by Julius Green
Although Christie had objected to the amorous antics of a French ‘Beau Poirot’ in Alibi, she was not above introducing an element of romantic frisson when it came to her own portrayal of her Belgian sleuth. Here are the final moments of Alibi, as performed by Charles Laughton:
CARYL (softly) I don’t care what anyone says, you will always be “Beau Poirot” to me! (holds out her hand) Good-night!
POIROT: (Taking both her hands, kisses first one, then the other) Good-bye. (Still holding her hands) Believe me, Mees Caryl, I do everything possible to be of service to you! (drops her hands)
(CARYL goes out)
Good-bye!
POIROT stands at the open window looking out after her as the Curtain slowly falls.26
And here are the not dissimilar final moments of Black Coffee, written several years before Alibi, in the original script approved by the Lord Chamberlain and performed by Francis L. Sullivan at the Embassy:
LUCIA: M Poirot – (she holds out both hands to him)
Do not think that I shall ever forget . . .
(Lucia raises her face. Poirot kisses her.)
(She goes back to Richard [her husband]. Lucia and Richard go out together . . . Poirot mechanically straightens things on the centre table but with his eyes fixed on the door through which Lucia has passed.)
POIROT: Neither – shall I – forget.27
Reviews from the Embassy, as with Alibi, inevitably focused largely on the interpretation of Poirot. ‘Mr Sullivan is obviously very happy in the part, and his contribution to the evening’s entertainment is a considerable one,’ said The Times.28 Amongst the other characters are Dr Carelli – played at the Embassy by Donald Wolfit – the archetypal Christie ‘unexpected guest’ who has echoes in The Mousetrap’s Mr Paravicini; and, more interestingly, a wittily executed portrayal of a young ‘flapper’ girl, the murder victim’s niece. The flapper phenomenon was at its height in 1922, as a generation of young women threw off the restrictions of the Victorian and Edwardian era and defined their own agenda in terms of fashion, entertainment and social interaction with men. The sexual revolution of the 1920s, in its subversion of what went before it, was arguably far more radical than anything that happened in the 1960s, and although Agatha herself would have been a decade too old to qualify as a flapper or to embrace their style and philosophy, there is a distinct affection in her writing for what they stood for, albeit informed by her trademark observational humour. In Black Coffee, Barbara Amory is described as ‘an extremely modern young woman of twenty-one’. She dances to records on the gramophone and flirts mercilessly with Hastings, describing him as ‘pre-war’ (‘Victorian’ in the original script) and exhorting him to ‘come and be vamped’. When criticised by her aunt for the brightness of her lipstick, she responds, ‘take it from me, a girl simply can’t have too much red on her lips. She never knows how much she is going to lose in the taxi coming home.’
When the play did finally open in the West End, at the St Martin’s Theatre, it was in a much-changed production. Christie had undertaken rewrites, as she had felt that her ‘aged’ play seemed out of date when she saw it at the Embassy. ‘Have been working very hard on Black Coffee. Some scenes were a little old fashioned, I thought,’29 she wrote to Max. Tricks she uses in order to achieve a more ‘contemporary’ feel include a joke about the brand-name vitamins Bemax, which were advertised widely in 1930. The script published by Arthur Ashley in 1934 included these changes, along with the following more straight-laced version of the final scene:
LUCIA: (Down to Poirot, takes his hand, she also has Richard’s hand) M.Poirot, do not think I shall forget – ever.
POIROT: Neither shall I forget (kisses her hand.)
(Lucia and Richard go out together through window. [Poirot] follows them to window, and calls out after them.)
POIROT: Bless you, mes enfants! Ah-h!
(Moves to the fireplace, clicks his tongue and straightens the spill vases.)30
At the Embassy, Black Coffee had been directed by Andre van Gyseghem, a radical young director who, as a RADA-trained actor, had worked for the theatre’s creative head A.R. Whatmore in his previous post at the Hull Repertory Theatre. A leading light of the Workers’ Theatre Movement, van Gyseghem was to become a member of the Communist Party and a frequent visitor to the Soviet Union, and later penned a surprisingly readable book entitled Theatre in Soviet Russia (1943). The West End production of Black Coffee was redirected by Oxford-educated Douglas Clarke-Smith, an actor-director who appears to have had no association with the Embassy, but who had cut his teeth at Birmingham Rep after distinguished service in the First World War, and who went on to direct over twenty productions for pioneering touring group the Lena Ashwell Players, the peacetime incarnation of the company that had provided entertainment for the troops throughout the conflict.
As well as a new director, all but one of the supporting cast to Sullivan’s Poirot were also new to the piece. Joyce Bland was amongst those who were replaced, along with van Gyseghem himself, who had doubled his directing duties with the small but significant role of Edward Raynor. Given that the delay in transferring had allowed for the luxury of a new rehearsal period, the Embassy had clearly decided not to commit too many of their core ensemble to a potentially lengthy West End run. On 9 April 1931, the day Alec Rea presented the West End premiere of Black Coffee, The Times was listing attractions at thirty-one West End theatres, including revivals of Shaw’s Man and Superman at the Court, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler at the Fortune and Somerset Maugham’s The Circle at the Vaudeville. At the Queen’s Theatre, Rudolf Besier’s The Barretts of Wimpole Street, directed by Barry Jackson, was advertising itself as ‘London’s Longest Run’ (which, of the productions then running in London, it was; it went on to complete 530 performances).
In the end, Black Coffee itself was to enjoy only a very short West End run. Reviews of the new production were not unfavourable, and the Observer’s influential Ivor Brown noted, ‘Mr Francis Sullivan prudently refraining from a Charles Laughton pastiche does not tie the “character” labels all over the part, but plays it quietly and firmly, trusting that the story will do its own work of entertainment.’ But he concluded, ‘Black Coffee is supposed to be a strong stimulant and powerful enemy of sleep. I found the title optimistic.’31
Reandco soon found that they needed the St Martin’s in order to gain a West End foothold for another production; as The Times reported: ‘In order that Messrs. Reandco may present Mr Ronald Jeans’s new play Lean Harvest at the St Martin’s Theatre on Thursday next, Mrs Agatha Christie’s play Black Coffee will be transferred on Monday to the Wimbledon Theatre, and on the following Monday, May 11, it will resume its interrupted run at the Little Theatre.’32 Although Reandco owned the lease on the St Martin’s, Bertie Meyer remained the building’s licensee on behalf of its freeholders, the Willoughby de Broke family. Having enjoyed a successful association with the Little Theatre as a producer, he was doubtless instrumental in facilitating Black Coffee’s transfer there, although he was not directly involved with the production. Black Coffee was sent away from the West End to Wimbledon in order to fill an unsatisfactory week’s gap between its scheduling at the St Martin’s and the Little. But the production never really recovered from this disruption, and closed on 13 June.
Between the St Martin’s and the Little Theatre, Black Coffee had completed a total of sixty-seven West End performances over two months, which was, at least, slightly longer than The Claimant’s run. Agatha herself missed her West End debut as a playwright, as she had by then joined her new husband at the archaeological dig in Ur.
Since Agatha’s response to Alibi had been to write Chimneys, a play without Poirot, it was ironic that the first work of hers to be presented in the West End should have featured the character. Not only the first play of hers to be performed but quite possibly the first full-length stage play she wrote, Black Coffee was – significantly – an original script rather than being adapted from one of her novels.
It was to be more than twenty years until the premiere of the next Christie play that was not based on a novel.
In the autumn of 1931 Max Mallowan relocated his archaeological work in Iraq to Nineveh, and at Christmas Agatha hurried home in the hope of catching the premiere of Chimneys, which Reandco had now scheduled for a December opening at the Embassy, clearly in the hope of enabling a West End transfer as they had done the previous year with Black Coffee.
The fate of Chimneys has taken on an almost mythical status amongst Christie scholars as a ‘play that never was’. Having been advertised as opening at the Embassy, gone into rehearsal and been licensed by the Lord Chamberlain, it suddenly disappeared from their schedule, apparently without explanation. It was not heard of again until it was unearthed by Canadian director John Paul Fishbach in 2001 and given its world premiere in Calgary in 2003, almost twenty-eight years after Christie’s death. As is often the case with matters theatrical, however, the reality of the ‘Chimneys mystery’ was far more prosaic than may at first appear, and those previously attempting to establish the facts of the matter may have enjoyed more success if Agatha had dated her letters with the year as well as the day and month. Once her letters are placed in the correct sequence, the order of events surrounding the cancelled production becomes apparent.
There are in fact no fewer than four copies of the script amongst Christie’s papers, all of them very similar. Three of these are duplicates, two clearly dated 5 July 1928 by the Marshall’s typing agency stamp and carrying Agatha’s address in Ashfield, Torquay. The unstamped duplicate carries the Hughes Massie label and has been annotated in pencil by the actress playing the role of Bundle. The fourth copy includes some slight variations in the typescript and handwritten notes by Agatha, and has the Hughes Massie address handwritten on it. The first point to establish, therefore, is that the script itself never actually ‘disappeared’, even if the scheduled premiere production appears to have done; assuming that Fishbach’s copy is now amongst those at the archive, we know of at least four other ‘originals’, including the one lodged with the Lord Chamberlain’s office. Hughes Massie’s records show that Reandco acquired the rights in the play as early as 22 April 1931, shortly after the opening of their West End run of Black Coffee, for production at the Embassy Theatre within six months of signature and with a West End option to be taken up within six weeks of the Embassy production.33 This time the sale had been co-ordinated by Hughes Massie themselves. As was standard practice, the royalties payable by the Embassy, as a small repertory theatre, were at the reduced rate of 5 per cent of box office income. Although the scheduling of the production would be subject to the vagaries of the repertory system and its short lead times, Reandco clearly wanted to ensure that the next Christie play would appear as part of their own repertoire rather than someone else’s.
The Times of Thursday 19 November 1931 duly announced that ‘The next production at the Embassy Theatre will be Chimneys, by Agatha Christie, which Mr A.R. Whatmore will produce [i.e. direct] on Thursday 1 December.’ This was slightly outside their six-month option period, but that would not have been an issue for a management of good standing who had given Christie her West End premiere, and an informal extension of the option had doubtless been negotiated. Based on the previous year’s experience, Rea and Whatmore clearly felt that a pre-Christmas Christie at the Embassy was a good formula for box-office success.
On the same day as The Times’s announcement, Chimneys arrived at the Lord Chamberlain’s office. Act One of the script submitted to the Lord Chamberlain is clearly from a different copy of the play to the rest of it, and includes rehearsal notes written in pencil apparently by the actor playing Lord Caterham.34 Interestingly, the list of characters at the front shows evidence of what appears to have been an earlier attempt to cast the production, with ‘Wolfit’ pencilled in as one of two suggestions for George Lomax and ‘Sullivan’ for Superintendent Battle. Neither of these were still under contract to the Embassy repertory company by the time the play went into production – Donald Wolfit was by then touring Canada with Barry Jackson’s company. ‘Boxer’ (John Boxer) is pencilled in as Bill Eversleigh and Agatha’s favourite, ‘Joyce’ (Joyce Bland), as feisty heroine Virginia Revel, and it is fairly safe to assume that these two were cast in these roles when Chimneys finally went into rehearsal, particularly as they were both appearing in the Embassy’s previous production, Britannia of Billingsgate – Bland in a small role no doubt in order to allow her to prepare for her leading role in Chimneys. A note next to the role of Anthony Cade says ‘Oliver’ or perhaps ‘Clive’. I don’t know who this is, but I’m sorry to disappoint those who believe that ‘Olivier’ may have been been considered for the production.
Writing to Max from a bug-infested train on her journey back from Nineveh in early December, Agatha, having just seen the 19 November copy of The Times, probably in a hotel lobby, laments:
Darling – I am horribly disappointed, Just seen in the Times that Chimneys began December 1st, so I shall just miss it. I did want to hear how this child of mine sounded on the stage. I could have gone on the Saturday convoy because my passport came back in time and then I’d have got home on the Friday and could have seen the last night Saturday. What I ought to have done was wired to Carlo . . . 8th or 1st? I’ve been getting out of my good telegraphy habits lately – with bad results! If she had had any sense she would have wired the date to me!35
Agatha had commenced her journey too late to return by Saturday 12 December, which would have been the last night of a run commencing on 1 December. In reality, under a two-weekly repertory system, with Britannia of Billingsgate having opened on 10 November and announcing in its programme, ‘Change of programme every fortnight’ and ‘production in preparation: Chimneys, a new play by Agatha Christie’,36 the scheduled opening date for Chimneys would originally have been Tuesday 24 November (the date for which it was licensed by the Lord Chamberlain’s office). But in the event the unexpected success of Britannia, a new comedy by Jope Slade and Sewell Stokes about a charwoman at a film studio who ‘walks on’ in a film and is such a hit that she later becomes a famous character actress, meant that it had been extended for a week at the Embassy and was thought worth transferring to the St Martin’s thereafter. Chimneys was therefore pushed to 1 December by the extended run at the Embassy, rather than being brought forward as Agatha seemed to believe it had been. It could only ever have opened on 8 December if there was another production scheduled between Britannia and it, which clearly there wasn’t.
Agatha arrived in Istanbul in mid-December, writing to Max, ‘Am now at Tokatlian [hotel] . . . looked at Times of Dec 7th and “Mary Broome” is on at the Embassy!! So perhaps I shall see Chimneys after all? Or did it go off after a week? All bookshops etc are closed of course – so can’t get any other papers.’37
Mary Broome, featuring Robert Donat and Joyce Bland, had indeed followed Britannia of Billingsgate into the Embassy on 1 December instead of Chimneys. With the transfer of Britannia to the St Martin’s went, presumably, the majority of the cast who would have been in rehearsal for Chimneys. The ‘extension’ of Britannia at the Embassy for a week would have helped to buy some time in respect of organising a new cast for Chimneys and was announced on the same day as the news that Chimneys was to follow it into the Embassy, so the original intention still seems to have been to make Chimneys work. But at some point it must have been decided that the logistics of re-casting Chimneys to open by 1 December were simply too daunting. Christie’s play is a relatively complex piece of theatre and not without its challenges; Mary Broome, on the other hand, was a twenty-year-old comedy by Allan Monkhouse which had become a firm favourite with repertory companies. Only two cast members of Britannia of Billingsgate did not transfer with the production, one of them being Joyce Bland, whose small role allowed her to be replaced and to take up the lead in Mary Broome rather than Chimneys. John Boxer was amongst those who departed with Britannia. Had Robert Donat, who was not in
the cast of Britannia, perhaps been in rehearsal for Chimneys when the switch was made? The programme for Mary Broome states: ‘Production in preparation: to be announced later (see Daily Press)’,38 indicating the disarray into which the Embassy’s scheduling had been thrown by the sudden departure to the West End of a number of the resident ensemble. With the transfer of Black Coffee, this had of course been avoided by taking a break in which to recast the production.
This piece of opportunism on the part of Reandco paid off for them, and Britannia of Billingsgate enjoyed a successful West End run, moving on from its launching pad of the St Martin’s to the Duke of York’s in much the same way that Black Coffee had moved on to the Little. The fact that they had produced Britannia in the West End would doubtless also have secured Reandco a share of the proceeds when it was filmed two years later, just as their brief West End presentation of Black Coffee had cut them in on 50 per cent of Christie’s income from the 1931 film of her play. The reason for the rescheduling given to Agatha on her return was rather different, however. On 23 December 1931 she wrote to Max, ‘Chimneys is coming on here but nobody will say when – I fancy they want something in Act One altered and didn’t wish to do it themselves’ She also mentions that ‘Alibi may come on in New York with Charles Laughton.’39
Chimneys was eventually rescheduled to commence at the Embassy on either 23 February or 1 March 1932. On 31 December 1931 Agatha wrote to Max from the Torquay Medical Baths, ‘I’m going to have a sea water bath (HOT!) to buck me up after Christmas . . . If Chimneys is put on on Tuesday 23rd I shall stay for first night. If it’s a week later well I shan’t wait for it. I don’t want to miss Nineveh and shall have seen rehearsals, I suppose. By the way, Alibi is being put on in New York after being rewritten and “Americanised” by someone. Charles Laughton to be Poirot.’40
