Agatha Christie: A Life in Theatre

Frederick died aged fifty-five, when Agatha was eleven and both of her siblings had already left Ashfield, the family home in Torquay; but her mother continued to nourish young Agatha’s enthusiasm for theatre, whisking her off to see Irving perform in Exeter. ‘He may not live much longer, and you must see him,’ she insisted.6 Agatha herself, notoriously averse to public speaking in later life, enjoyed venturing onto the stage in her youth, and an ambitious production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Yeomen of the Guard, produced by a group of young friends at the Parish Rooms in Torquay, gave her the opportunity to show off her singing voice in the role of Colonel Fairfax. ‘As far as I remember I felt no stage fright … There is no doubt that The Yeomen of the Guard was one of the highlights of my existence.’7

Finishing school in Paris at the age of sixteen was an opportunity to sample the French capital’s theatrical delights. She enjoyed herself in drama class, and had a remarkable ability to appreciate a fine theatrical performance:

We were taken to the Comedie Francaise and I saw the classic dramas and several modern plays as well. I saw Sarah Bernhardt in what must have been one of the last roles of her career, as the golden pheasant in Rostand’s Chantecler. She was old, lame, feeble, and her golden voice was cracked but she was certainly a great actress – she held you with her impassioned emotion. Even more exciting than Sarah Bernhardt did I find Rejane. I saw her in a modern play, La Course aux Flambeaux. She had a wonderful power of making you feel, behind a hard repressed manner, the existence of a tide of feeling and emotion which she would never allow to come out in the open. I can still hear now, if I sit quiet a minute or two with my eyes closed, her voice, and see her face in the last words of the play: ‘Pour sauver ma fille, j’ai tué ma mere,’ and the deep thrill this sent through one as the curtain came down.8

After spending a ‘season’ as a seventeen year old in Cairo with her mother, Agatha found herself a regular guest on the house party circuit. This served its purpose of introducing her to a number of eligible young bachelors, and she also became friends with the colourful theatrical impresario C.B. Cochran and his devoted and long-suffering wife, Evelyn. Charles Cochran was indisputably the greatest showman of his generation, in a career that included productions of Ibsen alongside the promotion of boxing, circus and rodeo as well as the management of Houdini. He was also to be instrumental in launching the career of Noël Coward. That was still ahead of him when he met the young Agatha, but for one thing he could take credit. Cochran was responsible for introducing the rollerskating craze which swept the country in the early 1900s, and a famous photograph shows Agatha and her friends enjoying some skating on Torquay’s Princess Pier. The Cochrans eventually invited her to their house in London, where she was ‘thrilled by hearing so much theatrical gossip’.

As a young woman, Agatha continued her own forays onto the stage. Photographs show her and her friends gloriously costumed for The Blue Beard of Unhappiness, which the programme (printed on blue paper of course) reveals to be ‘A drama of Eastern domestic life in two acts’.9 An open air production with a dozen in the cast, it is, we are told, set on a part of the terrace in Blue Beard’s castle in ‘Bagdad’. The folktale of wife-murderer Bluebeard was to provide Agatha with inspiration on more than one later occasion. In the ‘Confessions Album’, in which members of the Miller family regularly made light-hearted entries listing their current likes and dislikes, a 1910 entry from Agatha nominates Bluebeard as one of two characters from history whom she most dislikes.10 The other is nineteenth-century Mormon leader Brigham Young, the founder of Salt Lake City: another extravagantly bearded polygamist, though in this case not a serial killer. ‘Why did they Bag-dad?’ asks The Blue Beard of Unhappiness’s programme, and goes on to state ‘Eggs, fruit and other Missiles are to be left with the Cloak Room Attendant’. No playwright is credited and, sadly, no script survives.

Many of Agatha’s earliest writings were in verse, and her first published dramatic work took this form. A Masque from Italy, originally written in her late teens, was later included (with the subtitle ‘The Comedy of the Arts’) in the 1925 self-published poetry volume Road of Dreams, and has thus been overlooked as a playscript. Although it is structured as a series of solo songs (which she set to music shortly before the book was published), the piece is clearly intended as a short theatrical presentation, as indicated by, the word ‘masque’ in its title, and may have been written as a puppet show. There is a cast list, consisting of six characters from Italian commedia dell’arte; and a clear dramatic through-line based on the love triangle between Harlequin, Pierrot and Columbine, delivered in a prologue, seven songs and an epilogue. Punchinello serves as a master of ceremonies and is here envisaged as a marionette rather than as the ‘Mr Punch’ glove puppet. We know that Agatha was intrigued by a Dresden China collection of these characters owned by her family, but the piece shows a thorough understanding of their traditional dramatic functions and motivations (apart from some ambiguity over a female counterpart of Punchinello), and it is more than possible that local pantomimes were still including a traditional Harlequinade sequence featuring them when she was in the audience as a child at the turn of the century. Her lifelong interest in the Harlequin figure, later to manifest itself in the Harley Quin short stories, is here informed by his role as the dangerous and exciting stranger stealing women’s hearts, which was to be a recurring theme in her early plays.

And when the fire burns low at night, and

Lightning flashes high!

Then guard your hearth, and hold your love,

For Harlequin goes by.11

The pain of lost love and the tensions between these passionate and flamboyant characters are well drawn, and with Harlequin in his ‘motley array’ and Punchinello inviting the audience to ‘touch my hump for luck’, the whole effect is deeply theatrical. Whether performed by puppets or people, it would have been fun to watch.

Encouraged by her mother, and perhaps in the hope of emulating her sister who had had some success with the publication of short stories in Vanity Fair, Agatha began writing stories in her late teens. ‘I found myself making up stories and acting the different parts and there’s nothing like boredom to make you write.’12 Adopting the pseudonyms Mac Miller, Nathaniel Miller and Sydney West, Agatha set about composing a number of short stories on her sister’s typewriter, but they failed to impress the editors of the magazines she sent them to.

‘Sydney West’ had a particularly idiosyncratic style, and was responsible for a short one-act play entitled The Conqueror which, like the short story ‘In the Market Place’, also authored by West, is a parable with a mythological flavour. The Ealing address of Agatha’s great-aunt is inked on the script, which does not list a dramatis personae. Subtitled ‘A Fantasy’, the scene is ‘a great Mountain overlooking the Earth. On a throne sits a huge, grey Sphinx like figure, veiled and motionless. Around her are Messengers of Fate, and the air is full of winged Destinies who come and go ceaselessly.’13 A blind youth ascends the mountain and exposes the Sphinx, who appears to represent Fate, as a sham. Like ‘In the Market Place’, the whole thing is rather baffling and appears to be some sort of morality tale. It is intriguing to imagine what future Agatha envisaged for this play, particularly given the practicalities of ‘winged destinies’. Though atmospheric, and not without its interest as a stylistic experiment, it is hard to imagine that it would have proved particularly popular with the local teams responsible for putting together Antoinette’s Mistake and The Blue Beard of Unhappiness. What this odd little offering does do, though, is once again confirm the broad range of Agatha’s theatrical vocabulary.

When eighteen-year-old Agatha produced her first novel, Snow Upon the Desert, her mother suggested that she send it to local author Eden Phillpotts for his comment. Phillpotts became Agatha’s valued mentor, and it was his literary agent Hughes Massie & Co. which, having rejected Snow Upon the Desert, would eventually take her under their wing fifteen years later, the imposing Massie himself having by then been succeeded by the more affable Edmund Cork.

A long-time neighbour of the Millers in Torquay – his daughter Adelaide attended the same ballet class as Agatha Eden Phillpotts was forty-six when he started advising Agatha, and already a successful novelist. A sort of Thomas Hardy of Dartmoor, specialising in work written in Devon dialect and set in Devon locations, his prolific output would eventually exceed even Agatha’s, and he enjoyed some success latterly with detective fiction. Well connected in literary circles – he had undertaken collaborations with Arnold Bennett and Jerome K. Jerome – Phillpotts had originally trained as an actor in London but had been forced to abandon his thespian aspirations due to a recurring illness that made him unable to control his legs. His love of the theatre never left him, though, and although he had experienced no great success as a playwright by the time he counselled Agatha, he went on to write some thirty plays, a number of which were notable and long-running West End successes.

In 1912 Phillpotts famously refused to concede to the request of the Lord Chamberlain’s office that he alter two lines in his play The Secret Woman, about a man who starts a relationship with his son’s lover, with the result that they refused to issue it with a licence. The ensuing furore saw many of the great writers of the day sign a letter to The Times in his support and contribute to a fund to enable performances to take place in a ‘club’ theatre where a licence was not required. Amongst the signatories was Bernard Shaw, whose work ‘in its massive and glittering magnificence’ Phillpotts admired greatly, in particular ‘the thousand challenges he offers to humanity on burning and still living questions’.14 Phillpotts and Shaw would later meet at Birmingham Repertory Theatre which, under its legendary founder Barry Jackson, regularly produced the work of both men. There can be no doubt that Phillpotts shared his enthusiasm for Shaw with the young Agatha and that this informed some of her early, unpublished playwriting ventures, which deal with such Shavian preoccupations as variations on the marriage contract, grounds for divorce and eugenics. The lengthy and witty preface to Shaw’s 1908 Getting Married has particular resonances in some of Christie’s early work.

In any event, contact with Phillpotts would have broadened young Agatha’s mind when it came to the issue of human relations, as is evidenced by his recommended reading for her. In a letter to her he suggests that she try ‘a few of the Frenchmen’, including Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. ‘But this last is very strong meat and perhaps you had better wait till you have taken some lighter dose first of the more modern men. When you come to it, remember that Madame Bovary is one of the greatest works in the world.’15 Although one may concur with his literary appraisal, Madame Bovary seems a particularly daring recommendation for an eighteen-year-old Edwardian girl, given its subject matter and the lifestyle of its author, who stood trial in France for obscenity in 1857 after it was published in a magazine.

Sadly, Phillpotts’ advocacy of unconventional human relations extended beyond literature and into his family life. His daughter Adelaide, who collaborated with him on a number of books and plays, including the 1926 Theatre Royal Haymarket success Yellow Sands – and whose literary career was to cross paths with Agatha’s in the future – was the long-term victim of his incestuous attentions, as is apparent from his correspondence with her and, indeed, her own autobiography.16 This bizarre obsession was confined to the one relationship, and there is no indication of any impropriety as far as the young Agatha was concerned. There can be no doubt that Phillpotts’ advice and input, and his role as a sounding board for her early work, was critical to Agatha’s blossoming as a writer, enabling her to gain confidence in her writing and widen her horizons. Indeed, her 1932 novel Peril at End House was dedicated to Phillpotts ‘for his friendship and the encouragement he gave me many years ago’. He doubtless, too, encouraged her interest in theatre, and they maintained a sporadic correspondence until the 1950s. In 1928 Phillpotts’ wife died and the following year he married a young cousin. We will hear more of Adelaide later.

Nobody would publish Agatha’s novel Snow Upon the Desert, but she carried on producing short stories and one-act plays. Amongst these, Teddy Bear is an endearing and performable comedy for two male and two female actors, written under the pseudonym of George Miller. A well-constructed but lightweight romp, it centres around young Virginia’s attempts to attract the attention of Ambrose Seaton, a fellow who is involved in an impressive array of charitable ventures:

VIRGINIA: He’s so good looking and – and so splendid. Look at all his philanthropic schemes, the Dustmen’s Christian Knowledge, and the Converted Convicts Club, and the Society for the Amelioration of Juvenile Criminals.17

Virginia eventually adopts a strategy of attracting Ambrose’s attention by herself becoming a ‘juvenile criminal’. Needless to say, things do not go according to plan, and after the farcical unravelling of her scheme she abandons her attempts to ensnare the virtuous but elusive (and possibly gay) Ambrose and settles instead for her long-suffering admirer, Edward:

EDWARD: You heard me say I wasn’t going to propose again?

VIRGINIA: (smiling) Yes.

EDWARD: (with dignity) Well, I’m not going to.

VIRGINIA: (laughing) Don’t.

EDWARD: Not in that sense. I was going to suggest a business arrangement.

VIRGINIA: Business?

EDWARD: You see, you’ve got a lot of money, and I’m badly in need of some. The simplest way for me to get it would be to marry you. See?

VIRGINIA: (still laughing) Quite.

EDWARD: No sentiment about it.

VIRGINIA: Not a scrap.

EDWARD: Well – what do you say?

VIRGINIA: (very softly) I say – yes.

EDWARD: Virginia! (tries to take her in his arms)

VIRGINIA: (springing up) Remember you’re only marrying me for the money …

This is nicely constructed comic banter, although there is already an undercurrent of more serious debates about the nature of the marriage contract. In this case, it all ends happily, although it is clear who the dominant force in the relationship is going to be:

VIRGINIA: (tragically) … a confession of weakness. I’ve fallen from the high pinnacle of my own self esteem. I fancied that I was strong enough to stand apart from the vulgar throng, that I was not as other women (sits upright) but I am beaten, I am but one of the crowd after all, (slowly) I have –

EDWARD: (breathlessly) Fallen in love?

VIRGINIA: (dramatically) No. Bought a Teddy Bear!

Eugenia and Eugenics, another of Agatha’s unpublished and unperformed early one-act plays housed at the Christie Archive, is a more ambitiously constructed comedy which explores a popular theme of the day. We are told that it is set in 1914, which may be either the present or the future, given that it deals with the repercussions of a fictitious piece of legislation. In 1905 Shaw’s Man and Superman had received its London premiere, with a plot that underlined his belief that women are the driving force in human procreation, and that the development of the species is dictated by their success in finding biologically (rather than socially or financially) suitable partners: a quest which essentially constitutes the ‘Life Force’. There can be no doubt that Agatha’s work was also informed by this philosophy, although by what route it reached her is unclear. ‘What are men anyway?’ asks Kait in the 1944 novel Death Comes as the End. ‘They are necessary to breed children, that is all. But the strength of the race is in the women.’18 This novel is set in ancient Egypt, but time and again we see in Christie’s plays examples of the weak male either dominated or rejected by the superior female.

Shaw’s take on the topic, which challenged received Darwinian theory, was just one aspect of a much wider debate about the subject of eugenics that was current at the time, leading to the first International Eugenics Conference, held in London in 1912. Although there were ethical issues from the outset with a philosophy that advocated the genetic improvement of humanity, this was well before the concept of breeding a ‘master race’ took on a much more sinister aspect. Whilst Christie seems at home with Shaw’s approach to the matter, her comedy both makes merciless fun of the wider philosophy’s advocates and touches on some other burning issues of the day. Faced with an upcoming new law that will enforce eugenic philosophy by allowing only the physically and mentally perfect to marry, Eugenia has taken herself to what she believes to be a eugenics clinic advertising perfect partners. Her maid, Stevens, accompanies her:

EUGENIA: Talking of divorce, Eugenics will revolutionise the divorce laws.

STEVENS: Indeed Ma’am. Well I’ve heard as in Norway and Sweden and such countries you can get rid of your ’usband as easy as asking, with no more reason than just losing your taste for him. Very unfair I calls it. All men is trying at times, but don’t turn them helpless creatures adrift, call ’em your cross and put up with ’em.19

In the preface to his 1908 play Getting Married, under the heading ‘What does the word marriage mean?’ George Bernard Shaw had written: ‘In Sweden, one of the most highly civilized countries in the world, a marriage is dissolved if both parties wish it, without any question of conduct. That is what marriage means in Sweden. In Clapham that is what they call by the senseless name of free love.’20 The divorce laws were the subject of much debate in the early twentieth century, and it was not until 1923’s Matrimonial Causes Act that women were able to file for divorce on the same basis as men. Prior to that, men had simply to prove infidelity on the part of their spouse, whilst women had to establish further exacerbating circumstances such as rape or incest.

Christie’s play goes on:

EUGENIA: It’s an equal law for men and for women. Men can obtain a divorce with equal ease.

STEVENS: Ah! Ma’am, but a wife’s an ’abit to a man, and we all know how attached a man is to his ’abits, drinking and smoking and such like.

EUGENIA: So you class a wife with drinking and smoking, Stevens!

STEVENS: Well, Ma’am it’s true she comes more expensive sometimes.

EUGENIA: Stevens, you are lamentably behind the spirit of the age …

STEVENS: (thoughtfully) It seems to me M’am, what with the gentlemen being as difficult and scarce to get hold of as they are, that it’s a pity to ask too much of ’em …

EUGENIA: … next week, the Marriage Supervision Bill will become Law. It ensures that only the physically and mentally sound shall marry … I’m sure I don’t know what society is coming to. A few years ago money was everything – like birth used to be, and now nothing counts but notoriety. To be anybody one must have a new religion, or a new pet. My baby kangaroo, in spite of the fuss with the police, kept me in the forefront of society last season. But this year, Hyde Park is a walking menagerie, and an elephant would hardly attract attention. Eugenics, I feel assured, will be the next society craze. Let me then, be the first to take it up … This advertisement caught my eye this morning (reads) ‘Eugenic Institute. Men and Women of England. Protect the Race. Choose mates of physical and mental perfection. Come here and find your mate (Guaranteed with Medical Certificate). Remember the Race and Come. And here we are. What do you think of it, Stevens. Shan’t I be the most talked of woman in society?

STEVENS: It’s my experience, M’am, as anything that mentions racing, is shady.

Even the suffrage movement does not escape Stevens’ wisdom: ‘I holds as votes is very much the same as husbands, they’re a lot of trouble to get, and not much use once you’ve got ’em.’

Women over the age of thirty were finally enfranchised in Britain in 1918, but this play’s 1914 setting places it at the height of the suffrage campaign; the previous year, the Women’s Social and Political Union had mobilised thousands of supporters to march through the streets of London behind the coffin of suffragette Emily Davison, who had thrown herself in front of the king’s horse at Epsom. The characters in a play, of course, all speak with their own voices and without the benefit of authorial comment. Agatha’s writing, as ever, is well considered and fully engaged with the issues of the day, but it is up to the audience whether they believe Stevens to be speaking from a position of ignorance or whether they think her homespun philosophy may contain some pearls of wisdom.

Meanwhile, the ‘Eugenic Institute’ in the play turns out not to be all that Eugenia had hoped. The farcical construction of the piece is not as well handled as the comic dialogue, but suffice to say that Eugenia’s schemes to find the physically perfect partner are frustrated, and she resigns herself to marrying the devoted but self-professedly imperfect Goldberg who, from his name, we may assume to be Jewish. Agatha’s play thus wittily subverts eugenic philosophy and underlines the importance of putting the heart first. They decide to tie the knot immediately, before the new ‘Marriage Supervision Bill’ takes effect:

GOLDBERG: It seems to me, the only solution is for us to get married before next Wednesday.

EUGENIA: (reflectively) After all, if everyone is forced into Eugenics it will be far more chic to have an uneugenic husband …

GOLDBERG: Well, you know man hunting’s quite ousting foxhunting as a sport amongst the fair sex. You can hunt a man all the year round, you see, and English women are so deuced sporting.

Agatha’s own hunt for a husband, which had started in the social whirlwind of colonial Cairo and moved on to the more genteel setting of English house parties, was about to result in her marriage, at the age of twenty-five. Abandoning her fiancé, family friend Reggie Lucy, she opted instead for love from a stranger, and the promise of adventure offered by dashing young airman Archie Christie.

‘Archie and I were poles apart in our reaction to things. I think that from the start that fascinated us. It is the old excitement of “the stranger”.’21 Married on Christmas Eve 1914, their early years together were disrupted by war, with Archie gaining distinction for his contribution to the ground-based operations of the Royal Flying Corps, mostly on overseas postings, while Agatha remained in Torquay as a member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment at the Red Cross hospital in Torquay, completing the examination of the Society of Apothecaries and becoming a dispenser.

At the end of the war Archie, by now a colonel, was stationed at the Air Ministry in London, and after the war ended he found himself a job in the City. The couple divided their time between a flat in St John’s Wood and Ashfield, Agatha’s mother’s house in Torquay, where their daughter Rosalind was born on 5 August 1919.

The following year Agatha enjoyed a successful publishing debut with her novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Written on a break from her hospital work during the war, it was finally accepted for publication by Devon-born John Lane of the idiosyncratic and often controversial publishing house The Bodley Head, which specialised in books of poetry, and whose authors included Eden Phillpotts’ friend Arnold Bennett. The Bodley Head had been responsible at the end of the previous century for the notoriously decadent literary quarterly The Yellow Book. The five-book deal she signed with the firm was to establish her profile as an author, but it was to be another ten years until a play of hers was produced.