by Julius Green
The play is brimming with witty banter and social commentary about inter-war Britain, courtesy largely of a pair of society grandes dames who we meet when we go back in time to Carnforth Castle. Mrs Quantock, who is married to a colonel, and her friend Lady Emily, delight in making candid observations about relations between the sexes:
MRS QUANTOCK: My experience of life has taught me that you can trust nothing and no one. Always expect the worst and you’ll be surprised how often you’re right . . . Take Arthur now – in the regiment he was considered a perfect martinet – but if any woman were to come to him with a hard luck story – why he’d be as soft as butter. He’s much too soft-hearted.
LADY EMILY: It is a good thing he has you to look after him.
MRS QUANTOCK: It takes a woman to see through women. Men say ‘Poor little woman, all the others are so down on her.’
The bitter governess, here in conversation with the seventeen-year-old lady of the house, is similarly cynical on the subject:
MISS GREY: You’ve been living in a fairy tale all your life. (She speaks with real bitterness) You’ve been sheltered and protected. You’ve gone about believing fine things about men and women. Now your eyes are opened and you can see what life is really like. Ugly – ugly. It’s everyone for himself and the devil take the hindermost. Love a man and believe in him – he’ll let you down every time. You’ve got to use the whip. Treat him like dirt, trample on him, don’t ever let him think he’s got you. Life’s a dirty business – a sordid ugly business. You can’t afford to play fair if you want to win. It’s cheat or go under – down into darkness . . .
SYLVIA: Don’t – don’t . . . I feel as though you were thrusting me into a prison – away from the sun and the air.
MISS GREY: Not at all. I’m introducing you to real life.
The final, two-scene act brings us back to 1934 and is set in an art gallery and at the house of an art collector, the locations of the short story. Art is a major theme of the piece, and Christie’s observations on the art world are perceptive and informed. It was the impresario C.B. Cochran who nurtured her own interest in art in her late teens, after a childhood being dragged reluctantly around galleries: ‘Charles Cochran had a great love of painting. When I first saw his Degas picture of ballet girls it stirred something in me that I had not known existed.’29 In the following extract, Mrs Quantock and Lady Emily gossip about life as they inspect an exhibition of modern paintings. I include it for no other reason than that it is a wonderfully well-written and witty piece of theatrical dialogue and, as nobody has ever seen it performed on a stage, it seems a shame not to share it . . .
MRS QUANTOCK: I hope Arthur won’t keep us waiting. I’m surprised he’s not here. There’s one thing to be said for military men – they do know the meaning of punctuality. These young people are past anything . . . No manners . . . No consideration for others. They come down to breakfast at all times of the morning.
LADY EMILY: And the girls’ nails! Too terrible! Just like blood!
MRS QUANTOCK: (inspecting a picture severely through a lorgnette) ‘The Cafe Beauvier’. All these modern pictures are exactly alike.
LADY EMILY: What I say is, there is so much that is depressing in the world. Why paint it? These very peculiar looking men and women sitting at curious angles – where is there any beauty? That’s what I want to know.
MRS QUANTOCK: You heard about the Logans’ butler?
LADY EMILY: Yes, most distressing. Why, they trusted the man completely. (Consults catalogue) ‘Meadow in Dorset’. What a very odd looking cow. They came back unexpectedly, I suppose?
MRS QUANTOCK: Yes, and found his wife and six children occupying the best bedroom, and the wife wearing one of Mary Logan’s tea gowns.
LADY EMILY: No!
MRS QUANTOCK: A fact I assure you. ‘Spring in Provence’. Nonsense – not in the least like it. I’ve been to Provence.
LADY EMILY: What people suffer through their servants.
MRS QUANTOCK: Did I tell you about the housemaid that came to see me? Quite a nice respectable looking young woman. She asked me how many there were in family and if there were any young gentlemen. I said there was the general and myself and our two young nephews. And do you know what she had the impertinence to say?
LADY EMILY: No, dear.
MRS QUANTOCK: She said. Very well, I’ll come on Tuesday. But seeing there are young gentlemen, I’ll have a bolt on my bedroom door, please. I said, you’ll have no such thing for you won’t have a bedroom in my house. The impudence of the girl.
LADY EMILY: ‘La Nuit Blanche’. Dear, dear the bed looks very comfortable. Mrs. Lewis has had to get rid of her nurse. The woman simply wouldn’t allow her to come into her own nursery. Said she had entire charge and wouldn’t brook interference. Interference from the child’s own mother!
MRS QUANTOCK: Amy Lewis is a fool – always was. Look how she’s mismanaged that husband of hers.
LADY EMILY: He behaved very badly.
MRS QUANTOCK: I’ve no patience with women whose husbands behave badly. It’s a woman’s job to see that a man behaves properly. Do you think I would have stood any nonsense from Arthur?
LADY EMILY: But, we can’t all be like you, Maud. You’ve such a force of character.
MRS QUANTOCK: Men have got to be looked after. Left to himself a man always behaves badly. It’s only natural.
LADY EMILY: Everything seems very odd nowadays. Midge tells me that young people – people of different sexes – can go away and stay at hotels and positively nothing happens.
MRS QUANTOCK: I can well believe it. This generation has no virility.
LADY EMILY: It seems so unnatural.
MRS QUANTOCK: Of course it’s unnatural. Why, when I was a girl, if I had gone away for a week-end with a young man – Not that my parents would have permitted it for a minute – I repeat if I had gone away with a young man – everything would have happened.
(Examines wall)
This young man can’t paint a horse. I expect he lives in a nasty unhealthy studio and never goes into the country.
LADY EMILY: I expect you’re right, dear. That cow over there was most peculiar. I couldn’t even be sure if it was a cow or a bull.
MRS QUANTOCK: People shouldn’t try and paint nature when they know nothing about it. ‘The Dead Harlequin’. Very confusing – all these squares and diamonds. Nobody studies composition nowadays. There should be proper grouping in a picture – light and shade.
LADY EMILY: How right you are, Maud. I was very artistic as a girl. I used to do flower painting when I was at school in Paris.
MRS QUANTOCK: You sang, too, Emily.
LADY EMILY: Oh, I only had a very small voice.
MRS QUANTOCK: Nobody sings nowadays. They turn on that atrocious wireless. Even expect you to play Bridge with some annoying American voice wailing about Bloo-oos, or else a dreadful lecture on pond life – or some nonsense about Geneva.
LADY EMILY: What do you think about the League of Nations?
MRS QUANTOCK: What every sensible person thinks. (looks at catalogue) ‘Three Women’. H’m. I suppose you could call them women at a pinch.
LADY EMILY: Their faces seem to have been squeezed sideways and they’ve got no tops to their heads. Even an artist can’t think women look like that.
(Enter MIDGE . . . a charming young woman with great assurance of manner.)
MIDGE: Hullo, darlings. Fancy finding you here. (looks at picture) Oo-er, scrumptious. That’s amusing. I say, the man can paint, can’t he?
LADY EMILY: They’re all so ugly.
MIDGE: Ugly? Oh, no, they’re not. They’re marvellous. Do you think that rather attractive-looking man is the artist?
MRS QUANTOCK: Very likely. He looks very odd.
MIDGE: I thought he looked rather nice. So alive. Like his pictures.
LADY EMILY: Do you call these women alive?
MIDGE: I know. One looks at these pictures and one says no women were ever like that and t
hen one goes out into the street and one suddenly sees people that remind one of the pictures.
MRS QUANTOCK: I don’t.
Thank you for indulging me with that lengthy quotation; I hope that you found it as entertaining as I do.
Someone at the Window is a theatrically ambitious piece with a colourful sixteen-person dramatis personae, and as such would not have been immediately attractive to repertory theatres of the time. It is, sadly, let down slightly by the clumsy staging of the murder at a fancy dress ball and a rather contrived and rushed ending. The murderers plot and carry out their plan in front of the audience; this is not a whodunit, but a ‘will-they-get-away with it’. Plodding police investigations undertaken in the middle of the play by Inspector Rice and Sergeant Dwyer only serve to slow down the action. They conclude, as the murderers intended, that the victim committed suicide as a result of shellshock sustained in the First World War, but the murderers’ plan to inherit a fortune goes unexpectedly askew when the victim’s young wife gives birth to an heir after his death.
There is no reference to Someone at the Window in Christie’s autobiography, in her correspondence or in the licensing records of Hughes Massie, although her notebooks do contain some work in progress. The final script appears to be ‘performance ready’, but was never submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s office, and neither does there appear to be any record of it having been tried out by one of the club theatres, where the audience had to sign up as members and which therefore did not require a licence. Unlike other unperformed work of hers, she appears not to have returned to it, reworked it or lobbied for its production. She perhaps appreciated that its dramatic construction rendered it unattractively cumbersome as a production proposition. With its loss, sadly, we have in my opinion been deprived of some of her best dialogue for the stage.
One work which Christie did return to was the similarly lengthy Akhnaton, her remarkable historical drama about the idealistic pharaoh, father of Tutankhamun. Akhnaton, who dreams of ‘a kingdom where people dwell in peace and brotherhood’ and spends much of his time composing poetry, attempts to promote a pacifist philosophy and to unite the polytheist Egyptians under one god; policies which inevitably do not go down well with either the army or the priesthood. The action of the play takes place over seventeen years, moving from Thebes to Akhnaton’s purpose-built Utopia, the City of the Horizon, and involves a cast of twenty-two named roles, including an Ethiopian dwarf, not to mention scribes, soldiers and other extras, as well as a spectacular parade featuring ‘wild animals in cages’ and ‘beautiful nearly nude girls’.
Christie commentators tend to be united in their praise for the piece. Even biographer Laura Thompson, who is generally dismissive of her work for the theatre, singles it out. In the absence of a response from critics, Charles Osborne sums it up well: ‘Akhnaton is, in fact, a fascinating play. It deals in a complex way with a number of issues: with the difference between superstition and reverence; the danger of rash iconoclasm, the value of the arts, the nature of love, the conflicts set up by the concept of loyalty, and the tragedy apparently inherent in the inevitability of change. Yet Akhnaton is no didactic tract, but a drama of ruthless logic and theatrical power, its characters sharply delineated, its arguments humanized and convincingly set forth.’30
The play, eventually published in 1973 and not performed in Agatha’s lifetime, is usually dated as having been written in 1937. The earliest surviving copy is clearly stamped by the Marshall’s typing agency as having been completed on 12 August of that year, and the ancient Egyptian subject matter certainly makes sense in the context of her involvement with the archaeological community since her marriage to Max Mallowan. In introductory material written for its publication, Christie refers to the date of its writing as 1937,31 although thirty-six years later she may well simply have been using the date on the typescript’s cover as an aide memoire.
Mallowan himself touches briefly but perceptively on a small number of Agatha’s plays in a chapter towards the end of his autobiographical Mallowan’s Memoirs, published in 1977, a year after her death. Akhnaton, he says, is
Agatha’s most beautiful and profound play . . . brilliant in its delineation of character, tense with drama . . . The play moves around the person of the idealist king, a religious fanatic, obsessed with the love of truth and beauty, hopelessly impractical, doomed to suffering and martyrdom, but intense in faith and never disillusioned in spite of the shattering of all his dreams . . . In no other play by Agatha has there been, in my opinion, so sharp a delineation of the characters; every one of whom is portrayed in depth and set off as a foil, one against the other . . . the characters themselves are here submitted to exceptionally penetrating analytical treatment, because they are not merely subservient to the denouement of a murder plot, but each one is a prime agent in the development of a real historical drama.32
Mallowan appreciates the play’s classical dramatic construction – ‘the play moves to its finale like an Aeschylean drama’ – and, like other commentators on the piece, notes its contemporary relevance: ‘Egypt between 1375 and 1358 BC is but a reflection of the world today, a recurrent and eternal tragedy’. He does, however, appreciate why theatrical producers might hesitate. ‘Good judges of the theatre have deemed it beautiful, but would-be promoters are daunted by the frightening thought of an expensive setting and a large cast.’
Max introduced Agatha to Howard Carter at Luxor in 1931, describing the man who discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 as ‘a sardonic and entertaining character with whom we used to play bridge at the Winter Palace hotel’, and also to his friend Stephen Glanville, another leading Egyptologist who later became Provost of King’s College Cambridge and who Max claims offered Agatha guidance relating to source material for her historical drama. However, although Agatha’s new-found archaeological connections were understandably instrumental in the realisation of the script for Akhnaton that we now know, there are some ambiguities about the play’s inception that indicate that it may have had an earlier existence. In her autobiography, Agatha credits Glanville at some length for his assistance with the 1944 novel Death Comes as the End, which is set in ancient Egypt, but not with having helped her with Akhnaton. This may, of course, simply be because the play had not been published when she finished writing her autobiography, and she did not want to confuse readers with detail about its creation. She refers to it only twice, on the first occasion noting that ‘I also wrote a historical play about Akhnaton. I liked it enormously. John Gielgud was later kind enough to write to me. He said it had interesting points, but was far too expensive to produce and had not enough humour. I had not connected humour with Akhnaton, but I saw that I was wrong. Egypt was just as full of humour as anywhere else – so was life at any time or place – and tragedy had its humour too.’33
Despite the notoriously inaccurate chronology of Agatha’s autobiography, not least when it comes to her plays, one thing it tends to be very clear on is which part of her life she spent with Archie and which with Max. Her first mention of Akhnaton occurs very much in the former section of the book, in a sequence where she is recounting her activities after returning from the Grand Tour in 1922 and before her divorce. Immediately before this she mentions ‘the play about incest’ (i.e. The Lie) and there is no link with her second husband or his archaeological interests. To me, this indicates that she is placing the origins of Akhnaton in the pre-Max era of the mid-1920s. Agatha was of course no stranger to Egypt prior to meeting Max and his friends, having spent some time in Cairo with her mother as a seventeen-year-old, although one suspects that she was more interested in potential suitors than mummified Pharoahs during this particular visit. She notes that Gielgud wrote to her ‘later’, and this handwritten letter, dated simply ‘Friday evening’, was doubtless in response to the version of the script that was typed up in 1937 and which may well by then have benefited from Stephen Glanville’s input; Gielgud writes from an address in St John’s Wood which he occupied betw
een 1935 and 1938. Gielgud felt that Akhnaton requires ‘a terrific production in a big theatre with a great deal of pageantry. Personally I think it would have a great deal better chance of success if it was simplified and so made possible to do in a smaller way.’34
Agatha was a great admirer of Gielgud, but although he appeared in various screen adaptations of her work (and the novel Sleeping Murder even involves a visit to one of his stage performances), they never met and he never appeared in one of her plays. Gielgud later became both personally and professionally linked with the H.M. Tennent theatrical empire, and would have been unlikely to put his name to a production by Peter Saunders, Christie’s producer at the height of her playwriting career. Max invited him to speak at Agatha’s memorial service, but he was unable to do so.
As well as its dating, there is a further mystery surrounding the script that Gielgud was responding to. In 1926 Thornton Butterworth published a verse play called Akhnaton by Adelaide Phillpotts, the daughter of Agatha’s mentor Eden Phillpotts. There are striking similarities between Adelaide Phillpotts’ play and Christie’s, over and above the fact that they clearly share source material.
The story of Adelaide Phillpotts is a fascinating one, and would easily fill a book in its own right. An accomplished writer, and the author of forty-two novels, plays and books of poetry, her autobiography, Reveries, was published in 1981 when she was eighty-five, under her married name Adelaide Ross. It tells of her childhood in Torquay, where attending the local theatre was a highlight, her early naïve attempts at playwriting, finishing school in Paris, her adventures in London as a young woman where she became an admirer of Lilian Baylis’ Shakepeare productions at the Old Vic, and her various playwriting collaborations with her father, particularly the 1926 success Yellow Sands. It also makes reference, without recrimination, to the incestuous attentions that her father paid her from an early age, and to the oppressive closeness of both their personal and professional lives, until she finally married, despite his protestations, at the age of fifty-five. After which he never spoke to her again. ‘As to Father,’ concludes Adelaide simply, ‘he should be judged, as he wished, and it must be favourably, by his works.’35