Curtain Up

by Julius Green

  The theatre industry was indeed facing new challenges; the coronation, three years previously, had given rise to a substantial increase in television ownership and 1955 had seen the launch of ITV. Saunders notes that

  by drawing attention to the way in which the non-profit distributing companies were being used, Mr Wyatt convinced the government that the easiest way out would be to remove the entertainment tax completely. If there was no tax to pay, there would be no point in tax-exempt companies and everybody would be equal. In the Budget two years later, Mr Harold Macmillan, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, gave a firm promise that the entertainment tax would be removed the following year. Mr Peter Thorneycroft, in 1957, carried out that pledge. In doing so, he removed an enormous injustice from the industry at a cost of a little more than a million pounds a year.

  Macmillan himself had by this time stepped in as Prime Minister, following Anthony Eden’s resignation in the aftermath of the Suez crisis, and Thorneycroft’s 9 April budget led on various tax-cutting measures with the ending of entertainment tax effectively the headliner. The news was greeted by cheers in Parliament, and Cork wrote immediately to Christie explaining its significance: ‘The important thing for us in the Budget is the cancellation of the Entertainment Tax. This will make all the difference to theatre managers, and according to my arithmetic should add about 20% to your royalty.’80

  Saunders asks:

  What, then, will be the final verdict of the theatre historian on the fantastic manipulations of Hugh Beaumont? Some will say that because he raised the state of British theatre to its greatest heights the ends justified the means. Others may say that by achieving almost the power of a dictator certain talents of authors, artistes, directors and producers were stillborn, and that the British theatre lost as much as or more than it gained. My own belief is that the enormous good Binkie did to the theatre has never disappeared, and indeed never will. But nevertheless I believe that his omnipotence was taken from him at the right moment. Had it continued much longer, all concerned with the industry would inevitably have suffered, because dictatorship or benevolent feudalism (whatever one might call it) is never in the end successful.

  Beaumont continued to produce until his death, aged sixty-three, in 1973. Amongst the various letters about his achievements published in the press at the time was one in The Times from Enid Bagnold, who wrote that ‘He sat on his throne (and at one time it was a throne) disguised as a charming mouse. He was the romantic Mount Everest of my theatrical struggles – its steepest face . . . Playwrights, maybe, were not his closest friends. The “word” was dim to him. What he knew was whether the Whole would appeal . . .’81 Saunders, whose book was published the year before Beaumont’s death, magnanimously gives the man himself the last word on the subject, with his oft-quoted observation, ‘If it was a dictatorship I agree it was a bad thing. But it wasn’t. At least, I don’t think it was.’

  For Saunders, in 1957, the battle had finally been won. Binkie’s business empire had proved unassailable but, by taking the lateral step of removing the tax itself, the government had also removed the advantage he gained by avoiding it. His biographer, Richard Huggett, notes that ‘Nothing was ever quite the same again. Binkie looked on the abolition of the entertainment tax as Al Capone viewed the end of Prohibition. Their two empires did not collapse overnight but their days were numbered.’82 It is perhaps the case, though, that Saunders had played Bugs Moran to Binkie’s Al Capone, cleverly and determinedly constructing an alternative, and equally lucrative, operation based largely on a genre of populist theatre, typified by Christie, that did not fall within the decidedly highbrow agenda of ‘the Firm’. With the ending of Binkie’s tax advantage his nemesis, as represented by Saunders’ rival empire, arguably lost something of its own raison d’être; and it may be that, imperceptibly, some of the fight went out of Saunders at that moment. For now, though, Saunders had another problem on his plate, courtesy of Christie herself.

  On 30 December 1955 Saunders had taken out an option for a new Christie play called No Fields of Amaranth.83 This, then, is clearly the piece that Christie herself had intended would follow the courtroom drama Witness for the Prosecution and the comedy Spider’s Web, when she was at the height of her West End success; like the latter it was an entirely original piece, and not based on an existing source. Instead, 1956 saw a one-week repertory production of the updated A Daughter’s a Daughter at Bath, presented in the name of Mary Westmacott, and a West End production of Gerald Verner’s pedestrian adaptation of Towards Zero, to which she reluctantly lent her own name. Following four consecutive West End hits, Christie suddenly found herself in a position where her name was appearing on someone else’s work, and her own work as a playwright was being presented under a pseudonym. It seems that those responsible for the management of ‘brand Christie’ were working somewhat to their own agenda.

  Christie herself was awarded a CBE in the 1956 New Year’s Honours, and it can be no coincidence that this followed a five-year period in which her profile as the West End’s most successful female playwright had been firmly established. But, as was her habit, she then departed to Iraq until May, leaving Saunders and Cork to strategise the schedule for her theatrical work. No Fields of Amaranth mysteriously disappeared for over two years; like A Daughter’s a Daughter it was clearly not a play that they felt would sit comfortably alongside the established Christie repertoire, and it may well be that the half-hearted 1956 production of A Daughter’s a Daughter was by way of a consolation prize to Christie for allowing Towards Zero to jump the queue.

  It is no surprise that Cork and Saunders were disconcerted by No Fields of Amaranth; a ‘whodunit’ it certainly wasn’t. The play concerns the idealist Professor Karl Hendryk, whose subject appears to be moral philosophy. He is a political refugee from Eastern Europe, having lost his chair at the university in his homeland because he assisted ‘the Schultzes’, the family of an arrested colleague. Hendryk (called Henschel in early drafts, perhaps as an homage to Christie’s similarly named favourite director) lives in a Bloomsbury flat with his self-pitying wheelchair-bound wife Anya, whom he cares for with the assistance of her cousin Lisa Koletsky, a trained physicist who has given up her career to play housekeeper to Anya and her husband. Lisa’s relationship with Karl goes back a long way and their mutual devotion has grown into an unacknowledged love. This does not go unnoticed by Anya, however, who confides in the sagacious Dr Stoner her hope that when she dies Lisa and Karl will marry. Karl’s students include a boy with an obviously Jewish name and a miner’s son (neither of whom we meet), but tycoon Sir William Rollander persuades Karl also to take on his spoilt and objectionable twenty-three-year-old daughter, Helen, by offering in return the prospect of his paying for treatment for Anya.

  Helen becomes infatuated with Karl and, seeing his crippled wife as an obstacle, gives her an overdose of medication, making it look like suicide. ‘One feels so often that one would be better dead,’ Anya has told Helen. Karl roundly rejects Helen’s advances, and she then admits to him that she has killed his wife. Karl, astonishingly, does not report her to the police, believing that she is too naïve to understand the implications of her actions; significantly, in the context of 1958, he thereby spares her from the gallows. There is a very brief appearance by the methodical DI Ogden, a pointedly unshowy stage detective in the tradition of The Hollow’s tailor-made Inspector Colquhoun. Suspecting foul play and, based on evidence of a relationship between Lisa and Karl provided by their housekeeper, Ogden arrests Lisa. Only at this point does Karl tell the police that Helen is the culprit, but it is too late; Helen has been killed crossing the road, the implication being that she has committed suicide (‘The lorry driver claims that Miss Rollander gave him no time to brake’), and Lisa remains the prime suspect.

  There is an off-stage trial and the eventual verdict, awaited nervously by Karl, is that Lisa is innocent. Appalled that Karl’s initial forgiveness of Helen could have sent her instead to the gallows, Li
sa leaves him: ‘you put ideas first, not people. Ideas of loyalty and friendship and pity. And because of that the people who are near suffer.’ Karl is left alone in despair but in a final moment, reminiscent of the ending of My Fair Lady, Lisa returns to him ‘because I am a fool’.

  For those who believe that a playwright incorporating various elements of their life experiences into their work is in some way newsworthy, the play offers rich pickings. By 1955, when Saunders optioned it, Agatha Christie was extraordinarily famous, wealthy and successful, but there was no escaping the fact that she was a matronly woman in her sixties married to a renowned archaeologist fourteen years her junior. Max enjoyed close relationships with various female colleagues including, notably, his assistant, epigraphist Barbara Hastings Parker, whom he eventually married the year after Agatha’s death.

  The relatives-by-marriage of Agatha’s sister who for some reason considered themselves qualified to offer author Jared Cade so much information about the famous ‘disappearance’ also have plenty to say about the exact nature of Max’s friendships with Barbara Hastings. But to suggest that Agatha based the relationship between Karl, Lisa and Anya on that between Max, Barbara and herself, and that for her the play was, according to Cade, ‘a brave, if unsuccessful, attempt to reconcile herself to Max’s infidelity’,84 is to beg the question as to how, if this was indeed the case, she expected Max to react to such a public portrayal of their life together. In the novel Unfinished Portrait, sheltering behind Mary Westmacott, Agatha draws on painful incidents from her past in a semi-autobiographical manner, and I believe that she may once have hoped for a scene of reconciliation with Archie similar to the one she had portrayed in her unperformed play The Lie. But it is impossible to imagine such an intensely private person effectively laying bare any current domestic concerns she may have had in front of a West End audience and critics. All of this, in any case, is to ignore the real themes of the play and, by reducing them to the purely personal, to diminish Christie’s ability to tackle universal issues that are central to the human experience and her wide frame of reference in so doing.

  In No Fields of Amaranth, Christie was in fact exploring ideas that had been preoccupying her since her early playwriting experiments. The misguided idealist we have already seen (although audiences, of course, hadn’t) in Akhnaton, but he is now portrayed as a European intellectual émigré of the sort Christie rubbed shoulders with at Lawn Road Flats; people like the antiquarian bookseller and Jewish socialist Berliner Louis Bondy, who we know she dined with at Lawn Road (a reference to a housekeeper called ‘Mrs Bondy’ had been cut from the script of The Hollow).85 The fascistic Helen Rollander, with her belief that ‘people who are sick and worn out and useless should be removed so as to leave room for the ones who matter’, is a brutal post-war incarnation of the eugenicists Christie poked fun at in Eugenia and Eugenics. Other regular Christie themes are present too, as in the following exchange between Anya’s doctor and one of Karl’s students:

  DOCTOR: Love isn’t glamour, desire, sex appeal – all the things you young people are so sure it is. That’s nature’s start of the whole business. It’s the showy flower, if you like. But love’s the root. Underground, out of sight, nothing much to look at, but it’s where the life is.

  LESTER: I suppose so, yes. But passion doesn’t last, sir, does it?

  DOCTOR: God give me strength. You young people know nothing about these things. You read in the papers of divorces, of love tangles with a sex angle to everything. Study the columns of deaths sometimes for a change. Plenty of records there of Emily this and John that dying in their seventy-fourth year, beloved wife of So-and-so, beloved husband of someone else. Unassuming records of lives spent together, sustained by the root I’ve just talked about which still puts out its leaves and its flowers. Not showy flowers, but still flowers.86

  It would be easy enough to interpret this as a paean to the relationship between Agatha and Max, but we heard it first way back in The Lie, when Agatha was married to Archie, and Nell reminds us that ‘It’s the dull brown earth that endures, not the gay flowers that grow there.’ Another familiar Christie leitmotif is explored when Karl and Lisa remember a concert in their homeland at which they heard a performance of the ‘Liebestod’ – the final aria in Wagner’s 1859 opera Tristan and Isolde. Christie, who had once hoped to be an opera singer, chooses this particular work for a reason: its story, inspired by the ideas of philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, is of a love so intense that it is destructive and unattainable.

  This idea of unattainable desires is further reflected in the play’s original title. Early on in the piece, Lisa quotes from the eccentric nineteenth-century Welsh poet and philosopher Walter Savage Landor’s ‘Imaginary Conversations’, in this case the one between Aesop and Rhodope, when Aesop tells his legendarily beautiful lover, ‘There are no fields of Amaranth on this side of the grave.’ In an early draft, after the list of characters, Christie offers us the note, ‘AMARANTH – another name for the plant called Love-lies-bleeding. An imaginary flower that never fades. From the Greek amarantos – never fading.’ The note was reprinted in the play’s programme, although by this time it would explain only the use of the quotation in the play, rather than its title. In mythology, amaranth represents immortality because of its reputedly never-fading flower, and Aesop here is effectively saying that nothing in this life lasts for ever. As we have seen, in A Daughter’s a Daughter, written in the 1930s, Ann refers to the plant’s real-life manifestation as ‘love-lies-bleeding’; so, again, this is not something new to Christie’s theatrical vocabulary and the play’s title clearly carries a deep significance for her.

  There are echoes of these themes in the background of much of Christie’s stage work, and she is not presenting them in the foreground here simply in order publicly to exorcise concerns over her own marriage. There are even tantalising indications in one of the draft scripts (undated, of course) held at the Christie archive that at least some elements of the play originate from a much earlier period; the typography and layout on a small number of inserted pages is similar to that for work dating from over a decade previously. This would be consistent with the use of the name Henschel and with the Lawn Road inspiration for East European academic refugees living in a London flat. It would also place it closer chronologically to both Akhnaton and A Daughter’s a Daughter, both of which share themes with No Fields of Amaranth. Although Max had known Barbara Parker from at least the early 1940s, it would set the play’s alleged portrayal of this relationship in an entirely different context, or even bring Stephen Glanville, who lived at Lawn Road for a while, into the frame. It was Glanville, after all, who had originally encouraged Barbara to study archaeology, and who tutored Agatha in matters Egyptian and wrote so passionately to her. As with A Daughter’s a Daughter it would also, of course, mean that the original concept for No Fields of Amaranth pre-dated her attendance at Rattigan’s plays in the 1950s, although it may well be that their stylistic resonance with some of her own earlier work was what encouraged her to revisit it.

  As with much of Christie’s playwriting, it is impossible to offer any definitive chronology or interpretation, and I am certainly not attempting to do so here; I am simply suggesting that we consider a number of options rather than leaping to conclusions. Whatever its origins, sources and inspirations, No Fields of Amaranth is a profound and deeply thoughtful play that examines ordinary people who are the victims of extreme circumstances arising from the practical application of conflicting moral philosophies. Even the murder, which takes place in full view of the audience and is thus no mystery, can be seen in this context. The tragedy is that Christie felt the necessity to introduce, however grudgingly, a detective of any sort into this scenario. But, with A Daughter’s a Daughter having been sitting on Peter Saunders’ desk for almost five years, it was perhaps the bait she felt he needed.

  At the end of October 1957 Saunders, who clearly disliked the play’s title, had what he must have regarded as a bit
of good luck. In response to an interview given by Christie, a prolific author of romantic fiction called Hebe Keogh contacted him to say that she had written a book with the title ‘No Fields of Amaranth’ and requested therefore that Christie change her play’s title (and, by the way, when the change was announced, please could mention be made of her book?).87 Although the book was out of print, Saunders seized the opportunity and wrote back, ‘As good as the title is for a book it is a very bad one for a play . . . I am sure Agatha Christie will now agree to change it.’88 Exactly when the play was renamed, and to what extent Christie was involved in the decision, is unclear; but we do know that at the end of November 1957 actors were being contracted for a play called simply ‘Amaranth’, and by the end of February 1958 they were being reviewed in a play called Verdict.

  No Fields of Amaranth’s title change, however, did not have a similarly happy outcome to that made to the title of Three Blind Mice. In fact it proved to be a hugely detrimental move, leading both audiences and critics to believe that they were about to experience a courtroom drama in the same vein as Witness for the Prosecution. Not since the Shuberts advertised The Suspects as a follow-up to Ten Little Indians had expectations for a Christie play been so comprehensively subverted. Just how little Christie’s team understood about her more challenging work is apparent from a letter from Cork to Ober in April 1958. In fairness, he concedes that No Fields of Amaranth would have been a more suitable title for the play, but he goes on to say, ‘Although I don’t think it is a good play, I am inclined to think a very good film could be made out of it. The point is that one of the high spots of the play is a murder trial, and on stage it happens “off”, while obviously in a film it could be written up so that Verdict could be the logical successor to Witness for the Prosecution.’89 Such an idea would have been so far from Christie’s aspirations for the piece that, in this instance, one has to question Cork’s judgement.