Curtain Up (62 page)

As with much of Christie's playwriting, it is impossible to offer any definitive chronology or interpretation, and I am certainly not attempting to do so here; I am simply suggesting that we consider a number of options rather than leaping to conclusions. Whatever its origins, sources and inspirations,
No Fields of Amaranth
is a profound and deeply thoughtful play that examines ordinary people who are the victims of extreme circumstances arising from the practical application of conflicting moral philosophies. Even the murder, which takes place in full view of the audience and is thus no mystery, can be seen in this context. The tragedy is that Christie felt the necessity to introduce, however grudgingly, a detective of any sort into this scenario. But, with
A Daughter's a Daughter
having been sitting on Peter Saunders' desk for almost five years, it was perhaps the bait she felt he needed.

At the end of October 1957 Saunders, who clearly disliked the play's title, had what he must have regarded as a bit of good luck. In response to an interview given by Christie, a prolific author of romantic fiction called Hebe Keogh contacted him to say that she had written a book with the title ‘No Fields of Amaranth' and requested therefore that Christie change her play's title (and, by the way, when the change was announced, please could mention be made of her book?).
⁸⁷
Although the book was out of print, Saunders seized the opportunity and wrote back, ‘As good as the title is for a book it is a very bad one for a play . . . I am sure Agatha Christie will
now agree to change it.'
⁸⁸
Exactly when the play was renamed, and to what extent Christie was involved in the decision, is unclear; but we do know that at the end of November 1957 actors were being contracted for a play called simply ‘Amaranth', and by the end of February 1958 they were being reviewed in a play called
Verdict
.

No Fields of Amaranth
's title change, however, did not have a similarly happy outcome to that made to the title of
Three Blind Mice
. In fact it proved to be a hugely detrimental move, leading both audiences and critics to believe that they were about to experience a courtroom drama in the same vein as
Witness for the Prosecution
. Not since the Shuberts advertised
The Suspects
as a follow-up to
Ten Little Indians
had expectations for a Christie play been so comprehensively subverted. Just how little Christie's team understood about her more challenging work is apparent from a letter from Cork to Ober in April 1958. In fairness, he concedes that
No Fields of Amaranth
would have been a more suitable title for the play, but he goes on to say, ‘Although I don't think it is a good play, I am inclined to think a very good film could be made out of it. The point is that one of the high spots of the play is a murder trial, and on stage it happens “off”, while obviously in a film it could be written up so that Verdict could be the logical successor to Witness for the Prosecution.'
⁸⁹
Such an idea would have been so far from Christie's aspirations for the piece that, in this instance, one has to question Cork's judgement.

And it wasn't only the title that was to be an issue. Christie often agonised over the opening and closing moments of her plays, and in the case of
Verdict
the final page was to be the subject of numerous rewrites. The burning issue was whether, in the closing moments of the piece, Lisa, having abandoned Karl and all that he stands for, should walk back in – and if she did so then what she should say. This was not dissimilar to the problems experienced by Shaw regarding the staging and filming of the final moments of
Pygmalion
, which were definitively resolved after his death, and in a manner contrary
to his original intentions, by the creators of the musical
My Fair Lady
. The Agatha Christie archive contains a draft where Lisa does not return at all and Karl is left alone on the stage in despair, reading the Landor poem as his voice dies away and the book falls; another where Karl is left listening to Rachmaninov on the record player and Lisa returns and runs into his arms saying only his name; and further versions where Lisa returns and there is some brief dialogue, the eventual final line apparently being something of a last-minute addition. The version sent to the Lord Chamberlain's office, in which the final pages have been attached by adhesive tape in a manner that prevents us from seeing what is being replaced, sees Karl listening to the Rachmaninov and reads thus;

       
KARL: . . . Lisa – Lisa – How can I live without you?

       
(Door opens after a moment or two, Lisa comes in very softly, stands an instant, then comes softly down behind him, puts hands on his shoulders. He starts, thinks for a moment he is imagining, then turns, springs up)

Lisa? (afraid to believe) You have come back – why?

       
LISA: (between laughing and crying) Because I am a fool! (comes into his arms)

       
(Music comes up in triumphant passage)

       
CURTAIN
⁹⁰

Here is the same sequence as currently published:

       
KARL: Lisa – Lisa – how can I live without you? (He drops his head into his hands)

       
(The door up Centre opens slowly. Lisa enters up Centre, moves slowly to Right of Karl and puts her hand gently on his shoulder. He looks up at Lisa.)

Lisa? You've come back. Why?

       
LISA: (kneeling at Karl's side) Because I am a fool.

       
(Lisa rests her head on Karl's lap, he rests his head on hers and the music builds up as the Curtain falls)
⁹¹

If ever an example were needed of how an ‘acting edition' impoverishes a writer's original stage directions through the incorporation of stage manager's ‘blocking' notes from the prompt copy, then this is it. Historically, of course, it has often been this version of the script that goes ‘on the record' and by which a playwright's work has been judged by future academics. Christie's plays suffer particularly badly from this, with much of what we now read having been aimed specifically at enabling amateurs to recreate, as far as possible, the original staging.

Verdict
also gives rise to a particularly fine example of another of the problems that Christie's reputation as a dramatist is up against in certain academic quarters. In the introduction to
British and Irish Women Dramatists Since 1958
, edited by Trevor R. Griffiths and Margaret Llewellyn-Jones (1993), we read that ‘some plays written by women may conform both ideologically and formally to the established patriarchal norm, for example Agatha Christie's 1950s Poirot-style plays, notwithstanding Miss Marple's appropriation of such apparently male skills to solve mysteries in other plays.'
⁹²

I am not aware that Christie wrote any ‘Poirot-style' plays in the 1950s, and she certainly never wrote a play featuring Miss Marple. Her one full-length Poirot play was produced in 1930, and even then his skills are notably not portrayed as inherently ‘male' (but that's another story). In the Poirotless
The Hollow
, the female roles dominate the stage while the men are by and large weak and ineffectual, in
The Mousetrap
Miss Casewell hardly conforms to gender stereotypes, in
Witness for the Prosecution
Romaine runs circles around the self-satisfied male lawyers, in
Spider's Web
the resourceful female protagonist calls the shots as she sits at the centre of her web, and in
Verdict
, which is in no sense ‘Poirot-style', we see how a principled but misguided male idealist wreaks unintentional havoc on the lives of those around him like a modern-day Akhnaton.

Lib Taylor, in her chapter in the book, ‘Early Stages', notes under the heading ‘The West End, Collusion or Subversion' that
‘Christie's plays reveal an underlying collusion with patriarchy' – citing ‘The Verdict' [sic] as an example of this. Lisa, she says, ‘denies her own future in favour of his [Karl's] and even after prison – in a sense her punishment for her transgression against the marriage vow – she continues this sacrifice despite an apparent awareness of male oppression . . .'
⁹³
In this and other Christie plays, Taylor continues, ‘redemption comes through the suffering of women whose only crime is their sexuality, whilst men remain irreproachable . . . the women collude by rejecting the possibility of challenging their oppressors, preferring the
status quo
.'

Anyone with a proper understanding of Christie's work for the stage, or even the basic plot of
Verdict
, will emphatically reject this thesis. Karl is not ‘oppressing' anyone (except, arguably, himself); he is loyal to his wife, but he and Lisa are in love. He is trapped, like Akhnaton, by his own well-intentioned but ultimately destructive belief system, which is signposted in a minor way when he forgives a student for stealing a book. Far from being ‘irreproachable', the extreme events of the play conclusively challenge his misguided philosophical outlook. Lisa makes her own choices, and her decision to return to Karl at the end of the play makes her the stronger partner, not the weaker one. As with all of Christie's work for the stage,
Verdict
is approached from the perspective of women being innately the stronger of the sexes and men the weaker: ‘Men aren't realists like we are,' declares Helen to Anya. And I would respectfully suggest that if you are going to offer a critique of a play then you at least take the trouble to get its title right.

Taylor is, of course, restricted by the book's 1958 starting point to examining the relatively inglorious tail end of Christie's playwriting career. This date is chosen, according to its editors, because it is the year in which Shelagh Delaney's debut play
A Taste of Honey
, her first and last success, was premiered by Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop at the Theatre Royal Stratford East. The dramatis personae of nineteen-year-old Delaney's brave and extraordinary, Salford-set working-class domestic drama includes an alcoholic single mother, a pregnant
teenager, a black sailor and a homosexual art student. The play has achieved the same sort of iconic status as
Look Back in Anger
with some theatre historians and, we are told by the editors of
British and Irish Women Dramatists Since 1958
, ‘seemed to offer a new way forward for women's theatre.' It is worth noting in the context of this claim that in 1931, the year of Agatha Christie's first West End production, twenty plays written or co-written by women enjoyed runs in the West End, and there were also numerous one-off ‘try-out' performances of new plays by women writers in West End theatres. In the four years between 1956 and 1959 over fifty plays by women were presented in the West End, including work by Agatha Christie, Enid Bagnold, Lesley Storm, Lillian Hellman and Clemence Dane. And yet, at time of writing, the only play in the West End by a female playwright is
The Mousetrap
.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the challenges presented by the piece, casting
Verdict
proved problematic, and although the team that Saunders eventually assembled was certainly top-notch in terms of its ability to deliver the play, it did not offer any ‘star name' insurance against poor reviews. There had been much excitement the previous year when it seemed that French film star Charles Boyer might accept the role of Karl; in 1952 he had received a Tony award for his Broadway appearance in Shaw's
Don Juan in Hell
, directed by Charles Laughton, and casting him in what would have been his first London stage appearance since 1924 would indeed have been something of a coup. In the end, though, Saunders reported that Boyer had felt ‘he could not play the last act'
⁹⁴
and the role eventually went to German-born film and stage actor Gerard Heinz: the same actor who, as Gerard Hinze, had played Dr Gerard in the West End production of
Appointment with Death
. Though a busy and well-regarded film and television actor who had notably appeared in the 1942 premiere of Terence Rattigan's
Flare Path
, Heinz was by no means a headline star. One Tony award winner who did join the company was Patricia Jessel in the role of Lisa, her last Christie appearance having been as the toast of Broadway in
Witness for the
Prosecution
; and playing Helen was former Windmill girl Moira Redmond. Recently returned from Australia and an unsuccessful marriage, Redmond had been Vivien Leigh's understudy in the 1957 West End season of Peter Brook's production of
Titus Andronicus
and, by all accounts, she made the most of the role of the young murderess in
Verdict
.

Taking the helm as director was RADA-trained Charles Hickman, who had been responsible for the popular
Sweet and Low
wartime revues that briefly made way for
Murder on the Nile
at the Ambassadors in 1946. Hickman was the director of Reandco's hugely successful premiere of Lesley Storm's
Black Chiffon
at the Westminster Theatre in 1949, and the following year he enjoyed a similar success with
His Excellency
by Dorothy and Campbell Christie at the Piccadilly. He had already worked with Saunders, staging his production of a new musical of
The Water Gipsies
which opened at the Winter Gardens six months after
Witness for the Prosecution
closed there.

The scheduling of
Verdict
early in the year was unusual, not least because it meant that Christie herself was in Iraq when the production rehearsed and opened on tour on 25 February 1958. It also meant that Nottingham's Theatre Royal was unable to play its usual role hosting the first performance, and the production opened instead in Wolverhampton, much to the chagrin of the local critic in Nottingham. A review in
The Stage
from Wolverhampton was promising, assessing the play on its own merits rather than its writer's reputation. Under the rather uninspiring headline, ‘Mrs Christie Examines a Professor's Character', the critic's favourable response noted: