by Julius Green
It was also presumably his family who put up for sale his annotated director’s scripts for some of the Christie plays he directed, along with a small amount of correspondence from the playwright. I was very kindly given access to these items by an antiquarian bookshop which had purchased them at auction for resale, and will refer to them as they become relevant in our story. The antiquarian book market has not always been a friend to those protecting the Christie legacy, particularly as a quantity of original manuscripts bearing the Hughes Massie label have unaccountably come into circulation in recent years, but in this instance it came up trumps and provided a unique insight into the realities of Gregg’s involvement. Although two of the Christie plays that Gregg directed were successes, and doubtless owed much of that success to the care that he invested in their production, it is all too apparent that he had no real regard for either the plays or the playwright. Christie was no fool, and doubtless detected this trait in him, so whilst she commends his work in private correspondence with others, I cannot imagine that his omission from her autobiography is entirely accidental. It is not my own intention to underplay Gregg’s role in the story of Agatha Christie, playwright, but it is a sadness that the discourtesy of his book will forever taint the memory of his contribution.
Saunders arranged to introduce Gregg to Christie over lunch at the Carlton Grill, at what was also to be his own first meeting with her. The venue was Saunders’ suggestion and Agatha was accompanied by Max, along with Rosalind – who had remarried the previous year – and her new husband Anthony Hicks. Trained in Oriental Studies and as a barrister, although he never practised, Hicks was to provide a calm, reassuring and trusted voice in the conduct of the family’s business affairs, and became a valued advisor to Cork in the management of the ever-growing Christie brand.
‘Everything depended on the impression I made, and no First Night has ever made me feel so terrified,’ confesses Saunders.15 To an extent he had already proved himself with his commitment to the tour of Murder at the Vicarage, but the real hurdle was Gregg’s lack of credibility as a director, not to mention the fact that Saunders had persuaded him to take on the role of Cristow as well, offering him prominent ‘star’ billing on the production’s publicity.
Both Saunders and Gregg recall the fateful meeting in great detail. I will opt for Saunders’ account:
Her husband, Professor Max Mallowan, said very little, but this wonderfully kind man must have known the strain I was under. Anthony Hicks, her son-in-law, tried to ease things by talking on every subject under the sun, from the political situation to the difficulty of telling the difference between claret and burgundy. Agatha’s daughter, Rosalind, frankly frightened me. I was to learn what enormous fun she is. But she would be the first to agree that she looks very forbidding in certain circumstances, and I felt at the time she was keeping a careful watch on me in case I slipped my hand into Agatha’s handbag and knocked off her purse . . . Agatha of course was her usual shy self.
The meeting apparently went well despite a faux pas from Gregg, when he claimed to have preferred the ‘book’ of Black Coffee to the play. This would have been doubly embarrassing for Saunders, who had optioned the touring rights to Black Coffee two weeks before he signed the West End contract for The Hollow. Evidently designed as a follow-up to the successful tour of Murder at the Vicarage, his new production of Black Coffee went on the road in 1951 starring Kenneth Kent as Poirot, and doubtless provided a useful source of regular income for Saunders to balance the initially unpredictable fortunes of The Hollow. RADA-trained Kent had been a pre-war stalwart of the Old Vic Company, and appears to have been the ‘go to’ performer when casting the role of Napoleon on stage, resulting in his appearance in the role in no fewer than four productions. Casting a Napoleon as Poirot arguably has some logic to it, and he had also played Professor Challenger in Saunders’ ill-fated Conan Doyle adaptation.
Once plans were under way for The Hollow, Saunders also took a West End option on Black Coffee, possibly by way of an insurance policy.16 In the end, the option was never exercised, as matters had begun to develop rapidly in new directions; but Christie took the opportunity to update the twenty-year-old script for the tour, and this forms the basis of the current ‘acting edition’. Saunders makes no mention of the Black Coffee tour. Gregg does, which makes sense as it was running when he was working on The Hollow; but Gregg in turn makes no mention of the fact that Saunders’ first ‘Christie’ was Murder at the Vicarage.
As Bertie Meyer had predicted, casting The Hollow was to be no easy task. Whilst the characters themselves are well drawn, none of them has sufficient stage time to be a really attractive vehicle for a star actor. Gregg, of course, saw this as a sign of Christie’s lack of experience as a playwright. I think it more likely to have been a sign of her extensive experience of dealing with star actors, and of her dislike of the manner in which they had been inclined to hijack her work when given the opportunity to do so. According to Saunders, his friend the actors’ agent Dorothy Mather, of the company Film Rights, said, ‘I have read the script and I beg you, dear Peter, not to put this play on. It is awful.’17 As it happens, she greatly enjoyed the production when she saw it on tour and provided two actors when some of the cast were replaced prior to the West End.
At this point, though, financing The Hollow proved no easier than casting it. In the absence of ‘substantial resources’ of his own, Saunders initially approached ‘the Group’, in the form of Howard & Wyndham, hoping that their involvement might also help to secure crucial pre-West End touring dates. But, although they had been happy enough to back Meyer’s production of Murder at the Vicarage, for a production with Saunders at the helm they declined.
Undeterred, Saunders next approached the Arts Council. The Hollow was to be produced in 1951, the year of the Festival of Britain. Running from May to September, to mark the centenary of 1851’s Great Exhibition, the Festival was intended to celebrate Britain’s contribution to the arts, science and technology, with the opening of the newly built Royal Festival Hall as its centrepiece. The Arts Council of Great Britain, the post-war successor to CEMA, was a sponsor of several key events, and had encouraged theatre producers to apply for funding or guarantees against loss. Saunders claims that the council of the Society of West End Theatre Managers delayed relaying this invitation to the society’s full membership, which resulted in his application being submitted too late. In reality, although Saunders made a good case for the inclusion of The Hollow as a funded Festival event, his application was roundly rejected. The Arts Council’s secretary general, Mary Glasgow, wrote advising him that the Arts Council felt that ‘a single play on that scale is one that should be able to pay its way as an ordinary commercial proposition without any subsidy, and that it has not, in their opinion, any strong Festival appeal.’18 This was the same Arts Council that had unblushingly endorsed Binkie Beaumont’s hardly uncommercial endeavours; but Binkie had ensured his future by bedazzling John Maynard Keynes, one of its founding fathers, with his particular brand of theatrical stardust way back in the CEMA days.
Like many books with such titles, Methuen Drama’s Modern British Playwriting: the 1950s makes no mention of Christie’s contribution as a playwright. But it does contain an interesting interview with Anthony Field, finance director of the Arts Council from 1957 to 1985. The interviewer asks, ‘When you first started, what were the criteria on which you were assessing [theatre]?’ Field responds, ‘Well a number of us evolved this over my early years, and if an organisation applied to us for a grant and say it was for a drama company presenting Agatha Christie plays on the end of the pier in Blackpool, it would go to the drama department, and the drama department would say, you know, “We’re not interested: Agatha Christie plays, end of the pier, you know, that should pay for itself”, so it would never come to our finance department at all . . .’19
I have no axe to grind with Field, who in his lifetime did enormous good as a promoter and advocate of both commer
cial and subsidised theatre, and in any case is here discussing the assessment methods of the Arts Council drama department rather than necessarily his own. What is instructive, though, is the equation of Agatha Christie with ‘end of the pier’ and the assumption that her work is automatically disqualified for funding. Field, as it happens, was responsible for persuading the Arts Council to help fund the young Cameron Mackintosh’s 1978 production of My Fair Lady, originally staged in collaboration with the Haymarket Theatre in Leicester.20 One can only assume that Mackintosh would have had less luck with the Arts Council ten years earlier when, aged twenty-two, he was producing tours of Black Coffee, Murder at the Vicarage, Love From a Stranger and Witness for the Prosecution, and giving interviews declaring his intention to tour Christie plays every year.21 The fact is that Saunders’ spirited attempt to garner Arts Council funding never stood a chance, not because it was an inherently commercial endeavour (which it wasn’t), but because of the name of the playwright. The Arts Council’s ethic, as it turned out, was very different from that of the People’s Entertainment Society.
With his options running out, Saunders decided to swallow his pride and approach the one man who could ‘command’ a star to appear in the play. ‘I wrote to Binkie Beaumont and asked if I could come and see him on business.’22 At the ensuing meeting, Beaumont was courtesy itself. ‘He made me feel I was the only person in the world who mattered at that moment,’ says Saunders, and he promised to co-produce and find a star if he liked the play. But, of course, he didn’t. This was probably the first time that a play with Agatha Christie’s name on it had been across Binkie’s desk since he and H.M. Tennent had programmed the Love From a Stranger tour into Howard & Wyndham theatres.
The official line on Beaumont’s rejection of The Hollow is given in Richard Huggett’s biography of the ‘Eminence Grise of the West End’. Huggett’s obsequious prose is symptomatic of the reverence in which Beaumont’s name is held to this day in certain theatrical circles:
He was, at all times, rather less concerned with making money than in doing plays which interested and excited him, plays which offered splendid opportunities to his favourite actors and stars, plays which would add lustre to the Firm’s image. In short, it had to be a Tennent play, a category which it would be difficult to define, but was always easy to recognise. Anything which he felt did not qualify would be turned down instantly no matter how much money it was likely to make. Many of these were produced by rival managements with great success but Binkie was unresentful for he had little professional jealousy. He turned down an offer to do Agatha Christie’s first play [sic], The Hollow, and thus lost the chance of making history with The Mousetrap, a fact which Peter Saunders has related with some relish, and considerable detail, in his book, The Mousetrap Man. Binkie didn’t mind. It wasn’t a Tennent play and thus he would have no interest in it.23
I suspect, however, that equally important was the fact that the brusque and businesslike Saunders was not a ‘Binkie’ producer; Beaumont had been happy enough to work with Frank Vosper on Love From a Stranger.
Whilst it might have improved Christie’s credibility within the industry to be included in Tennents’ rosta of women playwrights, which included Daphne du Maurier, Lillian Hellman and Dodie Smith, Beaumont’s rejection of The Hollow proved to be a lucky escape for Saunders, who was thereby saved from being the junior partner in all future Christie projects. Without help from Tennents, the Group or the Arts Council, Saunders was forced to produce and raise the finance for the project himself, which ultimately proved to be the best thing that could have happened to him. His company’s repertoire of thrillers and comedies had in the end proved impossible to pass off as even partly ‘educational’, and entertainment tax exemption had thus been forfeited. This meant, though, that he was permitted to distribute profits to investors. And with this business model in mind, he now set about raising funds from a small group of family, friends and business associates. All of whom were about to make a great deal of money.
Meanwhile, an inspired piece of novelty casting had solved the problem of finding a star to lead the piece. Born in the British colony of Basutoland (now Lesotho), the Paris-trained actress and comedienne Jeanne de Casalis had started her stage career in New York and France before moving to London in 1921. Her lasting claim to fame was the creation, in 1931, of the hair-brained radio character Mrs Feather, reviewed thus in her Times obituary:
Mrs Feather, whose adventures continued throughout the 1930s, provided a flawless reflection of the surface of life as lived by a particular type of woman at a particular social level; while Jeanne de Casalis’s invention did not attempt to probe the deeper mysteries of the feminine character, it gaily and truthfully surveyed social activities and attitudes. Some of Mrs Feather’s charm can be found in Mrs Feather’s Diary, which Jeanne de Casalis published in 1936, but the printed page does not convey the intonations, the polish and the precision of timing and technique which she brought to her radio monologues.24
Casting a performer known to the public principally for a comic radio role was a high-risk strategy, and Max Mallowan for one, was not enamoured with the production’s leading lady, describing her as ‘that celebrated comedienne Jeanne de Casalis, who acted throughout as the Queen Bee, to the detriment of the hive’.25 He was, as it happens, no more taken with Cicely Courtneidge’s interpretation in a later revival, remarking that her performance ‘reminded me how often a production is a battle between the playwright and the actor, and how difficult it is for the producer [i.e. director] to reconcile the two. When he succeeds, he deserves an artistic triumph.’ But de Casalis proved a box office draw and, once she had settled into the role, turned out to be an accomplished performer who served the project well.
In January 1951, Christie, responding to a newspaper announcement of the forthcoming production, complained to Edmund Cork, ‘Don’t like the “thriller” and “whodunnit” publicity – I understood Peter Saunders was not approaching it that way. If he does this play will be a disappointment to people – Definitely not a thriller.’26 Cork duly relayed this to Saunders, who responded,
Thank you for your friendly tip. Mrs Christie had already telephoned me and I explained that the ‘Whodunnit’ part of ‘the Star’ write-up was their idea, not mine.
All the printing is going out without any description of the play. It is merely billed as ‘the new play by Agatha Christie’ . . . I bow to her wishes, but if the play is not a thriller and if it is not a ‘whodunnit’, I am darned if I know what it is.27
The play opened its pre-West End tour at the Cambridge Arts Theatre on 5 February 1951. Agatha had attended rehearsals before setting off to Iraq with her husband, settling back into the pre-war routine where several months a year were spent accompanying him on his archaeological digs, but she arranged for the cast to receive flowers as a first night gift from her, requesting; ‘something rather exotic for Jeanne de Casalis’.28 Edmund Cork relayed the news to her of the play’s successful opening, corresponding care of the British School of Archaeology in Baghdad: ‘You will have received Peter Saunders’ cable saying the Hollow is a great success’, he wrote a few days later. ‘There is no doubt at all that it is by far the best yet, and we shall have to be very unlucky not to have a really long run in town, with all the attendant subsidiaries.’29 It is interesting to note Cork’s eye for potential subsidiary exploitation, even at this early stage in the game, and the fact that he leads off with it before going on to discuss artistic matters, which would undoubtedly have been of more interest to his client. He would later write to her that ‘Repertory bookings for The Hollow are coming in marvellously – this is the real justification for the vicissitudes of theatrical production.’30
For now, though, the issue was de Casalis’ performance. ‘Lady Angkatell is the perfect part for a natural droll,’ wrote Cork, ‘and I am sure even you would have been surprised at what Jeanne de Casalis made of it. In fact, the only thing that bothered me on Monday night was whet
her the drama might not be sunk by the comedy. However there was a six hour conference after the show, with the result that there were no unexpected laughs on Tuesday, and the show seemed to have already got a nice balance. By the time we get to town in April it should be absolutely right.’31 Cork explained that the ever-loyal Stephen Glanville had already been to see the play in Cambridge and that Rosalind, who lived in Wales, was expected to attend in Cardiff the following week.
Agatha responded a week later:
I am delighted about the play and even more delighted that Peter Saunders and Hubert Gregg don’t want to play the thing only for laughs. That’s where they are more intelligent than Bertie. If they can get Jeanne more or less kept under so that she doesn’t run away with things, I think all should be well. Cambridge, of course, was bound to be appreciative, but Cardiff is pretty wet so it will make a useful contrast. Shall get a good blast of destructive criticism from Rosalind, I expect. If she says ‘not at all bad, mother’ I shall go up in the air. How maddening that I can’t see it. It’s just got to be running in London in May.32
As it happens, Agatha’s most fearsome critic appears to have very much enjoyed the performance, writing to Saunders somewhat belatedly,
Dear Mr Saunders,
I must write and tell you how much we enjoyed The Hollow. Our seats were very good, thank you, but I am sorry that you didn’t come down to Cardiff.
I thought most of the cast were very good – Henrietta was a particularly pleasant surprise! She was just right. Gerda was good particularly at the end but I think she was inclined to overdo being clumsy and stupid to begin with. Jeanne de Casalis was very good and very funny I thought – not quite Lady Angkatell but that doesn’t matter – Sir Henry was good but we didn’t like Edward much. He looked all right but he wasn’t very sympathetic. He has a loud assertive voice and sticks his chin out and would certainly never shoot himself. That scene is easily the worst part of the play in my opinion. It looks quite ridiculous when he attempts to shoot himself and made me feel quite uncomfortable. Otherwise I think Hubert Gregg directed it excellently. It goes quickly and never drags at all. He is not as unlike John Cristow as I had imagined he might be. We both thought when he is just about to be shot that he said ‘Gerda’ first – I know of course that he doesn’t but it sounded like he did. The Inspector was very good, but a little indistinct at times – he slurs his words together – the maid had a very funny face! Veronica was quite good and Midge I think was good. She is very attractive and I think could be even more like Midge than she is. Her clothes aren’t quite right in my opinion.