by Julius Green
The Stage subsequently announced that the new tour would open in Wolverhampton before playing Bath, Birmingham and the Nottingham Theatre Royal (no longer fulfilling its once traditional role as the opening venue), with the West End premiere set for Thursday 20 December.81 Goodnight Mrs Puffin, which was having a ‘successful run at the Duchess’ after transferring from the Strand Theatre, would move to the Duke of York’s Theatre. Saunders must have done exactly the deal that Gregg had suggested with the producers of Goodnight Mrs Puffin, allowing them to continue at the Duchess through the summer despite their poor box office figures on condition that they vacated the theatre in time to allow Rule of Three in before Christmas. At last, everything was set. The Christie theatre brand was, however, to suffer an unexpected setback before Rule of Three could finally make its London debut.
Taking advantage of the continued delays in presenting Christie’s latest dramatic offering in the West End, the irrepressible Bertie Meyer had bypassed Cork and approached her directly at the end of June 1962 with a suggestion for a West End revival of Ten Little Niggers, eliciting the response: ‘I think it would be fun to give “Ten Little Niggers” a new lease of life! I don’t know what production difficulties there are or if it “dates” – anyway talk it over with Edmund Cork because he always arranges all these things and knows far more about all my affairs than I do.’82 Despite the advanced state of Saunders’ plans for Rule of Three, and presumably in his full knowledge, a licence was duly issued to Meyer; such was the eighty-five year-old impresario’s status within the West End firmament that neither Cork nor Saunders were likely to have wanted to argue with the man who had produced Christie’s first West End hit. On 21 August The Times carried a story under the headline ‘Famous Thriller to be revived’ announcing that Ten Little Niggers, having been presented in productions around the world, would open at St Martin’s Theatre on 10 September. On the same day as this announcement, but without making reference to it, Saunders wrote to Gregg in Portugal to confirm arrangements for Rule of Three.
It was not the first time that Meyer’s seemingly somewhat arbitrary agenda had conflicted with Saunders’ well-laid plans; and it would be fair to say that to have the theatre opposite The Mousetrap opening a revival of Ten Little Niggers produced by a rival management, with Christie’s latest West End offering due to open just over three months later, was not particularly helpful.
Although the American civil rights movement was reaching a crescendo, and Martin Luther King was to deliver his ‘I have a dream’ speech the following year, the idea of emblazoning the play’s naïve 1943 title across the front of a theatre in post-Empire Windrush London, with the decolonisation of Africa in full swing, did not appear to raise any eyebrows. Or, if it did, then they were raised behind the scenes. In September 1962, The Stage reported, apparently without irony, that Langston Hughes’ Gospel musical Black Nativity was transferring from the Criterion to the Phoenix on the same night that Ten Little Niggers was due to open at the St Martin’s,83 and The Times unashamedly headlined its review ‘Back to Nigger Island’.84 A letter subsequently appeared in the Guardian politely suggesting that it might be time to consider a title change for the play,85 but it was not until a production in Birmingham in 1966 that protests outside the theatre were actually to achieve this. Since then it has been known as And Then There Were None, the title adopted for the American publication of the novel in 1940, although there were certainly still productions touring the UK under the original title in the 1970s, and the book itself was not renamed in the UK until the 1980s.
The problem with the 1962 London presentation, however, was not so much the play’s title as the universal critical condemnation with which the production itself was met, although the former may well have informed the latter by firmly positioning the piece as a product of a bygone theatrical era, and it is perhaps instructive to consider in this context Christie’s own concern about whether the play ‘dates’. The director of this unfortunate enterprise, which closed after twenty-six performances, was none other than Wallace Douglas. Perhaps his alignment with a rival management was by way of protest at being overlooked by Saunders for Christie’s plays since Spider’s Web, but in any event the result comprehensively put paid to his successful association with Christie’s stage work.
By contrast, the critical response to the second tour of Christie’s latest work was initially encouraging. The Stage’s regional reviewer remarked:
Agatha Christie’s trio of plays, Rule of Three, with some rewriting since they were tried out in the North and at Oxford last year, are now running for a week at the Grand Wolverhampton as the start of a pre-London tour. Miss Christie brings to the horror piece, The Rats, a highly ingenious plot, and to the whodunnit piece, The Patient, an electronic machine that enables an almost completely paralysed woman to answer questions. The author has to establish the basic situation so quickly that more than usual concentration is required to follow her. Miss a couple of words and one is done for: but Christie addicts are not likely to do this. In these plays it is often at her least typical that Miss Christie scores best.86
Of An Afternoon at the Seaside, he felt that its ‘comedy is very much in the usual run but is served up most professionally and it is in this play that the director, Hubert Gregg, can make his stamp more obvious. The acting fulfils the requirements of the author.’
But Saunders was to have less luck with one of the leading national critics of the day. His files relating to Rule of Three include an entertaining exchange with Bernard Levin, who had recently moved from his job as theatre critic of the Daily Express to fulfil the same role at the Daily Mail.
In November 1962 Levin wrote to Saunders objecting to a leaflet advertising the forthcoming West End run of the production. Although the leaflet itself made it clear that all the glowing reviews quoted on it were from ‘provincial’ newspapers (in fact, from the previous year’s tour), it included one from the Mail’s Northern edition calling the plays ‘vintage Christie’ and credited simply ‘Daily Mail’.87 Levin felt this implied that the review was his, and pointed out that the protocol whereby national critics did not attend ‘out of town’ performances should work both ways, and that producers should not quote reviews from national newspapers prior to a West End opening. Saunders responded that, in his opinion, he was entitled to quote a review from the Northern edition in this context, but that he would in future clarify that this was the case.
This, of course, did little to satisfy Levin, and Saunders eventually agreed to stop using the quote in question. For all Saunders’ efforts to please him, Levin, who had mercilessly attacked the revival of Ten Little Niggers in verse, gave Rule of Three a bad review as well. A few days later, Saunders wrote to fellow theatre-owner Leslie Macdonnell, managing director of Moss Empires, expressing his outrage that Levin had eaten sandwiches throughout ‘The Rats’ and had been absent from his seat for much of the rest of the evening. Saunders told Macdonnell that there was no point in the theatre managements complaining to the Mail about their critic’s behaviour, as ‘the more fuss one makes of Levin the more likely they are to keep him on’,88 but asked if there was anything that could be done to ensure that Levin ‘sees shows that he criticizes through from beginning to end, and that he doesn’t behave like a peasant’. Despite all this, as Saunders makes clear in his book, he, along with most other producers at the time, actually had a sneaking admiration for Levin and the publicity he brought to theatre through his forthright critical style.
Levin was by no means the only national critic to dislike Rule of Three, and the now traditional critical drubbing of Agatha Christie’s stage work was pretty well universal. Once again, The Stage’s London reviewer proved much harder to please than his regional counterpart:
Not much need be said about Rule of Three. The first play is a Grand Guignol in which a couple of lovers are trapped in a Hampstead flat by a homosexual who has lured them there . . . Afternoon at the Seaside is the sort of thing one saw in West End r
evue years ago – fun at the expense of ‘ordinary’ people on holiday. But in revue we would have a sketch of five or seven minutes. . . . the Patient is the feeblest of the plays . . . the play creaks and pants through stuff that would be laughable if it were not so depressing. . . . Hubert Gregg has obviously put a lot of work into his direction. The players all work extremely hard. Alas, they are defeated.89
The Guardian’s Philip Hope-Wallace, who was no fan of Agatha Christie, commented that ‘These Grand Guignol playlets may be feebly popular . . . but judged by the standards obtaining for the authoress of Witness for the Prosecution I fear I must call them cheap, coarse, obvious and forced.’90 Under the headline ‘LOOSE ENDS IN TRIPLE BILL – NAÏVE EVENING WITH AGATHA CHRISTIE’, the Times critic wrote:
As the talents of short story writer and novelist often do not go hand in hand, so the successful writer of one-act plays quite frequently fails with a full length play. And vice versa of course, as the new Agatha Christie programme demonstrates. Although the advertisements describe it as ‘Agatha Christie’s latest play’, it is in fact a bill of three plays, two dramatic and one comic sandwiched in between . . . In short, it is a harmless, naïve evening . . . it will probably appeal to amateurs and to the less demanding reps, but it is hardly, one would have thought, a probable addition to West End entertainments. Unfortunately, the actors do little to change one’s opinion on this score . . .91
Kenneth Tynan, back from his sojourn in New York and now firmly established as an advocate of the theatrical ‘new wave’, finally seems to have run out of patience with Christie on stage. Rule of Three, he wrote in the Observer, is ‘a trio of playlets devoted, like the rest of her work, to whetting one’s appetite for retribution. . . . the writing is banal, the titillation unthrilling, and the implied view of life suggestive of Broadstairs in the Baldwin epoch.’92 Next to his review, Tynan pays tribute to Charles Laughton, who had died a few days previously. Laughton, he said, was ‘exorbitant, overweening and unskilled in the humility of teamwork, but a prodigious orator, a man of voluminous mind, and a master of showmanship, who bestowed on the science of scene-stealing a unique dimension of kleptomania. Even those he robbed will mourn him.’93
The Broadstairs/Baldwin comment presumably refers specifically to An Afternoon at the Seaside, and is hardly a criticism. Christie specifies that the ‘time’ setting of the play is simply ‘a summer afternoon’; when she wants to set her plays in ‘the present’ she does so. Although the ‘daring bikini’ worn by ‘The Beauty’ tells us that we are very much in the 1960s, the whole piece is a deliberately constructed stylistic exercise in nostalgia for an era that if it is not Baldwin’s may be even earlier. The tragedy is that, to read Tynan and many of the other critics, one would get the impression that Christie was just an old lady of seventy-two whose portrayal of contemporary Britain was pitifully out of date. Gregg, in his book, treats us to several pages about his genius in taking his cue for the play from ‘naughty seaside postcards’, and his consequent directorial and textual embellishments of a scene where a lady gets changed from her swimming costume under a towel whilst attempting to preserve her modesty. In fairness, this routine (as delivered by Patricia Heneghan in the first tour and Betty McDowall in the West End) does appear to have brought the house down, but Gregg notes that whilst he had seen the play as the theatrical equivalent of a naughty seaside postcard, ‘I don’t think Agatha had. She didn’t complain at the result but she didn’t thank me.’94
The postcards he refers to were presumably those of Donald McGill, whose hugely popular saucy cartoons, with their classic double entendres, enjoyed their heyday in the 1930s and 1940s. Extraordinarily, in 1954 at the age of seventy-nine, McGill had been tried and found guilty of publishing obscene images, and a number of his works had been banned. He died two months before An Afternoon at the Seaside reached the West End. Whilst the play undoubtedly lends itself to this interpretation, it presents it in a context which, I suspect, was not intended and, in doing so, arguably coarsens it. Christie’s ‘alternative ending’ for the play, with its ‘Harlequinade atmosphere’, includes this delightful moment:
SOMERS: I don’t look like a burglar, do I?
(suddenly flings off coat and begins springing about, turning handsprings)
GEORGE: (alarmed) Stop it – stop it, you Clown! Have you gone mad?
SOMERS: I feel a bit mad. It’s the moonlight. Relax, you old Pantaloon.
GEORGE: What do you think this is? A Pantomime? The silent young lovers. Me, Pantaloon. You playing the Clown. All we need now is a comic policeman.95
Needless to say, they get one.
Philip Hope-Wallace had found the playlet ‘vulgar and patronising’. As directed by Gregg it may well have been, but Christie seems have found her own inspiration for the piece in a much older comic tradition than 1940s McGill.
The Telegraph’s critic appears to have been pretty much alone in finding something to enjoy in Rule of Three, and the advertisements for the production subsequently quoted a line from his review, ‘Three thrilling denouements for the price of one.’ ‘What a spiteful lot critics are,’ concluded Christie in a letter to Cork,96 pointing out that, contrary to the assertion in one review that she was ‘quite out of touch with today’s beach life’ she was, in fact, ‘an AUTHORITY’, as a result of regular trips to Devon beaches with young relatives.
To make matters worse, in January 1963, in a round-up of the previous theatrical year, the Financial Times upset Saunders by claiming that Rule of Three had ‘only just struggled into the New Year’.97 Never one to countenance misreporting, Saunders took up the matter of this ‘most damaging’ article with the paper’s editor, claiming that Rule of Three was in the best of health and stating that he hoped the journalist concerned would have the ‘grace to blush’ when the production celebrated its first anniversary.98
The Financial Times article in question actually offers a fascinating snapshot of London theatre at that time. Business in 1962, we are told, had suffered because ‘Over the Cuba crisis, theatre-goers stayed at home listening to the news, while the economic gloom has been accurately reflected in the barometer of theatre attendances.’ Nonetheless My Fair Lady and Beyond the Fringe had both returned a substantial profit. The Royal Shakespeare Company, which had been founded in 1961, was presenting King Lear at the Aldwych, and there were high hopes for the National Theatre, which was due to present its inaugural season at the Old Vic later in 1963. A list of theatrical hits that had opened in 1962 and were still running in January 1963 included Signpost to Murder, Boeing-Boeing, Come Blow Your Horn, Blitz!, The Private Ear and the Public Eye and Arnold Wesker’s Chips with Everything, ‘the only play to come out of the Kitchen Sink revolution’ to have been a success that year. The corresponding list of the previous year’s flops of course now included Ten Little Niggers, which was thereby humiliatingly demoted from its previous status as a West End hit.
Much of Saunders’ own optimism hinged on the fact that he had clinched a deal with the BBC for a live television broadcast of An Afternoon at the Seaside (or ‘A Day by the Seaside’ as it was referred to on the licence) which was due to take place on 7 February. The BBC paid Christie £75 for the broadcast rights, of which Saunders was entitled to keep a third.99 Saunders and Cork had high hopes that this exposure would revive the production’s fortunes but, according to Saunders, although ‘it seemed to televise beautifully’ it ‘had absolutely no effect on the box office whatsoever’.100 Writing to Anthony Hicks on 12 February, Cork said that the broadcast ‘made me laugh . . . but, alas, the box office has not responded.’101
Rule of Three closed on 9 March after a run of ninety-two performances over eleven and a half weeks, so the Financial Times’ reporter, as it turned out, had no need to blush. I have not seen budgets or accounts, but the financial outcome cannot have been good. ‘I felt dreadfully responsible over this one . . . I don’t think I have ever fought so hard for a play,’ says Saunders. And the production’s failure, of
course, meant that he was also facing the expensive prospect, as a theatre owner, of seeing the Duchess go ‘dark’. Rule of Three eventually staggered on until a replacement could be found: a ‘new revue’ called See You Inside. It may have been some consolation to Saunders that, two weeks later, Goodnight Mrs Puffin closed at the Duke of York’s.
The Times’ summation that Rule of Three was likely to find a home with amateur and repertory companies proved remarkably prescient. Saunders had no hesitation in paying an advance of £200 to take up his 50 per cent share of Christie’s income from amateur rights for the seven-year duration of his licence, and the three plays were rushed into print by Samuel French, published separately under their own titles. In May 1963 Hughes Massie took an advertisement in The Stage announcing that they were ‘available for repertory’, the author’s royalty being 4 per cent for each play or 10 per cent if the three were presented together.102 As it turned out, they did indeed end up as three plays for the price of one, although not in the way that the publicity had originally intended. As a business strategy for these particular works, it wasn’t a bad one – but it was a sad West End finale for the playwright who, less than ten years before, had been the toast of London and Broadway.
It should not be forgotten, though, that none of the three plays was presented as Christie herself had originally envisaged. By the time the production reached the West End, the Grand Guignol ‘before your very eyes’ stabbing and the implied suicide, which she had seen as the centrepiece and the denouement of The Rats, had been cut completely; and her unique ending for The Patient had been replaced with something far more conventional, eventually scribbled by her on some small sheets of hotel notepaper at the start of the second tour in Wolverhampton. And An Afternoon at the Seaside, which seems likely to have taken its cue from the revues of the 1920s, had been reinterpreted as a naughty postcard, complete with a line added by Gregg for a lady complaining that there was sand in her bra. As was so often the case, Christie’s own theatrical imagination displayed a far more intriguing frame of reference than that of those responsible for delivering her work. Christie had written ‘The Rule of Three Doth Puzzle Me . . . Old Rhyme’ on the front page of her script, and the line also appeared on the title page of the play’s programme. It certainly puzzled her producer, her director and the critics. I shall leave the last word on Rule of Three with Agatha herself; in a 1971 letter to Rosalind she says simply, ‘I wrote the three short plays entirely to please Peter Saunders but I didn’t enjoy them – and they were not really successful.’103