails from Torquay.'
⁷¹
Gibson, who was nine years younger than Christie and was indeed a native of Torquay, had started her career acting in rep at Paignton and had the distinction of having ‘discovered' Dirk Bogarde when making her West End directorial debut in 1947, with Michael Clayton-Hutton's play
Power Without Glory
. Gibson's work was highly regarded and she went on to become head of drama at Irish television station RTE, but we know from correspondence relating to finding a director for
The Hollow
that, according to Saunders, ‘Miss Christie is not keen on Chloe Gibson.'
⁷²
Quite why this was we may never
know – it may even have related to childhood and family matters in Torquay – but for whatever reason Gibson, who would have been an interesting choice, was not entrusted with the project.