Curtain Up

by Julius Green

  Miss Barbara Toy, the traveller and writer, has just spent a day and a night alone on the summit of the 19,000 ft Wehni Peak, in Northern Ethiopia, from which she landed by a helicopter . . . with a sleeping bag, a camera and some food . . . She found a dilapidated church, wells filled with leaves and stones, and a crumbling fort with its heavy wooden doors ajar. She also found many passages leading to tiny cells and rooms. At the end of her stay she was taken off by the same helicopter. The lowland natives were surprised to see her return alive.82

  All of this seems a million miles away from the vicarage at St Mary Mead. My instincts tell me that there is probably a good story to be told about Barbara Toy, who abandoned an apparently promising career in the theatre to travel the world, her lesbian friend and collaborator Moie Charles who died young, and a theatrical production company called Farndale.

  Charles and Toy’s adaptation of Christie’s Murder at the Vicarage opened on 17 October 1949 at the New Theatre, Northampton, where The Stage reported that it was very well performed, particularly by Barbara Mullen as Miss Marple (‘It would be hard to find a part that suited Barbara Mullen better’83) but let down by a long drawn-out final act. The publicity leaflet at Liverpool’s Royal Court Theatre, the last venue on the eight-week pre-West End tour, once again fails to distinguish between Christie’s own work for the stage and that of her various adaptors:

  This thriller-masterpiece, adapted for the stage from her ‘best-seller’ of the same name, is perfect theatre and comes with its forceful dramatic impact and full-blooded appeal at a time when playgoers, surfeited with a procession of namby-pamby milk and water histrionics, are crying out for virile and dynamic pyrotechnics in their plays.

  Crime, brilliantly handled as it was in Agatha Christie’s earlier smash-hit successes such as Alibi, Ten Little Niggers, Love From a Stranger and Appointment with Death has proved to be the most completely satisfactory of dramatic fare, which is not surprising since it is also the most effective escapism for playgoers who yearn to be carried magically away from the monotonous humdrum of everyday life.84

  The copy-writer was no less restrained in praising the production’s two key players. Of American-born Barbara Mullen, who had forged a notable career as a West End leading lady after training in London at the Webber-Douglas School, they proclaimed, ‘she is able to bring to life with quite startling brilliance the personality of the alert-brained old lady whose penetrating perception elucidates seemingly unfathomable mysteries. Barbara Mullen, in fact, adds another gem to her collection of widely contrasting roles . . . Roles varying from 18 to 75 have been taken with equal success by Miss Mullen since she arrived in England, so the mature Miss Marple presents no difficulties.’ The last line, presumably, was by way of reassurance to those who might have feared that, at thirty-five, Mullen was unsuitably young for the role. Of popular West End leading man Reginald Tate we are told that he is ‘Equally distinguished as actor and producer [i.e. director]’ and that he ‘fills both these roles in Murder at the Vicarage. His staging of the play is carried through to achieve the dramatic results essential to a murder mystery and to retain the excitement and suspense without which a “thriller” would lose its hold and appeal. In his leading role as the easy-going artist, Lawrence Redding, he gives a performance of unusual strength and great charm.’

  Meyer appears to have secured a West End theatre well in advance on this occasion and, following the week in Liverpool, the production opened at the Playhouse Theatre on 14 December 1949. The Times reviewer commented that ‘Everyone has a motive for killing. Nobody, unhappily, has a reason for living. It is not until the final scene . . . that we become aware that there was, after all, an effective one act play in Miss Christie’s novel . . . Miss Barbara Mullen is Miss Marple, and once she is allowed to take a firm practical hold on the story she manipulates it with all possible skill.’85 Ivor Brown in the Observer was complimentary of his wife’s associates’ input – ‘Neatly knit together and tidied up for the stage by Moe Charles and Barbara Toy’ – and joined the general chorus of approval for the leading lady, whilst harbouring doubts about the production: ‘Barbara Mullen is excellent as that sharp eyed Prodnose Miss Marple, and her performance along with that of Reginald Tate and of Jack Lambert as the nice, dull, dutiful vicar, gives West End quality to a production otherwise on a less exalted level . . . the second act was very much more persuasive than the first.’86

  The production played for 126 performances and closed on 1 April 1950. Both Cork and the PES blamed the 1950 General Election for its demise; the PES’ annual report for the year stated that ‘The returns of the production Murder at the Vicarage, at the Playhouse, London, were adversely affected, in common with other shows, by the General Election, and it had to be withdrawn.’87 There was indeed a great deal of interest in the election, which was effectively the public verdict on the Labour Party’s post-war programme of nationalisation and welfare reforms, and it turned out to be a cliff-hanger, resulting in a very slim majority for Labour. But it took place on 23 February, over five weeks before the production’s eventual demise, and it seems somewhat disingenuous to link the two events. Cork wrote to Christie in Baghdad to reassure her that the production had run for long enough to become a valuable property for amateur and repertory companies.88 And the People’s Entertainment Society, the co-operative movement’s unusual and initially highly successful venture into show business, continued until 1955 when, following a decline in its fortunes, it went into voluntary liquidation.

  In the summer of 1944, with Irene Hentschel’s masterful production of Ten Little Niggers still running in the West End and on tour, and the Shuberts about to open their hugely successful production on Broadway, Agatha Christie, playwright, had the theatrical world at her feet. By the end of 1946 that dream had been shattered. Her highly imaginative script for Towards Zero had been rejected, the exotically located Appointment with Death had sunk without trace, and Hidden Horizon (without its ‘alternative’ ending) was a laughing stock on Broadway. Perhaps more damagingly yet, her producers, and even her own agent, had started to characterise her dramatic work as something that could yield huge dividends in secondary markets and subsidiary rights if given even the most perfunctory of ‘first-class’ presentations, and they had no hesitation in deliberately confusing the issue of who had actually penned a particular script if that assisted sales of tickets or licences. Here, of course, Christie’s popularity as a writer of detective novels was, to an extent, undermining her legitimacy as a playwright. Christie herself was, as a playwright, more than happy to work in a number of different genres and to tackle all sorts of scenarios and issues; but whilst egotistical actors leapt at the chance to play Poirot on stage, her domestic drama A Daughter’s a Daughter, arguably her finest dramatic work to date, remained on the shelf in the office of Basil Dean, the producer who had given Clemence Dane her West End playwriting debut. And whilst Dane’s agent, Spencer Curtis Brown, would no doubt have wept to see the global income generated by the dramatisations of both Ten Little Niggers and Murder on the Nile, not to mention some of the third-party adaptations, it was to be his client who would secure page after page in the history of female playwriting.

  It is my belief that a proper understanding of when, where, how, why and by whom a play was first presented is critical to an appreciation of the subsequent fortunes and reputation of both the play and its writer. Biographer Laura Thompson’s succinct summary of events may arguably be easier to digest (‘The play Hidden Horizon flourished after its initial difficulties and it, too, went to New York’),89 but this is to overlook the complexities of the production process and the extraordinary array of personalities involved in it; the very elements of theatre which Christie herself found endlessly fascinating, if at times perplexing.

  ‘I should always write my one book a year,’ Christie wrote in her autobiography, ‘I was sure of that. Dramatic writing would be my adventure – that would always be, and always must be hit and miss. You can have
play after play a success, and then for no reason, a series of flops. Why? Nobody really knows. I’ve seen it happen with many playwrights. I have seen a play which to my mind was just as good or better than one of their successes fail – because it did not catch the fancy of the public; or because it was written at the wrong time; or because the cast made such a difference to it. Yes, play-writing is not a thing I could be sure of. It was a glorious gamble every time, and I liked it that way.’90

  Despite her apparent acceptance of the vagaries of theatre, we should not underestimate the damage to Christie’s confidence as a playwright caused by the setbacks of the 1940s; the fact that she allowed Moie Charles and Barbara Toy to adapt a book that she herself had previously earmarked for dramatisation (although many other such requests, from both established writers and amateurs, were turned down) is indicative of the insecurity that she must now have felt about her own playwriting abilities. Perhaps even more telling is the following passage from her autobiography: ‘I suppose it was Ten Little Niggers that set me on the path of being a playwright as well as a writer of books. It was then that I decided that no-one was going to adapt my books except myself: I would choose what books would be adapted, and only those books that were suitable for adapting. The next one I tried my hand on, though several years later, was The Hollow . . .’91

  This is to ignore completely her own Towards Zero, Appointment with Death and Murder on The Nile, as well as Charles and Toy’s Murder at the Vicarage. Such rewriting of history specifically in order to exclude mention of a period of heartache is in a league with the phrase ‘so ended my first married life’ at the point in her autobiography where one might expect some explanation of her expedition to Harrogate. As far as she is concerned, the events simply didn’t happen.

  At the end of 1950, as she turned sixty, it must have seemed to Christie that her playwriting ambitions were to come to nothing. And then, suddenly and extraordinarily, all that was to change. Within four years she would become the undisputed Queen of the West End.

  Act Two

  Saunders Saves the Day

  SCENE ONE

  The Binkie Effect

  British post-war theatre was characterised by the dominance of the H.M. Tennent production empire, known as ‘the Firm’, and the theatre building-owning cartel, known as ‘the Group’. Whilst the two were not unconnected through various directorships and shareholdings, it is notable that in the UK the dominant theatrical production company and the major building-owning interests were at least nominally controlled by different people (the means of production and distribution, if you like, were technically separate entities), whereas in the USA at the time they were both directly controlled by the Shuberts.

  ‘The Group’ was an interconnected collection of theatre-owning and producing entities which had started to establish links in the early 1940s. It involved such potent ‘bricks and mortar’ managements as Prince Littler, Stoll Theatres, Associated Theatre Properties, Moss Empires and Howard & Wyndham, and included theatre buildings throughout the country as well as in London’s West End. While no single company or individual within the Group could be accused of operating a monopoly, the labyrinthine network of long and short building leases, directorships and shareholdings that bound it together effectively created one. In 1952 the Federation of Theatre Unions (comprising Equity, the Musicians’ Union and the National Association of Theatrical and Kine Employees) published a 280-page book called Theatre Ownership in Britain, which lists and analyses the directorships and holdings of all the major building owners and production companies. It is not exactly a thrilling read, but it is astonishing in its analysis and exposure of what was clearly a highly organised cartel, with a number of independently owned theatre buildings struggling to exist in its shadow.

  H.M. Tennent Ltd was formed in 1936 by Harry Tennent and his assistant Hugh ‘Binkie’ Beaumont, who had been working together as bookers for the Group’s Moss Empires and Howard & Wyndham Theatres, and who had identified a gap in the market for a new production company. Following Tennent’s death five years later, the enigmatic Binkie Beaumont had found himself managing director of the fledgling enterprise, and about to launch the most successful business strategy ever conceived by a commercial theatre producer in the UK. The company was linked to the Group through substantial shareholdings by two of its major theatre-owning players, but H.M. Tennent itself had no building-owning interests and Binkie was clearly identified as its boss.

  Entertainment tax, a levy on ticket sales, had been introduced in 1916 as a wartime measure. In 1942, at which time the tax typically accounted for over a third of the ticket price, a scheme was set up offering exemption to non-profit distributing theatre companies whose productions were partly educational. The judgement as to whether a play was educational (or, indeed, ‘partly’ educational) was put in the hands of three CEMA-appointed ‘experts’, who rapidly became known as the ‘three blind mice’. The 1946 Finance Act revised these terms so that the aims of the company itself, rather than necessarily all of its productions, were required to be partly educational, rendering the mice redundant. Crucially, there was nothing to prevent the company itself from trading at a profit, provided such profits were not distributed to investors. In 1942, Beaumont had established Tennent Plays Ltd, a non-profit distributing and therefore tax-exempt company, to run alongside his commercial company H.M. Tennent Ltd. Following a spat with the tax authorities in 1947, this was reconstituted as Tennent Productions Ltd. The two companies shared an office, staff and board members, many of whom were accountants and solicitors. In a move to lend the company credibility with the newly formed Arts Council – whose endorsement (‘in association with the Arts Council’), though not essential to qualifying for tax exemption, clearly gave its operation kudos and legitimacy – Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud were added to the board of Tennent Productions Ltd.

  The tax-exempt non-profit distributing company paid the commercial company £40 per week for managing each of its productions and, unlike its competitors, retained the full ticket price, thereby quickly accumulating cash reserves that could, by definition, only be spent on further productions. At the same time, the commercial company continued to present its own productions. As a motor for the creation of a theatrical monopoly based on volume of work this was an extraordinarily productive model, and the two companies between them soon established complete dominance over the industry, with what appeared to be exclusive access to the best theatres, writers and performers based on their ability to guarantee an unprecedented volume of high quality work. Along with this, of course, went (unproven) accusations of using their cash reserves to pay over the odds for theatre rents, actors’ fees and authors’ royalties, as well as a widely held perception that the companies operated blacklists and that you either worked for Tennents or you didn’t work at all.

  The ‘educational’ aims of Tennent Productions, as reflected in its repertoire, and the legality of its tax-exempt status were frequently challenged by rival managements, with matters coming to a head over their 1948 production of Daphne du Maurier’s September Tide, directed by Irene Hentschel and starring Gertude Lawrence, and the following year’s A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Laurence Olivier and starring Vivien Leigh. By 1950 they had survived the scrutiny of both an Inland Revenue Board of Enquiry and a Parliamentary Select Committee and, although the Arts Council’s increasingly controversial ‘association’ had eventually been dropped, the twin companies’ dominance of the West End appeared to be unshakeable.

  Kitty Black, Tennents’ loyal and long-serving office manager and production assistant, in her understandably uncritical book Upper Circle, maintains that ‘To all the critics of Binkie’s methods and the acrimonious condemnation of the stranglehold he exercised over the London theatres, there is always only one reply. If he could do it, why couldn’t anyone else?’1 This is somewhat disingenuous. The fact is that by the time other managements fully understood Binkie’s business model, his position was unassa
ilable. It was simply too late to mount an effective challenge, even through the application of Binkie’s own strategy. The monopoly system works very effectively in theatre, as the Shuberts had demonstrated in New York, largely due to the finite number of buildings available in which it is possible to operate. And once a particular operator is in place, it is very difficult to shake them.

  At the centre of all this sat Binkie himself, in his offices at the Globe (now Gielgud) Theatre: the archetypal smooth operator, whose personal charms wooed both the Arts Council and the leading players of the day, and whose management style was characterised as an ‘iron fist in a velvet glove’.2 In the darker corners of the West End there were mutterings that the industry had fallen under the control of a gay mafia, but from the audience’s point of view there had never been a better time to go to the theatre, with an array of immaculately presented, impressively cast productions filling London’s best theatres every night. In Kitty Black’s words:

  While Harry [Tennent] concentrated on the bricks and mortar managements, Binkie used his charm and incredible energy on the stars, male and female, who guaranteed the success of the productions, wooed authors, directors and agents who provided the raw material . . . his diary was crammed with lunch dates and supper engagements . . . I have also heard that he was a dedicated poker player, keeping it up sometimes all through the night. I could well imagine those blue eyes giving nothing away while he treated the card game much as he did the wheeling and dealing he was carrying out in the cut-throat business of the theatre world.3