Curtain Up

by Julius Green

  Saunders appears not to have exercised his own American option on The Unexpected Guest, although he was quick to secure his share of UK amateur income from this handy, single-set ten-hander, and the ‘acting edition’ was published within months by Samuel French.29 In May 1965, an American licence was eventually issued by Dorothy Olding to Bruce Becker30 who, with his wife Honey Waldman, had recently renovated the Broadway Theatre in Nyack, New York, and was about to reopen it as the Tappan Zee Playhouse. This enterprising couple were later to found the off-Broadway Bouwerie Lane Theatre, converted from the German Exchange Bank building; but for now The Unexpected Guest would be the first play of their opening season at Nyack from 5 to 10 July 1965, following a gala opening with Jack Benny (he who had expressed an interest in The Mousetrap a decade previously).

  But this was only part of the strategy; The Unexpected Guest actually opened at the Town and Country Playhouse in Rochester, New York, on 29 June, and the week at Nyack was to be the second date on a ten-week tour that was evidently intended to prepare it for Broadway. And key to this was the casting of Hollywood legend Joan Fontaine in the role of Laura Warwick. Forty-eight-year-old Fontaine had won the 1942 Best Actress Oscar playing opposite Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s Suspicion, and had also been nominated for the prize for Hitchcock’s Rebecca, playing opposite Laurence Olivier, in 1941, and for Margaret Kennedy and Basil Dean’s The Constant Nymph in 1944. On paper, at least, she was one of the biggest names to be cast in a Christie role. The New York Times announced, ‘The Unexpected Guest, a revised version of Agatha Christie’s mystery play that ran in London in 1958, may be shown on Broadway with Joan Fontaine in the starring role. The presentation will be made by Bruce Becker, operator of the Tappan Zee Playhouse in Nyack, New York.’31

  We know from press reports that the tour was a big success at the box office (it won a gold cup for breaking the attendance record at Westport Country Playhouse32) but for some reason the production never made it to Broadway. The answer as to why may lie in the Palm Beach Post’s review, headlined ‘An Unexpected Mistake at Grove’, which commented: ‘Agatha Christie has written so many books and plays she’s bound to make a mistake now and again. One of them, The Unexpected Guest, opened last night at the Coconut Grove Playhouse . . . more than 200 million Christie murder mysteries have been sold, so the 74-year-old writer doesn’t really need this play to add to her reputation.’33

  How much the critic’s intense dislike of the play was down to yet another ‘revised’ American version of Christie’s work we will never know, but he had no problem with Fontaine’s performance, saying that she ‘did a fine job, all things considered . . . That’s the main redeeming feature of the play – looking at Miss Fontaine. I’m not sure just how old she is, but she’s still a doll.’ If this was indicative of the overall critical response, then there was clearly no basis on which to take the gamble of Broadway and, having cleaned up at the box office on the touring circuit, the producers took the no doubt wise decision to quit while they were ahead.

  It must also be remembered that Fontaine, though not yet fifty, had all but quit her Hollywood career and was no stranger to lending her name to dinner theatre and out-of-town productions. Her only Broadway experience consisted of taking over from Deborah Kerr in the hit Tea and Sympathy in 1954 and she would later appear, again as a take-over, in the long-running Forty Carats. Such are the vagaries of show business that the Hollywood legend seems to have been good novelty billing for boosting dinner theatre and touring box office revenues, but perhaps simply not regarded as a sufficient stage heavyweight to sustain a Broadway opening in her own right. Or maybe she just preferred it that way, having left Hollywood for New York, she claimed, when they tried to cast her as Elvis Presley’s mother.34 As well as various TV appearances, Fontaine went on to tour regularly in Dial M for Murder and, in the summer of 1967, played Clarissa in a tour of Christie’s Spider’s Web (no doubt in a ‘revised’ version) seven years before its off-off-Broadway New York premiere.

  Although it never played Broadway, The Unexpected Guest’s numerous international productions included a notable Parisian staging in 1968, adapted by French playwright Robert Thomas, whose Trap for a Lonely Man had enjoyed a successful run at the Savoy in 1963. Less happily, in 1999 The Unexpected Guest was the second of three original Christie plays to be ‘novelised’ by Charles Osborne; Black Coffee (1997) and Spider’s Web (2000) were similarly adapted. I readily acknowledge that Osborne’s 1982 book The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie made a significant contribution to her readers’ appreciation of Christie’s work as a playwright, but to me the idea of turning her original stage plays into novels seems to be a curiously retrograde step. At least Verdict was spared.

  On 8 January 1960, Saunders optioned Christie’s latest play, Go Back for Murder;35 and, with the next one in the bag, he closed The Unexpected Guest on 30 January. Go Back for Murder opened its short pre-West End tour in Edinburgh three weeks later. Saunders, who had perhaps been lulled into a false sense of security by The Unexpected Guest, and maybe by the fact that the title of the new piece contained the word ‘murder’, had booked the Duchess Theatre for a 23 March opening. The Duchess had provided a happy home for The Unexpected Guest, and had also hosted two other successes for Saunders; William Douglas Home’s The Manor at Northstead and Ronald Millar’s The Bride and the Bachelor. Now that the Christie stage thriller production line appeared to have overcome its brief malfunction, the Duchess had evidently been earmarked as a regular home for her work. But if Saunders had been expecting another detective yarn to keep the Queen of Crime’s seemingly insatiable whodunit fans happy, he should perhaps have paid a little more attention to her chosen subject matter.

  Go Back for Murder (the only play Christie ever wrote with the word ‘murder’ in the title) is based on her novel Five Little Pigs, originally serialised as Murder in Retrospect in the American magazine Colliers Weekly in 1941, and first published by Dodd, Mead & Co. in America the following year. Christie herself had not adapted a play from one of her novels since 1951’s The Hollow had finally laid to rest the memories of her struggles in the 1940s with Hidden Horizon, Towards Zero and Appointment with Death. Having enjoyed in the interim four major successes with plays that did not use her novels as their source material, this seemed like an odd moment to return to a formula where her hands were tied by the logistics of the adaptation process. It also seems perverse that she should have specifically chosen one of five titles that she had highlighted to Cork in 1950 (when discussing the folly of adapting Towards Zero) as being unsuitable for adaptation as stage thrillers.36 But that list, of course, had also included The Hollow, a challenge to which she had successfully risen. And, as Ten Little Niggers had amply demonstrated, if there was one thing that Agatha Christie, playwright, enjoyed it was a challenge.

  Like other works of the period which Christie adapted for the stage (1937’s Death on The Nile, 1944’s Towards Zero and 1946’s The Hollow), Five Little Pigs presents us with a man who finds himself under the same roof as both his new and old loves: a scenario which proves the catalyst for murder. In this case, the artist Amyas Crale is working on a portrait of his mistress Elsa, in the presence of his wife, Caroline. But who in the household put the poison in his beer? On stage, this question keeps the audience’s eyes glued on the drink in question in the same way that they try to spot who is tampering with those ten notorious little figurines. But it is not the premise of the plot that fascinated Agatha so much as the unusual narrative structure by which the book delivers it. The action actually starts sixteen years after these events. Amyas and Caroline’s daughter, Carla, is attempting to clear the name of her mother, who died in prison having been convicted of her father’s murder. She enlists Poirot to interview five potential witnesses (the ‘five little pigs’ of the title), and he obtains both verbal and written accounts from them giving their own differing recollections of the circumstances leading up to the murder, and of the event itself. Simply by comparing
these accounts, Poirot is eventually able to ascertain the truth of the matter.

  At the centre of Christie’s narrative premise is the critical legal conundrum of how far it is possible to ascertain the accuracy of personal testimony. Every individual’s view of events is clouded by their own perception and prejudices and, in this case, also by the distance of time. Christie’s contention here is that it is by identifying the very contradictions and inconsistencies in different individuals’ recollections of events that the truth can be ascertained; and it is this that becomes Poirot’s fascinating challenge. As a literary experiment this is ingenious; and it is deeply satisfying for the detective novel reader, who can work alongside Poirot to piece it all together by analysing the characters’ various written and verbal communications. Like Ten Little Niggers, it is a masterpiece of narrative construction of the sort on which Christie’s reputation as a novelist was based. As the basis for a piece of theatre, though, the problems it presents would appear to be well-nigh insurmountable; particularly if the first thing you do is to cut the character of Poirot. But I have no doubt that this is precisely why she took it on; and the solutions she provides are ingenious and, in terms of stagecraft at least, show Christie at the top of her game.

  At the age of sixty-nine, Christie, buoyed up by her West End success, had set herself arguably the biggest challenge of her playwriting career. Like her fellow beneficiary of the People’s Entertainment Society, J.B. Priestley, she had always been fascinated by the dramatic potential of the concept of time but, while ‘murder in retrospect’ had become a recurring theme in her novels, it was not something that she had ever achieved on stage. The unperformed Someone at the Window presents us with a substantial sequence in which we see a number of the same characters in flashback, and the ‘alternative ending’ to Hidden Horizon would have to some extent replicated the denouement of Priestley’s 1932 play Dangerous Corner. Now, Christie was to produce a work which would push director, designer and actors to their limits but which, if successfully delivered, should have created an astonishing coup de théâtre.

  In Act One of Go Back for Murder, Carla arrives from Canada, where she has been living, and enlists the help of solicitor Justin Fogg to organise one-to-one interviews, each in a different location, between herself and the five potential witnesses to her father’s murder sixteen years previously. In Act Two, she persuades them to revisit the scene of the crime (the garden room and terrace of a now-deserted country house ‘in the West of England’ – complete with French windows, of course) and again recount their versions of events; but this time, as they do so, the action switches seamlessly in and out of the night of the crime, so that we see it acted out as the characters remember it. The actress playing Carla also plays her own mother, Caroline, and Christie gives intriguing notes in the ‘acting edition’ on how the other performers should subtly adjust their performances to indicate whether they are in the past or the present. Fogg acts as a sort of master of ceremonies, anchored in the present, and serves Poirot’s function of spotting the vital clues as presented in the flashbacks, which we assume he himself is hearing simply as narrative from the five witnesses. The true killer is revealed but, once again, appears to escape justice, as there is no evidence of a sort that would hold up in a court. Carla has achieved her objective of seeing her mother exonerated to her own satisfaction, and the killer, we are told, has already been sentenced; the knowledge of their guilt, and of the miscarriage of justice inflicted on Caroline, has condemned them to ‘life imprisonment’ inside themselves.

  Christie has not only successfully dispensed with Poirot but, as in Hidden Horizon, has removed the role of the detective completely. She has also brilliantly made use of the highly theatrical device of re-enactment in a manner that suspends the audience’s disbelief and engages them simultaneously in the present and the past. The ‘present’ of the play is 1959, and the ‘past’ is (wartime) 1943 which, in another interesting timewarp, is the ‘present’ of the novel’s UK publication. We (and the actors) literally do ‘go back’ for murder. As a dramatic exercise it is daring but effective. At least, it should be. If it is properly directed. And designed. And acted.

  Even Lib Taylor has to admire Christie’s use of ‘metatheatrical devices’, conceding that she is ‘certainly here raising questions about linearity, and in representing multiplicity she foreshadows the preoccupations of feminist writers’.37 Unfortunately, however, the solicitor apparently ‘functions uncritically as male author, sustaining the narrative structure and “speaking for” characters, especially females, thereby denying plurality in favour of singularity and resolution. The deconstructive process reinforces rather than dislodges stereotypes, as the perceived villainess now coincides with the “true” murderess, and the mother is restored to her ideologically defined position. Moral justice prevails; the status quo remains undisturbed.’ Well, now we know. To satisfy the feminists, the mother would have had to murder her husband; it is a shame that The Hollow pre-dates the time frame of Taylor’s thesis.

  What Taylor has spectacularly failed to appreciate, of course, is that by removing Poirot from the story altogether, Christie has placed Carla right at the centre of the action. Fogg, acting under her direction, has a certain stage management role in Act Two, but in Act One it is Carla rather than Poirot who interviews the suspects. Carla’s single-minded determination to discover the truth is the driving force of the piece and, for good measure, she rids herself of a distinctly oppressive fiancé in the process. This gentleman, who goes by the name of Jeff, has some disturbing and distinctly outdated views on eugenics, which take us right back to Sydney Fairfield’s dilemma in Clemence Dane’s 1921 play A Bill of Divorcement and, indeed, to Christie’s own early ‘Eugenia’ parody. Here, in conversation with Fogg, he reveals his dismay on discovering that his fiancée’s mother was a convicted murderess:

  JEFF: There I was, all set to marry a nice girl, uncle and aunt some of the nicest people in Montreal, a well-bred girl, money of her own. Everything a man could want. And then – out of the blue – this. . . . I’ll admit that, just at first, I thought of backing out – you know, kids – things like that?

  JUSTIN: You have strong views about heredity?

  JEFF: You can’t do any cattle-breeding without realizing that certain strains repeat themselves. ‘Still’, I said to myself, ‘it isn’t the girl’s fault. She’s a fine girl. You can’t let her down. You’ve just got to go through with it.’

  JUSTIN: Cattle breeding.

  JEFF: So I told her it made no difference at all.38

  Later, in conversation with the brandy-swigging archaeologist Angela Warren, Carla expresses her doubts about Jeff:

  ANGELA: He minds about this?

  CARLA: He’s very magnanimous.

  ANGELA: How bloody! I shouldn’t marry him.

  CARLA: I’m not sure that I want to.

  ANGELA: Another man?

  CARLA: Must everything be a man?

  ANGELA: Usually seems to be. I prefer rock paintings.

  Just so we are clear about Angela’s sexual orientation, we are told that ‘she is a tall woman of thirty, of distinguished appearance, well-dressed in a plain suit with a mannish hat.’ As for Carla herself, in Christie’s extensive theatrical pantheon of independent, determined female protagonists, she leads the field: single-mindedly pursuing her own agenda, irrespective of the men around her.

  In terms of Go Back for Murder’s complex moral outcomes, it is worth noting, in passing, that the miscarriage of justice which put Caroline Crale behind bars instead of the real killer was not in this case compounded by the death penalty. We are told specifically that ‘The jury made a strong recommendation to mercy. Her sentence was commuted to imprisonment.’ The death sentence for murder was technically mandatory until the 1957 Homicide Act created various exceptions, and there is reference to this in 1958’s The Unexpected Guest, when Starkwedder states that prison for Laura would be ‘just as bad as being hanged by the neck, or is th
is the kind of crime you are hanged for? I can never remember.’ But even in the early 1940s the jury’s recommendation, provided the judge and the Home Secretary were of the same mind, could have resulted in a reprieve. Whilst the existence of the death penalty substantially raises the stakes in many a Christie drama, and specifically for the wrongfully accused women in Towards Zero and Verdict, 40 per cent of men and 90 per cent of women sentenced to the death penalty in the UK in the first half of the twentieth century were actually reprieved in this way.39 Christie is thus not, as some have suggested, deliberately avoiding the issue of a misapplied death penalty, and thereby missing an opportunity to fuel the increasingly virulent opposition to it in the wake of the 1955 hanging of Ruth Ellis, but is simply realistically reflecting the most likely outcome. The play’s narrative and psychological concerns are in any case not driven by the same agendas as Come and Be Hanged!, and if they were then the real killer could certainly not be allowed to walk free at the end. The death penalty for murder was finally suspended in 1965, when Labour MP Sydney Silverman, the man who had supported Binkie Beaumont in Parliament, introduced a Private Member’s Bill of his own. It was abolished completely five years later.