by Julius Green
This was clearly the reply that Cork had been hoping for: ‘I am delighted to hear that you are thinking of dramatising Ten Little Niggers yourself – generally speaking, I am all against such valuable professional time as yours being spent on anything so speculative as the drama, but Ten Little Niggers is different.’5
Notwithstanding Hughes Massie’s support of A Daughter’s a Daughter, Cork’s reservations may go some way towards explaining Christie’s lack of progress as a playwright since signing up with the agency seventeen years previously. Christie and Cork met for lunch to discuss the matter further, and Cork wrote to her afterwards, ‘I would like to say thank you for one of the most heartening of lunches. I feel tremendously enthusiastic about the dramatisation of Ten Little Niggers . . .’6
There are no surviving scripts for Ten Little Niggers in the Agatha Christie archive, which is a shame, as Christie undertook substantial rewrites between the first and final drafts and it would be intriguing to be able to see how the material developed. Her wartime separation from her husband, however, means that there are letters from her to him which include details of the mounting of the production itself; and Hughes Massie’s Christie archive finally connects with our story in 1940, meaning that this is the first Christie dramatic venture for which we can see a full exchange of correspondence between the playwright and her agent. At this stage in the game, though, there are still no producers’ archives in evidence, so the picture we get of the creation of this important production remains frustratingly incomplete.
For Christie, with a drawer full of her own original plays, to stand aside while others adapted The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The Stranger and Peril at End House (although the latter had not yet been performed) must have been deeply frustrating. As she notes in her autobiography, ‘It suddenly occurred to me that if I didn’t like the way other people had adapted my books, I should have a shot at adapting them myself. It seemed to me that the adaptations of my books to the stage failed because they stuck far too closely to the original book. A detective story is particularly unlike a play, and is so far more difficult to adapt than an ordinary book. It has such an intricate plot, and usually so many characters and false clues, that the thing is bound to become confusing and overladen. What was wanted was simplification.’7 Significantly, the second of her own novels that she chose to adapt for the stage was not, strictly speaking, a detective story, and her dramatic instincts in this regard were to prove entirely correct.
The first producer to be approached was her old friend C.B. Cochran, now sixty-eight. As Christie says of the adaptation in her introduction to Peter Saunders’ The Mousetrap Man, ‘Charles Cochran who was a great friend of mine liked it and wanted to put it on, but his backers were against it. “Impossible,” they said, “to have ten people dying on stage – it would just make audiences roar with laughter.”’8
In mid-April Christie wrote to Cork, ‘Maddening about Cochran. Why will they go round and listen to people? All full of enthusiasm one minute, and just as easily put off the next! I got quite a nice letter from him, but he’d obviously got doubts about it all. Oh well, build no hopes on the theatre! Am looking forward to Peril at End House if the Vaudeville isn’t bombed from Norway first.’9 A few days later, Cork replied, ‘Most certainly Ten Little Niggers haven’t gone down the drain. Mr Cochran still says that he is going to do it, and in any other business this, from a man in his position, would be good enough to count on. It is only because it is a theatrical deal that one feels unsure about it.’10
In the autumn of 1940 both the Hughes Massie offices and Agatha’s London house in Sheffield Terrace experienced narrow escapes from German bombs. On 10 September Cork wrote to Agatha, ‘The raid last night shook us up a bit. Contract books thrown all over the office by the explosion but everyone seems to be carrying on much as usual.’11 And on 22 October she wrote to Cork, ‘Sheffield Terrace was hit a few days after we left! . . . houses next door and opposite completely flattened – so we would have had a rude awakening had we been there!’12 Five months later, the Mallowans would move to the relative safety of the Lawn Road Flats.
Towards the end of 1942, Bertie Meyer, who had produced Alibi fourteen years previously, began to express an interest in Agatha’s dramatisation of Ten Little Niggers, but felt that changes would be necessary in order for it to go forward to production. In September Christie wrote to Cork, evidently responding to Meyer’s suggestions for script changes, ‘As to Ten Little Niggers I don’t think I like these cheap comedy effects and silly to build up a love interest unless (quite possible) you end play by Vera and Lombard turning tables on Judge – L having been shamming dead to catch him and being really a hero who risked his life to save natives – this could be managed and would make for a good end – but I know how to do it . . . I do not think I want anyone messing about with my play . . . they can back it or leave it!’13 Cork replied immediately, ‘My first thought was that it would be sacrilege to alter Ten Little Niggers as you suggest, but I am coming round to thinking that you could do it – and of course if you did it would make much easier theatre. I have put the idea to Bertie Meyer, and I will let you know what transpires.’14
Christie’s willingness to make changes had the desired effect. A week later, Cork wrote to her:
I have just had another talk with Mr Bertie Meyer regarding your play Ten Little Niggers. He and his associates are willing to enter into a contract to acquire the British stage rights . . . this is subject to certain alterations being carried out in the script, but it is agreed that you should do these yourself. One of Mr Meyer’s associates would like to discuss these alterations with you, and I had thought that this matter might be done over lunch . . . Would you let me know if you want this matter to go forward, and when you would care to have a talk about the alterations?15
Because of the very short timeframe between Christie’s original undertaking to write the script at the end of January 1940 and Cochran’s rejection of it in mid-April, my original thought was that Cochran had simply shied away from the idea of commissioning a script from Christie. But the language in which the involvement of both Cochran and Meyer is discussed by Cork and Christie raises the intriguing prospect that there was an existing script, completed by Christie in less than two months at the beginning of 1940, in which all ten of the visitors to the island end up dead, as they do in the novel. This speed of delivery would not have been atypical of Christie, who is on record as saying that three months is the ideal time in which to write a book, but that a play should take less.16 It seems that Cochran and his investors turned down the script on the basis that its original premise was dramatically unfeasible, but that the revised ending, which was clearly Christie’s own idea and evolved out of other amendments she had been asked to make, succeeded in bringing Meyer to the table.
The ‘associate’ of Bertie Meyer’s who Cork is referring to was thirty-four-year-old Barbara Toy, one of the most interesting of the extraordinary cast of characters who Christie came into contact with through her theatre work. Brought up in Sydney, Australia, where her father was the editor of the Sydney Bulletin, she worked in a bookshop as a teenager and later travelled extensively with her husband, a member of the Royal Geographical Society, before drifting apart from him and moving to London in 1935. In an unpublished letter she later said that ‘the biggest influence in my life was my father, whom I adored. We went off on holiday together. There was a great affinity and looking back I realise I had a real father-complex which probably didn’t help my relations with other men!’17
On arrival in London she made some undistinguished appearances as an actress, the first of these being at the Q Theatre in The Good Old Days by Eden and Adelaide Phillpotts, before becoming a stage manager at Richmond Theatre and later working at a film studio in Welwyn Garden City where she met the director Norman Lee. A popular English writer of American-style thrillers, Lee had been a script writer on Hitchcock’s 1927 film of Eden Phillpotts’ hugely successful play The Farmer’s
Wife. He had gone on to write a number of documentaries, mainly about London life, before turning to writing and directing comedy films. Toy and Lee collaborated, under the pen name Norman Armstrong, on a three-act ‘play of the Merchant Navy’, Lifeline, which had a run of eighty-five performances at the Duchess Theatre in 1942, produced by the independent management Linnit and Dunfee. Lifeline had just closed when Meyer requested that Agatha meet Toy.
At the end of the war Barbara Toy travelled to Germany and Holland to compile a report for ENSA on the state of theatre in the occupied territories. She went on to pen three further plays, all in collaboration with her friend Moie Charles, including a modestly successful adaptation of James Hilton’s Random Harvest; but in 1950 she would suddenly embark on an extraordinary career change and reinvent herself as a globetrotting solo adventurer, travelling alone to remote corners of the world in a Land Rover she named Pollyanna and writing up her exploits in a series of eight entertaining and highly readable books.
Quite what brought this extraordinary woman to the offices of Bertie Meyer in the autumn of 1942 is unclear. Her signature appears next to Meyer’s in a copy of the nursery rhyme book Ten Little Niggers which all those involved in the production signed for Agatha, presumably as a first night gift,18 indicating that she enjoyed considerable status within the management of the project. She appears to have had some association with a company called Farndale, which would eventually co-produce the play with Meyer and which took first position producer billing (i.e. before Meyer) in the West End programme. Farndale Pictures had been set up in 1936 with a board of directors consisting mainly of solicitors and accountants; its name implies that it was conceived as a film production company, but it registered as a ‘Theatrical Employer’ the following year. Barbara Toy and Moe Charles replaced two female literary agents as directors of the company for almost a year from July 1944 (immediately after the West End run of Ten Little Niggers), at which time they were also both directors of Overture Theatres Ltd, which managed the repertory company at the Connaught Theatre, Worthing. Toy and Charles were not shareholders of Farndale, and it is not clear from the paperwork whether their association with the company pre-dates the Ten Little Niggers project or whether it came about because of it.
In any event, between signing the rights and opening Christie’s play, Farndale produced its first West End venture, Enid Bagnold’s first play, Lottie Dundas. If Toy was indeed a senior figure within Farndale prior to becoming a director of the company, it is odd that the company appears to have had no involvement in the 1942 production of her own play, Lifeline. At this point, though, irrespective of her status within the production companies associated with the project, Toy’s only literary qualification for giving Christie notes on her work was the fact that she had anonymously co-authored one modestly successful play.
Unsurprisingly, Christie appears not to have responded to the idea of meeting Barbara Toy. A month later, Cork gave her a nudge: ‘Mr Bertie Meyer has just been talking to me again about Ten Little Niggers. Apparently several producers [i.e. directors] feel that the play cannot be put on as it stands, but says that his people are convinced that it can be put right if you will only listen to them. The present suggestion is that you might meet Barbara Toye [sic] and Derrick de Marney some time next week to hear their ideas. Shall I arrange such a meeting? I think perhaps it should be held here for reasons I will explain to you before it takes place.’19
Thirty-six-year-old Derrick de Marney and his brother, thirty-three-year-old Terence, were a busy pair of actor-directors. Terence had just appeared in Barbara Toy’s play Lifeline and was to play the role of Lombard in Ten Little Niggers, but Derrick spent much of the war involved in documentary film projects. There is a frustrating lack of extant paperwork relating to Meyer’s Christie productions, but I am assuming from the role that Derrick de Marney played in later projects that his involvement here was as an investor or even an uncredited co-producer.
Cork’s suggestion that the meeting be held at the Hughes Massie office was no doubt simply a tactical ploy to establish that Christie herself was in the driving seat. It took place on 4 November and went well. The next day Agatha wrote to Max:
Another crisis arising with Ten Little Niggers – usual talk of immediate production. I met yesterday ‘under the auspices’ of Cork with an eloquent girl with a Cockney accent [had Agatha perhaps mistaken an Australian accent for a Cockney one?] and an intense young man with masses of black hair to discuss the usual alterations. Their suggestions were for once sensible and in fact an improvement – the alternative ‘happy ending’ ‘He got married and then there were none’, I have always contemplated as a possibility if I can do it my own way which is agreed – well I shall believe nothing until the contract is signed!20
Christie here refers to two different endings that were used for the nursery rhyme. The one in which the final boy ‘went and hanged himself, and then there were none’ leads to the novel’s truly mystifying outcome, where all ten of the visitors to the island are found dead. The alternative, where the final boy ‘got married, and then there were none’, offers up the possibility of a ‘happy’ ending, and was in fact the version used in the children’s book of that time. This was the ending that she now adopted for the playscript, but it necessitated a further twist in that the survivor required someone to marry; so in the event not one, but two, of the play’s protagonists escape the killer’s clutches. This entails one of the characters, who has apparently been shot dead, standing up and declaring the immortal line, ‘Thank God women can’t shoot straight.’
When the play is performed these days, and in the absence of the first version of Christie’s script, the last two pages are usually subtly edited to reinstate the far more sinister ending that Christie herself originally intended. Although she appears to have been quite happy with the revised ending, and even takes full credit for it in her autobiography, it clearly came about as the result of pressure from producers and, to a modern playgoer, undermines the carefully crafted tension that has been built up throughout the piece. For wartime Britain, though, it has to be said that the instincts of all concerned (including Christie’s in readily agreeing to the alteration) were probably correct, and that the counterpoint of the upbeat and humorous ending to the horrors that preceded it was doubtless appreciated by audiences as they stepped out into war-torn London.
Agatha got down to work immediately on the script amendments, and on 20 November Cork wrote to her, ‘I have just been talking to Barbara Toy on the telephone. She is delighted that you have carried out the alterations so quickly, and she is so anxious to see what you have done that she can’t wait for the script to be typed. I have therefore sent it along to them as it is – they can do what retyping is necessary!’21 A week later, Bertie Meyer invited Christie to lunch at the Savoy restaurant, and it seems that at this lunch he confirmed his intention to produce the play.
On Christmas Eve 1942 Cork wrote to Christie, ‘Here is the contract for Ten Little Niggers. Would you sign and return it so that we can complete early next week? It has been tentatively fixed for Monday . . . this deal seems to be “all set” . . .’22 On 30 December 1942, the following Wednesday, a stage licence for Ten Little Niggers in the territories of Great Britain, Ireland, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand was issued jointly to Bertie Alexander Meyer and Farndale Pictures Limited. A £100 advance was paid against royalties on the usual sliding scale of between 5 and 10 per cent on banded levels of box office income, with the licence to run for seven years from the date of the first performance. The producers were granted an option on the American territory and a share of amateur income, but the film rights to the book had already gone elsewhere.23
The play had secured its producers, and they in turn quickly moved to secure a director. On 18 February 1943 Agatha wrote to Max, ‘latest news of Ten Little Nigs good. Irene Hentschel likes it and is willing to produce [i.e. direct] it – hesitated because she likes a rest in between productions – but
at this critical moment her husband Ivor Brown got a boil – and anything which she produces when he has a boil is always lucky!!! Can you beat it?! Aren’t theatrical people extraordinary? Tentative date April 19th – I said quickly April was my lucky month and 19 my lucky number, and that made a great impression.’24 Agatha’s affection for the quirkiness of theatrical people, and her quick-thinking bluff, paid off. The woman entrusted with the first of Christie’s adaptations from one of her novels to reach the stage was one of the most successful and sought-after directors of the day. Notably, she was a regular director for H.M. Tennent Ltd, a new venture established by Harry Tennent and Hugh ‘Binkie’ Beaumont and now run solely by Beaumont following Tennent’s death in 1941. Hentschel’s recent work for the company had included highly regarded productions of Frederick Lonsdale’s On Approval at the Aldwych Theatre and Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma, starring Vivien Leigh, at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket.
A year younger than Christie, Hentschel had trained as an actress at RADA and first worked as a director at Hampstead’s Everyman Theatre in 1926. According to her 1979 Times obituary (which, unsurprisingly, fails to mention her successful foray into the work of Agatha Christie),
for a quarter of a century she was among the most skilful and respected members of a highly specialized branch of the theatre that, when she entered it, was dominated by men . . . the 1930s was an exceedingly fruitful decade with seventeen or eighteen successes and very few failures. Priestley’s Eden End (1934) was the first piece in which people remarked upon Irene Hentschel’s loving instance on realism; nothing, in performance or décor, must be out of place. Companies liked acting for her; she was positive, friendly, and a thorough-going professional.25
Perhaps Hentschel’s greatest claim to fame was as the first woman to direct Shakespeare at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford upon Avon where, in 1939, she staged a controversial production of Twelfth Night. Designed by the women’s design team Motley, who went on to work regularly at Stratford, it featured Joyce Bland as Viola. Bland was the young actress who had caught Agatha’s eye in the role of Lucia Amory in Black Coffee at the Embassy, and Agatha’s unerring theatrical judgement also told her that Hentschel was a formidable talent.