Agatha Christie: A Life in Theatre

In 1922, Archie was engaged to take part in a world tour to promote the forthcoming British Empire exhibition, and Agatha took the opportunity to join her husband on this eye-opening voyage, which took in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii and Canada, with a stop for Agatha in New York in November on the way back, while Archie continued his work in Canada. In New York, Agatha stayed with her elderly American godmother Cassie Sullivan, and it is her name and address, along with the date 9 November 1922, that tantalisingly appears in handwriting on the front of the typed one-act playscript The Last Séance. In her autobiography, Agatha remembers this as one of her very first short stories, later rewritten for publication (which occurred in the American magazine Ghost Stories in 1926). The scenario works much better as a short play, however, and I believe that it was in this format that she first envisaged and wrote it, as an exercise in the then popular theatrical genre of Grand Guignol. In a letter to her mother from Melbourne in May 1922, Agatha writes, ‘I’ve been rather idle – but have written a Grand Guignol sketch and a short story.’22 Notes for The Last Séance (titled ‘The Mother’) appear in Notebook 34, along with those for the novel The Man in the Brown Suit (1924). ‘Passed Tenerife last night’ she observes at one point.23

At the time of Agatha’s stay in Paris as a teenager, the original Parisian Théâtre du Grand-Guignol was under the direction of Max Maurey, and at its height as a ‘horror theatre’ venue, with André de Lorde its celebrated and prolific principal writer. An ever-changing programme of evening entertainments consisting of a collection of graphically bloodthirsty and macabre one-act plays, occasionally interspersed with comedies by way of light relief, were the talk of the town. It was widely advertised that audience members frequently passed out from fear, but the public proved themselves more than happy to rise to the challenge, and flocked to the small theatre in the Quartier Pigalle. It seems unlikely that those responsible for the education of a group of teenage girls would have allowed their charges to sample the delights of the Grand Guignol, but in 1908 the French company made headlines when it toured to London, including in its repertoire a play called L’Angoisse (The Medium).

In the early 1920s the Little Theatre on the Strand hosted London’s own Grand Guignol season, with a poster so horrifying that it was banned from the London Underground. A total of forty-three plays were produced in its rolling repertoire and the Lord Chamberlain’s office added to the publicity by refusing a licence to several more. Rarely out of the newspapers, the regular casts included such stalwarts of the English stage as Sybil Thorndike and her husband Lewis Casson, and a repertoire of work that included translations of some of the original French pieces (including The Medium) along with pieces by several English writers of the day. Noël Coward even contributed a short play, although he opted for a comic interlude rather than a horror piece. The Better Half, which was another play highlighting the inadequacies of the divorce laws, culminates in this heartfelt plea from its heroine:

ALICE: I tried to make him strike me, so that I could divorce him for cruelty – but No. He wouldn’t! He did just twist my arm a teeny bit but not enough even to bruise it … As somebody so very truly remarked the other day, the existing Divorce laws put a premium on perjury and adultery! Therefore I am going to find a lover and live in flaming sin – possibly at Claridges.24

As regards the horror element of the programme, the following review from The Times sums up the sort of evening that audiences could enjoy:

The other new feature of the evening is probably familiar to most visitors to the Paris Grand Guignol, and it has already been seen in both French and English in this country. It is The Medium, the gruesome little play about a sculptor who is filled with strange imaginings on moving into a new studio. His model is a medium and goes off into a trance … during which she reveals the grizzly secrets which the studio holds … Those who like two series of shudder in one evening will probably appreciate The Medium, particularly as it gives Miss Sybil Thorndike another opportunity for a hair-raising performance … but we confess that for us The Hand Of Death is quite enough for one evening.25

There is no record of Agatha having attended a Grand Guignol performance at the Little Theatre, but she was living in London at the time and would have read the numerous press articles and reviews that the season generated. The genre’s preoccupations would certainly have resonated with her interest in the occult and with some of her own literary experimentations, including a few published stories and a number of unpublished ones such as ‘The Green Gate’, ‘The Woman and the Kenite’, ‘Stronger than Death’, ‘Witch Hazel’ and ‘The War Bride’.26

The Last Séance itself is a short, atmospheric and effective shocker in the true Grand Guignol tradition. Written for two male and two female actors, and set of course in Paris, it concerns a medium, Simone Letellier, who is persuaded to communicate with the spirit of a dead child. The outcome is marvellously gory, as a curtain is pulled back to reveal that ‘Simone is lying on the marble floor in a pool of blood which is dripping down the steps.’27 This would be a gripping coup de théâtre, but it does not make for a satisfactory short story. The dialogue, which in the story simply appears to have had speech marks put around it, works well when spoken but not when read, and the highly theatrical denouement, when briefly described on the page, goes for nothing. We don’t know whether the play was submitted for performance, but in these early days Agatha found it a lot easier to get her work published than produced, so this is likely to have accounted for the change of format.28

Agatha also continued to write one-act plays on themes that seem likely to have been suggested by the writings of George Bernard Shaw, but which latterly sound as if they may also have been informed by her own experiences as a wife and mother. Ten Years concerns a couple who have lived together as man and wife on the basis that they will review their relationship after a ten-year trial period. Elliot, the husband, is an author who has begun to enjoy some success, here talking to his lawyer, Rogers:

ROGERS: I fancy your – early views – were rather unpopular.

ELLIOT: Oh! They gained me a sort of notoriety. But unorthodoxy is for the young, Rogers – the young who imagine they’re going to remake the world on their own improved pattern. As we go on in life we find that the old pattern is not so bad after all! …

… I admit that my one aim then was to free the world from many of its existing conventions which I considered hampering and degrading. You may have heard that I met my – that I met Desiree when she was studying art in Paris. She too held unorthodox views. We both agreed in condemning the convention of marriage, which seemed to us then an ignoble bondage. Instead we favoured what is known as the ten years marriage system.29

When the time comes, however, Desiree decides that, despite having been entirely faithful for ten years, she wants to leave Elliot and set up home with another male friend.

DESIREE: I’ve been a good wife and mother – but – I’m still young. Young enough to feel the divine fire, and long for it. I’m only thirty-three, remember. And something cries out in me – for more life! I want romance – passion – fire – the things we had once and can never have again. I want to feel the first exquisite thrill of mingled fear and joy. I want the beginning of love – not its end. I don’t want peace and security, and calm affection. I want to live – to live my life – not yours.

This comes as a shock to Elliot, who believes that the ten-year experiment has been a success. He and Desiree argue over custody of their child and, in a sentimental ending, resolve to stay together for the child’s sake.

Marmalade Moon is another four-hander one-act play, this time a comedy reminiscent of Noël Coward. As usual with most of these early, unpublished works, the typescript is undated, the author’s name is not given, and the researcher has to turn detective, scouring the script for contemporary references, or comparing stylistic traits or even paper quality, typefaces and layouts with other works the dates of which are known. In this case, it seems likely that the play predates Coward’s Private Lives by several years, although the scenario is not dissimilar to his 1930 comedy about a divorced couple reuniting during their honeymoons with their new spouses.

There are two versions of the script in the Christie archive, Marmalade Moon being a slightly amended version of the earlier New Moon. The location is a continental hotel, the second draft rationalising the first’s two settings into a more user-friendly single one. Here we meet two couples, one celebrating their honeymoon and the other the first anniversary of their divorce. In this extract, the divorced man offers some words of wisdom to the female honeymooner:

BRANDON: As a matter of fact, I’m here to commemorate my wife’s divorce.

SYLVIA: Who from?

BRANDON: Regrettably, but inevitably, myself. She didn’t start threatening soon enough. She just went (flicking his fingers)– like that. That’s why I advised you to start threatening now. Then you may not have to leave later.

SYLVIA: Since you seem so frank about it, perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling me why your wife left you?

BRANDON: (lightly) – You mean why I left my wife. Certainly. We couldn’t agree on how to pronounce ‘Wagner’. She would call him ‘Oo-agner’. She was an American. They said it was incompatibility of temperament. Anyway, I never loved her.

SYLVIA: Oh dear!

BRANDON: Yes, it distressed me greatly, in fact, almost as much as her quite indecent mispronunciation of Wagner! (slight pause, then seriously) But perhaps the real trouble was that neither of us would give in to the other. In married life you have to have a master – or a mistress.30

Again, there are echoes of Shaw’s preface to Getting Married, in which he asserts, ‘the sole and sufficient reason why people should be granted a divorce is that they want one’, and indeed to the play Getting Married itself, which involves a couple who are hesitant to marry and another who are divorced. In Agatha’s play, as in Shaw’s, the happy outcome follows a traditional dramatic convention. The newlyweds split up and then reunite, and the divorced couple are eventually reconciled. In the first version, New Moon, Brandon concludes, ‘This is just the beginning of a new era of our married life – a new moon.’ In the wittily retitled Marmalade Moon he states, ‘This is just the beginning of a new era of our married life – our second honeymoon! Our Marmalade Moon. That’s it – a little less sweet, perhaps, but a lot less sticky, and a thousand times more satisfying!’

It is not clear for what purpose the four playlets Teddy Bear, Marmalade Moon, Eugenia and Eugenics and Ten Years were intended; it may be that they were designed to be Guignol comic interludes. They appear to have been written over a number of years, but in terms of their subject matter they share a frame of reference informed by Shavian explorations of the theme of marriage. If performed together the effect would not have been dissimilar to Noël Coward’s popular 1936 short play compilations Tonight at 8.30.

Agatha’s early playwriting experiments demonstrate a natural aptitude in a variety of styles, but she had yet to see any of her work reach the stage. Then, in 1924, her sister Madge (or, perhaps, a clever agent working on her behalf) suddenly raised the stakes by somehow persuading impresario Basil Dean to produce her own full-length play, The Claimant, in the West End. Madge’s penning of short stories for magazines had ceased when she married the wealthy and quietly charming businessman James Watts and moved into his impressive Victorian mansion Abney Hall, near Manchester. Meanwhile, Agatha’s career as a writer had been successfully launched with three novels in three years for The Bodley Head. But now, suddenly, it was Madge’s name that was in lights, albeit the non-gender specific name ‘M.F. Watts’ under which she now wrote. ‘Awfully exciting about her play!’ Agatha wrote to her mother from the Grand Tour in May 1922. ‘And I shall be furious if she arrives “on film” before I do! It seems as though there was such a thing as an agent who is some good.’31

Basil Dean, who at this time was in his mid-thirties, had abandoned a career on the Stock Exchange in favour of training as an actor in repertory at Manchester, before becoming the first director of the Liverpool Repertory Theatre (later Liverpool Playhouse). During the First World War, in which he became a captain in the Cheshire Regiment, he had been director of the Entertainment Branch of the Navy and Army Canteen Board, supervising fifteen theatres and ten touring companies. Such experience served him well when he set up a theatrical production company in partnership with businessman Alec Rea, one of the principal sponsors of the Liverpool Rep project. As the Theatre Royal Windsor’s Curtain Up magazine commented: ‘One of the great men of the theatre of our time, Basil Dean began his remarkable career as a West End producer and manager in 1919 in partnership with Alec Rea. For the twenty years between 1919 and 1939, which at the beginning saw Galsworthy at his height and later Priestley at his prime, Basil Dean held a position in the West End theatre quite as powerful and influential as any of the big London managements of our post-war days. Under his sure guidance, plays by nearly all the leading dramatists of that period saw the light of day.’32

A passionate commentator on theatre, and an early advocate of a National Theatre, Dean wrote a highly readable two-part autobiography, in which he remembers Alec Rea’s offer to him to go into business:

had I dreamed for a hundred years I could not have imagined an opportunity more suited to my circumstances … I needed a business manager whom I could trust. My choice fell on E.P. Clift, who was doing an excellent job as manager of the latest garrison theatre at Catterick Camp. He jumped at the chance, and thereafter wove himself in and out of my story with persistent self-interest … Meanwhile Alec [Rea] busied himself with the legal formalities of registering our company, to which he gave the name ReandeaN, always printed with capital letters at either end. People scoffed to see this name at the head of our playbills … Eventually the public came to accept it as the hallmark of an efficient presentation … I felt an urge to replace the ramshackle productions of the wartime theatre by the standards of acting and homogeneity of production in which I had been trained … Inspiring the new company with these ideals would not be easy. Actors trooping back from the battlefields and munitions factories were discomfited, more anxious about future employment than present perfection.33

Rea paid Dean a salary of £20 per week, and set about looking for a theatre to use as a base for their operations. He settled on the St Martin’s, a small and elegant playhouse and London’s newest theatre, built by theatrical manager Bertie Meyer for Lord Willoughby de Broke and opened in 1916. C.B. Cochran had taken a lease on the building but failed to make a success of it and was keen to dispose of it. Rea eventually paid £20,000 for the remaining nineteen and a half years of the lease – as Dean put it, his ‘enthusiasm overcame his business caution’ – and ReandeaN took over the theatre on 11 February 1920.

The new company’s first major success was to be a play by a new female playwright. ‘Still walking the tight-rope between success and failure,’ writes Dean, ‘I decided that my only course was to go forward boldly … so I chose A Bill of Divorcement, a first play by Clemence Dane, a young writer who had already attracted the attention of the literary critics with two early novels. This moving play would have stood no chance of acceptance by a commercial management because the subject of madness was taboo on the London stage.’34 Clemence Dane was the pen name of Winifred Ashton, whose work merits many a chapter in the established histories of female playwriting. The production, directed by Dean himself, was by all accounts an extraordinary one, not least due to the performance of ReandeaN’s ill-fated young starlet Meggie Albanesi, and it ran at the St Martin’s for over four hundred performances. It was also to launch Dane’s career as one of the best known and most prolific women dramatists of the inter-war years. A friend of Noël Coward, who based Blithe Spirit’s Madame Arcati on her, she continued writing plays until her death in 1965.

As with Agatha’s early plays, the issues of the divorce laws and eugenics were primary themes of Dane’s West End debut. Following the First World War the divorce rate in England had quadrupled, fuelled by hurried courtships, enforced separations, wartime adultery (both at home and abroad) and a new-found independence enjoyed by women, not least in the realm of employment. The resulting public and political debate lent renewed urgency to the recommendations of a 1912 Royal Commission, which had suggested a liberalisation of the divorce laws, and Clemence Dane’s 1921 play, set in 1933, controversially considered a future in which some of the proposed reforms had been introduced. As a dramatic exercise, this was not dissimilar to Agatha’s examination of the potential consequences of the fictional ‘Marriage Supervision Bill’ in Eugenia and Eugenics. When, in 1923, the Matrimonial Causes Act removed the additional exacerbating circumstances that women needed to prove in order to obtain a divorce, the immediate result was that the number of cases brought by women rose from 41 per cent to 62 per cent of the total. However, the only grounds for divorce on either side remained proven adultery until the 1937 Matrimonial Causes Act, which additionally allowed for cruelty, desertion or incurable insanity to be cited as reasons. The latter reason, of course, was kept firmly on the agenda by the eugenics movement.35

Dane’s play concerns war veteran Hilary Fairfield, who suddenly returns to his wife and daughter one Christmas Day, having been hospitalised for over seventeen years with mental problems, thought to be shellshock. Citing the ‘incurable insanity’ clause in the fictional new divorce law, his wife Margaret has divorced him and is on the verge of remarriage. His daughter Sydney, meanwhile, is about to marry the son of the local rector. Although he claims to be cured, it comes to light that the mental illness from which Fairfield is suffering is in fact hereditary, and the play’s debate, whilst sympathetic to his predicament, involves a wide-ranging consideration of the issues of women’s rights in the matter of divorce and the ethical implications of knowingly passing on hereditary illness to the next generation. Eventually Sydney, fearful of passing on the illness to her own children, gives up her own aspirations of marriage in order to care for her father, thus liberating her mother to find happiness with a new husband.

Critics and audiences welcomed the play’s bravery and, as Dean’s obituary in The Times summed it up, ‘Basil Dean excelled himself as a director, and his young contract players, Meggie Albanesi and Malcolm Keen, excelled themselves in the roles of the daughter and the father.’36 In Dean’s words, the response to Albanesi’s sensational performance as Sydney was ‘The only instance within my memory of a young actress achieving an international reputation by virtue of her performance in a single play.’37 Three years later the object of Dean’s heartfelt admiration was dead, at the age of twenty-four, most probably as the result of a botched abortion.

Quite what attracted Basil Dean to produce and direct Madge Watts’ The Claimant is unclear. He perhaps hoped to repeat his success promoting the work of a female writer and The Claimant, like A Bill of Divorcement, concerns a man re-entering the family circle after a long absence. But there the similarities end. The play was cleared by the censor on 9 August 1924 for ‘performance at St Martin’s in a few weeks’,38 but actually opened on 9 September at the Queen’s Theatre. It ran for forty-four performances and was not a success, although Madge’s letters from rehearsals to her husband and son are full of theatrical gossip and details of her involvement – clearly encouraged by Dean – in the process of creating the production.39 She stayed in London during rehearsals and frequently visited Agatha and Archie, entertaining them with news of the latest dramas from the rehearsal rooms. Agatha herself attended rehearsals on at least one occasion, and doubtless enjoyed her first experience of the making of professional theatre. She also may well have noted the immaculate work of Marshall’s typing agency in the preparation of her sister’s playscript, and certainly entrusted them with much of her work thereafter.

As for the play itself, it has been said that it is inspired by the notorious case of the ‘Tichborne Claimant’, Roger Tichborne, who having been assumed dead in an 1854 shipwreck, turned up almost twenty years later to claim his inheritance. This resulted in a celebrated 1874 court case, following which the claim was rejected and the ‘claimant’ subsequently imprisoned for perjury. Madge’s play is a relatively light-hearted domestic drama, in which the protagonist abandons his claim and admits his true identity when it is discovered that the man he is impersonating was married, and that if he keeps up the pretence he will thus be unable to marry the young lady with whom he has fallen in love. There is an almost incomprehensible back-story and the central family’s relationships are so labyrinthine that a family tree is included in the script by way of explanation. This relatively trivial affair is a long way from the courtroom drama that gripped the nation in the 1870s. As G.S. Street at the Lord Chamberlain’s office put it, ‘I see no harm in the play. The Tichborne case has inspired many stories; in this case (except for calling the hero Roger) the resemblance is quite remote.’40

The Times, which the week before opening had announced a new play by ‘Mr M.F. Watts’,41 corrected itself with its review headline ‘Woman Dramatist’s new play’ and went on to say

The history of the Tunstall family is a little complicated, even with the aid of a genealogical table kindly issued by the management with the programme … The author, Mrs M.F. Watts is, we take it, new to the stage, and inexperienced dramatists are apt to be over-lavish with their plots. There was, for instance, a first act exhibiting various members of the Tunstall family who were never seen again. You identified them carefully by the aid of the genealogical table, but it was labour wasted; the play got on very well without them … But there is plenty of competent acting from an exceptionally choice cast … And, for an ‘extra’, there was Mrs Lottie Venne, in a yeomanry helmet and Union Jack as Britannia ruling the waves and evidently wondering, as well she might wonder, why she was there.42

The latter is a reference to a fancy dress party scene, which may have inspired a scene in Agatha’s 1930 short story, ‘The Dead Harlequin’, later adapted by her for the stage as Someone at the Window. In The Claimant, a footman comments on seeing the cream of society in fancy dress: ‘To see all these ’Arliquings and Pantomimes and Columbias, and then to think ’oo they are … well, reelly!’

The Claimant, which appears to have been the only play by Madge to reach the stage, sank without trace and has never been revived, although forty-five years later the seventy-nine-year-old Agatha would request a copy of it from the Lord Chamberlain’s office; to what purpose we will probably never know.43 The irrepressible Madge, undaunted by the reception of her play, expressed her intentions to write a piece about Warren Hastings, but the only other script of hers that remains is another three-act drama, Oranges and Lemons, in which the widow Octavia has to choose between Junius, the young radical MP, and Rockhaven, the Conservative Prime Minister, both of whom are up against the machinations of a Labour leader of the opposition. The saying ‘Life’s a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel’, usually attributed to seventeenth-century French playwright Jean Racine, appears on the title page. Yet again, there are shades of eugenics in the play’s debates, as in this conversation between young Junius and the older Octavia: