Curtain Up

by Julius Green

  The appointment of a director, however, was an altogether less happy process. The man who got the job, Peter Cotes, was one of the most controversial stage directors of the day. The older brother of twin film-makers John and Roy Boulting, he had changed his name to avoid being eclipsed by their success. His parents had both been performers, and he started his career playing the music halls in revue and cabaret. Amongst his own early acting ventures was a small role in the 1943 film The Gentle Sex, co-scripted by Murder at the Vicarage co-writer Moie Charles and directed by Derrick de Marney. This won him a role in the 1944 tour of Charles’ Tomorrow’s Eden, for which he also worked as assistant to director Irene Hentschel. His controversial 1946 production of Pick-Up Girl, a hard-hitting American play by Elsa Shelley about child abuse and venereal disease, opened at his New Lindsey club theatre in Notting Hill, a licence having been declined by the Lord Chamberlain’s office because Cotes refused to cut certain lines, including a reference to abortion. Since club theatres were exempt from censorship, they had become notorious for offering a showcase for work rejected by the censor. Astonishingly, seventy-nine-year-old Queen Mary decided to attend the production in the tiny, upstairs theatre space and, following this royal endorsement, the Lord Chamberlain’s office had no option but to allow the production to transfer to the West End.

  As a result, the following year Binkie Beaumont offered Cotes the direction of the London premiere of Deep Are the Roots, a Broadway drama about racial prejudice. He argued with the actors over his interpretation of the piece and was promptly fired; if there was indeed a Tennent blacklist then Cotes was undoubtedly on it. Not surprisingly, in his 1949 book No Star Nonsense, an eloquent advocacy of ensemble theatre, he made a point of attacking everything that the West End stood for. A one-man theatrical awkward squad, and no stranger to litigation, Cotes was nonetheless in a different league to Hubert Gregg as a director. Adam Benedick’s obituary of Cotes in the Independent newspaper describes him as ‘a kind of pathfinder in what are considered by people who did not live through them to have been the darkest days of British theatre, the 1940s and 1950s . . . as long as he ran his own company under his own management he was happy and successful.’18

  With Peter Saunders, Hubert Gregg and Peter Cotes all offering markedly conflicting first-hand accounts in their books (published in 1972, 1980 and 1993 respectively), it is difficult to establish a definitive sequence of events as regards the appointment of a director for Three Blind Mice. It is clear, though, that something was afoot from the outset. According to the chronology offered by Cotes in his book Thinking Aloud, he was approached by both Attenborough and Saunders at the end of February 1952. Attenborough and Sim were under contract to film with Cotes’ brothers at the time, and according to Cotes this offer followed a lunch between Attenborough and John Boulting, which I believe to be a lunch at the Ivy that Saunders refers to having been present at with these two. It seems logical that Cotes would have been Richard Attenborough’s first choice as director; not only was he related to the Attenboroughs’ employers, who were releasing them both from their contract so that they could perform in The Mousetrap, but Sheila Sim had been directed by Cotes in Come Back Little Sheba, which her husband had seen. Having made a name for himself with Pick-Up Girl and, more recently, The Biggest Thief in Town, Cotes was in all respects a credible director who, having assisted Irene Hentschel earlier in his career, would doubtless take the same serious approach to Christie’s work that Hentschel had.

  Cotes claims to have read the script and lunched with Saunders at the Carlton, after which casting then proceeded, the majority of those selected being actors who had worked with him before. He makes cryptic mention of the fact that his agent was then ‘called into negotiations’ and that there has been ‘no really comprehensive account of how it all started, when heads rolled, directors were chosen, titles changed’.19

  According to both Hubert Gregg and Peter Saunders, however, Gregg was Saunders’ first choice for director. Undeniably it was Gregg who forged the introduction with the Attenboroughs. He was at the time working at the Garrick Theatre as assistant director on To Dorothy, a Son, a hugely successful comedy they were starring in. Gregg introduced the couple to Saunders in their dressing room, Attenborough agreed to read the script, and shortly afterwards Saunders lunched with John Boulting and Attenborough at the Ivy. A letter from Saunders to Boulting and Attenborough dated 11 January 1952 offers them the opportunity to invest £1,000 in the production and makes reference to receipt of Attenborough’s contract to appear in it,20 so Saunders’ account of being introduced to Attenborough backstage in February is clearly inaccurate. Attenborough’s film schedule meant that a deal had to be done a long time in advance, and a rehearsal date of 15 September was set.

  According to Hubert Gregg, he not only introduced the play’s stars to Saunders but also came up with its eventual title – although Agatha credited her son-in-law Anthony Hicks with the idea in her autobiography, much to Gregg’s inevitable chagrin. A title change was necessitated when, Saunders having announced the forthcoming production, powerful impresario Emile Littler (Prince’s younger brother) advised him that he had produced a play called Three Blind Mice before the war and requested that Christie change the title of hers. There is no copyright in titles, and in fact no fewer than seven plays of this name had been licensed by the Lord Chamberlain’s office in the previous fifty years, but you didn’t argue with a Littler.

  ‘The Mousetrap’ is the title flippantly given by Shakespeare’s Hamlet to a play performed by a group of strolling players for his uncle, Claudius. The play’s actual title is The Murder of Gonzago, and Hamlet hopes that its subject matter, which parallels the murder of his father, will provoke an incriminating response from Claudius, who he believes to be the murderer. The new title resonated with Christie’s play on a number of levels. Not only did it fit neatly with the theme of ‘Three Blind Mice’ (as the killer refers to their potential victims), but Christie’s policeman has the suspects re-enact the murder at Monkswell Manor in much the same way that the players’ performance in effect reconstructs the murder of Hamlet’s father. The re-enactment in Christie’s play, however, results in the trapping of the next victim rather than the murderer.

  Gregg had played Hamlet twice and had a good knowledge of Christie’s script, so in this case I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. It may be that Saunders relayed Gregg’s suggestion to Cork, who then passed it on to Rosalind and Anthony, who were closely involved with the project as Mathew’s trust was technically the licensor. It thus could well have been Anthony who relayed the suggested new title to Agatha on her return from that year’s dig. It seems unlikely that he would have deliberately taken the credit for someone else’s idea, and more probable that we are simply dealing here with a case of Chinese whispers recalled inaccurately by Agatha in all innocence some years later. Or it may be that both Hicks and Gregg really did come up with the same remarkably catchy new title for Three Blind Mice.

  Some time after the contracting of Attenborough, Saunders obtained a licence to mount a post-West End tour of To Dorothy, a Son. According to Saunders, Gregg then asked if he could give up directing The Mousetrap in order to direct and star in this new production of Roger MacDougall’s comedy (‘an extraordinary decision and I think one that he later regretted’21). According to Gregg, he didn’t ask; Saunders offered it to him.22 I suspect that what actually happened is that Saunders, having been told by Attenborough and Boulting that they wanted Cotes to direct, took a licence for To Dorothy, a Son in the knowledge that Gregg would jump at the opportunity to both direct and star in it. This would get Gregg out of the way and leave the coast clear for Saunders to secure his star by engaging Peter Cotes. In any event, it seems unlikely that Attenborough would have approved as a director a man he knew as the hired-in assistant responsible for rehearsing new cast members into the West End production of To Dorothy, a Son. It seems that discussions must have been taking place with Cotes at a
time when Gregg was nominally still at the helm of The Mousetrap, although it may be, of course, that Gregg was complicit in all this and happy to take the other project in the knowledge that he was clearing the way for Cotes. We are unlikely ever to discover the truth of the matter, as all of those involved put their own distinct spin on events.

  Gregg’s replacement, however, turned out not to be Peter Cotes, but John Fernald, whose production of Dial M for Murder had opened at the Westminster Theatre on 9 June. It seems that negotiations to secure Cotes’ services had been lengthy, and it is perhaps not surprising that Saunders took the opportunity (and presumably persuaded Attenborough) to go with the director of the biggest hit thriller in town. In the end, Fernald withdrew from the project just as rehearsals were about to start, having disagreed with Saunders, Christie and Attenborough over the casting of the role of Miss Casewell. Cotes claims to have been unaware that Fernald was the ‘first director to be offered the job’ and had ‘turned it down’. The actress who Saunders and the others wanted to play the role was Jessica Spencer, who had taken over the role of Midge when The Hollow moved into the West End. In 1947 she had made her TV debut as ‘Molly Davis’ in Three Blind Mice, and the following year she had won Equity’s Clarence Derwent award for Best Supporting Performance for her portrayal of Barbara Martin in Royal Circle, directed by Ralph Richardson at Wyndham’s Theatre; moreover, she had also notably played the ‘Pick-Up Girl’ for Peter Cotes. Fernald, according to Saunders, apparently had a more ‘feminine and fluffy’ actress in mind. He left the production, but there were no hard feelings, and thirty years later he became the sixteenth director to oversee its run.

  If we are to believe Saunders rather than Cotes, it was at this point that Richard Attenborough suggested Cotes as Fernald’s replacement. On 30 August, with the production scheduled to open in Nottingham on 6 October, Saunders wrote to Cotes saying, ‘As I told you this morning, the producer [i.e. director] of this play has withdrawn and I am most happy that you agree to direct it on the terms originally agreed.’23 It is apparent from this that there had been previous negotiations with Cotes and that a deal had at some point been agreed in principle but not signed off. Cotes evidently knew the script and the project already, if he was prepared to agree to do it on the basis of one conversation. One thing that had attracted him to it in the first place, he claims in his book, was the fact that the story had originally been written for Queen Mary, whose patronage of his production of Pick-Up Girl had enabled it to circumvent the censors and enjoy a West End run. This remarkable woman, an indomitable supporter of theatre in all its forms, died in March 1953 aged eighty-five, without having seen the stage production that her original request for a radio play from Christie had inspired.

  In his book, Cotes goes out of his way to describe the success of his working relationship with Christie and his respect for her, no doubt in deliberate counterpoint to Gregg’s portrayal of her as distant and inhospitable:

  There are those connected with the theatre who have criticised Christie as a negative character when she was away from the theatre or her other work. I am bound to say that in my experience she was the soul of equanimity; throughout our association in study, dining-room, theatre and rehearsal room, not one hard word was ever heard between us. She was protective of her ‘brain child’ as all good mothers should be, but only up to a point. Her shrewd side was uppermost in her mind when constructive discussions had to be made about removing or adding a line or even a speech here and there. She would grasp an idea to strengthen the play or even alter characterizations wholeheartedly . . . This sort of person is sparing with her words too, with a dislike of non-essentials, and Agatha in her detailed letters to me, some of many pages, as well as her scores of postcards, showed a similar dislike. She wished at all times to relieve herself of spare talk and theatrical chitter-chatter. She refused to obscure the main issue by the side-tracking discussion that all too often passes in the world of theatre for constructive discussion. What she did possess was professionalism; a willingness to co-operate once she had made her mind up, as well as a degree of receptivity not always to be found in highly successful writers when their ‘brain child’ is being transferred from the page to the stage.24

  Cotes claims that the prologue was cut at his request, although Saunders suggests that it was he who asked Christie to remove the scene, for reasons of economic necessity. In any event, the fact that the copy submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s office included a version of it is consistent with its abandonment very late on in the process. Of the brief pre-show soundscape that was used instead, Cotes observes, ‘The replacement, conceived between author and director, was played in semi-darkness with various sound effects such as police whistles, footsteps and shouts. This appeared to me to create the correct atmosphere for the play that followed.’ It would be difficult to disagree. Most importantly, whilst Cotes is full of praise for Christie’s openness to editing and improving on the dialogue, he is, unlike Gregg, very clear that any such changes were the work of the playwright herself rather than the director.

  Cotes watched the first night of the seven-week pre-London tour in Nottingham, gave his notes and rehearsed with the company the following day, but then absented himself to work on another play, The Man, in which his wife Joan Newell was appearing, and which subsequently opened in the West End a month after The Mousetrap. Cotes made occasional appearances during the Mousetrap tour, and was happy to entrust Christie, Saunders and Attenborough with any changes that they felt needed making in his absence; but Saunders felt that this was negligent on Cotes’ part, and was aggrieved that he had apparently not been advised by Cotes of his other commitment. The main issue that needed resolving with the play, as had been the case with The Hollow, was whether the comedy element was too dominant, although in this case it was down to the writing rather than the performance of the leading lady. Whether this perceived imbalance was resolved by Cotes or Saunders we will never know; they each took credit for coaxing the necessary changes out of Christie. But resolved it was.

  On this occasion, with the success of The Hollow to his credit and his stellar leading couple contracted well in advance, Saunders experienced no difficulty in securing the £5,000 up-front finance required to stage the production; but there were still problems securing a suitable West End home for it, particularly as he was hoping to open in London at the best time of year, just in time for the pre-Christmas rush. Saunders found the Group’s doors closed to him, although he did have offers from two independently owned theatres: the tiny Ambassadors, where Herbert Malden was keen to repeat the box office success of The Hollow, and the vast Winter Garden. Persuaded by Attenborough, Saunders wisely opted for the smaller of the two, and The Mousetrap duly opened at the Ambassadors Theatre on 25 November 1952. True to form, Tennents took out an advertisement in the programme promoting no fewer than ten of their own productions.

  Forty-four London theatres were advertising their wares in The Times that day; they included a number that were not strictly ‘West End’, such as the Tennent-controlled Lyric Hammersmith, not to mention Sleeping Beauty on Ice at the Empire Pool, Wembley. There was particularly strong competition in the thriller genre; Janet Green’s Murder Mistaken, starring Derek Farr, had moved from the Ambassadors to the Vaudeville in order to make way for The Mousetrap, and Frederick Knott’s Dial M for Murder was packing them in at the Westminster. Meanwhile, Bertie Meyer was producing Meet Mr Callaghan at the Garrick, Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea was playing at the Duchess, Peter Ustinov was still appearing in The Love of Four Colonels at Wyndhams and, at the Phoenix, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne were appearing in Noël Coward’s Quadrille. The complete television listings in The Times on 25 November 1952 were contained in three and a half lines.

  The critical response was, with the notable exception of the Sunday Despatch, very supportive. Ivor Brown in the Observer, of course, was one of the few to pick up on the allusion to Hamlet. He went on to say:

  Agatha
Christie has a taste for Nursery Rhymes and why not? They tinkle their horrors to the tots and they will make murder wherever they go. To one who so neatly disposed of ‘Ten Little Nigger Boys’ three blind mice are quite a small order . . . if so many of our soubrettes now sing on skates [no doubt a reference by Brown to Sleeping Beauty on Ice], why not a cop gliding on skis to the scene of the crime? . . . It is all gloriously improbable and a trifle untidy, but it goes with a scream and the actors have some characters to work on. Richard Attenborough leads a capable team through the humours as well as the horrors of this hotel with death on the menu; small wonder that it could not collect any staff.25

  Sketch Magazine concurred: ‘I would say that, while this is by no means in the Ten Little Niggers class, it is well up to The Hollow, and that, if Mrs Christie can continue to reel off these theatrical puzzles, she fills again a gap in the West End list about which addicts had begun to complain.’26

  Punch noted that ‘The Mousetrap is a delicately poised machine, and I cannot say very much about Mrs Agatha Christie’s play of that name without unforgivably springing it . . . Suspicion switches cleverly, and in one tense moment after another we seem to be on the edge of the author’s secret . . . Peter Cotes’ direction is as discreet as a solicitor’s letter, and a sound cast plays a complicated game with fairness . . . This is one of Mrs Christie’s neatest puzzles and it takes the stage very naturally. Only the final moments are a trifle untidy – but then Mrs Christie was left with a great deal to clear up in a short time.’27 The Times joined the general chorus of approval, noting that ‘the piece admirably fulfils the special requirements of the theatre. There are only two acts, the first of exposition and preparation, the second of action and conjecture.’ The characters, it says, ‘provide the colour, the mystification, the suspects and the screams . . . there remain the alarming silences, which are perhaps the true test of such a piece on stage. That we feel them to be alarming can only be thanks to the producer, Mr Peter Cotes.’28 Cotes, incidentally, provides in his book an appendix which helpfully quotes no fewer than sixteen reviews singling out his personal contribution for particular praise.