by Julius Green
Rule of Three was the last occasion on which Peter Saunders premiered a play by Agatha Christie. There can be no doubt that she owed her theatrical success in the early 1950s very largely to Saunders’ diligence, honesty and perspicacity; he was a tireless and resourceful ambassador for her plays, a charming, witty and skilful business ally and a loyal and valued friend. But, as an independent theatre producer launching his career in the early 1950s, he faced unprecedented challenges from within the industry, which he overcame to a large extent by characterising Christie’s work in a manner that suited his own agenda. For a good deal of the time the playwright and her producer were creative fellow travellers, and when they were they created some of the West End’s most legendary successes. But, on the occasions when they were not, the results could be disastrous. Against considerable odds, Saunders successfully maintained his position in a hugely competitive marketplace by defining himself as a purveyor of ‘beer’ rather than ‘wine’. Agatha, however, continued to regard playwriting as an activity that allowed for creative experimentation and, right up to the end, she would continue to be full of surprises.
In 1964, when asked by the Evening Standard for his views on ‘dirty’ plays in the context of Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane, Saunders said, ‘Filth and obscenity have become an unhappy trend in recent years, and if there is to be a place in theatre for this kind of thing, let the Lord Chamberlain issue F for Filth certificates. The public would at least be warned about what they are likely to see.’104 Christie’s other principal producer held similar views; in an article in The Stage two years later, celebrating Bertie Meyer’s sixty years in show business, we hear that ‘Mr Meyer prefers plays with a good story, well told, and free from kitchen sink associations’ and that he was in favour of the censorship role of the Lord Chamberlain, with whom he had ‘had the happiest of relationships for the past sixty years. His presence lends dignity to the theatre in Mr Meyer’s estimation.’105 Christie herself believed that theatre should be accessible to people of all ages, and had been delighted to discover that the British Ambassador to India had taken his entire family, aged eleven to seventy-nine, to see Spider’s Web. In old age, her cherished ambition became to write another comedy for family audiences in the same vein as Spider’s Web, partly as a deliberate counterpoint to what she saw as current trends.
Comedy had always been one of Christie’s strong suits. Ten Little Indians had been advertised on Broadway as a ‘comedy thriller’ (which would doubtless have horrified Christie had she known at the time) and there had been much debate during the pre-West End tour of The Mousetrap about whether the play’s comedy element was at risk of eclipsing its thrills. Her early one-act plays are mostly comedies, and the observational humour and witty dialogue that pervades all of her work are skilfully crafted; Saunders himself had felt that ‘An Afternoon at the Seaside’ might have made a good full-length play.106 Key to the success of Spider’s Web had been the casting of Margaret Lockwood, who went on to work for Saunders on several more projects. ‘She was a wonderful person to have in a company,’ he writes. ‘She was always punctual, never complained if she was kept hanging around, and rather disconcerted the cast because, having a photographic memory, she used to come to the first rehearsal knowing her lines.’107 Spider’s Web had been one of Christie’s happiest theatrical experiences, and she envisaged that the new comedy on which she now spent much of her time would be another vehicle for Lockwood, along with her daughter Julia. In 1972 Julia was to become the third wife of Ernest Clark, who had played John Cristow in The Hollow and Mr Myers QC in Witness for the Prosecution on Broadway.
Amongst the many treatments for the new ‘M and J play’ is the following from Notebook 4a, with ‘M’ indicating Margaret Lockwood and ‘J’ indicating Julia. These brief, intriguing aides-memoires for a work in progress are typical of the gloriously jumbled and frequently indecipherable jottings that fill the 73 volumes of Christie’s notebooks:
Spy Trial background Play
M. good-natured landlady – ex actress
Spivy boy Ronnie – soft spot for him
J. comes through window – girl ‘wanted’ in bank
robbery (at Worthing)
M. packs her off as Miss Jones – Rumanian student
who is due to arrive –
Other lodgers – one borrows M.’s shopping bag –
‘She’s always doing it’ – Another – man – has
done his own decorating etc.
Spy ring head waiter with M. as fall guy –
Ron is ‘taken’ with Miss I. (J)
End of 1st Act Revealing sentences between J. + R
‘She fell for it like a lamb’ Inference is J + R
are the bank robbery ‘Wanteds’ –
Act II
Appearing + disappearing papers – a
Murder? – +so on
M. taken off by police for questioning – her shopping
Bag. End of Act – Is it she who is crook?
Act III ends with unmasking of Murderer
Mrs. K(?) or Mr. Lewis (nice New Zealander?)
Or Finkelstein who has set up M. – in business –
really for his own ends –
Denouement – J + R are MI5 Security agents108
An outline for another of these ‘Lockwood’ plays, Miss Perry, appears in Notebook 53, and there are also a number of ‘work in progress’ scripts for it in the Christie archive; most interestingly one that appears to be a first draft typed by Christie herself, with numerous handwritten corrections, annotations and amendments. The dramatis personae in this draft has ‘ML’ written next to the role of Poppy and ‘JL’ next to that of Miss Perry. There is also a ‘clean’ typed version, incorporating the amendments. This copy has timings scribbled next to the scenes (23, 21 and 45 minutes) and has the letter ‘M’ next to male characters. The timings, and the clarification about casting, indicate that at some point a reading of the play probably took place. There are three plastic-bound copies of a retyped version, which looks as if it may have been created for such a reading, with a typist’s telephone number which indicates that it dates from after 1966. In 2011, Dutch collector Ralf Stultiëns purchased a copy of Miss Perry, evidently from a stock of Christie’s manuscripts that appear to have been ‘recycled’ by a former Hughes Massie employee. From what I have seen of pictures of this, it may be the first draft of the professionally typed version, containing Christie’s corrections of the typist’s work. In a television interview, Stultiëns either misstates (or is mistranslated as stating) that the play is ‘about an elf who takes part in a bank robbery’.109 This is not actually the case.
A twelve-hander, two-act play, Miss Perry is a full-length (but relatively short) piece which reads rather in the style of an episode of a television sitcom. It is set in the fictional village of Saddlebridge, where the residents are organising a pageant under the watchful eye of Poppy, ‘a handsome woman with a vast fund of vitality’. They are using the front room of the Queen of Diamonds pub as their headquarters. A young woman, who introduces herself as Miss Perry, turns up and convinces the local residents that she is a fairy by performing a series of magic tricks, including turning someone into a tortoise and rustling up a live elephant: interesting challenges for a theatre designer. Of course, nothing is quite as it seems. ‘Miss Perry’ turns out to be an actress called Tania, and her ‘magic tricks’ are part of a plot to expose the criminal activities of a local bigwig and to put right a historic miscarriage of justice, whereby the wrong man was imprisoned for a bank heist.
In the play, Christie enjoys a couple of sideswipes at recent trends in theatre. Here Martin Wylie, the young writer who has been brought in to prepare a script for the pageant, is upbraided by his father:
MR WYLIE: Nothing degrading about money, my boy. It’s useful. I can use it. Your mother can use it – and I’ve no doubt in spite of your sentiments that you can use it. You can put on some of those new-fangled plays about a tramp and a drunk an
d a tart all meeting in a public lavatory . . .110
Martin later recruits Tania to appear in his next play, which is evidently no country house whodunit:
TANIA: He says I’m a very good actress. He’s writing a play and he thinks I’d be good enough to play the leading part in it. It’s a wonderful part – wonderful.
POPPY: Not a fairy queen, I presume!
TANIA: No indeed! It’s a girl in a remand home. She’s had two abortions and has tried to be a prostitute. She falls in love with this man, but it’s no good. She goes back to fulfilling her real nature. Back to the brothel.
POPPY: Well really – (laughs) – you children nowadays!
Another sign of the times is the distinctly Cold War, comically ‘reds-under-the bed’ police superintendent, here in conversation with the PC who is assisting him:
SUPERINTENDENT: Tania’s a Russian name, and for all we know she may be a prominent member of the Communist party.
BARNSTABLE: I wouldn’t think that’s likely, sir. She seems a very nice young lady.
SUPERINTENDENT: They catch ’em young, boy. So as to indoctrinate them proper. And naturally she’d seem a nice young lady. Because she’s supposed to make converts, see?
And, when Miss Perry magics up a suitcase full of clothes, we hear Christie’s view on the latest fashion trends; ‘everything a young lady of today wants,’ declares Miss Perry, naming the items as she unpacks them ‘as though it was a foreign language’:
MISS PERRY: A skirt. A Blouse . . . a play suit? An evening dress. A little black number. That’s a funny name! Stockings. Shoes. Panties. And – (frowns) – oh yes, a brassiere . . . a . . .
MARTIN: (embarrassed) Stop.
WILLIAM: Gorblimey!
MISS PERRY: And something – very odd. (holds up jeans)
WILLIAM: Jeans.
MISS PERRY: Jeans? They are not pretty at all.
Once ‘Miss Perry’ becomes Tania we see her quite happily ‘wearing jeans and a sloppy sweater’. Whatever Christie’s personal wardrobe preferences, her female characters were, as ever, moving with the times.
On 22 March 1962, Christie lunched with Margaret Lockwood, an arrangement she apparently made without telling Peter Saunders. The previous day Cork had written to her, ‘We had arranged to have a serious talk with Peter Saunders today, but he has apparently heard from Margaret Lockwood of tomorrow’s lunch, and he has suggested that we put off our talk to see if anything transpires tomorrow that might alter the situation.’111 Three weeks later, in a letter that starts with an update on Cork’s efforts to track down a particular brand of American maple sugar that Agatha had requested, we find the following intriguing reference to Miss Perry: ‘There have been no developments regarding the musical of Miss Perry, but there is nothing sinister in this as it is due to Mr Sekers being in Italy. He wrote me a civil note saying he would be in touch the moment he got back. I daresay you will hear from Peter that he is very excited about this project. I told him about it in general terms, as we and Sekers agreed that it would be treating him rather badly, if after the long and close association we did not give him a chance of coming in on it.’112
The ‘Mr Sekers’ referred to would have been ‘Miki’ (later Sir) Nicholas Sekers, a Jewish-Hungarian immigrant silk tycoon and one of the leading arts philanthropists of the day. A board member of Glyndebourne and the Royal Opera House, in 1959 he had opened the Rosehill Theatre on his Cumbrian estate, a few miles from Britain’s first nuclear power station at Windscale. Peggy Ashcroft performed the opening ceremony, Emlyn Williams and John Gielgud were booked to give entertainments in the opening season, and The Stage had heralded the new theatre as ‘The Glyndebourne of the North’ and ‘one of the most luxurious theatres of its size and type in Europe’.113
We hear nothing more either of the meeting with Lockwood or of Miki Sekers’ interest in a musical of Miss Perry, but the proximity of these two letters from Cork offer the intriguing prospect of Agatha Christie involving herself in the development of a musical for Margaret Lockwood; although it has to be said that a whimsical comedy about a village pageant would hardly seem to be the stuff of musical theatre.
It is clear, though, that by the beginning of 1962, with the West End opening of Rule of Three delayed, Christie was taking steps to develop her own theatrical agenda, independently of Saunders. The following year there was to be some discussion about a third-party musical adaptation of Christie’s 1955 Poirot novel, Hickory Dickory Dock. The rights for the book had been assigned to a trust set up to pay for the schooling of Max’s nephews, Peter and John Mallowan, and Cork expressed some hope that the project might swell the trust’s coffers.114 But, again (and, perhaps, thankfully), nothing came of it.
Sekers may not have pursued his Agatha Christie project, but his firm was to provide the silk that formed part of the décor when Peter Saunders refurbished the Vaudeville Theatre, which he bought in 1969. Two years later, Saunders’ latest acquisition would become the home of Ray Cooney and John Chapman’s successful comedy, Move Over Mrs Markham, which Saunders co-produced with Cooney. Master farceur Cooney, who had performed with Brian Rix at the Whitehall, played Detective Sergeant Trotter in The Mousetrap in 1964, joining the company just as the production celebrated its 5,000th performance. Christie’s own aspirations to pen a new stage comedy remained undiminished, and she saw and admired Move Over Mrs Markham on its pre-West End tour, although Max evidently did not share her enthusiasm for farce.
Oddly for someone who achieved Christie’s huge commercial success, much of her life was dogged by financial uncertainty. Her father’s premature death and her separation and divorce from Archie had made matters difficult in the early years and, like many successful writers of the day, she was involved in frequent disputes with the tax authorities in both the UK and the USA. Much of the correspondence between Edmund Cork, Harold Ober and Ober’s lawyer Howard Reinheimer deals with these issues in considerable detail, and many of the problems they encountered regarding the taxation of income generated through the exploitation of intellectual property were unique to the period in which Christie was writing. This was particularly bad luck for Christie, but it also meant that, in terms of finding solutions to the numerous issues created by the punitive taxation policies of the era, her advisors frequently found themselves to a certain extent improvising. In retrospect, some of their advice and decisions may appear to have been slightly ill-judged: Cork, in particular, was clearly no expert in these matters, although he tried his very best to be so.
In later years, Christie was particularly fortunate to benefit from the direct involvement of her legally trained son-in-law, Anthony Hicks, in the conduct of her business affairs. Rosalind and he moved into a cottage on the Greenway estate in 1968, and the tactful and perceptive guidance that he provided to Cork and others on numerous occasions was invaluable. Despite the constant assistance of her professional advisors and her family, Agatha’s seemingly endless battles with the tax authorities were distressing and time-consuming for her, and although she generally dealt with them with good humour they were the cause of considerable anxiety throughout her life.
The problems had started in the late 1930s, when, following a test case in the USA, the authorities there started to tax Christie’s American earnings although she was non-resident and was already paying tax on them in the UK. A claim for back payments was made, and her American earnings (her most important source of income at the time) were frozen in the USA pending the outcome of lengthy legal wranglings.115 Matters were eventually resolved following the 1945 double taxation treaty between Britain and the USA, which at least clarified matters for the future; a substantial settlement, however, still had to be negotiated regarding back payments, and arguments about this dragged on until 1954, further complicating the already labyrinthine business dealings with the Shuberts. Meanwhile, the post-war taxation regime in the UK had become notoriously punitive, with particularly high earners also facing substantial ‘surtax’ liabilities, as the publ
ic purse took on responsibility for funding the new Welfare State alongside a robust defence budget.116
The easiest way to avoid this was to become a tax exile but, unlike Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan, that was an option which Christie always refused to take. Instead, arrangements were made for her to become the salaried employee of a company (a solution also adopted by Enid Blyton). Agatha Christie Ltd was set up in 1955, and would own the copyrights on all work of hers produced thereafter; licences for plays written after this date were thus with the company rather than with Christie herself. The issue then became one of share ownerships and corporation tax on the profits from the exploitation of Christie’s work, rather than of tax on her personal income.
At his death, Bernard Shaw’s estate had been valued by the Inland Revenue based on the income generated by his most successful work multiplied by the number of his works, although in doing so they failed of course to include income from My Fair Lady, which was to premiere six years after his death. On a similar basis Cork estimated that Christie’s death duties bill, based on Witness for the Prosecution, could amount to £20 million.117 When the Christie Copyrights Trust was established in 1957, taking ownership of the rights in most of her work that pre-dated the establishment of the company, and a number of smaller trusts were also created to hold individual copyrights to the benefit of certain individuals and organisations, the issue of punitive death duties was avoided, and Christie was given the pleasure of seeing charities, friends and family members, including Max’s two nephews, benefit from her work.118