Curtain Up

by Julius Green

  My attention was grabbed by Cork’s reference to the fact that Troubridge had ‘tried it out’, which, in the context of the Shubert correspondence referring to a ‘try-out’ production of Towards Zero, would seem to indicate that Chimneys had perhaps been premiered in a small ‘club’ theatre somewhere, or even in a repertory theatre, given that the script had already been licensed by the Lord Chamberlain’s office. But it seems here that Cork simply means that Troubridge had been trying to interest producers in the play. The piece is very much of its era, and Christie presumably sensed this when she re-read it, as we hear nothing more about the idea. Instead she wrote The Mousetrap.

  In her autobiography Christie writes, ‘I knew after I had written The Hollow that before long I should want to write another play, and if possible, I thought to myself, I was going to write a play that was not adapted from a book. I was going to write a play as a play.’4 In the end, she opted to adapt one of her short stories, ‘Three Blind Mice’, which had itself been adapted from a short radio play of hers of the same title. The latter was part of an evening of programmes celebrating the eightieth birthday of Queen Mary, a new play by Christie having been specifically requested by her when the BBC asked the Palace what they should schedule for the evening. Christie accepted the commission and donated her fee to charity. The original radio broadcast was on the Light Programme on 30 May 1947, four days after Queen Mary’s birthday, and on 21 October that year a live television transmission took place of what appears to have been the same script.

  The following year Christie adapted the radio play into a short story (a very long one, perhaps more correctly described as a novella) which was first published in the US in Cosmopolitan magazine and subsequently serialised in the UK in Woman’s Own magazine. In 1950 it was published by Dodd, Mead & Co. in America in the collection Three Blind Mice and Other Stories. At Christie’s insistence the story has never been published in book form in the UK, in order to preserve the secrets of the stage adaptation, although the playscript has been in publication in the UK since 1954.

  The process of adapting a short story, rather than a novel, for the stage seems to have suited Christie well. ‘There can be no doubt that I think one of the advantages of The Mousetrap, as the stage version of Three Blind Mice was called, has had over other plays is the fact that it was really written from a précis, so that it had to be the bare bones of the skeleton coated with flesh. It was all there in proportion from the first. That made for good construction.’5 It can be no coincidence that her two most successful plays, The Mousetrap and Witness for the Prosecution, were both adaptations from short stories.

  The Mousetrap once again demonstrates Christie’s uncanny knack for subtly capturing the spirit of the age. Mollie Ralston (Mollie had been listed by Agatha as a ‘favourite name’ of hers in the Miller family’s ‘Album of Confessions’ thirty years previously6) is another feisty young Christie leading lady and, like Ten Little Niggers’ Vera Claythorne, is not herself untainted by the events of the past. She has inherited Monkswell Manor, a country house which, with her husband of a year, Giles, she has decided to run as a guest house. They keep chickens and have no staff, and Mollie herself prepares the meals (corned beef) and does the cleaning (crossing the stage with a carpet sweeper at one point, much to the disgruntlement of one of the guests). Giles, meantime, does the sign writing and stokes the boiler, the fuel for which is running low. What we are witnessing is not some country house idyll, but a young couple struggling to set up a business in the post-war age of ration book austerity. ‘There are one or two rather incongruous bits of Victorian furniture,’ say Christie’s stage directions, ‘and the house looks not so much a period piece, but a house which has been lived in by generations of the same family with dwindling resources.’7 It has to be said that, judging from photographs, Roger Furse’s original set design fulfilled this brief more successfully than subsequent reworkings.

  The play’s subject matter is as hard-hitting as its setting is contemporary, exploring as it does the long-term consequences of child abuse, and inspired by the case of the two O’Neill brothers who were placed under the care of Reginald and Esther Gough of Bank Farm by Newport Borough Council in 1944. A doctor was called to the farm in January of the following year, having been advised that twelve-year-old Dennis O’Neill was having a fit; but when he arrived, he found Dennis dead, clearly malnourished and the victim of repeated physical assaults. The case was extensively reported and resulted in an overhaul of the fostering system. To London audiences in the early 1950s, this scenario would have stirred recent memories of their wartime evacuee children being placed in the care of strangers, and of the inevitable anxieties caused thereby.

  As Harold Hobson, former Sunday Times drama critic, commented in an article included in the play’s fortieth anniversary brochure, ‘I am convinced that The Mousetrap would never have achieved the longest run in the history of theatre had it not been, as well as a very exciting story, a parable of the social outlook of our times.’8 To my mind, Christie’s particular skill as a playwright lies in her ability deftly to deliver this in a manner acceptable to the censor, palatable to West End family audiences of the early 1950s and within the considerable constraints of the ‘whodunit’ format. Straightforward ‘realism’, by contrast, is relatively easy to achieve on stage.

  The five guests on Monkswell Manor’s opening day are an odd assortment of misfits, including an effeminate young man with an ‘artistic tie’ and a young woman ‘of a manly type’; clearly gay and lesbian characters, but sufficiently encoded to meet with the approval of the censor, who in his report describes the guests as a ‘queer lot’.9 The house gets colder and becomes snowbound, and we discover that a murderer is on the loose. As in Ten Little Niggers, Christie has created a scenario where an isolated group of strangers is at the mercy of a self-appointed agent of justice. Paranoia mounts and mutual suspicion sets in, even between devoted husband and wife, as this angel of vengeance starts to go about their mission of meting out punishment to those whose past negligence has contributed to the suffering of others. A young detective sergeant perhaps owes something to the role played by the eponymous inspector in J.B. Priestley’s seminal 1945 play An Inspector Calls; and the unexpected guest whose car has run into a snowdrift, the enigmatic Mr Paravicini, ably fulfils his role of diverting attention from the two characters who really are impersonating someone else.

  The single location, eight-hander play that we now know originally included two locations and four extra characters. Early drafts of Three Blind Mice held at the Agatha Christie archive include an eleven-page opening scene set in a London street on a foggy day, where we see the immediate aftermath of a murder which is reported on the radio by way of back-story at the start of the play as we now know it. The stage directions read:

  Two workmen, Alf and Bill, are sitting by a charcoal brazier – possibly in a little shelter. During their talk people pass along. This can include all the members of the cast. It is very dark and they are seen hardly at all except as moving figures. The men are wrapped up in mufflers, turned up collars, etc. Women, Mollie and Mrs Boyle have head scarves on. The exception to this is Mr Paravacini, who is conspicuous in his fur lined overcoat and goes along uttering ‘Brrrr’ to himself. Bill is a typical pessimistic labourer – Alf is younger and has ideas with which he is pleased.10

  All the men wear ‘dark overcoats, light mufflers and similar hats’, the significance of which will become apparent later. Much of the opening scene is taken up by Alf and Bill’s views on life, the universe and everything:

  ALF: Expect there’ll be lots of accidents in this fog.

  BILL: There’s been too many accidents lately. Train accidents, air accidents, road accidents. I don’t know what things are coming to.

  ALF: Nature, that’s what it is. The world’s over-populated, and accidents is Nature’s way of putting it straight, see?

  BILL: There ain’t nothing natural about aeroplanes. ’Ighly complex they are.
You wouldn’t believe. I got a nephew who’s ground staff.

  ALF: Got a fag?

  Bill gives Alf a cigarette, just as a character walks on wearing a muffler; collar up, hat down. Alf’s lighter isn’t working and he scrounges a match from the passer-by, standing so that the audience’s view is obstructed. The passer-by speaks in a whisper and exits whistling ‘Three Blind Mice’. The workmen discuss why the passer-by may have been whistling:

  ALF: What makes blokes do what they do. Unconscious motivation.

  BILL: (suspiciously) You been listening to the Third Programme?

  ALF: I’m a bloke what thinks about things. A chap whistles because he’s pleased about somethink. Maybe that young fellow was going to be married.

  BILL: If so he don’t know what’s what! If he did he wouldn’t whistle.

  ALF: Or maybe he’s got himself a good job.

  BILL: Wish I’d got a job inside somewhere. Straight – I’d rather be down a ruddy coal mine than here.

  Alf then mimics the tune that the passer-by was whistling.

  ALF: I know that tune. Now whatever is it?

  BILL: God Save the King?

  ALF: Nah!

  BILL: Internationale?

  ALF: Nah. It’s a kid’s tune. Nursery rhyme.

  BILL: Little Jack ’Orner?

  ALF: Not quite. I’ll tell you another thing as I’ve been thinking about sitting ’ere – Feet.

  BILL: Feet?

  ALF: ’Eard it on the wireless. Charles Dickens. ‘Tale of Two Cities’. London and Paris they are. All about the French Revolution. And it starts with feet. Trampling along. Feet what’s coming into your life. And I been thinking this morning. All these feet along here. Where are they going to and where ’ave they come from?

  BILL: You’re barmy.

  They find a notebook which the passer-by has dropped, and then Mrs Casey runs on, screaming that her lodger has been murdered . . . by a person who whistled ‘Three Blind Mice’ as they left the house. A police constable comes to her assistance.

  Here is a unique attempt by Agatha Christie to portray working-class characters who are not domestic staff of some sort in their working environment. They talk about working down a coal mine and the French Revolution, and are familiar with the Internationale. Whilst she has an experienced ear for the banter of domestic staff, though, Christie is as endearingly out of her depth here as she was with the Cockney-accented New York gangsters of The Clutching Hand. This sort of material would not have won her any friends at the Royal Court, where the English Stage Company were to lead the new wave of realist ‘kitchen sink’ drama only four years later, and Bill’s ‘pessimism’ would hardly have given Jimmy Porter a run for his money; but it does show that she was not unaware of the directions in which theatre was heading and not unwilling to dip her toe in the water. We are eleven pages into an Agatha Christie play, and so far all we have seen is a road works, while the only characters who have been identified are two workmen, a boarding-house landlady and a police constable.

  The idea of all the suspects that we will meet later being seen in the street outside the murder scene is a fascinating theatrical device, but the necessity for an extra set and four extra characters made the whole scene a non-starter from a practical point of view. The copy of the script submitted to the Lord Chamberlain, which was presented to Christie in a gold binding on the play’s tenth birthday, includes a version of the Bill and Alf scene, as does the prompt copy of the play held at the V&A, although in the latter it has been torn out and stuck unceremoniously into the back of the script as scrap paper. The V&A’s prompt copy is also notable for extensive and witty doodles and observations by a very artistic and clearly rather bored stage manager, unaware that their sketch of ‘Marilyn Monroe hiding in a pile of grapefruit’ (think about it!) would one day form part of a priceless museum piece. Meanwhile, the reader’s report was thoughtfully removed from the Lord Chamberlain’s script before it was presented to Agatha; the report describes the piece as a ‘poor thriller’.11

  The Christie archive also contains a draft script with the play’s new title on the cover and ‘Suggested alterations for first scene’ written on the first page, followed by a badly typed three-page insert. Bill and Alf are gone, and instead we have a short scene in the snowy London street which simply involves Mrs Casey enlisting the assistance of the police constable. Intriguingly, though, three of the characters who we will see later, including the murderer, still cross the stage, muffled against the cold, in a reduced version of the full-cast dumb show that was included in the previous draft.

  The original 1947 radio script for which, of course, location was not an issue, includes the first murder victim Mrs Lyon and her landlady, as well as a brief appearance by two unnamed workmen, but omits one of the characters who we will later meet in the stage play. The short story, or novella, as published in America, is even closer to the play, but the final character is still to be introduced.

  The play’s prologue, inevitably, was found to be surplus to requirements, and was abandoned before rehearsals started. It was replaced with a brief, atmospheric (and certainly more economical) soundscape portraying Mrs Lyons’ murder, played in darkness before the curtain rises. The resulting two-act, eight-character play is lean and efficient, qualities which enhance its dramatic effectiveness and which have doubtless contributed to its longevity. The brevity of the dramatis personae serves to emphasise the writer’s skill in concealing the murderer amongst them, and the fact that the action takes place over a timeframe of only two days serves to heighten the tension. The Mousetrap’s missing prologue, though, shows a willingness to experiment with form and content for which Christie rarely receives credit.

  During the 1950s much of Edmund Cork’s work focused on arrangements to enable Agatha to circumvent both punitive income tax and potentially punitive death duties, a strategy encompassing wholesale copyright assignments to a labyrinthine network of trusts and companies. One of the first beneficiaries of these arrangements was her grandson, Mathew, and in August 1951 Cork wrote to Christie confirming arrangements for a trust to which the copyrights of the novel They Do It with Mirrors and the play Three Blind Mice were assigned until Mathew’s twenty-first birthday, at which point they would become his. Cork added that ‘Peter Saunders is prepared to make a contract with the Trustees for Three Blind Mice [himself and Rosalind] on terms pretty similar to those we obtained for The Hollow. He does not think, however, that he should be called upon to pay the unusually heavy advance we extracted for The Hollow – you will remember I made him pay through the nose as an earnest of his seriousness and sincerity, of which I think we now have ample proof.’12 Saunders had indeed paid an advance against royalties of £500 to option The Hollow, and had also just paid a considerable sum to the Ambassadors to keep the theatre dark for five weeks and enable the play’s transfer from the Fortune at the end of its run there. Cork was right that his seriousness and sincerity could not be questioned.

  On 3 September 1951, nineteen days before Mathew’s eighth birthday, Agatha transferred the rights to Three Blind Mice to the trust, and a month later, Saunders acquired the UK play licence from it.13 When he says in his autobiography that Christie gave him the finished script over lunch just after Christmas 1951, he must have known that it was on the way; what is not clear is whether he had seen an earlier draft or whether the play was actually written between November and December 1951, after he had acquired the licence. On 17 September the following year Cork wrote to Christie, ‘I hear from Peter that rehearsals for The Mousetrap are going very well indeed. Mathew is a very lucky boy!’14 Mathew was told about his ownership of the rights the following week, on his ninth birthday, but by all accounts was more interested in his new train set. ‘Mathew, of course, was always the most lucky member of the family,’ Agatha remarked, ‘and it would be Mathew’s gift that turned out the big money winner.’15

  Legend tells of different estimates given by those involved for the length of West End ru
n that the play would enjoy, although it should not be forgotten that, even if it had not broken all West End records, on the showing of Christie’s other plays Mathew’s income from residuals would have been considerable. What was to transform the fortunes of the project, though, and give it a head start over all Christie’s plays to date, was the involvement from an early stage of two substantial stars: Richard Attenborough and Sheila Sim. The RADA-trained husband and wife team had enjoyed huge popular success and critical acclaim in a series of stage and screen roles, both individually and as a couple. In 1947 Attenborough had appeared in the role of the vicious young gangster Pinkie Brown in the Boulting brothers’ film of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, establishing his status as one of the country’s most sought-after young actors. Although Sheila Sim, who played the role of the young guest-house owner Mollie Ralston to great acclaim, was to leave the company at the end of her eight-month West End contract in order to fulfil a film commitment, Attenborough was to extend his engagement as Sergeant Trotter in the production to almost two years. During the time they were both in the production they also starred as Tommy and Tuppence in a thirteen-part radio adaptation of Christie’s Partners in Crime, providing the play with invaluable additional publicity.

  Max Mallowan writes, ‘The play was fortunate too in having two theatrical stars of the highest magnitude to send it off – Richard Attenborough and his beautiful wife Sheila Sim – both of them lovable and great artists with a faultless sense of timing.’16 Attenborough’s integrity, says Saunders, ‘was beyond belief. No one dared not give their best when he was there, and they adored him. It was Dickie who started the Mousetrap snowball . . . and I have never ceased to be grateful to him.’ It was not only Attenborough’s agreement to take part, but his obvious and unselfish dedication to the work, that helped to ensure its success. The long-term commitment to, and obvious affection for, the production shown by this giant of stage and screen is arguably the most ringing endorsement of her skills as a playwright that Agatha Christie could have hoped for, and this was not lost on Christie herself. ‘Richard Attenborough and his enchanting wife Sheila Sim played the two leads in the first production,’ she recalls. ‘What a beautiful performance they gave. They loved the play, and believed in it and Richard Attenborough gave a great deal of thought to playing his part. I enjoyed the rehearsals – I enjoyed all of it.’17