Curtain Up
Page 49
And it wasn’t only the title that was to be an issue. Christie often agonised over the opening and closing moments of her plays, and in the case of Verdict the final page was to be the subject of numerous rewrites. The burning issue was whether, in the closing moments of the piece, Lisa, having abandoned Karl and all that he stands for, should walk back in – and if she did so then what she should say. This was not dissimilar to the problems experienced by Shaw regarding the staging and filming of the final moments of Pygmalion, which were definitively resolved after his death, and in a manner contrary to his original intentions, by the creators of the musical My Fair Lady. The Agatha Christie archive contains a draft where Lisa does not return at all and Karl is left alone on the stage in despair, reading the Landor poem as his voice dies away and the book falls; another where Karl is left listening to Rachmaninov on the record player and Lisa returns and runs into his arms saying only his name; and further versions where Lisa returns and there is some brief dialogue, the eventual final line apparently being something of a last-minute addition. The version sent to the Lord Chamberlain’s office, in which the final pages have been attached by adhesive tape in a manner that prevents us from seeing what is being replaced, sees Karl listening to the Rachmaninov and reads thus;
KARL: . . . Lisa – Lisa – How can I live without you?
(Door opens after a moment or two, Lisa comes in very softly, stands an instant, then comes softly down behind him, puts hands on his shoulders. He starts, thinks for a moment he is imagining, then turns, springs up)
Lisa? (afraid to believe) You have come back – why?
LISA: (between laughing and crying) Because I am a fool! (comes into his arms)
(Music comes up in triumphant passage)
CURTAIN90
Here is the same sequence as currently published:
KARL: Lisa – Lisa – how can I live without you? (He drops his head into his hands)
(The door up Centre opens slowly. Lisa enters up Centre, moves slowly to Right of Karl and puts her hand gently on his shoulder. He looks up at Lisa.)
Lisa? You’ve come back. Why?
LISA: (kneeling at Karl’s side) Because I am a fool.
(Lisa rests her head on Karl’s lap, he rests his head on hers and the music builds up as the Curtain falls)91
If ever an example were needed of how an ‘acting edition’ impoverishes a writer’s original stage directions through the incorporation of stage manager’s ‘blocking’ notes from the prompt copy, then this is it. Historically, of course, it has often been this version of the script that goes ‘on the record’ and by which a playwright’s work has been judged by future academics. Christie’s plays suffer particularly badly from this, with much of what we now read having been aimed specifically at enabling amateurs to recreate, as far as possible, the original staging.
Verdict also gives rise to a particularly fine example of another of the problems that Christie’s reputation as a dramatist is up against in certain academic quarters. In the introduction to British and Irish Women Dramatists Since 1958, edited by Trevor R. Griffiths and Margaret Llewellyn-Jones (1993), we read that ‘some plays written by women may conform both ideologically and formally to the established patriarchal norm, for example Agatha Christie’s 1950s Poirot-style plays, notwithstanding Miss Marple’s appropriation of such apparently male skills to solve mysteries in other plays.’92
I am not aware that Christie wrote any ‘Poirot-style’ plays in the 1950s, and she certainly never wrote a play featuring Miss Marple. Her one full-length Poirot play was produced in 1930, and even then his skills are notably not portrayed as inherently ‘male’ (but that’s another story). In the Poirotless The Hollow, the female roles dominate the stage while the men are by and large weak and ineffectual, in The Mousetrap Miss Casewell hardly conforms to gender stereotypes, in Witness for the Prosecution Romaine runs circles around the self-satisfied male lawyers, in Spider’s Web the resourceful female protagonist calls the shots as she sits at the centre of her web, and in Verdict, which is in no sense ‘Poirot-style’, we see how a principled but misguided male idealist wreaks unintentional havoc on the lives of those around him like a modern-day Akhnaton.
Lib Taylor, in her chapter in the book, ‘Early Stages’, notes under the heading ‘The West End, Collusion or Subversion’ that ‘Christie’s plays reveal an underlying collusion with patriarchy’ – citing ‘The Verdict’ [sic] as an example of this. Lisa, she says, ‘denies her own future in favour of his [Karl’s] and even after prison – in a sense her punishment for her transgression against the marriage vow – she continues this sacrifice despite an apparent awareness of male oppression . . .’93 In this and other Christie plays, Taylor continues, ‘redemption comes through the suffering of women whose only crime is their sexuality, whilst men remain irreproachable . . . the women collude by rejecting the possibility of challenging their oppressors, preferring the status quo.’
Anyone with a proper understanding of Christie’s work for the stage, or even the basic plot of Verdict, will emphatically reject this thesis. Karl is not ‘oppressing’ anyone (except, arguably, himself); he is loyal to his wife, but he and Lisa are in love. He is trapped, like Akhnaton, by his own well-intentioned but ultimately destructive belief system, which is signposted in a minor way when he forgives a student for stealing a book. Far from being ‘irreproachable’, the extreme events of the play conclusively challenge his misguided philosophical outlook. Lisa makes her own choices, and her decision to return to Karl at the end of the play makes her the stronger partner, not the weaker one. As with all of Christie’s work for the stage, Verdict is approached from the perspective of women being innately the stronger of the sexes and men the weaker: ‘Men aren’t realists like we are,’ declares Helen to Anya. And I would respectfully suggest that if you are going to offer a critique of a play then you at least take the trouble to get its title right.
Taylor is, of course, restricted by the book’s 1958 starting point to examining the relatively inglorious tail end of Christie’s playwriting career. This date is chosen, according to its editors, because it is the year in which Shelagh Delaney’s debut play A Taste of Honey, her first and last success, was premiered by Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop at the Theatre Royal Stratford East. The dramatis personae of nineteen-year-old Delaney’s brave and extraordinary, Salford-set working-class domestic drama includes an alcoholic single mother, a pregnant teenager, a black sailor and a homosexual art student. The play has achieved the same sort of iconic status as Look Back in Anger with some theatre historians and, we are told by the editors of British and Irish Women Dramatists Since 1958, ‘seemed to offer a new way forward for women’s theatre.’ It is worth noting in the context of this claim that in 1931, the year of Agatha Christie’s first West End production, twenty plays written or co-written by women enjoyed runs in the West End, and there were also numerous one-off ‘try-out’ performances of new plays by women writers in West End theatres. In the four years between 1956 and 1959 over fifty plays by women were presented in the West End, including work by Agatha Christie, Enid Bagnold, Lesley Storm, Lillian Hellman and Clemence Dane. And yet, at time of writing, the only play in the West End by a female playwright is The Mousetrap.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the challenges presented by the piece, casting Verdict proved problematic, and although the team that Saunders eventually assembled was certainly top-notch in terms of its ability to deliver the play, it did not offer any ‘star name’ insurance against poor reviews. There had been much excitement the previous year when it seemed that French film star Charles Boyer might accept the role of Karl; in 1952 he had received a Tony award for his Broadway appearance in Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell, directed by Charles Laughton, and casting him in what would have been his first London stage appearance since 1924 would indeed have been something of a coup. In the end, though, Saunders reported that Boyer had felt ‘he could not play the last act’94 and the role eventually went to German-bor
n film and stage actor Gerard Heinz: the same actor who, as Gerard Hinze, had played Dr Gerard in the West End production of Appointment with Death. Though a busy and well-regarded film and television actor who had notably appeared in the 1942 premiere of Terence Rattigan’s Flare Path, Heinz was by no means a headline star. One Tony award winner who did join the company was Patricia Jessel in the role of Lisa, her last Christie appearance having been as the toast of Broadway in Witness for the Prosecution; and playing Helen was former Windmill girl Moira Redmond. Recently returned from Australia and an unsuccessful marriage, Redmond had been Vivien Leigh’s understudy in the 1957 West End season of Peter Brook’s production of Titus Andronicus and, by all accounts, she made the most of the role of the young murderess in Verdict.
Taking the helm as director was RADA-trained Charles Hickman, who had been responsible for the popular Sweet and Low wartime revues that briefly made way for Murder on the Nile at the Ambassadors in 1946. Hickman was the director of Reandco’s hugely successful premiere of Lesley Storm’s Black Chiffon at the Westminster Theatre in 1949, and the following year he enjoyed a similar success with His Excellency by Dorothy and Campbell Christie at the Piccadilly. He had already worked with Saunders, staging his production of a new musical of The Water Gipsies which opened at the Winter Gardens six months after Witness for the Prosecution closed there.
The scheduling of Verdict early in the year was unusual, not least because it meant that Christie herself was in Iraq when the production rehearsed and opened on tour on 25 February 1958. It also meant that Nottingham’s Theatre Royal was unable to play its usual role hosting the first performance, and the production opened instead in Wolverhampton, much to the chagrin of the local critic in Nottingham. A review in The Stage from Wolverhampton was promising, assessing the play on its own merits rather than its writer’s reputation. Under the rather uninspiring headline, ‘Mrs Christie Examines a Professor’s Character’, the critic’s favourable response noted:
Agatha Christie’s new play, Verdict, which was presented at the Grand, Wolverhampton last week, shows a new point of departure for the author. The emphasis shifts from the creation of an atmosphere of suspicion to a psychologising of the characters involved. Moral problems, too, are drawn in. The bare pattern of the play is made quite shapely with the same skill that appears in the author’s more popular style of mystery play. When the murder of the professor’s ailing wife is committed, no mystery surrounds it. Instead, we are invited to examine the character of the professor and the way his single-minded attachment to his ideals brings suffering to all those devoted to him.95
From early on, though, it was clear that the ending of Verdict was going to be problematic. In a courteous correspondence with the Birmingham Post’s critic, J.C. Trewin (later to contribute an entertaining chapter on Christie’s theatre work to H.R.F. Keating’s book, Agatha Christie, First Lady of Crime), Peter Saunders took issue with the poor review that he had given to the play:
Although naturally disappointed that you did not like my production of Verdict, may I say that at least it was a reasoned criticism, and as such, I feel I must answer it.
1. You say it is as artificial an anecdote as you have heard for some time. Do you really think it more so than Witness for the Prosecution which you liked?
2. You complain that the ultimate clue is all too predictable. But you have overlooked the fact that this is neither a thriller nor a whodunit. It is a play. You may indeed say – in fact you do say – that it is a bad play, but should you look for a surprise ending in something that was never intended to surprise?
3. The final minute to which you object is as much a bone of contention as the final twist in Witness for the Prosecution, when the majority of provincial critics urged Agatha to take it out. Already, with this ending we are having the same tug-of-war. I know that if I leave it in, it will be criticised as a phoney ending, and if I take it out the author will be accused of letting her play ‘fade into nothingness’.
In your final paragraph you ask, I gather, for a return to the straightforward whodunit. It is in response to criticism that the characters are always the same, with butlers, maids and country vicars, that Mrs Christie has tried to be different. Her difficulty is, of course, that her name on the jar proclaims the kind of jam it is. Perhaps this time theatregoers will be disappointed.
Please do not take this letter in any way as an aggrieved producer who thinks he knows best. I am well alive to the kindness with which you have treated many of my plays in the past.96
Trewin replied, ‘It was charming of you to write. I felt very guilty about Verdict, if I can put it in that way, because as a rule Agatha Christie gets me – and complaints seem almost disloyal. I look forward to seeing the play again. Here it may very well be that preparation, foreknowledge, helps . . . Mrs Christie sentimentalises the last curtain, I think falsely. Better, surely, to let the play remain ruthless (I’ve always wondered whether Rattigan was right to alter the original tragic end of Deep Blue Sea).’97
Saunders responded, ‘I must confess that a lot of criticism has been aroused at the return of Lisa and it may be that this will still be changed, although I don’t think so. As I know that you will not be influenced by anything I say in this personal letter, I admit freely that I am not looking forward to the London First Night. I am sure one or two of the critics will really have a lovely time – if you know what I mean.’98
As well as problems with the casting and the script, Saunders had once again experienced difficulties when seeking a West End theatre for a Christie play; but he eventually secured the Strand Theatre, yet another non-‘Group’ venue, where the play opened on 22 May 1958. Other West End attractions on offer that night included Simply Heavenly, an ‘All-Negro musical’ presented by Jack Hylton at the Adelphi; Lesley Storm’s Roar Like a Dove, produced and directed by Towards Zero’s Murray MacDonald at the Phoenix and heralded by Kenneth Tynan as ‘a resounding, self-evident hit’; Terence Rattigan’s less well-received Variation on a Theme produced by Tennents at the Globe; and the London premiere of My Fair Lady, a rare Tennents venture into musical theatre, which had opened to huge acclaim the previous month at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane and which, as the company’s largest scale commercial venture to date, took full advantage of the abolition of the entertainment tax. Meanwhile, at the Ambassadors, The Mousetrap was advertising its ‘Sixth Dazzling Year’.
With astonishing irony after all the debates about the ending, the young stage manager, Wendy Noel, who had worked on a number of previous Saunders productions including Witness for the Prosecution and Towards Zero, called the final curtain early on opening night and created the ending that J.C. Trewin had wanted, curtailing the performance before Lisa’s return and leaving Karl, bereft, on the stage. This did not go down well with the audience, and there were boos from the gallery. In a review in the Daily Telegraph headlined ‘GALLERY BOOS CHRISTIE PLAY – A MELANCHOLY OCCASION’, W.A. Darlington wrote:
It seems that there is no grace in our gallery-goers – in those, at any rate, who booed when the curtain fell at the Strand last night on Agatha Christie’s new play Verdict. If there is a writer in existence who has deserved gratitude from the many-headed, it is Mrs Christie. So when, for once, trying herself out in a new sort of play, she fails to bring it off, could not they let the melancholy occasion go by in silence? . . . There was no dextrous twist at the end, which solved everything and brought the lovers together. Instead there was a great scene of renunciation and parting, which rang false and fell flat.99
Booing from the gallery in West End theatres had become something of an issue in 1958, and one on which Saunders, of course, had strong opinions; its occurrence at the end of Verdict was by no means an isolated incident, but it was certainly a first for an Agatha Christie play. Under the headline ‘AN IMPROBABLE VERDICT: PLAY BY AGATHA CHRISTIE BOOED’, the Times critic wrote, ‘Miss Agatha Christie has brought off some mighty fine stage surprises in her time. Alas, all the surprises in h
er latest play are surprises that people should behave as she makes them behave . . . The lady companion is obviously “on a spot” but after her acquittal she, who has all the time impressed as a sensible and sympathetic woman, surprises us by tearing the quixotry of her adored professor to shreds and leaving him for ever . . . And the gallery booed, a surprising thing to happen to an Agatha Christie, but all things considered perhaps on this occasion not so surprising.’100
It is important to put the ‘booing’ incident in context, however. A year later, man of the moment John Osborne’s short-lived West End musical The World of Paul Slickley was also booed on its opening night, on this occasion from the stalls rather than the gallery.
Even with Verdict’s correct ending restored, there was no pleasing the press. The Stage’s London critic disagreed with his provincial counterpart, although he clearly did not see the ill-fated opening performance, noting that ‘the professor and Lisa at last come together in a musical aura of true love and understanding which is unbelievably sloppy’. Under the headline ‘REAL LIFE DEFEATS THE THRILLER QUEEN’, the review concluded that
Agatha Christie, Queen of the thriller writers, apparently attempted in Verdict, at the Strand, to write a play about real life and living people. Having for the time abandoned her murder puzzles, cardboard characters and reliance on technical ingenuity and a gift for creating suspense, she had to face a variety of fresh problems, none of which is satisfactorily solved in Verdict. Mrs Christie in trying to create flesh and blood characters succeeds only in giving us dummies . . . Probably Charles Hickman should not be blamed too much for a thoroughly pedestrian production; a genius could not have saved the play.101