Curtain Up

by Julius Green

  Shortly after the opening of Appointment with Death at the Piccadilly, the long-awaited pre-West End tour of Hidden Horizon finally began, over a year after the play’s try-out production in Dundee. In the intervening period, Sullivan had sold his company’s rights in the project to Alec Rea36 whose company Reandco had transferred Sullivan from the Embassy to the West End in Black Coffee in 1931. Along with his business partner E.P. Clift, Rea now become the producer of the project, and Sullivan himself remained in the role that had been written for him. On this occasion, Reandco co-produced in association with seasoned tour booker and promoter Barry O’Brien, who had produced a post-West End tour of Peril at End House starring Sullivan, and who was presumably responsible for booking the theatres for Hidden Horizon. In mid-February Agatha wrote to Max, ‘Hidden Horizon is going into rehearsal March 12th and has first production at Wimbledon on April 9th. Then Birmingham and then Cardiff 23rd. By which time you might be home and we would have a visit to Ros combined with seeing Larry Sullivan in his dog collar as Canon Pennefather!’37

  The response at Wimbledon, where Ten Little Niggers had also opened, was encouraging. Under the headline ‘Wimbledon premiere’, The Stage announced, ‘On Monday last at Wimbledon, Alec Rea and E.P. Clift presented a new play by Agatha Christie entitled Hidden Horizon. Any play by Agatha Christie is bound to attract attention and Hidden Horizon is no exception.’38 The fact that the play had actually premiered in Dundee the previous year is conveniently overlooked. The review went on, ‘There are numerous “situations”, plots, clues, with plenty of excitement and thrills. It is a cleverly worked-out play . . . The cast is a strong one. Francis L. Sullivan as Canon Pennefather . . . gives a fine rendering of the character of a middle-aged clergyman.’

  By June, though, Cork was writing to Agatha with disappointing news:

  I’m afraid I have not any good news for you about Hidden Horizon. Business was not very good either in Hammersmith or in Glasgow, and although at the latter place there was a very strong counter-attraction and [director Claud] Gurney says Appointment With Death left a prejudice against Christie plays, I do find it rather disappointing. But the disturbing thing is that the short tour ends this week . . . and Clift tells me that he is quite unable to get a suitable London theatre. His suggestion was that you should be asked whether you would be prepared to grant a further extension of the option under which Clift has to put it on in London by July 12th . . . I think I know the answer to this without asking you. He then asked how we would view the possibility of putting it on at the Westminster Theatre – he has not the offer of it but he thinks he might be able to arrange it. My view is that the Westminster is quite unsuitable for this play, and I would be prepared to argue that the Westminster is not a ‘first class West End Theatre’ as required by the contract. Do you think it is? . . . Probably from a hard business point of view it might be better for you for the present contract to run out, which would mean that the projected American production would come on first under a contract granted from you as provided by the last lot of papers that you signed. If it were successful in America, we would be in a very strong position to deal with an English manager. But – and I am afraid this letter seems to be all buts and dashes – I am afraid your friend Sullivan may feel rather badly about it.39

  The end of the war in Europe had caused a momentary hiatus in the West End that contributed to the demise of Appointment with Death, but ultimately created an unprecedented boom in theatre attendance, as a celebratory mood prevailed and the long process of demobbing commenced, swelling the number of potential attendees. In August Cork wrote to Agatha again:

  I have not written to you about Hidden Horizon because, despite everyone’s protestations, there have not been any developments. I have just spoken to Clift again, and he tells me that though he is doing his damdest there is no progress to report. Such business as is being done today has never been known among London theatres, and there is not a single show that need come off . . .

  I realise how unsatisfactory you must find all this, but I doubt if any other management could have done better – certainly the Tennents seem to have a lot of shows on, but they have many more plays that they have bought and cannot find theatres for. I suggest that we do not grant an extension to Sullivan and Clift in case another opportunity presents itself, but allow them to carry on with their efforts (which they will do as they have the production and every confidence in it) on the understanding that their position will be regularised if they can produce an acceptable proposition within a reasonable time.40

  The possible American production of Hidden Horizon that Cork refers to in his earlier letter was being planned by the Shuberts under an option that they eventually obtained from Reandco at the beginning of August 1945.41 The UK producer would not normally have been entitled to sell the US rights in advance of opening in the West End, but Hughes Massie had given them a special dispensation to do so in order to facilitate the sale without the Shuberts having to wait for Reandco to present the play in London. Presumably sensing that there were problems with their commissioned Towards Zero script, and eager to have a follow-up ready for Ten Little Indians (which had finally closed on Broadway the previous month), the Shuberts seem to have taken on Hidden Horizon as a fall-back position. Ten Little Indians’ Albert de Courville was lined up to direct and again named as a co-licensee and entitled to 25 per cent of profits, indicating that he was regarded once more as a key player in securing the title for them from Hughes Massie (via Ober in New York). Significantly, the Shuberts at no point showed any interest in Appointment with Death, even though its American option was in the gift of Bertie Meyer, with whom they had struck the deal for Ten Little Indians.

  Towards Zero, though, would have had greater currency as a title in America at the time than a retitled Death on the Nile, and the Shuberts did their best to safeguard their investment and make it work. On the day that they had issued their commissioning contract to Christie for Towards Zero, their lawyer Adolph Kaufman had spoken with Ivan von Auw of the Ober office about adding a clause that would enable them to make changes for the script in the event that it was ‘not fit for American theatre’. But, he reported to Lee Shubert at the time, ‘Mr Van Auw stated that from his past experience with Miss Christie, she has always been very co-operative with publishers in the matter of changes and he sees no reason why she would not co-operate in this case. He thinks this question should be left to the future because, very likely, you will not need many changes in any event.’42

  Changes were duly requested, and in January 1945, Cork wrote to Christie, ‘I hear from Harold Ober that Lee Shubert is enthusiastic about your play Towards Zero, but he is suggesting certain slight alterations in the last act, which have been posted to us by airmail. I should think these are just “producer’s alterations” which I believe you anticipated.’43

  It seems though that, in the event, Christie was too busy to undertake any changes and, following exchanges with Hughes Massie in March, an American writer, Robert Harris, had eventually been engaged to carry out some script doctoring. On 5 June 1945 the Shuberts signed an agreement to pay Harris $1,000 ‘to edit and re-write for us any or all parts of the play now known as Towards Zero as shall be designated by the undersigned’.44 Harris was to waive all his rights and would not receive a credit on the play. According to a memo from Kaufman to Lee Shubert on 30 June, ‘The work performed by Harris becomes the property of Select [one of the Shuberts’ companies] and he has no claim of ownership or title to the work.’ It added that he ‘has already delivered the rewritten work and been paid in full’.45

  I was first set on the trail of the Towards Zero script by a letter from Lee Shubert to Christie (care of Hughes Massie) dated 18 October 1945. It reads,

  Dear Miss Christie,

  We ‘tried out’ the above play this summer and regret to say unsuccessfully. The trouble, as Mr de Courville pointed out, lies in the last act, and, even though we went to considerable expense in an effort
to correct the act, we found the climax came too suddenly and the final situation was not plausible to the audience.

  We therefore decided to postpone the New York production of the play until you yourself had an opportunity to put things right. It would, in our opinion, be unwise to produce a successor to the very popular Ten Little Indians unless we felt we had an opportunity of topping, or at least equalling the success of your other play. It would not only be bad for us, but also for the name of Agatha Christie, which we wish to keep very high on Broadway . . .

  Would you be good enough to undertake the work on the play yourself for, after all, we know of no one else competent enough to do it. You know, of course, the difference in the returns between a mediocre play and a good one and we hope you will agree to make the necessary alterations and give us the necessary time for producing same.

  With kind regards I am sincerely yours,

  Lee Shubert46

  For Shubert himself to write to Christie in this way is indicative of the perceived value of her work to his company, but the most significant point here is that he is clearly discussing a work that, by October 1945, has already been performed in America in a ‘try-out’ production, albeit not in New York. Within hours of phoning the Shubert archive I was advised that they held copies not only of the original commissioning agreement, but also of the script. Having cast myself in the role of detective in this particular story, I felt that it was essential that I see the evidence first hand as I had with the scripts for The Lie, The Stranger and others. This was much more than a missing Christie play; it was a missing play that had actually been performed, the only play that she wrote as a result of a commission, and the only work of hers to receive its world premiere in America in her lifetime. The Shubert archive, as it happens, held three copies of this unique and previously unknown script, one of which has now kindly been donated by the Shubert Organisation to the Agatha Christie archive.

  Like the novel, Christie’s play is set at Lady Tressilian’s house on the coast. It follows the same plot concerning a man who flaunts his new wife in front of his previous one; and a murder, the perpetrator of which comes close to successfully framing another suspect, and has constructed the whole scenario in the hope of disposing of the wrongly accused individual via the hangman’s noose (hence the original magazine serialisation title, Come and Be Hanged!). It is a neat plot with a surprise outcome, but it is no Ten Little Niggers in terms of construction and consequent dramatic potential. Instead, as is often the case with Christie’s stage work, she takes the opportunity to focus on characterisation and motivation, which is of particular interest to her in a story the premise of which is to explore how, through people’s interactions, the ‘zero hour’ of murder is actually arrived at.

  Superintendent Battle, for whom this was his last appearance in a novel, is absent from the play’s dramatis personae, and local CID man Inspector Leach is left to do the honours. A cast of thirteen take part in the three-act drama (totalling five scenes), which takes place over a period of eight days. Intriguingly, the piece is set in the open air, on the terrace and in the garden of the house and on the adjacent cliff path. We see a garden wall, a large rock at the top of the cliff and a sea view across to the hotel on the other side of the bay. Audrey, the play’s female protagonist, regularly encounters the failed suicide Angus McWhirter on the cliff path, where they engage in discussions about issues of mortality:

  ANGUS: . . . If life holds nothing worth living for – the only sensible thing is to get out.

  AUDREY: Oh no – oh no! I don’t want to believe that . . . one’s life might be valuable.

  ANGUS: A man’s the best judge of that himself.

  AUDREY: I meant valuable to someone else.

  ANGUS: If a man’s all that valuable to someone else, I doubt that he’d want to commit suicide at all. His natural vanity would prevent it.

  AUDREY: One’s life might be valuable to someone one had never seen.

  ANGUS: I’d be interested to hear how you make that out?

  AUDREY: I’m being stupid, perhaps, but it seems to me that life is a little like a play – everyone has a part.

  ANGUS: (quoting rather sententiously) ‘All the world’s a stage and every man a player’. Is that your meaning?

  AUDREY: (Smiling) Oh, I know that Shakespeare put it a good deal better. What I’m trying to say is – (breaks off)

  How difficult it is to put one’s ideas into words.

  ANGUS: Go on. I’d be interested to hear just what you have in mind.

  AUDREY: (slowly and with difficulty) The actors in a play depend on each other – and so does the action of the play. If a man decides to make a final exit, shall we say, in the first act – what’s to happen in the third act when he has perhaps a small, but very important part – only a few lines, perhaps, but without them the play goes to pieces – the action is meaningless – all because a small part actor who didn’t think his part sufficiently important, has walked out on the Company.

  Following this, of course, McWhirter goes on to play a significant role in the story’s resolution. Anyone familiar with Gerald Verner’s 1956 drawing-room set adaptation of the novel will immediately recognise that this is an entirely different play. Verner’s eleven characters, only six of which are shared with Christie’s version, include Battle but not McWhirter. Christie’s work is a far more dramatically ambitious piece on all levels, but one can see why the Shuberts were perplexed by it.

  A check in the New York Times archive for 1945 quickly revealed where and when the try-out production of their new Christie script, as doctored by Robert Harris, had taken place: ‘Towards Zero, another murder mystery by Agatha Christie, will be tested for the Shuberts by Arthur J. Beckhard on Martha’s Vineyard on September 11. Clarence Derwent is directing the cast, which includes Elfrida Derwent, Althea Murphy, Shirley Collier, Rand Elliot, Ned Payne, Esther Mitchell and J.P. Wilson.’47 Arthur J. Beckhard was a prolific producer-director and Martha’s Vineyard resident, who regularly promoted seasons and Broadway try-outs at the Playhouse there. London-born Clarence Derwent was a respected actor and director who carved a successful early career in the UK before moving to America where, from 1946 to 1952, he was President of American Actors’ Equity, which still gives out an annual award he set up to recognise the work of ‘supporting’ actors on Broadway; their UK counterpart also presents an award for supporting actors in his name in the West End. Earlier in the year Derwent had directed Diana Barrymore in the short-lived Broadway premiere of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and his wife, Elfrida Derwent, played Lady Tressilian in his production of Towards Zero.

  The New York Times appears to have got the date of the production wrong by a week; it seems that the world premiere of Agatha Christie’s Towards Zero actually took place at Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse on Tuesday 4 September 1945, two days after the formal surrender of Japan, following the unleashing on Hiroshima and Nagasaki of weapons of mass destruction not dissimilar to those described by Christie in Black Coffee over two decades previously. The Martha’s Vineyard Gazette of 7 September provides, as far as I know, the only critical appraisal of this unique theatrical event. Under the headline ‘A New Mystery Play: Characteristic Touches of popular writer Make an Engrossing Play’ it ran the following review:

  A new Agatha Christie mystery play, Towards Zero, is this week’s production at Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse, on East Chop . . . The action takes place on the walled terrace of Lady Tressilian’s house, Gull’s Nest, on the high coastal rocks of a place called Salt Creek, the atmosphere of which is excellently realized by the stage setting of Pamella Judson-Styles . . .

  As so often in Agatha Christie stories, the apparent facts do not coincide with the real facts, which is the sort of mystification the reader or the audience can follow with suspense and see resolved with a sense of surprise and satisfaction . . . The title of the play derives from exchanges of philosophy between Audrey and a roving Scot named McWhirter, who appears from time to t
ime on the coastal path . . . Events move, it is pointed out, towards a zero hour of murder, with people gathered from different places as if by appointment . . . The play has been well staged by Clarence Derwent, and the cast is good.48

  Given that this was presumably the doctored version, of which there appears to be no surviving copy, it seems not to have differed significantly from the script delivered by Christie in December the previous year. It is notable the care with which the complex exterior setting appears to have been executed for what was evidently intended in the first instance as a one-week run, and the detailed description of this set in Christie’s script provides the answer to another little mystery. The Agatha Christie archive contains a small, beautifully executed watercolour which recreates in every detail the play’s setting as specified by Christie. On the back of it is written ‘Sketch of Scene – Towards Zero’, but until the discovery of this script there was no explanation for it. The picture bears no relation to Gerald Verner’s 1956 script and, whilst it is not a technical design drawing for a set, it is completely uninhabited and is an artist’s impression specifically of the relevant buildings and landscape rather than of a moment from the novel. Now that we know what it portrays, my belief is that Christie commissioned the painting so that she could visualise the unusual layout of the stage while she was writing and plan the characters’ positions on it and their entrances and exits. It is signed ‘H. Francis Clarke’ (or possibly Clark with a smudge), offering the intriguing prospect that it may have been the work of the distinguished landscape architect Frank Clark, who was resident in Hampstead (not far from Christie’s Lawn Road address) at this time.