by Julius Green
The production was directed by Wallace Douglas, who had made such a success of Witness for the Prosecution – just for once, Hubert Gregg does not claim that the job was offered to him first. Douglas’s star was in the ascendant, and on 2 September 1954 The Stage reported, ‘With the opening of Dry Rot at the Whitehall this week, Wallace Douglas has directed three plays now running in the West End, the others being Witness for the Prosecution at the Winter Garden and The Manor at Northstead at the Duchess. He is now working on Spider’s Web, the play that is to bring Margaret Lockwood back to London.’ It was indeed fortuitous that Douglas embarked on Christie’s comedy immediately after opening John Chapman’s Dry Rot, which was destined to become one of the longest-running and most successful of the farces presented by Brian Rix at the Whitehall Theatre during the 1950s and 60s. His experience at the helm of the Whitehall farce team must have proved invaluable to him in the staging of Christie’s larky comedy, and with London evidently in the mood for farce the timing could not have been better. Saunders again teamed Douglas with designer Michael Weight, although Spider’s Web presented fewer design challenges than their previous collaboration on Witness for the Prosecution.
Douglas and Christie clearly got on well although, like Gregg, she does not mention him in her autobiography. Unlike Gregg, Douglas was hugely respectful of the playwright with whose work he was entrusted. The draft script in the Agatha Christie archive opens with Clarissa’s house guests, Sir Rowland Delahaye and Hugo Birch, discussing butterflies at great length. In some cases, the names of the butterflies have been left blank in the typescript and filled in later by hand, presumably following consultation with someone who was in a position to advise on the subject; possibly Christie’s son-in-law Anthony Hicks, who she remarked in her autobiography ‘could talk knowledgeably on butterflies’.17
Delightful though the conceit is of two eccentric fellows engaged in a passionate lepidopteral debate, Wallace Douglas believed that this would not be a dramatically effective opening to the play. Although Christie dug her heels in, she changed her mind after seeing the first performance in Nottingham, and she and Douglas worked in a room at their hotel to create the opening that we now know, involving Delahaye and Birch taking part in a blindfolded port tasting. ‘That is what was so very sweet and generous of her,’ remarked Douglas to unofficial Christie biographer Gwen Robyns. ‘Once she was convinced that she was wrong she was never so discourteous as not to admit it.’18 This new scenario may also have owed something to Hicks, of whom Christie observed affectionately, ‘If he has a fault, it is that he discusses wine at too great length.’19
As is so often the case with the edits Christie made to her plays at the request of directors, the original version is far more interesting as a piece of writing than what we have been left with, although in strictly dramatic terms it would probably be difficult to argue with the decision to cut. Here, then, is the butterfly conversation – which, it should be noted, includes some wry observations on the male–female dynamic and the scientific and legal professions, all of which are absent from its replacement. It is a ‘wet evening in March’:
ROWLAND: What I say is, there’s a lot of nonsense in these books. Why, I found a Heath Fritillary myself in my own herbaceous border.
HUGO: Nothing against that, but the Large Copper is entirely different. Lycaena Dispar has been extinct in this country since 1847. Consult any authority you like, they all say the same.
ROWLAND: Doesn’t prevent them all being wrong.
HUGO: It’s highly unlikely that they’d all be wrong.
ROWLAND: Most likely thing in the world! These scientific fellows are all the same, like a pack of sheep. All repeat what the other feller said. But here we’ve got a reliable witness. Clarissa’s aunt definitely saw –
HUGO: Probably saw Polychloros – the Large Tortoiseshell.
ROWLAND: Not at all. Clarissa’s aunt was a meticulous observer. You didn’t know her.
HUGO: No – but what I say is, anyone can be mistaken.
ROWLAND: Not Clarissa’s aunt! Why if Clarissa’s aunt was alive now and came to me and said she’d seen a flying saucer – dash it all, I’d believe in flying saucers! . . .
HUGO: Now, look here, Rowly, let’s go back a bit. Clarissa’s aunt wasn’t exactly what you’d call a professional entomologist –
ROWLAND: Of course she wasn’t a professional entomologist. She was a country woman and what she didn’t know about birds, butterflies, wild flowers –
HUGO: What I’m getting at is that she wasn’t an expert.
ROWLAND: (snorting) Expert! Experts are the curse of this age. Give me an expert and I’ll show you a fellow who’s pretty certain to be wrong.
HUGO: That’s a mere generalisation. But let’s go back a bit. You admit the story is that Clarissa’s aunt was out for a walk with her brother-in-law and her brother-in-law said ‘My dear there is a Large Copper.’ It’s not really her word you have for it, it’s his.
ROWLAND: I see no reason to disbelieve the story. Her husband’s brother was Wainwright. You know, high court judge. Don’t tell me that a high court judge would commit himself by saying ‘There’s a Large Copper’ unless it was a Large Copper. You know how careful these legal wallahs are.
HUGO: What I’m getting at is that she didn’t know of her own knowledge that it was a Large Copper, she just agreed with what he said because he was a man and sure to know best. Wish we had a little more of that delightful Victorian spirit nowadays.
ROWLAND: My point is that two people saw the Large Copper by the Harford River, and they can’t both have been mistaken, and you’re entirely wrong about Clarissa’s aunt. She was a charming woman, but she had plenty of spirit.
HUGO: It’s a well known fact that the Large Copper only breeds where the great water dock grows.
ROWLAND: Heaps of great water dock by the Harford River.
HUGO: How do you know, Rowly? You don’t know a bee orchid from a stitchwort.
ROWLAND: Ah, but I was lunching at the club the other day. There was one of those botanical fellows there, just come back from Dartmoor. Had been looking for a lesser bogwort or something like that. I could swear he mentioned the great water dock. ‘No rarity grows like a weed,’ he said. Well, I mean, it is a weed of course.
ROWLAND: It’s common in the Norfolk Broads but I don’t believe it grows in the West of England. We’ll look it up. (He rises and goes to door of library)
HUGO: You’ll see. ‘Found in marshy places and near streams.’ That’s what it will say. Clarissa’s aunt knew all about wild flowers.20
The draft script also shows that the play originally consisted of three acts each of one scene, but that what were originally the first twenty-seven pages of a rather long Act Three were renumbered and converted into a second scene for Act Two. This change to the early draft, which clearly pre-dates rehearsals and the involvement of a director, gives a better balance to the piece and allows for an excellent curtain line at the new end of Act Two, which has been inserted on an additional page. John Curran identifies preparatory notes for the play which include Act Two action under the heading ‘Act Three’, and his surmise that the act structure must have been changed in this way is correct.21 Three sections of additional dialogue (one in Act Two and two in Act Three) appear to have been added at a later stage and have been inserted, along with the new opening, into the copy held in the Lord Chamberlain’s plays collection.22
One other change was made during the West End run of the play, according to correspondence in the Lord Chamberlain’s files. In Act One, in a conversation about autographs, young Pippa says that she wishes she had ‘Neville Duke’s and Roger Bannister’s. These historical ones are rather mouldy, I think.’ In April 1956, in an acknowledgement of the marriage that month of Prince Rainier of Monaco to Grace Kelly, this was changed to ‘I wish I had Grace Kelly’s and Prince Rainier’s’.23 This change was evidently not passed on to Samuel French, who used the original line when they published t
he script in 1957.
Spider’s Web opened in the West End at the Savoy Theatre, owned by the Savoy Hotel, on 14 December 1954. Once again, Saunders had been forced to find a home outside of ‘the Group’, many of whose theatres were contracted to Tennents. There was no orchestra on this occasion, but two pianists entertained the audience with a selection of Gershwin and Porter melodies, and the play featured the specially composed ‘Spider’s Web Theme Music’.24 Saunders celebrated his trio of West End Christies by taking an advertisement for The Mousetrap and Witness for the Prosecution in the programme for Spider’s Web. The first night audience’s response was less emphatic than it had been for Witness for the Prosecution, although the play was undoubtedly a crowd-pleaser.
Kenneth Tynan had replaced Ivor Brown as the Observer’s theatre critic and, despite his later advocacy of British theatre’s ‘new wave’, appears to have shared his predecessor’s soft spot for Christie’s idiosyncratic contributions to the West End stage. ‘Those who grieve that our drama is a ritualistic art no longer should see Mrs Christie’s Spider’s Web and be consoled,’ he wrote, ‘for the detective play, in which a nameless avenger strikes down a chosen victim, is governed by conventions every bit as strict as those of Greek tragedy.’25 He then goes on wittily to explain in some detail the parallels between ancient Greek drama and Christie’s work, before lamenting that her characters were too well-drawn to serve the thriller genre and concluding, ‘Audiences who emerged from Witness for the Prosecution murmuring “How clever she is” will probably emerge from Spider’s Web murmuring “How clever I am!” Yet there are, I suppose, more unpleasant things to murmur.’
The Times review was less supportive, however: ‘Miss Agatha Christie tries this time to combine a story of murder with a comedy of character. As Edgar Wallace showed more than once, the thing can be done. There is no reason why the special tension of the one should not support the special tension of the other. In this instance, however, the support is at best intermittent . . . the play as a whole is the least exciting and not the most amusing of the three Agatha Christies now running in London.’26 A view which seems to have been shared by most of the critics.
The royal family continued to be enthusiastic in their support of Christie’s work; on 1 March 1955 the Queen Mother saw a performance of Spider’s Web and the following week the play was attended by the Queen, accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh and Princess Margaret. According to Lockwood, ‘More nerve-wracking than the first night was the night when the Queen came to see the play.’27 Lockwood’s career, like so many in our story, had previously benefited from the unexpected endorsement of Queen Elizabeth’s grandmother, Queen Mary, who at the age of seventy-eight had insisted on attending the premiere of her controversial film The Wicked Lady. Two months after attending Spider’s Web, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh would be in Windsor watching Witness for the Prosecution.
As with The Mousetrap, Cork and Saunders’ strategy for Spider’s Web deliberately excluded New York. Harold Ober reported that the agent of veteran Broadway leading lady Dorothy Stickney had expressed an interest in the play as a possible vehicle for their client, but at fifty-eight she would hardly have been suitable for the role of Clarissa. In January 1955, Cork wrote to Ober that ‘This play was specially written for our film star Margaret Lockwood . . . I think Saunders expects about a four months’ run, and there seems to be an idea that Lockwood would then make a film of it, which I suppose would rule out an American production.’28 Christie herself wrote a two-page treatment for a film – ‘Commence with vast spider’s web gradually dissolving into Clarissa studying a spider’s web in country house . . .’29 – but this was not pursued. A low-budget British colour film was eventually made by the Danziger brothers and released by United Artists in 1961. Shown as a ‘second feature’ in the UK, it was never released in the USA, although it was seen on television there. Glynis Johns played Clarissa, with the much-loved husband and wife duo of Jack Hulbert as Sir Rowland Delahaye and Cicely Courtneidge as Mildred Peake, the eccentric gardener who had been played on stage to great effect by Judith Furse.
In 1962 Hulbert and Courtneidge, both clients of Herbert de Leon, undertook a lengthy and successful stage tour of Spider’s Web for Geoffrey Hastings (who had invested £125 in the West End run), under licence from Peter Saunders. On this occasion Courtneidge played the role of Clarissa. At the age of sixty-nine. The New York premiere of Spider’s Web would eventually take place at the off-off-Broadway Lolly’s Theatre Club in 1974, two years before Christie’s death.
When Margaret Lockwood eventually left the cast after a run of fifteen months, the role of Clarissa was taken on by the popular thirty-five-year-old film and television actress Anne Crawford, Wallace Douglas’s third wife. Tragically suffering from leukaemia, Crawford died on 17 October 1956, and Saunders recalls that he ‘watched with admiration the gallant but hopeless battle of her last weeks. Often in agony, she never missed a performance until the end.’30 The understudy, Elizabeth Bird, took over for the last few weeks of the run, but Saunders had arranged for the production to play weeks at Golders Green and Streatham after it finished in the West End. According to Saunders, Bird was pregnant and unable to play these dates, although I suspect that it may have been more of a case of the management not wanting to risk fielding an understudy to headline two potentially lucrative touring dates. In any event it was here, according to Saunders, that ‘Margaret Lockwood showed her professionalism and her generosity. She was having a much needed holiday in the South of France and, without telling me, her agent Herbert de Leon, phoned her and told her of my problems. Margaret immediately flew back from her holiday and played those two touring dates for me. I know of very few stars who would have done this.’ I’ve not seen a record of Margaret Lockwood’s deal, but Felix Aylmer and Ann Crawford were each earning £125 per week, and the lowest paid members of the company were on £20. In the week at Golders Green Hippodrome which Lockwood came to the rescue of, the production made a profit of £916 and Christie received a royalty of £348.31
Despite the lukewarm critical response, Spider’s Web went on to enjoy the longest first run of any Christie play (after The Mousetrap, of course), clocking up an impressive 744 performances. Saunders found himself with yet another commercial hit on his hands, courtesy of Christie. The production’s finances followed the usual pattern of a £5,000 capitalisation (with an actual production cost of £4,101), in which Saunders himself took the majority share; 72.5 per cent on this occasion, entitling him to 82.8 per cent of overall profit. After Saunders, Herbert de Leon was the biggest investor, backing his star to the tune of £1,000. The final profit on the enterprise was £63,388, calculated in 1963,32 seven years after the end of the West End run, and including a share of residual income from a modest film sale and the licensing of two post-West End tours and numerous repertory productions. Although actual dividends would have been paid over the previous eight years, that’s well over a million pounds in today’s money, of which de Leon would have received 12.5 per cent.
Under Saunders’ diligent stewardship, Agatha Christie on stage had become big business. At the age of sixty-four, she had three big hits running in the West End and she remains, to this day, the only female playwright to have achieved this record.33 She was also enjoying huge acclaim on Broadway. Only a dozen Agatha Christie novels were published in the 1950s, and some commentators believe this to indicate that her creative output was slowing down. On the contrary, her dedicated application to her day job had finally put her in a position where she was free to spend time on the work that she really enjoyed and found fulfilling. The journey from the Embassy Theatre in Swiss Cottage had not been an easy one for ‘Mrs Pooper – cheap novelist’, and success had been a long time coming, but when it suddenly arrived her position as the Queen of the West End was unassailable. Or so it appeared.
On the night that both Agatha Christie and Wallace Douglas scored their West End hat-tricks, Robert Morley and Wilfrid Hyde-White, both
of whom had turned down Christie plays, were appearing at the Lyric in Hippo Dancing, and Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables was playing at the St James’s Theatre. Elsewhere in the West End, theatregoers could see the musicals Salad Days, The Boy Friend and The King and I, or could enjoy an evening with Joyce Grenfell. Prince Littler’s two-and-a-half-thousand-seat Stoll Theatre on Kingsway, meanwhile, was hosting the first of several West End Christmas seasons of Enid Blyton’s Noddy in Toyland, performed largely by a cast of children drawn from the Italia Conti stage school and complete with wicked golliwogs. Noddy in Toyland was directed by Andre van Gyseghem, the original director of Black Coffee and the author of Theatre in Soviet Russia. It was produced by Bertie Meyer.
Blyton’s agent George Greenfield notes in his amusing autobiography:
Early in 1954, she rang me and asked, ‘George, do you think I could write a children’s pantomime?’
I replied – and I meant it sincerely – ‘If you put your mind to it, Enid, I reckon you could write almost anything.’
She sounded pleased and soon rang off. Two or three weeks later, she sent me the complete book and lyrics of the Noddy in Toyland pantomime. When it was staged at the huge Stoll theatre in Kingsway that Christmas, where every performance was fully sold out, neither the producer, B.A. Meyer nor the stage director, Andre van Gyseghem, had changed it to any great extent.
Bertie Meyer was in his seventies when I introduced him to Enid and Kenneth [her husband] as the potential producer. Tall, with luxuriant white hair, a Roman nose and a clipped moustache, he was a commanding and courteous figure. He had been involved in the West End theatre for over fifty years; soon after the turn of the century, Sir Henry Irving had been one of his leading actors.
After the meeting, when Bertie had left us, Kenneth Darrell Walters said in his bleating falsetto, ‘He’s far too old. He’ll drop dead on us in the middle of a run – and then we’ll be stuck.’