by Julius Green
Peter Saunders, meanwhile, was continuing to consolidate his own position in the West End. He already owned the lease on the Ambassadors, and in October 1961 he bought the freehold on the Duchess. The purchase was facilitated by a bank loan organised by Edmund Cork, and this was to be the foundation of a West End theatrical property empire, based on the leases of small playhouses bought from independent owners, that would later also include at various points the Vaudeville, the Duke of York’s and the St Martin’s. The following year, the Duchess would provide a home for Agatha’s final West End offering, with Saunders now in the dual role of producer and landlord. But, ironically, owning the theatre was to prove no advantage when it came to scheduling the production’s West End opening.
It seems that Rule of Three, an evening of three one-act plays, really was ‘Saunders’ Folly’. In his autobiography he notes, ‘It will be remembered that one of my major successes had been Witness for the Prosecution, which I had persuaded Agatha Christie to write against her inclination. I had long since wanted to do a Christie evening of three one-act plays. My idea was that as many people prefer her short stories to her full-length novels, the theatre-going public might like three plays for the price of one. Agatha was very unwilling to do this, but I am afraid I didn’t refrain from reminding her how right I was about Witness for the Prosecution and, in due course, she produced Rule of Three, three one-acters.’56
The earliest reference to the project in Christie’s papers is in Notebook 3, in a list headed ‘General projects 1955’ which also includes ‘The Unexpected Guest’. The relevant note reads,
Three plays (Rule of Three?)
1. Accident?
2. Rajah’s Emerald?
3. SOS?57
All three titles were existing Christie short stories, 1929’s ‘Accident’ having been the subject of Margery Vosper’s one-act play, Tea for Three, in 1939. Perhaps Christie had considered including Vosper’s piece in Rule of Three, but it seems more likely that she had simply forgotten that it existed. It may also have been ruled out because it shares a poisoning theme with ‘SOS’ (1926). There are quite extensive notes that appear to develop the idea of turning ‘SOS’ into a play, but as it features the arrival at a remote house of a stranger whose car has broken down, it may be that she felt the premise was too similar to that of The Unexpected Guest, which she was also developing at the time. Of the three titles, the only one that was pursued is ‘The Rajah’s Emerald’ (1926), which contains elements that were to appear in the piece eventually known as An Afternoon at the Seaside. By Notebook 24 the list of plays has been amended to ‘The Patient’, ‘Seaside Holiday’ and ‘SOS’, and is headed ‘Rule of Three 3 1-act plays for PS’, thus acknowledging Saunders’ influence on the project.
Rule of Three (more often referred to in correspondence between Cork, Christie and Saunders as ‘Triple Bill’) ended up comprising three short plays: The Rats, An Afternoon at the Seaside and The Patient (performed in that order). In the first play, the titular ‘rats’ in a trap are secret lovers Sandra and David, who are lured to a flat whose owners have gone away. There, bizarre and terrifying events unfold in an atmosphere of increasing tension and claustrophobia, as it becomes apparent that they are being framed for the murder of Sandra’s husband, John, whose body they find in a chest where he appears to have hidden himself for the purpose of spying on their clandestine activities.
In Christie’s original version, their gay acquaintance, Alec, who briefly joins the two lovers in the flat, actually murders the concealed John before their eyes. In the following extraordinary sequence Alec opens the chest in which Sandra’s husband is hiding and kills him, without them (or probably most of the audience) noticing. But first, he is at pains to point out that the balcony would offer the perfect opportunity for suicide:
ALEC: (goes out through door onto balcony) Perfect for suicide! Five flights and concrete at the bottom. (comes back in and shuts the door. Picks up knife from where David has put it down, holding it rather carefully towards the middle) Now let’s see what else we can explore. Nothing very much is there, except the chest. That I believe is what they call a Kuwait Bride Chest. Oh listen, darling, do you think somebody could be hiding inside it? I must see. (opens lid, leans down inside. He holds the knife in his hand. There is a faint groaning noise masked by Alec’s rather high-pitched voice) Delicious embroideries. Do you think the Torrances smuggled all these things through customs? (shuts down lid again) Well, I must say I’m disappointed.58
In the published version, the reference to suicide is recontexualised so as not to be so suggestive of the act, and Alec does not carry out the murder of John on stage, evidently having killed him at some point before Sandra and David’s arrival at the deserted flat. In both versions he gets their fingerprints on the murder weapon, an ornamental knife, before departing, although only in the published script does he ‘accidentally’ drop the knife over the balcony. Sandra and David discover John’s body and, realising that they are locked in the room and are being framed, they argue and their love quickly turns to hate.
By contrast, An Afternoon at the Seaside is just what it says on the tin; a delightful observational comedy set in the English resort of ‘Little-Slippyng-on-Sea’, it pokes gentle fun at the British on holiday, and is framed in a wafer-thin plot about stolen jewellery. The third play, The Patient, is set in a private nursing home, where a paralysed woman is attempting to use a ‘new electrical gadget’ to assist with the identification of the person who pushed her off a balcony. The suspects are assembled and eventually the villain is entrapped. The play’s conclusion involves the victim’s assailant melodramatically stepping out from behind a curtain just as Inspector Cray identifies them by name as the culprit.
On the face of it, Rule of Three presents us with three unconnected plays, each in different styles and each with a crime element. But, as with much of Christie’s stage work, there is a lot more to it than may at first appear. The Rats draws its storyline, of a murdered man concealed in a chest from which he had been spying on his unfaithful wife, from the 1932 Poirot short story ‘The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest’. First published in the Strand Magazine, it was later reworked into the longer ‘The Mystery of the Spanish Chest’, published in Women’s Illustrated in 1960. Christie would have been working on the expanded version, with its references to marital jealousy that draw parallels with Othello, at a time when the idea for ‘The Rats’ was already well-developed. In the original version of the story, Hastings comments that the events it concerns would make a good plot for a play, and Poirot responds that it has already been done. Poirot could be referring to Othello or to the 1928 Patrick Hamilton play, Rope, in which party guests are served a buffet from the lid of a trunk containing a dead body. But I suspect that it may in fact be a reference to a short play called Crime, which featured in the first London Grand Guignol season at the Little Theatre. Crime, which premiered in November 1921, starred Sybil Thorndike and her brother Russell, and was written by her husband Lewis Casson.59 In it, a woman is murdered with a breadknife by an unsavoury pair of characters and her body put in a trunk. Due to circumstances beyond their control, they are forced to remain in the room with their victim, and fall out between themselves. In their nervousness, they eventually give the game away to a third party and the trunk is opened, exposing her horribly mutilated corpse; in the ensuing fracas, one of the killers shoots the other.
The Times was not impressed, saying that there was ‘not a single thrill’ in the piece and that the corpse was ‘an obvious dummy’, although the actors ‘make the best of a bad job’.60 But there was to be a real-life twist to the tale; Russell Thorndike, in his book about his sister’s work, tells the tale of a rehearsal at which Sybil became trapped inside the trunk, which did not have air holes, and fainted.61 All of this – the killing with the knife, the conspirators falling out with each other, the question of air holes – finds resonances in The Rats. As Christie’s The Last Séance demonstrates, she was well
aware of the Grand Guignol concept, and we know that she attended a Grand Guignol performance when visiting France with Archie in 1924. Black Coffee had played at the Little Theatre in 1931; and it is more than likely that, if Christie had not actually seen Crime ten years earlier, she at least read the reviews and heard the stories about it, and that it is therefore this that Poirot is referring to in ‘The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest’ when he says that a play has already been made out of the scenario. By 1961, of course, Christie was a friend of Sybil Thorndike and would have heard all about it first hand. Whatever the origins of its storyline, The Rats, particularly in its original version featuring an onstage murder, is clearly an exercise in Grand Guignol and, as such, is Christie’s second. A few of the critics picked up on this, and even the censor, in recommending it for licence, refers to it as ‘Quite a good Guignol.’62
The Grand Guignol programmes had, of course, provided some light relief from the horrors by including short comedy plays of the sort that Christie herself had once written, and even Noël Coward had contributed such a piece to the original London Grand Guignol season. As a concept, Rule of Three is not dissimilar to Coward’s own collections of short plays, Tonight at 8.30, with which he and Gertrude Lawrence enjoyed huge success in 1935–6; and it is also in Coward’s work that we can find a direct inspiration for An Afternoon at the Seaside. Elements of the setting, and of the plot such as it is, had been borrowed by Christie from her own short story, ‘The Rajah’s Emerald’, published in 1926 in Red magazine; but in theatrical terms the play appears to find its inspiration in a Coward piece written two years later. Coward’s 1928 musical revue, This Year of Grace, was the show in which his enduringly popular song ‘A Room with a View’ first appeared. Produced by Agatha’s friend, the impresario C.B. Cochran, it enjoyed successful runs at the London Pavilion and at the Selwyn Theatre (now the American Airlines Theatre) on Broadway.
The Act Two opener was a routine called ‘The Lido Beach’ (showing the English upper classes holidaying abroad), followed by ‘The English Lido Beach’ (showing the English working-class holiday at home). In the foreground of the first piece there is ‘a row of cabanas with coloured, striped awnings’ facing the audience, which are replaced in the second by a row of bathing machines. In Christie’s piece, over thirty years later, ‘Three bathing huts face the audience on a rostrum.’ After we have observed the upper classes at play in ‘The Lido Beach’, the compere announces, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, it has been suggested in several newspapers of late that English seaside resorts hold out fewer attractions to visitors than Continental ones. Any true patriotic Englishman naturally resents this reflection on our national gaiety, and Mr Cochran perhaps more keenly than anyone – so he has determined to prove conclusively once and for all that no holiday resort in the world can equal in charm, gaiety and light-hearted carefree enjoyment an average watering-place on the shores of the English Channel.’63
What follows is, in spirit, very similar to An Afternoon at the Seaside, although considerably shorter and obviously without the ‘crime’ element. Coward’s piece, of course, also contains musical sequences, although for good measure Christie does specify a chorus of ‘I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside’ (‘rather out of tune’) as the curtain goes up. There is no direct duplication of dialogue, and Christie puts her own unique stamp on the whole thing, yet An Afternoon at the Seaside as a piece of theatre seems likely to have been inspired by an affectionate memory of the mise en scène and characters in Coward’s ‘The English Lido’, a fact which more than one reviewer of Christie’s play would make reference to. She may also have been remembering the title of another sketch in This Year of Grace!, a spoof of the dramatic style of J. M. Barrie, Frederick Lonsdale and Edgar Wallace called ‘Rules of Three’.
Christie’s own Rule of Three, with its direct references to Grand Guignol and pre-war revue, is I believe a very specific theatrical exercise; but one that it is possible her younger producer and his team did not fully appreciate. She herself was an enthusiastic and well-informed theatregoer, and we know that she attended the plays of Samuel Beckett alongside those of Terence Rattigan. She would have been fully aware of current theatrical trends, and when critics found the experience of Rule of Three old-fashioned I have no doubt that Christie had deliberately crafted it to be so. But if the staging and marketing of the piece failed to reflect this fact, then inevitably she simply appeared to be out of date.
One of Christie’s notes for The Patient suggests a number of different endings for the piece, including, intriguingly, ‘Patient is really policewoman – whole thing is rigged’; as it happens, the idea of a policewoman in disguise was eventually to be used in An Afternoon at the Seaside. More helpfully than the notebooks, though, in the case of Rule of Three the Agatha Christie archive also includes loose-leaf first drafts for each of the three plays. Apparently typed by Agatha herself, they are (inevitably) undated, and are covered in handwritten notes, amendments and corrections. At this stage The Rats is a three-hander, without the second female role of Jennifer, and An Afternoon at the Seaside (or ‘Beside the Seaside’) has an ‘alternative’ ending in which the play is split into two scenes; Scene One is set in ‘Late afternoon’ and Scene Two ‘Five hours later. Follows immediately. Moonlight. Beach deserted. Harlequinade atmosphere. Distant voice singing Me and My Girl.’64 The singing of ‘Me and My Girl’ is, again, evocative of a bygone era, and I particularly like the fact that, after all her intervening theatrical adventures, Christie’s mind turns once again to the childhood delights of a Harlequinade.
Although hospital rooms were a favourite Guignol setting, and helpless patients a favourite premise, the plotting of The Patient, unlike the other two plays, appears to have no antecedents in Christie’s own work. The first draft concludes with the highly original concept that the curtain should come down just as the culprit is about to be revealed, so that the audience never discovers their identity. We hear instead a poem containing a wonderful sideswipe at the critics:
Don’t let whodunnit make you mad,
Don’t let it make the critics sad,
Because they cannot give away,
The murderer! If they can they may!65
What isn’t clear from the script is that this poem was intended to be heard on a recording of the playwright’s own voice; ‘We agreed to Agatha making this record’ says Hubert Gregg, yet again at the helm as director. ‘She seemed convinced it would work and we wanted her to get it out of her system.’66
An alternative to the poem, in which a voice simply asks the audience who they think did it, and the critics are spared, is inked in to the script. And following this is a page that reads,
A suggestion
If plays run satisfactorily, at some unadvertised date, the ending of the Patient will be different. Inspector Cray will have a few extra lines and the screen will be drawn aside, so that the audience sees who is hiding behind it! This could be done at odd intervals.
Correspondence shows that Christie received a ‘good copy’ of Rule of Three, which was typed up from the draft that had contained this note, on 24 August 1961,67 so we know that what follows is pure coincidence. A week later, a fan from South Africa called James Chapman wrote to her, ‘I have been an admirer of your writing for many years, and for some time now I have been meaning to write to you with a “crazy” idea for a play, which only you would be able to make use of at its best. Possibly you get hundreds of suggestions, but here it is to do with what you like! The idea would be for you to write one of your excellent “who done its” with say possibly five suspects . . . now, here is the difference to other plays – you make five different endings, in each of which one of the five suspects is the guilty party.’68 He goes on at some length to explain how it would work, concluding: ‘A critic friend I once discussed the idea with thought it had flaws – but knowing your love of fooling your audiences, you may think it has possibilities. With all good wishes for your continued success.’ Chapman received a standard
response from Hughes Massie and there is nothing to indicate that Christie herself even saw his letter, but his concept is particularly intriguing in the context of Christie’s ideas for the ending of The Patient.
There has been some confusion over the timeframe of the original production of Rule of Three, because neither Saunders nor Gregg make it clear in their accounts that an entire year elapsed between its original short tour and its West End opening. In respect of casting, Gregg says simply, ‘There was some reshuffling before we reached London,’ but the genesis of the production was far more troublesome and time-consuming than either of them imply.
Cork wrote to Christie in August 1961 enclosing the ‘good copy’ of the script, but explaining that ‘when it was “acted” it took precisely 81 minutes, which is rather too little to give the customers for their money. If you could see your way to adding 17 pages – say 7, 5 and 5 respectively, this would be perfect. I think you will agree when you see Peter that he is now going ahead with this project with terrific enthusiasm. With this he will probably overcome all difficulties.’ The plays had actually been ‘acted’ by Gregg to Saunders over dinner at Saunders’ house in Bishop’s Avenue, and it is clear from the first draft that they would have been too short for an evening’s entertainment. Christie dutifully added further material, in the case of The Rats by creating a scene with an additional character, the inquisitive Jennifer, so that a three-hander became a four-hander. Jennifer has come to feed the budgie belonging to the flat’s owners, and is surprised to find Sandra there, but less so when Sandra’s lover David also turns up. Jennifer puts two and two together and leaves the two of them together. David and Jennifer are then joined briefly by Alec.
Christie had previously kept the Lord Chamberlain’s office happy by complying with the accepted codification of homosexual characters, including Christopher Wren (who wears an ‘artistic’ tie) in The Mousetrap and the ‘pansy’ Basil in A Daughter’s a Daughter. But now, four years after the Wolfenden Report had recommended that ‘homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private be no longer a criminal offence’, she attempted something more direct. Alec Hanbury is described as ‘a young man of twenty-eight or nine, the pansy type, very elegant, amusing, inclined to be spiteful . . . dressed in the height of fashion, even wearing gloves’. When David remarks to Sandra that Alec clearly does not like her she responds, ‘I don’t think he likes any women very much.’ Alec, of course, is a nasty piece of work, but then so are all the characters in ‘The Rats’; a heterosexual woman in the piece also proves to be a murderer. Christie’s point is that crimes of passion are not a heterosexual preserve.