by Julius Green
VERA: What happened?
EMILY: (self-righteously) Naturally, I refused to keep her an hour under my roof. No one shall ever say I condoned immorality.
VERA: Did she drown herself?
EMILY: Yes.
VERA: How old was she?
EMILY: Seventeen.
VERA: Only seventeen.
EMILY: (with horrible fanaticism) Quite old enough to know how to behave. I told her what a low depraved thing she was. I told her that she was beyond the pale and that no decent person would take her into their house. I told her that her child would be the child of sin and would be branded all its life – and that the man would naturally not dream of marrying her. I told her that I felt soiled by ever having had her under my roof –
VERA: (shuddering) You told a girl of seventeen all that?
EMILY: Yes, I am glad to say I broke her down utterly.
VERA: Poor little devil.39
The West End remained remarkably buoyant throughout the war. On the day Ten Little Niggers premiered, thirty-one West End theatres were open, and amongst the productions with which it was competing for audiences were Ivor Novello’s The Dancing Years at the Adelphi, produced by Tom Arnold (who had hosted Ten Little Niggers’ opening at his Wimbledon Theatre); Terence Rattigan’s RAF play Flare Path, produced by H.M. Tennent Ltd at the Apollo; the PES’s Priestley play They Came to a City, co-produced with Tennent Plays Ltd at the Globe; John Gielgud in Congreve’s Love For Love, produced by Tennent Plays Ltd at the Haymarket; and the final week of Enid Bagnold’s Lottie Dundas, produced by Farndale Pictures Ltd and starring Sybil Thorndike at the Cambridge Theatre.
In many histories of British theatre, chapters on the war years focus almost entirely on the roles of ENSA and CEMA. ENSA, under the irrepressible Basil Dean, took responsibility for providing entertainment for the troops (who dubbed it Every Night Something Awful) whilst the work of CEMA, the precursor of the Arts Council, was directed at audiences on the home front. Under the chairmanship of John Maynard Keynes, and with Ivor Brown as its first Drama Director, CEMA undertook a wide-ranging programme including tours to factories and garrisons by the Sadler’s Wells Ballet and Ballet Rambert and the dispatch of the Old Vic Company (temporarily based at Burnley) to perform Shakespeare plays starring Sybil Thorndike in Welsh mining villages.40
It is clear that the government, through its promotion of both these organisations, subscribed to the belief that the provision of live entertainment in all its forms was a crucial wartime morale booster. But to focus exclusively on their work is to overlook not only the contribution of the PES but also the fact that the foundations of two of the century’s biggest commercial theatre empires were laid during the war; the theatre-owning ‘Group’ consolidated its position, and the recently formed production company H.M. Tennent began to flourish. As we have seen, the pre-war West End puts the current one to shame with regard to its promotion of work by female playwrights, as well as that of directors such as Irene Hentschel, Auriol Lee, Leontine Sagan and Margaret Webster; and in the early 1940s the absence at war of a generation of men, as with so many other industries, helped further to consolidate women’s position in the theatre. Amongst the many women who saw their plays produced in the West End at this time were Esther McCracken, Enid Bagnold, Daphne du Maurier, Rose Franken, Margaret Mayo and Lillian Hellman.
It must be remembered too that wartime conditions prevailed throughout the first West End run of Ten Little Niggers. This was reflected in particular in the performance times, with daily matinees at 2.30 p.m. and only two evening shows per week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays at 6 p.m. The programme carried the following announcements:
Important notice
During ‘Alerts’ no trains from Piccadilly Circus to Charing Cross, Waterloo or Elephant; but there are special buses from Haymarket and Jermyn Street.
The Booking Hall, Piccadilly Circus station, is NOT an air-raid Shelter. If you wish to take shelter, see list in Vestibule.
Warning of an AIR RAID will be given by a RED electrical sign above the orchestra pit. ALL CLEAR will similarly be shown in GREEN. Patrons are advised to remain in the Theatre, but those wishing to leave will be directed to the nearest official air-raid shelter, after which the performance will be continued for so long as is practicable.
Should any news of particular interest be received during a performance it will be announced from the stage at the end of the succeeding scene or act of the play.41
And, on a lighter note,
Ladies are earnestly requested to remove their Hats or any kind of Head-dress. The rule is framed for the benefit of the audience and the Management trusts that it will appeal to everybody, and that Ladies will kindly assist in having it carried out.
Fortunately, a performance was not in progress when the St James’s Theatre suffered bomb damage at the end of February 1944. The production was forced to relocate to the Cambridge Theatre for several weeks before returning to its original home, where it continued until July, clocking up a very respectable total of 261 performances.
It may seem surprising that Christie’s biggest theatrical success to date was staged in these adverse circumstances. One reason for good ticket sales may well have been the co-operative movement’s support for the venture, not simply in terms of its direct financial input but also through its constant publicity for the production amongst its members, including the promotion of group bookings. But there was clearly also an intrinsic quality to the piece which struck a chord with wartime theatregoers. On one level, the play explores the familiar Christie themes of guilt and the nature of justice, and employs her familiar device of bringing together a diverse group of people in an isolated location. All of these ideas, however, are here developed to an extreme, enhanced by the claustrophobia of the setting and the characters’ growing anxiety in the face of the inexorable progress of a bloodthirsty unseen enemy who clearly intends that all present will be his or her victims. Paranoia sets in as the norms of social interaction begin to disintegrate in the face of a seemingly all-knowing adversary, and the characters expose their own vulnerability as they each begin to suspect the others.
In the book (in a line that is absent from the play) Vera makes the point that, after the horrors of the night, the remaining protagonists have effectively become a ‘zoo’. Christie’s play, like William Golding’s Lord of the Flies a decade later, thus examines the disintegration of social order amongst a group marooned on a small island. It does not take a huge leap of the imagination to see how this scenario might have resonated with the vulnerable inhabitants of an island state at war with a powerful enemy and where, as the programme’s notes on evacuation procedures make clear, everyone is a potential victim. During the war many of the established niceties of the theatregoing experience itself were abandoned; travel to and from theatres was a challenge (as it is to and from the island in the play) and, with most performances being matinees, evening dress and post-show dining in swanky restaurants were things of the past. At the outset of the play, in the host’s absence, dressing for dinner is ‘optional’, and the image of characters running short of food and serving up tinned meat would have had a particular resonance.
The original novel had been written on the very eve of war, but the final script of the play was not completed until the autumn of 1942, by which time the country had experienced the Blitz. Without consciously creating a wartime or a military piece Christie had exactly tapped into the contemporary zeitgeist, and her agreement to the new upbeat ending undoubtedly sealed its success in this context. In the play the two surviving characters are shown to be innocent of the ‘crimes’ of which they are accused, and their ultimate vindication, defeat of their persecutor and escape from the island thus inadvertently turned the play into a morale booster as well as a thriller. It was not the last time that Christie the playwright would find success by connecting with audiences on a subliminal level in this way; her natural empathy with her public was indicative of an instinctive appreci
ation of their concerns rather than the exercise of a particular agenda. ‘The People’ had adopted Agatha Christie as their playwright, and they could not have chosen anyone better qualified for the role.
Shortly after Ten Little Niggers had opened in London, English producer/director Albert de Courville started negotiations for an ‘exclusive US and Canadian Licence’ with permission to ‘assign to Select Operating Corp (A Shubert subsidiary)’.42 An advance of $2,500 was paid against an author’s royalty of 10 per cent, of which Christie was to receive two-thirds. Meyer and Farndale were to receive one-ninth and two-ninths respectively; Farndale was by now operating from the same address as Meyer, and clearly from this had been responsible for the majority of the project’s finance. The People’s Entertainment Society’s involvement ended with the 1944 post-West End UK tour of the production, and of West End co-producer Jay Pomeroy we hear nothing more. A note on the Hughes Massie summary memo relating to the American licence states, ‘A Christie’s two thirds temporarily held up in US against the General Tax Settlement’; this refers to an epic and, for Christie, demoralising battle with the American tax authorities that she was engaged in throughout the 1940s relating to income from all of her work.
Fifty-seven-year-old Albert de Courville seems an unlikely choice for the valuable American rights to the piece. Although he had obtained the rights with a view to the American production being a vehicle for himself as a director, his credentials in this regard could not have been more different from Irene Hentschel’s. He had made a career in London and the UK provinces as a director and promoter of light entertainment revues rejoicing in such titles such as Fun and Beauty and Flirts in Skirts before moving into film as a director of comedies and musicals. When he moved to New York in 1940, his theatrical work continued in much the same vein. The key to the deal was the intention that his rights were to be assigned to the Shuberts, and one suspects that it was probably in this role as an intermediary with Broadway’s most powerful producers that he was perceived by Cork as bringing value to the project.
Brothers Sam, Lee and Jacob J. Shubert had set up in business at the turn of the century, buying up theatre leases in their native Syracuse, New York, and setting out to challenge the then nationwide theatre-owning and production monopoly of the Klaw and Erlanger empire; they had achieved this feat by the 1920s, by which time they had interests in hundreds of theatres nationwide and controlled half of Broadway. The eldest brother, Sam, had died in a train crash in 1905, five years after they leased their first Broadway venue, the Herald Square Theatre, but Lee and ‘JJ’ had continued to provide a seemingly unstoppable momentum to the company, so that by the time Agatha Christie was working with them they had become indisputably America’s most important theatrical powerbrokers.
As Gerald Schoenfeld, who ran the Shubert Organization from 1972 to 2008, noted in the introduction to its official history, ‘these brothers were not ordinary men. For while they possessed courage, ruthlessness, and an innate intelligence, they had no regard for what others thought of them or their actions. Devoid of guilt and lacking the desire to be liked, admired, or respected, they conducted their business and personal lives as they saw fit.’43 Lee Shubert’s 1953 Times obituary remarked that the brothers ‘produced more than 500 plays and every successful performer since 1920 had at one time or another contributed to their profits. It is more difficult to say that they in return contributed much that was creative to theatre.’44 Basil Dean regarded the Shuberts as extraordinarily penny-pinching and difficult to deal with when negotiating the Broadway transfer of one of his projects, and found Lee Shubert to be particularly irksome, ‘a quiet little man with hard unrelenting eyes that belied his gentle voice . . . I grew tired of waiting about in one or other of his corridors of power, listening to angry arguments over the telephone by members of his staff, who all seemed to be living in a mild state of frenzy lest “Mr Lee’s” displeasure should put their livelihoods at risk.’45
The Shuberts were indeed legendarily tough cookies, but as Schoenfeld comments, ‘through their undying devotion these two brothers undoubtedly saved the institution of commercial theatre from the threats posed by the advent of motion pictures, the Depression, bankruptcy, and the coming of television. In retrospect they were to the theatre what Ford was to the motor car and the Wright brothers to aviation.’ They were, undoubtedly, the biggest players to date to express an interest in the work of Agatha Christie, playwright.
The immaculately maintained Shubert archives, which document over one hundred years of Broadway theatre history, demonstrate the company’s dispassionate and meticulous attention to business detail under ‘Mr Lee’s’ regime, with younger brother ‘J.J.’ a constant presence in the background. An exchange of correspondence between Lee Shubert and his lawyers in the months before the New York opening of Christie’s play shows the organisation level-headedly dealing with a complicated chain of paperwork and negotiating for improved terms right down to the wire. It is evident that, although the licence with the English producers is in the name of de Courville, negotiations are taking place directly between Hughes Massie (represented here by Christie’s New York agent, Harold Ober) and the Shubert office. Amongst other complications were the paperwork between de Courville and the Shuberts assigning his rights to them, which he did in return for 25 per cent of profits over and above his director’s fee of $750 and expenses of $1,250, and the necessity for a standard Broadway Dramatists Guild Dramatic Production Contract. Although Christie herself had become an associate member of the Guild in anticipation of an American production of Peril at End House, the Guild contract, like the contract that de Courville was assigning, was actually with Farndale and Meyer, meaning that they in turn had to become Guild associate members.
A confidential memo to Lee Shubert from Adolph Kaufman (who worked for the Shuberts’ fearsome lawyer, William Klein) clarifies that ‘Miss Christie is involved in some tax litigation and wants to be kept out of it.’46 The Shuberts nonetheless required Christie to sign a warranty that she had assigned her interest, at least on paper, to Farndale and Meyer. Although the Shuberts were entitled to 50 per cent of income from ‘stock’ (i.e. repertory) licensing, Kaufman, who was clearly as sharp as a knife, was particularly concerned that ‘reserved rights’ (i.e. those in which they did not participate) could ‘very seriously interfere with the stage performance rights’ if exercised by Christie. These included the amateur, broadcasting, television, operatic, musical comedy, play publishing and film rights. Undertakings had to be obtained that they would not in any event be exercised until after the Broadway run.47
With the film rights, Kaufman went one better. Critical to the Shuberts’ involvement was a separate deal that they negotiated with RKO48 – who had bought the film rights to the novel in 1941 – whereby, following the Broadway opening, they had the option to purchase RKO’s rights for $50,000. As it happens, the Shubert/RKO deal proved to be just the start of a complex and bitter series of wranglings concerning control of the film rights, about which no doubt another book will one day be written. In the meantime, de Courville himself was clearly playing both ends against the middle and ensuring that, whatever the outcome of the stage rights negotiations, it was a good one for himself. The fact that much of the key paperwork relating to the rights in the production does not appear to have been signed until the day before the first Broadway performance, several weeks after the production’s 5 June ‘out of town’ opening in Washington, is evidence of the Shuberts’ own confidence in the strength of their position; but the trouble they were clearly prepared to go to in order to safeguard their investment, and their apparent confidence in a lucrative outcome, is indicative of the value that they placed on Christie’s play.
The Shuberts had in fact been keeping an eye on Christie’s work for some time. An internal memo from their publicist gloats at the poor reviews received by upstart independent producer Jed Harris for Morton and Anderson’s The Fatal Alibi in 1932,49 but their archive nonetheless inclu
des file copies of the 1931 West End script of Black Coffee and of Frank Vosper’s version of Love From a Stranger. The Shuberts were no doubt right in not considering Black Coffee to be Broadway material (it had, after all, only run in London for two months) and Christie’s name, through no fault of her own, had so far been associated on Broadway only with two flops. So it is a tribute to the potency of the London success of Ten Little Niggers that the Shuberts elected to make the play Agatha Christie’s own Broadway debut.
For its US publication in 1940, the title of the book had been changed to And Then There Were None. History may however have been kind to publisher Dodd, Mead & Co. in attributing a post-civil rights motivation to them in so doing. This was, after all, the same publisher who, some forty years earlier, had changed the title of Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus to The Children of the Sea. ‘I consented to change of title under protest,’ wrote Conrad later when signing a copy. ‘The argument was that the American public would not read a book about a “Nigger”.’50 When Christie’s play opened in 1944, America was a country where racial segregation was the norm in the Southern states and in the army that was fighting in Europe, and yet the musical Carmen Jones was enjoying huge success on Broadway (‘A performance by Negroes – yes – and they do a highly creditable job!’ applauded the New York Times51). What is certain is that the play’s original title would have had very different connotations in America than in the pre-Empire Windrush UK.
The Shuberts, however, did not elect to adopt the book’s new American title for the play, but instead came up with their own; Ten Little Indians (an alternative, The Unknown Host, had also been considered). As with the American edition of the novel, the protagonists of the poem at the centre of events were duly changed to the ‘Indians’ of Septimus Winner’s original American song of the same name, although their actual fates continued to follow Frank Green’s English version. No correspondence exists to substantiate how, why or at whose instigation the play’s British title was rejected, but the play’s plot was certainly more attractive to Hollywood than the novel’s, and it was effectively now identified as a separate intellectual property; a fact that was to strengthen the Shuberts’ negotiations with film makers. There certainly appears to have been no shame in handing out audition scripts for Broadway carrying the original title, which also appears on the director’s rehearsal script and the stage manager’s prompt copy; and the first typescript of the Shuberts’ rebranded version clearly states ‘Ten Little Niggers (Indians)’. In its direct reference to the play’s ten potential murder victims, the Shuberts’ title is certainly closer to Christie’s original intention than that used for the novel in America, and it was perhaps felt that the reference to native Americans, whose ten befeathered silhouettes adorned the posters, added a touch of exotic mystery to proceedings for 1940s New York theatregoers. In any event, the new title clearly resonated with the American public in a way that the British one would not have done, and doubtless sold a great many more tickets than ‘The Unknown Host’ would have.