by Julius Green
The 25 May 1958 edition of the Observer is interesting in a number of respects. Kenneth Tynan praises the Moscow Art Theatre, performing Uncle Vanya at Sadler’s Wells, and gives a less than enthusiastic review to the premiere of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party at the Lyric, Hammersmith. Laurence Kitchen is left to review Verdict, and comments that it is
a dislocation of the Christie formula, trying to do an Ibsen on us and achieving lesser Pinero . . . beyond the patter of tiny clichés there are frustrating murmurs of a strong theme struggling to make itself heard. The murderess (Moira Redmond) remarks at one point ‘I’m not a virgin, if that’s what you’ve been worrying about’. Voraciously Beat Generation and neo-Fascist, she is brought to dramatic life without compromise, wielding a corrupt logic and the Sack line [the latest dress fashion]. Alarmed, it seems, by her own creation, Mrs Christie has this girl run over by a bus and takes refuge in the consoling babble of a shaggy old family doctor.
This is at least a considered response to the play, although it would have been interesting to see what Tynan himself made of it. Elsewhere in the newspaper there is a major article on the excavations at Nimrud, in which the reporter remarks that ‘The good living, and a feeling of good sense not always found in such expeditions, was in large part due, I suspect, to the presiding influence of Mrs Mallowan, wife of the distinguished Director. I was allowed to make use of a small, almost secret, room that she has had added to the end of the house and where, during the opening phase of each season, she retreats to work and becomes once more Agatha Christie.’
Beresford Egan, theatre critic of the Courier magazine, seems to have been alone in identifying a strand of Christie’s previous work in Verdict. He wrote to Saunders the week after the West End opening:
Once again, I find myself at variance with my fellow critics. While granting them a certain justification, I enjoyed Verdict. It was magnificently played, and, on that score alone, deserved a better fate. I am afraid Miss Christie got herself rather entangled with ‘Mary Westmacott’ – which is an interesting experiment, but obviously risky. The public, like mice, can only be attracted by the same trap. They are naturally wary of anything new. Agatha Christie and Whodunit are synonyms, and should never be separated. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t have missed Verdict for the world. May fortune smile on your next production.102
Arguably, as with A Daughter’s a Daughter, there may have been a case for selling Verdict as a Mary Westmacott play. Even though the cat was out of the bag as to Westmacott’s true identity, it would neatly have circumvented the issue of audience expectation and might even have given Saunders the confidence to ignore Mrs Keogh. Although no writer at all is credited for The Lie, and it pre-dated Christie’s adoption of her nom de plume, it was in effect the first ‘Westmacott’ play. A Daughter’s a Daughter is the second. And Verdict is indeed arguably the third; even biographer Laura Thompson likes it. Or it may simply be the case that these are actually the only three ‘Agatha Christie’ plays, and that the rest of her repertoire as a playwright bears witness to a lifelong struggle against what audiences expected to see.
The damning reviews were reflected in poor ticket sales, and in the two weeks after the opening night the box office income fell below Saunders’ weekly cost of running the production, a scenario which allowed the theatre to give him two weeks’ notice to close; this they duly did, in a regretful and politely worded letter.103 Saunders would doubtless have been grateful that he was thus relieved of the responsibility for closing the production, after a mere thirty-six performances. It is a great shame that Patricia Jessel’s happy memories of the night she was cheered when she walked into Sardi’s on Broadway would have been clouded by the memories of the night she was booed from the gallery in the West End. Jessel, who was to die in 1968 at the age of forty-seven, had by all accounts given the definitive interpretation of a Christie stage role in her performance as Romaine, and her own reviews for Verdict were also complimentary: ‘establishes Patricia Jessel as a must for any Christie play’, said the Daily Mirror.104
Charles Hickman would go on to direct a successful run of Jack Popplewell’s A Day in the Life of . . . for Saunders at the Savoy in October 1958, with the unfortunate Wendy Noel, who had evidently been forgiven by both Hickman and Saunders, as stage manager. Typically, Christie’s first thought on the night had been for the distress caused to the young stage manager who called the cue early, and she wrote to Noel the next day to assure her that the play would have received poor reviews in any case.105 From what we know of the critical response to the correct ending, Christie wasn’t wrong; but it is nonetheless something of a mystery how such an error came to be made, given that the production had been well run-in on tour prior to its West End opening. I can’t help wondering whether Saunders, following the Trewin correspondence and in Christie’s absence, had been experimenting with different endings on tour and that an alternative cue had therefore been marked in to the prompt copy, causing confusion on the opening night.
Verdict was the first Christie flop of the Saunders regime, and the first of her plays not to return a handsome profit to his investors. Two investors had each contributed the not inconsiderable sum of £1,000 to the production, with Saunders himself covering the remaining £3,000.106 Herbert de Leon, who had invested in Spider’s Web, notably was not among those financing the show on this occasion despite the fact that two of his clients, Patricia Jessel and Viola Keats (playing Anya), were performing in it. It is very clear that no one on the management side gave much for its chances from the outset. The production actually cost £4,791, making it the most expensive Christie play to date,107 despite the fact that considerably less was spent on the set and on the advertising than for Witness for the Prosecution.
In 1966, when his licence expired, Saunders wrote to his investors to advise them that, once income from the pre-West End tour, numerous repertory productions and a post-West End tour by Geoffrey Hastings had been taken into account, ‘All things considered, it seems we were lucky to only lose a total of £20 on a play which ran for four and a half weeks in the West End.’108 It was indeed not a bad result under the circumstances, and is indicative of how buoyant the Christie brand remained in secondary markets. French’s published their ‘acting edition’ at the end of 1958 and the amateur rights were released in 1959; and despite its West End fate, the play, with its cast of ten and single set, proved as popular with amateurs as it had with repertory companies. Saunders took up his option to participate in amateur rights,109 as he always did, although investors were not entitled to a share in this income so it did not appear on the final statements.
As well as the investment details, the accounts files for Verdict contain two lovely examples of Saunders’ legendary high principles in his financial dealings. Upmarket couturiers, Rahvis of Mayfair, had the audacity to demand payment prior to delivery for a costume that they had made. Outraged, Saunders took this as an affront to his reputation as a prompt payer and sent the company a solicitor’s letter.110 They immediately agreed to standard payment terms. By contrast, the boss of Morden Park Sound Studios requested no payment for his work because the production was not a success, eliciting the immediate response from Saunders, ‘I understand you have made no charge for your own work and this is something that is not fair. It is extremely nice of you but the fact that the show was a failure isn’t really your fault and had it been a success I would not have paid any extra, so will you please send me an amended account.’111
For Christie herself, the vagaries of theatre could scarcely have been more pointed or more poignant. The first night of Verdict (her shortest West End run) came just over a month after The Mousetrap’s attainment of the longest run in British theatre history had been celebrated with a party at the Savoy that was trumpeted by the Daily Mail as London’s ‘biggest-ever theatrical shindig’.112 Christie was outwardly stoic in her acceptance of Verdict’s failure, but in her autobiography she makes it clear that it was a play:
which,
though not a success with the public, satisfied me completely. It was put on under the title of Verdict – a bad title. I had called it No Fields of Amaranth, taken from the words of Walter Landor’s ‘There are no flowers [sic] of amaranth on this side of the grave’. I still think it is the best play I have written, with the exception of Witness for the Prosecution. It failed, I think, because it was not a detective story or a thriller. It was a play that concerned murder, but its real background and point was that an idealist is always dangerous, a possible destroyer of those who love him – and [it] poses the question of how far you can sacrifice, not yourself, but those you love, to what you believe in, even though they do not.
As Hubert Gregg observes, ‘The clown wants to play Hamlet . . . The thriller writer wishes he or she doesn’t have to thrill. Laudably, Agatha had her go in a play called Verdict. It didn’t work. The public will take an unexpected guest but not an unexpected Christie. Its failure must have been a disappointment to Saunders who presented it. I don’t think it can have been a surprise . . .’113 Saunders himself tells the story of going to photograph the sign at the front of the theatre, only to discover that one of the lights had gone out, so that it now read ‘Peter Saunders resents Verdict’.114
SCENE FIVE
The Late Plays
Verdict had opened at the Strand on 22 May 1958 and closed on 21 June 1958. ‘After the disaster of Verdict I had begged Agatha Christie to write another play as quickly as she could,’ writes Peter Saunders in The Mousetrap Man. ‘I was afraid that if she didn’t she might lose interest. Within a month she had produced The Unexpected Guest. Like driving a car immediately after an accident, I made certain this play would go on quickly.’1
He certainly did, and the result was a textbook operation in the production of a Christie hit. Hubert Gregg was tracked down on a beach in Portugal (Saunders’ long-serving general manager Verity Hudson personally delivered the script, along with a copy of the Spotlight casting directory) and now-veteran Christie set designer Michael Weight was enlisted to work alongside him. Leading cast members were contracted at the beginning of July,2 rehearsals commenced on 14 July (Saunders didn’t technically option the play from Hughes Massie until 31 July),3 and the production opened at the inappropriately large Bristol Hippodrome on 4 August. There wasn’t even time to book the usual pre-West End tour; after a week at Bristol, The Unexpected Guest opened on 12 August at the Duchess Theatre, where it was to prove a critical and financial success and played for a total of 612 performances, according to Gregg breaking all box office records for the small, independently owned, thirty-year-old theatre.
The play, although imbued with trademark Christie quirkiness, was a whodunit set in a country house with French windows and involved plenty of police procedurals. As a quick-fix exercise in theatrical damage limitation it was ruthlessly efficient. Christie’s critical reputation as a purveyor of finely crafted thrillers was restored: ‘Verdict atoned for’ she wrote to Cork upon receiving copies of the largely favourable reviews.4 By the end of 1960, Saunders and his investors had shared in profits of £38,000, including £32,000 from the West End run and a share of income from over fifty repertory licences as well as the usual post west-End tour presented by Geoffrey Hastings.5 And yet this was one of the few times that Christie herself had been in the country but not attended a first rehearsal for one of her plays; reportedly she sent a message that she was unable to be there as she was making raspberry jam.6 And in her autobiography she notes simply that she wrote ‘a play called The Unexpected Guest’. To Gregg, who had in his own estimation salvaged Christie’s theatrical reputation, this was an unforgivable slight.
Lest the speed and efficiency of the operation seem unfeasible, it should be noted that according to Saunders, Christie ‘produced’ The Unexpected Guest within a month of the opening of Verdict, not that she necessarily actually wrote it within this timeframe. There is, in fact, plenty of evidence that Christie had been developing the idea for the play for at least eight years, and every indication that it was in any case ready to bring to the boil at about this moment. The agency-typed script held in the Agatha Christie archive, although it contains a few handwritten amendments, is to all intents and purposes a performance text for the play as it is now known, the only significant change being that its original three-act structure was reduced to two in the course of the rehearsal process by the simple expedient of combining the first two acts into one; Hubert Gregg’s rehearsal notes show him working out the practicalities of this.7
The speed of the production process meant that there simply wasn’t time for the usual to-ing and fro-ing with director and producer amendments, and it has to be said that the result is none the poorer for it. Agatha Christie was clearly more than capable of writing a full-length, ready-to-perform stage play without the necessity for third-party intervention. Gregg, of course, felt that she had by now taken on board the lessons learnt from experts like himself, and notes grudgingly that ‘Much thought had been given to this Guest . . . much attention having been paid to the manipulation of that Hollow.’8 In this case he takes personal credit only for the police sergeant’s penchant for poetry – the sort of comic police ‘stage business’ that Christie is on record as disliking.
Unusually for a Christie play, it is to her notebooks, rather than draft scripts, that we must therefore turn for an insight into the origins and development of the piece. As we have seen, in her autobiography Christie remarks that, after writing The Hollow, her intention was ‘to write a play that was not adapted from a book. I was going to write a play as a play.’9 Although her next completed script turned out to be The Mousetrap, this comment makes perfect sense of the heading ‘Play’ in Notebook 34, followed by notes (unusually and clearly dated ‘1951’) in which she outlines what is unmistakably an early version of the plot of The Unexpected Guest.10 Notebook 53 and Notebook 47 also contain work on the piece, apparently dating from the early 1950s and mid-1950s respectively, and in the former case under the heading ‘Play – The Unexpected Guest’.11
In certain elements of its structure and setting The Unexpected Guest is indeed a natural successor to The Hollow; in both plays a wife is found holding a gun over the body of her husband in the supposedly classic Christie dramatic setting of the country house. The Unexpected Guest, though, is a much darker piece, and the psychological interplay of the characters far more complex. Without the necessity to unweave Poirot from the story, Christie presents us with the efficient, sarcastic and no-nonsense Inspector Thomas; like Verdict’s Inspector Ogden he is a natural successor to The Hollow’s made-for-stage Inspector Colquhoun, and a man who is in any event guaranteed not to distract from the characters at the centre of the play’s intense domestic drama.
It is clear from her notes that Christie does not regard the role of the inspector as in any way a central one; he is not named in the plot outlines and is not even included in some of the draft character lists. Similarly, the eventual identity of the killer is evidently not a priority, and various outcomes are experimented with; ‘whodunit’ does not appear to be of particular concern to Christie herself. Over the lengthy gestation of this story, the female protagonist starts life as Vera – a name presumably abandoned as it would have duplicated that of the leading female role in Ten Little Niggers – and eventually becomes Laura, the name that was rejected in favour of Clarissa for the heroine of Spider’s Web. The character who eventually becomes Major Julian Farrar, her lover, is portrayed as an MP in the notes but is eventually demoted to a parliamentary candidate; if Appointment with Death’s Lady Westholme had been believed by the censor to resemble too closely Nancy Astor, then the prospect of portraying an MP involved in blackmail and an affair with a married woman was doubtless considered too much of a hostage to fortune in that respect. ‘Excuse my ignorance, but what are you, Tory?’ he is asked. ‘I’m a Liberal,’ replies Farrar. ‘Oh, are they still at it?’ comes the response.
By Notebook 28 the title of the play has changed tempor
arily to ‘Fog’, perhaps inspired by the dramatic potential of the killer smog that engulfed London in December 1952. The play is set in a house in South Wales near the Bristol Channel, a location which, although not geographically identical, may have been inspired by the house at Pwllywrach which Rosalind inherited from her first husband, Hubert Prichard, and where Christie had spent time with her daughter and grandson. The action of the play is punctuated by the ‘melancholy boom’ of the Bristol Channel foghorn and, significantly, it is the last thing we hear, even once the metaphorical fog besetting the characters appears to have cleared. In practical terms, it is the fog that causes the road accident that results in the titular ‘unexpected guest’ seeking refuge in the house where, on entering, he discovers Laura holding the gun over her wheelchair-bound husband’s body. Inevitably, all is not as it appears, and the new arrival unearths a web of intrigue, deception and distrust in a sinister and dysfunctional household living in the shadow of the murder victim’s bullying.
Like The Hollow, the house has a well-stocked gun cupboard, and it is clear from the start that this is going to be no vicarage tea party. The dramatis personae includes a terminally ill matriarch, a shifty male nurse and the mentally ‘retarded’ teenage boy, Jan; but arguably the dominant character in the play is dead from the outset, although we do spend the first scene in the company of his corpse. Amongst Richard Warwick’s objectionable practices, we are told, was his penchant for shooting at animals, birds and the occasional passer-by through his open window: it was a habit he shared with Agatha’s wayward brother, Monty, who had similarly spent time in Africa and who also required the services of a full-time nurse. According to Agatha’s autobiography, Monty delighted in announcing that he had fired in the air around ‘some silly old spinster going down the drive with her behind wobbling’.12 In The Unexpected Guest, Laura reports a similar incident in which her husband boasted of having sent shots to the right and left of a woman ‘going away down the drive’, her ‘fat backside . . . quivering like a jelly’.13 In each case, the police were eventually called. Given the chronology of the writing of her autobiography (between 1950 and 1965) there is every chance that these similarly worded homages to her brother, who had died in 1929, were penned at around the same time. Monty himself, however, whilst both troubled and troublesome, was clearly not the model for the deeply unpleasant Richard Warwick, even if they did share an alarming inclination for using passers-by as target practice.