Curtain Up (60 page)

Having produced four consecutive Christie plays in the West End, and having firmly established her brand in the stage thriller market, Saunders was clearly at something of a loss as to what to do with
A Daughter's a Daughter
. Eventually, though, he concocted a scheme that would get the play off his desk and on to a stage with a minimum of fuss or, indeed, of financial outlay.

Amongst Saunders' smaller investors was Ralph Wotherspoon, a former satirist for
Punch
magazine who was now a director of Smith and Whiley Productions, which presented repertory seasons under the management of Geoffrey Hastings. Himself an investor with Saunders, Hastings had worked alongside him on his early theatrical projects, and was regularly licensed by him to produce post-West End tours of Christie plays. Smith and Whiley had engaged Hastings to run repertory seasons at the Theatre Royal Stratford East before the theatre was taken over by Joan Littlewoood's Theatre Workshop in 1953, and by 1956 he was managing successful seasons for them at Newquay and at the Theatre Royal, Bath. Now Saunders turned to Wotherspoon and Hastings' repertory company at Bath, the London Resident Company, to host the premiere of
A Daughter's a Daughter
. The production was scheduled to run for a week and would be cast from within the local repertory players. It was a low-maintenance operation, not in itself designed for West End transfer, but it would at least get the play on its feet.

The
Bath Chronicle
was well aware of the playwright's identity, and in July 1956 ran an article which read:

The London Resident Company are privileged to announce that they have been chosen to produce for the first time on any stage the new drama ‘A Daughter's a Daughter' by Mary Westmacott. The author is, of course, more widely known
as Agatha Christie, the world famous novelist who also specialises in stage thrillers. When writing novels other than thrillers she uses the name Mary Westmacott. There is always something exciting about the production for the first time of a new play, particularly if its author is a popular figure, and the London Resident Company are grateful for the opportunity of participating on such an occasion. Agatha Christie and the London impresario Peter Saunders, who has exclusive rights on all Miss Christie's stage productions, will be paying a visit to the Bath Theatre Royal one night during the week to see this, her latest work.
⁷³

Strangely, for a local event of this importance (‘First time on any Stage' trumpeted the Theatre Royal's programme), the
Bath Chronicle
appears not to have run a review of the play, and this means that the review in
The Stage
newspaper, like that of
Towards Zero
in the
Martha's Vineyard Gazette
, is the only first-hand account that we have of the production. Unlike the
Chronicle
's journalist,
The Stage
's critic was either ignorant of, or chose not to reveal, the playwright's true identity. The newspaper's review, which ran under the headline ‘THE HATE THAT GROWS IN WOMEN', oddly categorised the piece as a ‘domestic comedy', perhaps as a result of local advertising, and went on to say:

It has a nice workman-like plot and some unusual angles and has much to commend it. It is scarcely a comedy, although it contains much amusing dialogue. It portrays the hate that can grow in women who have made a sacrifice and can never forget the smell of its burning. A mother is about to marry again. Her teenage daughter greatly resents this and breaks off the marriage. From this time a happy home is disrupted. The mother takes to the gay life and the daughter marries a dissolute rich young man. Drink and drugs cloud the mind of both, despite the efforts of a kindly elderly relative. Audrey Noble plays the part of the mother with effect, and her duologues with her daughter are finely given. The
daughter is played brilliantly by Mary Manson, a clever and attractive young actress.
⁷⁴

The rest of the London Resident Company, led by their director Maurice Jones in the role of Ann's suitor, Richard Cauldfield, are also praised by the reviewer. Playing Sarah's hapless suitor Jerry was twenty-two-year-old Trevor Bannister, later to appear in the long-running television comedy
Are You Being Served?

Doubtless to Saunders' relief, this was hardly the sort of response that was going to put pressure on him to put the play into the West End. And in any case, Christie herself was immediately distracted by rehearsals for
Towards Zero
. The truth was that Saunders wasn't really the man for this particular job, and he probably knew it. If Basil Dean had produced
A Daughter's a Daughter
back in 1939 with Gertrude Lawrence as Ann, it may well have been a sensation and sent Christie on an entirely different course as a playwright. Even if Saunders had produced the play when he himself first received it in the early 1950s, it might well have passed muster in a West End where Emlyn Williams explored middle-class flirtations with the seamier side of London life in 1951's
Accolade
and, the following year, Terence Rattigan's
The Deep Blue Sea
presented audiences with Peggy Ashcroft as Hester Collyer, a female protagonist who has suffered severe emotional damage as a result of the choices she has made in her pursuit of love. Both these productions were presented, of course, by Tennents, in whose hands
A Daughter's a Daughter
might well have been better positioned. For all they may have been accused of focusing their efforts on the work of gay men, Tennents produced a number of new plays by women writers, including Clemence Dane, Lesley Storm, Dodie Smith, Lillian Hellman and Daphne du Maurier; and two months before
A Daughter's a Daughter
opened in Bath, they had presented the London premiere of Enid Bagnold's
The Chalk Garden
, her first West End venture since Farndale had produced her debut play
Lottie Dundas
in 1943.

Although twenty years her junior, Rattigan, like Christie, had
come into his own as a playwright in the post-war West End. We know from ticket orders held by Cork that Christie attended Rattigan's
Separate Tables
at the St James's Theatre in 1954, possibly in this case to support its designer Michael Weight, who was about to design
Spider's Web
; and there is every reason to believe that, as an avid theatregoer, she would have seen
The Deep Blue Sea
as well. When
A Daughter's a Daughter
finally received its West End premiere in 2009, almost thirty-four years after Christie's death,
Daily Telegraph
critic Charles Spencer wrote, ‘Christie's clear-eyed, long-neglected account of the way the English middle-class can make their lives unutterably miserable can stand comparison with Rattigan at his best';
⁷⁵
the
Guardian
's Lyn Gardner noted that ‘Christie catches the uncertainty and desperation of a post-war Britain in rapid social change', while observing, ‘It's a clever fake that looks and sounds like a Rattigan play, but it never feels like the real thing.'
⁷⁶
In fact, of course,
A Daughter's a Daughter
pre-dates the majority of Rattigan's work, and the period of rapid social change which it addresses was originally a much earlier one. As a play, it is remarkably ahead of its time; the time, that is, when it was originally written. Developments in Theatreland in 1956, however, had conspired to make it seem immediately out of date.

Two months before
A Daughter's a Daughter
opened at Bath, the newly established English Stage Company at the Royal Court, a beneficiary of a recent expansion in the Arts Council's funding remit, had presented their third production, John Osborne's
Look Back in Anger
. Osborne's play, which was set in a small, squalid Midlands flat and featured the truly shocking sight of a woman ironing on stage, introduced audiences to Jimmy Porter, the prototype ‘angry young man'. It heralded a new wave of ‘realist' playwriting and as such, if literary historians are to be believed, constituted a seminal moment in British theatre, arriving as it did less than a year after twenty-four-year-old director Peter Hall's London premiere of the distinctly non-realist
Waiting for Godot
. The
Observer
's Kenneth Tynan was to lead the charge for
Look Back in Anger
(his
predecessor, Ivor Brown, hated it) and, given this, Tynan's review of the notably substandard
Towards Zero
four months later was remarkably good-natured. As the normally unquotable Hubert Gregg puts it rather nicely, ‘Coward had been clipped by Pinter, Beckett had rubbed out Rattigan. White ties and tails had surrendered to no ties and sweatshirts. Technique gave place to the grunt, the graceful gesture to the scratch. A witty line lost out to an interminable pause . . . One thing was certain amidst the shifting sands . . . nobody, but nobody was going to spring The Mousetrap.'
⁷⁷

The decades of delays in producing Christie's Rattiganesque
A Daughter's a Daughter
meant that it had, to all intents and purposes, missed the boat. With Jimmy Porter ranting and his wife Alison doing the ironing, Rattigan himself, like Coward after the war, suddenly found that he was yesterday's man; not helped, of course, by his advocacy, in the 1953 second volume of his
Collected Plays
, of playwriting that would find favour with audiences whom he characterised as ‘Aunt Edna' – a ‘nice, respectable, middle-class, middle-aged maiden lady'. Shaw had always challenged the ‘well-made plays' of Rattigan, but now the ‘angry young men' could have a field day promoting themselves as the antithesis to Aunt Edna.

Coward reinvented his career in Vegas and Rattigan reinvented his in film, but Christie herself was not caught in the crossfire between Aunt Edna and Jimmy Porter. With Saunders as her producer she was categorised as a provider of populist entertainment rather than the sort of art that people actually bothered arguing about. She was part of neither the culture (as represented by Tennents) nor the counter-culture (as represented by the Royal Court), and while this means that she has effectively been written out of theatre history, had she kept her head down and focused on writing detective thrillers for the stage she might well have remained above the fray. But Agatha Christie, playwright, didn't play by the rules.

Whilst the Royal Court benefited from the new era of public subsidy for theatre, Tennents cleverly continued to create their
own subsidy by operating a tax-exempt company alongside their commercial one. Peter Saunders, in analysing the failure of Woodrow Wyatt's Theatrical Companies Bill, notes that ‘The Tory Government of the day did not see fit to give way to a Socialist's plea on a matter like this. But the campaign for the Entertainment Tax's abolition was mounting. Deputations went to the House of Commons. Normally reticent producing managers opened their accounts to show how they were suffering, and how unfair it all was.'
⁷⁸

Amongst those raising their voices in protest was Frank G. Maddox, general manager of the Theatre Royal, Bath, who in 1956 wrote in the introduction to the programme for
A Daughter's a Daughter
, ‘This will be a sad week and one of disappointment in the live theatre, for once again the Chancellor has refused the opportunity afforded him to put things right and abolish the Entertainment Tax. With a solemn promise that in the next budget he hopes that it will no longer be necessary for him to defend this imposition, and that he will look into the whole structure of the Entertainment Duty, he has again washed his hands of the theatre's present plight.'
⁷⁹
He went on to note that eighty theatres had closed down in the UK in the previous two years, that London cabaret clubs were circumventing the tax by charging excessively for food and offering ‘free' entertainment and that television was pulling stars away from live theatre.

The theatre industry was indeed facing new challenges; the coronation, three years previously, had given rise to a substantial increase in television ownership and 1955 had seen the launch of ITV. Saunders notes that

by drawing attention to the way in which the non-profit distributing companies were being used, Mr Wyatt convinced the government that the easiest way out would be to remove the entertainment tax completely. If there was no tax to pay, there would be no point in tax-exempt companies and everybody would be equal. In the Budget two years later, Mr Harold Macmillan, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, gave a firm
promise that the entertainment tax would be removed the following year. Mr Peter Thorneycroft, in 1957, carried out that pledge. In doing so, he removed an enormous injustice from the industry at a cost of a little more than a million pounds a year.

Macmillan himself had by this time stepped in as Prime Minister, following Anthony Eden's resignation in the aftermath of the Suez crisis, and Thorneycroft's 9 April budget led on various tax-cutting measures with the ending of entertainment tax effectively the headliner. The news was greeted by cheers in Parliament, and Cork wrote immediately to Christie explaining its significance: ‘The important thing for us in the Budget is the cancellation of the Entertainment Tax. This will make all the difference to theatre managers, and according to my arithmetic should add about 20% to your royalty.'
⁸⁰

Saunders asks:

What, then, will be the final verdict of the theatre historian on the fantastic manipulations of Hugh Beaumont? Some will say that because he raised the state of British theatre to its greatest heights the ends justified the means. Others may say that by achieving almost the power of a dictator certain talents of authors, artistes, directors and producers were stillborn, and that the British theatre lost as much as or more than it gained. My own belief is that the enormous good Binkie did to the theatre has never disappeared, and indeed never will. But nevertheless I believe that his omnipotence was taken from him at the right moment. Had it continued much longer, all concerned with the industry would inevitably have suffered, because dictatorship or benevolent feudalism (whatever one might call it) is never in the end successful.