Curtain Up

by Julius Green

  Writing of her life in London in 1925, Adelaide says, ‘I spent several hours in the British Museum Reading-room, where I procured books, recommended by Arthur Weigall, concerning the life and times of Pharaoh Akhnaton, about whom Father had urged me to write a blank verse play – a splendid theme which I had promised to attempt.’36 Weigall was an Egyptologist and theatre set designer who in 1910 had authored the book The Life and Times of Akhnaton, Pharoah of Egypt. Publisher Thornton Butterworth’s Times advertisement for a ‘new and revised edition’ in 1922 trumpeted, ‘“the world’s first idealist” . . . “the most remarkable figure in the history of the world” . . . such are some of the praises given to the young Pharaoh of over 3,000 years ago whose strange and pathetic story is here told by the distinguished Egyptologist, Mr Weigall’.37 The author was part of a team that he believed had discovered the mummified remains of Akhnaton, although from my necessarily brief dip into Egyptology it appears that correctly identifying and dating ancient Egyptian remains is a challenge equal only to that of establishing a chronology for the work of Agatha Christie. I suspect that Weigall’s archaic and occasionally melodramatic prose style may have influenced that adopted by Agatha in writing her own play.

  Like Agatha’s play, Adelaide’s was never performed, but it was well reviewed in the February 1927 edition of The Bookman:

  Some thirty-three hundred years separate the periods of Akhnaton and Yellow Sands. Yet two characters are common to each play – the Pharoah of the one and the socialist of the other. During the war they would have been described – and derided – as Pacifists; in these less disruptive days they may be accepted as idealists . . . This has not been written to gratify historical or archaeological curiosity, but to display the character and difficulties of a ruler who dared to place himself in opposition to the powerful priestly and military castes of his period. Akhnaton is seen in conflict with all types, from the father he succeeded to the scullions of his kitchen, and in every varied circumstance his character is depicted with unfailing consistency and ever-growing charm. But it is not merely on her interpretation of Akhnaton that Miss Phillpotts is to be congratulated; her sketches of the general Horemheb, of the aggressive sculptor Bek, and of the subtle and wavering High Priest are also drawn with a firm hand. And many of her episodes have a high dramatic quality, which culminates in a scene of great tensity in the tomb of Akhnaton fifteen years after his death. What theatrical producer will enrich the intellectual and moral life of the nation by an adequate performance of this remarkable play?

  Eden Phillpotts was delighted by his daughter’s play. He wrote to her from Torquay, ‘My darling dear, I love to have the dedication of the Akhnaton and am very proud to think that you dedicated it to me. It will be my most cherished possession after your dear self and I shall value it beyond measure,’38 and, ‘I gave Mrs Shaw Akhnaton and she was very pleased with the gift and I hope will tell me what she thought of it.’39

  Adelaide’s and Agatha’s plays, of course, share much the same cast list of historical characters and both use as their ultimate source material translations of the Armana letters, a remarkable collection of around three hundred ancient Egyptian diplomatic letters, carved on tablets and discovered by locals in the late 1880s. Whilst Adelaide meticulously credits her sources, however, Agatha does not; so it is difficult to tell where they end and her own invention begins. Adelaide’s play is written in accomplished blank verse and Agatha’s in a sort of poetic prose that makes it completely different in style from any of her other writing. Whilst Adelaide’s is arguably the more accomplished literary work, Agatha’s is definitely the more satisfactory as a piece of drama, with more developed intrigue and conflict amongst the courtiers, the dramatic licence of the introduction of the then newsworthy character of Tutankhamun (played as a young adult rather than the child that he would then have been) and, for good measure, a climactic poisoning and suicide (although there is no mystery as to how or why).

  Amongst the striking parallels between the plays are the use of Akhnaton’s coffin inscription as his death speech. In Adelaide’s version,

  I breathe the sweet breath of thy mouth,

  And I behold thy beauty every day . . .

  Oh call my name unto eternity

  And it shall never fail (Akhnaton falls back dying)40

  And in Agatha’s,

  I breathe the sweet breath which comes from thy mouth . . . Call upon my name to all eternity and it shall never fail (he dies)41

  Immediately after this, both plays feature an epilogue set in Akhnaton’s tomb, in which people are erasing Akhnaton’s name and someone gives a speech. In Adelaide’s version,

  . . . A ghost with Amon’s dread wrath upon thy head – eternally forgotten by God and man.

  (Priests, raising their torches) Amen! Amen! Amen!

  And in Agatha’s,

  . . . So let this criminal be forgotten and let him disappear from the memory of men . . . (a murmur of assent goes up from the People)

  There is a scene in Adelaide’s version where a sequence of messengers read out letters bringing news of military calamity from the far reaches of the empire. In Agatha’s version of what is effectively the same scene, there are no messengers but Akhnaton’s general Horemheb reads out the letters himself. In both cases, the readings are interrupted by a comment from Horemheb. In Adelaide’s version,

  My lord, troops disembarked at Simyra

  And Byblos, could be quickly marched to Tunip

  In Agatha’s,

  My lord, it is not too late, Byblos and Simyra are still loyal. We can disembark troops at these ports, march inland to Tunip.

  Again, the source material (credited by Adelaide but not by Agatha) is clearly the same, so the similarities in the phraseology are less remarkable than the dramatic construction of an intervention by Horemheb with these words. But perhaps even more notable are some similarities in stage directions. Adelaide: ‘The high priest . . . with shaven head, wearing a linen gown . . .’; Agatha: ‘The high priest . . . his head is closely shaven and he wears a linen robe . . .’

  So, what to make of all this? On one level it may appear that in writing Akhnaton Christie simply ‘did a Vosper’ on the work of her mentor’s daughter. But when Christie’s own play finally saw the light of day in 1973, Adelaide was still very much alive (she died, aged ninety-seven, in 1993); and Christie is unlikely to have allowed its publication in the knowledge that she had consciously borrowed from another living writer’s work. It has to be said, too, that each writer puts her own very distinctive touches into the story. Adelaide includes the characters of Akhnaton’s and Queen Nefertiti’s two daughters, who some historians believe he took as additional wives, with the following exchange between father and daughter as one of them is married off to a young prince:

  AKHNATON . . . I think thou art still a child?

  MERYTATON: A woman, my lord.

  AKHNATON: Then art thou willing to be wed?

  MERYTATON: No sire,

  If husband gained mean father lost. But, yes,

  If I may keep them both

  Christie, on the other hand, explores in some detail the relationship between the artistic, poetry-reciting Akhnaton and his muscular general, Horemheb. One wonders what the Lord Chamberlain’s office would have made of this exchange between the two men:

  AKHNATON: (after looking at him a minute) I like you, Horemheb . . . (Pause) I love you. You have a true simple heart without evil in it. You believe what you have been brought up to believe. You are like a tree. (Touches his arm) How strong your arm is. (Looks affectionately at Horemheb) How firm you stand. Yes, like a tree. And I – I am blown upon by every wind of Heaven. (wildly) Who am I? What am I? (sees Horemheb staring) I see, good Horemheb, that you think I am mad!

  HOREMHEB: (embarrassed) No, indeed, Highness. I realize that you have great thoughts – too difficult for me to understand.

  As it happens, Adelaide’s was not the first verse play on the subject by a female writer
. In 1920 The Wisdom of Akhnaton by A.E. Grantham (Alexandra Ethelreda von Herder) had been published by The Bodley Head, the company that in the same year gave Christie her publishing debut. Grantham’s introduction cites the Amura tablets as her source and advocates the relevance of Akhnaton’s philosophy:

  There was no room for greed or hate and war in this conception of man’s destiny; no occasion for those ugly and gratuitous rivalries which make human history such a never-ending tragedy . . . never has mankind stood in direr need of a real faith in the indestructability and the supreme beauty of this great Pharaoh’s ideals of light and loveliness in life . . . the episode chosen for dramatisation is the conflict between the claims of peace and war and Akhnaton’s successful struggle to make his people acquiesce in his policy of peace.42

  The Bodley Head’s Times advertisement for Grantham’s The Wisdom of Akhnaton read, ‘A remarkable play about Akhnaton, the father of Tutankhamen, and the Pharoah who tried to establish the pure monotheistic religion of Aton and a religion of Love and Peace thirteen hundred years before Christ . . . this is one of the few works of fiction ever written about the Egypt of those days, which are now being made to live again so vividly by Lord Carnarvon’s discoveries.’43

  Despite covering approximately the same period of history and including several of the same characters, however, there are no echoes of Grantham’s work in either Adelaide’s or Agatha’s, a fact which only serves to highlight further the similarities between those of Eden Phillpotts’ two protégées. Whilst Grantham chooses to halt the story at the point where Akhnaton has been ‘successful in his struggle to make his people acquiesce in a policy of peace’, both Adelaide and Agatha go on to show Akhnaton’s ultimately tragic failure. In doing so they are not, in my view, opposed to the value of striving for Akhnaton’s aspirations, even against all the odds and in the face of human nature.

  During the First World War, Adelaide had worked for Charles Ogden’s Cambridge Magazine, which controversially gave a balanced view of events by publishing throughout the conflict translated versions of foreign press articles, as well as pieces by writers such as Shaw and Arnold Bennett. By the early 1920s, newspapers were full of reports of the latest archaeological finds in Egypt, and Egyptologists were front page celebrities as they continued to unveil the ‘secrets of the tombs’. Western writers and intellectuals were intrigued by the lessons that could be learned from this ancient culture, particularly in a world still reeling from the devastation of war, and it is little wonder that the Phillpotts circle found the pacifist philosophy of Akhnaton in particular worth exploring, and that at least two female playwrights, A.E. Grantham and Adelaide Phillpotts, thought him a worthy subject for a verse play.

  It thus seems plausible that Agatha’s autobiography could well be correct in appearing to date the origins of her own Akhnaton play to the mid-1920s, and that it may have been, at least initially, the product of this post-war zeitgeist and her association with Eden Phillpotts rather than her more specific interest in archaeology in the 1930s. It may even be that it was Phillpotts himself who suggested the idea to Agatha, just as he had to his daughter. Even if one dismisses the similarities between Agatha’s Akhnaton play and Adelaide’s as pure coincidence, there seems to me to be a Phillpotts stamp on the project that is hard to ignore.

  In a further twist to the tale, in 1934 Adelaide Phillpotts and her friend and writing partner Jan Stewart wrote a three-act murder mystery play, which was performed in repertory at Northampton. It was called The Wasps’ Nest.44 Like Christie’s at that time unperformed 1932 one-act play of the same title, it revolves around the destruction of a wasp’s nest in a country house and the murderous application of the cyanide used to achieve this. Although the outcome is entirely different, it contains some remarkably similar plot devices to Christie’s story, and shares a storyline about a woman returning to her previous lover having abandoned him in favour of another man.

  Did Agatha read Adelaide’s 1926 Akhnaton play? Did Adelaide read Agatha’s 1928 ‘Wasp’s Nest’ short story in the Daily Mail? We do know that Agatha and Adelaide exchanged some affectionate correspondence in the late 1960s, in which the two old ladies charmingly reminisced about their Torquay childhoods and shared news of family and friends.45 There is no mention at all of matters Egyptian. Or of wasps.

  Another long-term playwriting project of Christie’s was the compelling domestic drama, A Daughter’s a Daughter, which she wrote in the 1930s but which was not to receive its premiere until 1956. Taking its title from the saying, ‘Your son’s a son till he gets a wife, but a daughter’s a daughter all your life’, it concerns the friction between a widow, Anne Prentice, and her adult daughter, Sarah, as each in turn contrives to destroy the other’s opportunities to find fulfilment in love. As with The Lie and The Stranger, we see a young woman torn between a dull but reliable suitor and the excitement of a potentially more dangerous liaison.

  In the third week of March 1939, a letter from Bernard Merivale, Edmund Cork’s business partner at Hughes Massie, landed on the desk of Basil Dean.

  Dear Basil Dean,

  I would be very glad if you would read the enclosed play by Agatha Christie.

  The play has nothing whatever to do with Poirot or crime solution. It impresses me as being another manifestation of this author’s undoubted genius.

  I would be very interested to know your reaction.46

  Dean appears to have responded positively although, sadly, his side of the correspondence is in the missing early years of Hughes Massie’s Christie archive. Merivale acknowledged his ‘interesting letter’ about the play, and on 5 April Agatha sent Dean a handwritten note from Sheffield Terrace:

  Dear Mr Dean,

  I should be so pleased if you could lunch here on Wednesday 12th 1.15. I should be most interested to hear your ideas about A Daughter’s a Daughter.

  Yours sincerely,

  Agatha Christie47

  There is no record of what took place at this lunch, although it seems that Dean suggested various alterations to the script. The sudden death of Merivale interrupted the correspondence, and put the matter into the hands of Cork, who wrote to Dean in late May:

  We really ought to have written to you regarding the Agatha Christie play . . . I am afraid the insistent demand for her literary work has prevented Mrs Christie from doing any work on A Daughter’s A Daughter, and there doesn’t seem any prospect of her being able to get down to possible alterations in the immediate future, but perhaps I may come and see you about it on your return from America.48

  It is interesting that Hughes Massie should have approached Basil Dean about this project rather than his former business partner, Alec Rea, who had produced Black Coffee. But as well as being a producer, Dean had a track record of successfully directing work by women playwrights, including Clemence Dane and Margaret Kennedy, both of whose playwriting careers he had effectively launched. And although Rea had co-produced The Claimant with Dean, it was Dean, as director, with whom Agatha’s sister had had the working relationship. Madge had invited Dean to lunch as recently as 1937,49 although there is no indication as to how he responded to this suggestion, or as to what Madge’s agenda was in making it. She had possibly hoped to interest him in an updated version of Oranges and Lemons, for which there are some handwritten notes on the script; Junius adds the air force to the army and navy in summarising the list of ‘essential’ government expenditures, and ‘Bolshevists’ are now described as ‘Communists’.50

  The move to Dean, then, was a logical one for Agatha, and was vindicated when, undeterred by her own lassitude, he appeared to be on the brink of pulling an extraordinary piece of potential casting out of the bag. In June 1939 Cork wrote to Dean, ‘The pressure of her literary work made it difficult for Agatha Christie to get down to the alterations in A Daughter’s a Daughter, but your exciting news about Miss Lawrence’s interest enabled us to persuade her to do so, and I have great pleasure in sending you the revised script herewith. I shall
look forward keenly to developments.’51

  Gertrude Lawrence had become the talk of the town for her 1936 partnership with Noël Coward in his Tonight at 8.30 playlets, and her interest in the role of Ann Prentice certainly had the desired effect. The revised script cleverly specified Ann’s age as thirty-nine, as against Lawrence’s forty-one, and in her covering letter to Dean Christie wrote,

  I return the play. I have completely rewritten the third act, following the scene order you suggested and I really do think it is a great improvement . . . I still feel that Sarah’s rudeness ought to arise spontaneously – like a jealous and undisciplined child, and that any deliberate ‘trick’ on her part does make her an ‘unpleasant character’ which she should not be. However, it may seem different when played.

  I think I’m by now quite incapable of doing any more to it – so if you feel it needs further alterations, I suggest you do them and tell me what you have done!’52

  This last suggestion is not as extraordinary as it seems. Dean’s input on Margaret Kennedy’s stage version of her novel The Constant Nymph had, after all, been sufficiently substantial to earn him a co-writing credit.

  Although Christie had used the pen name Mary Westmacott for her non-crime novels Giant’s Bread (1930) and the semi-autobiographical Unfinished Portrait (1934), there was at this stage, as we can see from the wide frame of reference of her dramatic work, no indication that the name Agatha Christie, as a playwright, was necessarily going to be associated exclusively with the crime genre. Indeed, the Christie archive’s copies of the 1930s version of A Daughter’s a Daughter state clearly that it is ‘by Agatha Christie’. And so it was that, in mid-August 1939, Agatha Christie seemed poised to have her passionate, witty and cleverly constructed drama about the conflict between mother and daughter presented in the West End. Undoubtedly her finest work for the stage, and compared by surprised critics to the work of Rattigan at its eventual West End premiere thirty-three years after her death, it was to have been produced and directed by the man who launched the playwriting careers of Clemence Dane and Margaret Kennedy and seems likely to have starred one of the most popular actresses of the day. Within three weeks, though, Britain had declared war on Germany, and the story of Agatha Christie, playwright, was to take a very different turn.