by Julius Green
Another very straightforward reason for the neglect of Christie as a playwright is continued confusion over the authorship of the plays credited to her. As well as her own work for the stage there have been a number of second-rate adaptations of her novels by third parties; and this, combined with the enduring success of third-party film and television adaptations, has led to an assumption that the plays credited to her were not from her own pen. There is an immediate and obvious qualitative difference between Christie’s own work for the stage and that of her adaptors, but the staging of a number of such works in her own lifetime, and several more since, has inevitably diluted her own stock as a playwright. Christie herself was unequivocal on the subject, repeatedly expressing her displeasure at her stage adaptors’ work: ‘Several books of mine were dramatised by other people and they all dissatisfied me intensely,’ she told the Sunday Times in 1961.4 Ironically, though, whilst arguably initially hindering her own development as a playwright, the adaptors’ efforts provided her with an entrée to the world of theatre and its practitioners, where she became a willing student and gained the confidence to promote her own work: ‘I think what started me off was my annoyance over people adapting my books for the stage in a way I disliked.’5 Certainly, she is the only playwright I can think of whose reputation has had to contend with the truly bizarre obstacle of a body of work for the stage penned by others but promoted to the public and the critics in her name.
And then there is the question of collaboration. Playwriting is often a shared undertaking, and writers from Shakespeare to Brecht to David Edgar have worked with others in the preparation of their scripts. There can be no doubt that one of the things that most attracted Christie to the stage was the collaborative nature of the process, enabling her as it did to exchange ideas with others in a way that her largely solitary work as a novelist did not. She was a willing and adept participant in script discussions, either as a commentator on other people’s adaptations of her novels or as a playwright herself attempting to address the concerns of producers, directors and actors. Despite the patronising claims of certain directors about the level of their own input, the fourteen full-length plays and three one-act plays that were premiered on stage in Christie’s lifetime, and which carry her name as sole playwright, are indisputably her own work. She only ever incorporated the suggestions of others up to a point, and always remained in control of the script development process. And when she was convinced that she was in the right she was legendarily immovable. Ironically, her own highly accomplished adaptation of one of her short stories was appropriated wholesale by an ‘adaptor’ without so much as an acknowledgement of her own dramatisation as source material. And, conversely, she had very little to do with the only script for which she is actually credited as co-adaptor. In such cases Christie herself acted in good faith at the behest of agents and producers, but it doesn’t help when it comes to establishing the extent of her own contribution to the dramatic canon that bears her name.
There is also perhaps a misconception that Christie exploited her reputation as a novelist to promote her career in the theatre, and that her theatrical successes were in some way dependent on the success of her books. If anything, as we shall see, the opposite was the case, and the expectations raised by the popularity of her detective fiction frequently hampered her progress as a playwright and prejudiced critical opinion against her work on the stage. Whilst her producers inevitably attempted to capitalise on her existing fan base, the adaptations of some of her best-selling novels proved to be critical and box office disasters, and theatregoers repeatedly demonstrated themselves to be more than capable of judging her work for the stage on its own merits. Christie’s success as a playwright was exceptionally hard-won and, far from resting on her laurels as a popular novelist, she consistently dedicated herself to honing her craft, observing and willingly learning from the numerous leading theatrical practitioners with whom she worked. In any case, Christie was writing at a time when combining careers as a novelist and a playwright was not uncommon; amongst the contemporary female playwrights who did so were Clemence Dane, Margaret Kennedy, Enid Bagnold, Dodie Smith and Daphne du Maurier. Christie was simply both a more successful novelist and, ultimately, a more successful playwright than any of them. And, for those who carp that her plays were simply adaptations of existing works, it is instructive to note how far these adaptations diverge from their source material and that, amongst her full-length plays, there are nine totally original works, six of which were premiered in her lifetime. Christie herself said, ‘I prefer to write a play as a play, that is rather than to adapt a book.’6
Christie was passionate about theatre and was deeply involved in the processes of making it. She attended and contributed to rehearsals, and her delightful ‘author’s notes’ at the front of some of the published editions of the plays show her engaging with everything from the mechanics of creating the effect of a lift ascending and descending in Appointment with Death to the problems associated with the unusually large dramatis personae of Witness for the Prosecution and the ‘ageing’ of actors and multiple locations in Go Back for Murder. She was very aware of the practicalities of putting on a play, favouring single sets and relatively small casts (Appointment with Death and Witness for the Prosecution are notable exceptions), and this partly accounts for her enduring popularity with cash-strapped repertory theatres and touring companies over the years, and the consequent law of diminishing returns in terms of both production values and credibility within the theatre community.
Born in 1890, for the first ten years of her life Agatha was a Victorian; Gladstone became Prime Minister for the fourth time shortly before her first birthday. As a teenager and a young woman she was an Edwardian. She sent husbands off to both world wars, and women got the vote on the same basis as men when she was thirty-eight. In 1969 she watched man land on the moon on television, and when she died in 1976, Harold Wilson was Prime Minister. Her first success as a novelist came when she was thirty; but although she started writing plays as a teenager, none of her work was staged until she was forty, and her playwriting career didn’t really take off until she was in her sixties. This is an interesting inversion of the timeline of Noël Coward’s career; Coward and Christie were contemporaries, but his success as a playwright came much earlier in life and reached its pinnacle in the Second World War with Blithe Spirit and Present Laughter, just as Christie was experiencing her first West End hit with Ten Little Niggers. (The history of this play’s problematic title is examined later in this book.)
Each of Christie’s plays is firmly set in its own time, and resists any attempt at updating in just the same way that the work of Noël Coward does. Although the moral dilemmas faced by the characters and their guilt, obsession, love and jealousy are timeless, their behaviour and interactions are very much a function of the social mores of the time in which each play is set, and modern communications technology would severely compromise elements of the plotting. The stakes are raised in several of the storylines by the ever-present threat of the hangman’s noose; particularly in Verdict, where the existence of the death penalty clearly informs the protagonist’s decision not to turn the murderer over to the police, and in Towards Zero, where it accounts for an extraordinary plot twist. The acceptability of smoking provides a continuous subtext of cigarettes, pipes and cigars both as a form of social interaction (offering someone a cigarette can be as good as a chat-up line) and to underscore key moments of tension. A nervous character will reach for a cigarette and a pipe smoker is usually to be trusted.
But it would be a mistake to assume that the society reflected in the majority of Christie’s stage work is a halcyon one of pre-war vicarage tea parties. Ironically, this relatively elderly woman, whose upbringing was defined by the mores of the previous century and whose frame of reference is generally assumed to be that of the pre-war era, found lasting fame as a playwright in the decade when ‘angry young men’ were allegedly redefining the theatrical playing fie
ld at the Royal Court. Christie did not live a cocooned middle-class life. She was adventurous, widely travelled and politically aware, and encountered people of all classes and cultures. She worked in a hospital dispensary during the First World War (gaining a comprehensive knowledge of poisons in the process), was one of the first people to surf standing up on a surfboard (whilst visiting South Africa) and made use of recent changes in the law to divorce her cheating first husband, Archie Christie, in 1928. Her work spans a century of massive social and political change and this does not go unacknowledged within it, from The Hollow with its crumbling aristocracy facing up to the loss of empire to the overtly political challenge to the conservative orthodoxy represented by Alderman Higgs in Appointment with Death, the ‘not a Red, just pale pink’ Miss Casewell in The Mousetrap, the post-war suspicion of foreigners in Witness for the Prosecution and the persecuted East European immigrants at the centre of Verdict.
Whilst the received wisdom is that Christie’s novels are to a certain extent formulaic, and much scholarly time has been devoted to analysing these alleged formulae, the same most definitely cannot be said of her work as a playwright, and it almost seems that she found herself enjoying greater freedom of expression as a writer in this genre. A repertoire encompassing the edge-of-your-seat chiller Ten Little Niggers, the definitive courtroom drama Witness for the Prosecution, the Rattiganesque psychological drama Verdict and the ‘time play’ Go Back for Murder can hardly be described as formulaic and there is no such thing as a ‘typical’ Agatha Christie play. Despite the enduring perception of her work as little more than an extended game of Cluedo, Christie’s plays tend to be character-led rather than plot-led, and she clearly relishes entrusting the entire momentum of the story-telling to the voices of her ever-colourful dramatis personae. Her dialogue fairly trips off the tongue and is spiced with witticisms and observational comedy frequently worthy of Wilde. In her plays the detectives and police inspectors are usually relegated to minor roles, with the solving of a crime taking second place to the human drama that is being played out. It is as if we come closer to what Christie wants to say as a writer without the dominating presence of Poirot and Marple. With the exception of Poirot’s appearance in Black Coffee, the first play of hers to be produced (in 1930), neither character features in any of her own stage plays, and indeed she removed Poirot from the storyline when undertaking her own adaptations of four of the novels in which he appears, maintaining, doubtless correctly, that he would pull focus on stage.
Explorations of guilt, revenge and justice loom large in Christie’s stage work and are timeless subjects that go back to the very dawn of playwriting, but although the concept of justice and the many forms that it can take is central to many of her plays, the image of the policeman leading away the guilty party in handcuffs is rarely part of her theatrical vocabulary. An inability to escape the past is a recurring theme, and man’s infidelity is often the catalyst for its exploration, a frequently used storyline that some have attributed to the philandering of Christie’s own first husband. In Christie’s work for the stage, the murder itself is usually nothing more than a plot device to move forward the action and to set the scene for Christie’s exploration of the human condition and the dilemmas faced by her characters. ‘Who’ dunit is far less important than ‘Why’.
Agatha was a regular theatregoer from childhood and engaged in theatrical projects from an early age, was hugely theatrically literate and drew on a broad frame of reference from Grand Guignol to Whitehall farce, all of which can be seen in her work. But her lifelong passion was for Shakespeare, and her theatrical vocabulary was defined in particular by an enjoyment and understanding of his works, gained as an audience member and a reader rather than a scholar. In a 1973 letter to The Times she wrote: ‘I have gone to plays from an early age and am a great believer that that is the way one should approach Shakespeare. He wrote to entertain and he wrote for playgoers.’7 And in her autobiography she says,
Shakespeare is ruined for most people by having been made to learn it at school; you should see Shakespeare as it was written to be seen, played on the stage. There you can appreciate it quite young, long before you take in the beauty of the words and the poetry. I took my grandson, Mathew, to Macbeth and The Merry Wives of Windsor when he was, I think, eleven or twelve. He was very appreciative of both, though his comment was unexpected. He turned to me as we came out, and said in an awestruck voice, ‘You know, if I hadn’t known beforehand that that was Shakespeare, I should never have believed it.’ This was clearly meant to be a testimonial to Shakespeare, and I took it as such.8
Agatha and her grandson particularly enjoyed the knockabout comedy of The Merry Wives of Windsor:
In those days it was done, as I am sure it was meant to be, as good old English slapstick – no subtlety about it. The last representation of the Merry Wives I saw – in 1965 – had so much arty production about it that you felt you had travelled very far from a bit of winter sun in Windsor Old Park. Even the laundry basket was no longer a laundry basket, full of dirty washing: it was a mere symbol made of raffia! One cannot really enjoy slapstick farce when it is symbolised. The good old pantomime custard trick will never fail to rouse a roar of laughter, so long as custard appears to be actually applied to a face! To take a small carton with Birds Custard Powder written on it and delicately tap a cheek – well, the symbolism may be there, but the farce is lacking.9
Agatha’s letters to her second husband, Max, during the war are full of enthusiastic descriptions of her visits to the major Shakespearian productions of the day, including those presented by the Old Vic Company at the New Theatre, their London home at the end of the war. Her critiques of the productions and the performances of the leading classical actors of the day, and her insightful interpretations of the characters’ motivations, display a comprehensive knowledge of the Shakespearian repertoire. She also shows a keen interest in Shakespeare’s craft as a playwright. Commenting on the fact that he did not devise original plots she says, of the era in which he wrote:
I think the playwright was rather like a composer – he had to find a libretto for his art (like a ballet nowadays). ‘I should like to do a setting of Hamlet, or my version of Macbeth etc.’ Inventing a story was not really thought of. ‘What is the argument?’ Claudius asks in Hamlet before the players begin. The argument was a set thing – you then exercised your art on it . . . I think plays tended to be loose on construction, because they incorporated certain ‘turns’ – like the music halls . . . He saw a play as a series of scenes in which actors got certain opportunities. Rather like beads on a necklace – the thing to him remained always individual beads strung together.10
Shakespeare’s portrayal of female characters particularly engaged Agatha – ‘All Shakespeare’s women are very definitely characterized – he was feminine enough himself to see men through their eyes’11 – and she was intrigued by Oxford academic A.L. Rowse’s disputed identification of the ‘Dark Lady’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Rowse, in turn, was an admirer of Christie; ‘We must not underrate her literary ambition and accomplishment, as her publishers did, simply because she was the first of detective story writers.’12 Meanwhile, Christie trivia buffs can spend many happy hours identifying the numerous Shakespearian references in the titles and texts of her works. To get the ball rolling, I will pose the question, what were the two plays she wrote that took their titles from Hamlet?
Agatha was as enamoured with the backstage world of theatre as she was with the performance itself. ‘I don’t think you know, that there is anything that takes you so much away from real things and happenings as the acting world,’ she wrote to Max in 1942.13 ‘It is a world of its own and actors never are thinking of anything but themselves and their lines and their business, and what they are going to wear!’ And she says in her autobiography, ‘I always find it restful to stay with actors in wartime, because to them, acting and the theatrical world are the real world, any other world was not. The war to them wa
s a long drawn-out nightmare that prevented them from going on with their own lives, in the proper way, so their entire talk was of theatrical people, theatrical things, what was going on in the theatrical world, who was going into E.N.S.A. – it was wonderfully refreshing.’14 To Agatha Christie, whose imaginary world has offered a welcome escape for so many, the world of theatre offered one to her.
Agatha shared with her theatrical friends the excitements and disappointments of live performance – ‘Lights that do not go out when the whole point is that that they should go out, and lights that do not go on when the whole point is that they should go on. These are the real agonies of theatre’15 – and in particular the agonies of first nights:
First nights are usually misery, hardly to be borne. One has only two reasons for going to them. One is – a not ignoble motive – that the poor actors have to go through with it, and if it goes badly it is unfair that the author should not be there to share their torture . . . The other reason for going to first nights is, of course, curiosity . . . you have to know yourself. Nobody else’s account is going to be any good. So there you are, shivering, feeling hot and cold alternately, hoping to heaven that nobody will notice you where you are hiding yourself in the higher ranks of the Circle.16
