Curtain Up (4 page)

And, examining Clemence Dane's work in
Women, Theatre and Performance
(2000), Gale observes that Dane ‘falls foul of many failings in theatre historiography: the unwillingness to view women's work in the mainstream; the fear of the “conservative”; and the general lack of interest in mid-twentieth century theatre. It remains quite extraordinary that there is so little critical, biographical and historical material on a playwright so recently working in theatre, a playwright, once
a household name, who has somehow been removed from fame to obscurity.'
¹⁹

It could so easily be Agatha Christie to whom Gale is referring that I have gladly taken this as the starting point for my own book. ‘Suffrage theatre' gets a great deal of attention from historians of women's writing for the stage, but theatre written by women simply in order to entertain audiences tends to be overlooked. Gender history is a fascinating subject, but the problem with it is that it tends to be written by gender historians. Lib Taylor, in
British and Irish Women Dramatists since 1958
(1993), dismisses Christie's plays solely on the basis that she believes them to exhibit an ‘underlying collusion with patriarchy'. This view is based on a comprehensive misreading of a small number of the later works, and seems to be a common misapprehension amongst academics. And even if it were true, a playwright is surely free to ‘collude' with whoever they like. In 1983, seven years after Christie's death, the Conference of Women Theatre Directors and Administrators undertook a major survey of women's role in British theatre.
²⁰
Amongst the many interesting statistics arising from this important exercise was that of the twenty-eight plays written by women produced in the previous year on the main stages of regional repertory theatres, twenty-two (or 80 per cent) were penned by Agatha Christie. More recently, on the eve of her 125th anniversary year, Christie was the only woman with a play running in the West End. It is a shame that the preconceptions and prejudices of many historians of women's theatre appear to have dictated against a proper analysis of her achievements as a playwright.

Of the two ‘authorised' biographies, Janet Morgan's (1984) does its best to examine the importance of theatre in Agatha's life and work, whilst Laura Thompson's (2007) marginalises it in favour of an emphasis on the hardly revelatory thesis that much of Agatha's work under the pen name of Mary Westmacott was semi-autobiographical. Both contain significant inaccuracies in relation to the plays, the former due mostly to the notorious difficulty of correctly dating Agatha's correspondence
(which Morgan quotes extensively) and the latter due to the author's evident lack of interest in this area of Agatha's work. The book you are reading is not a biography; I have had the privilege of being able to investigate in detail a particular aspect of Agatha Christie's work, and I do not underestimate the task of attempting to chronicle the entire life of such a multi-faceted individual. So if you want to find out more about her personal life, and in particular her family history, then I recommend both of these books.

The journalist Gwen Robyns wrote an unauthorised biography,
The Mystery of Agatha Christie
, in 1978, based largely on interviews with people who knew and worked with Christie. Although somewhat unorthodox in its approach, it acknowledges the importance of theatre in her work, and is of particular interest in that Robyns appears to have spoken with some of the key players, including Peter Cotes, the original director of
The Mousetrap
, and Wallace Douglas, who as director of
Witness for the Prosecution
and
Spider's Web
was responsible for two more of Christie's biggest hits. Whilst inaccurate in a number of respects, Robyns' book gives a good flavour of the spirit of Christie's engagement with the world of theatre. As is often the case, though, her list of ‘Agatha Christie plays' makes no distinction between those written by Christie herself and those which are the work of third-party adaptors.

It is autobiographies, rather than biographies, that provide the most fruitful source of published material for the Agatha Christie theatre researcher. In 1972, Agatha wrote the introduction to
The Mousetrap Man
, the autobiography of Peter Saunders, who produced all of her work in the West End between 1950 and 1962, including her biggest successes. An entertaining and opinionated romp, it gives an interesting, but nonetheless selective, insight into Agatha's work at the height of her playwriting career, as well as Saunders' own views on matters such as investors, critics and his fellow producers. In 1977, Agatha's own autobiography was published posthumously. Written between 1950 and 1965, when she was aged between fifty-nine and seventy-five, it is a compelling read and
gives some fascinating insights into her personality and her love of theatre, but is notoriously selective and not always entirely accurate in points of detail and chronology. Because of its focus on her early life, and the fact that her work as a playwright met with success relatively late in her career, it ironically is not the most reliable of sources on the subject. Agatha's second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan, published his own autobiography,
Mallowan's Memoirs
, in the same year. His opinions on his wife's theatrical efforts are perceptive and insightful, if relatively brief.

In 1980 Hubert Gregg, who directed
The Hollow
,
The Unexpected Guest
and a couple of Christie's later, less successful plays, published
Agatha Christie and All That Mousetrap
. In this bizarrely self-satisfied and resentful book from a relatively minor player in the story of Christie on stage, Gregg complains that Christie underplayed Peter Saunders' contribution to her theatrical success in her own autobiography. What Gregg really objected to, of course, was that she had failed to mention his own modest contribution at all. I have had access to a small but very interesting privately held collection of Gregg's rehearsal scripts and correspondence with Christie, which does not entirely bear out his version of events.

Peter Cotes, the original director of
The Mousetrap
, uses his 1993 autobiography,
Thinking Aloud
, to establish (at some length) his own position in respect of his lifelong dispute with Peter Saunders, the play's producer. In doing so he quotes Gwen Robyns in support, although Robyns was presumably simply repeating information that Cotes had himself given to her. Saunders, Gregg and Cotes between them provide lively and often conflicting first-hand accounts of the production process of Christie's plays from 1950 onwards, but tend to marginalise the role of Christie herself.

No Christie scholar's bookshelf is complete without the extraordinary contribution of John Curran, whose meticulous transcriptions from and analyses of her seventy-three notebooks in his own two-volume work,
Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks
(2009) and
Agatha Christie's Murder in the Making
(2011),
provide a vital key to Christie's imaginary world. Largely undated and frequently illegible, these copious, gloriously disorganised, handwritten
aides memoires
show work in progress as Christie developed ideas for storylines for both her novels and plays. The notebooks themselves are particularly interesting for their outlines of plays that never made it as far as a draft script, and Dr Curran has been unstintingly generous as an expert guide in this respect, sharing his knowledge in a manner that enabled me quickly to locate the particular nuggets that I was seeking. For plays that reached script stage, however, the notebooks are frequently less informative as a source for examining the work's development than the often numerous versions of the draft scripts themselves, the typed and handwritten amendments made to them, and Christie's sometimes extremely detailed correspondence with directors and producers as new ideas were explored and incorporated. The draft scripts for
Three Blind Mice
(which became
The Mousetrap
) and
Witness for the Prosecution
, for instance, are full of alterations, insertions, amendments and pencil notes made as she developed the scenarios and characters. We often see quite radical changes to plotting and outcomes taking place before us on the page. The draft scripts are, in effect, the ‘notebooks' for the plays.

Many of these drafts are held by the Christie Archive Trust, whose collection consists mainly of papers that were removed from Christie's cherished Devon estate Greenway when it was handed over to the National Trust in 2001, and includes a vast quantity of personal correspondence, as well as the legendary notebooks and drafts of many of the books and plays. The correspondence, mostly between Christie and her second husband Max, at times when he was either away on archaeological work or on wartime military service, gives a fascinating and deeply personal insight into Agatha's devotion to family, the wide range of her interests and her delightful sense of humour. Almost entirely absent is any reference to her work as a novelist (which, to her, would have been the equivalent of discussing her ‘day job'). She does, however,
frequently refer with obvious delight to progress on her numerous theatrical projects. The letters themselves, like the notebooks, are mostly undated (or not fully dated; we are usually told the day of the week) and often illegible; at one point even Max asks if she would mind typing her next epistle. Analysing the correspondence when a line about a play rehearsal could read either ‘it was absolutely marvellous' or ‘I was absolutely furious' is a labour-intensive but deeply rewarding operation. Dating the letters is an equally time-consuming process, although made easier by Max's completely legible and meticulously dated side of the correspondence, where available. Some of the previous mistakes that have been made in documenting Christie's theatre work have arisen from the misdating of letters, but ironically taking note of their theatrical context is often one of the most accurate ways of identifying the time of writing. When and where certain productions that she refers to were actually staged is, after all, a matter of record. Five key scripts are missing entirely from the archive:
Black Coffee
,
Ten Little Niggers
,
Appointment with Death
,
The Hollow
and
Go Back for Murder
; but it more than redeems itself by housing five unpublished and unperformed full-length scripts and a further seven one-act plays, all of them of considerable interest to the historian of her work as a playwright.

One of the many problems with assessing historic play texts is that what we currently accept as the published version may well contain significant changes to the draft that was accepted for production, and equally to the version that was eventually performed in front of the critics following amendments made during the rehearsal process. It is here that the Lord Chamberlain's Plays collection at the British Library provides an invaluable resource. From 1737 until 1968 all plays produced in the UK were subject to approval by the Lord Chamberlain's office, thus effectively conferring a censorship role on a department of the royal household. Almost every play submitted has been retained in the collection, and scripts from the period 1824–1968 are housed at the British Library, referenced through thousands of
handwritten index cards. Significantly, the script held in this collection would be exactly that performed on the first night, and thus reviewed by critics, because changes were not permitted once a licence had been issued.

Scripts had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain no later than a week before the first scheduled performance, and to allow for changes to be made right up to the last possible moment they were often sent at very short notice; it has to be said that the Lord Chamberlain's office seems to have been remarkably good-natured and diligent in processing scripts and responding to them in what were frequently very short time-frames. The result of this was that playwrights effectively self-censored, as nothing could be more catastrophic than to have your play postponed by a last-minute spat with the censor when the production was paid for and in rehearsal. Each play was subject to an Official Examiner's report on a single sheet of paper, which make for interesting reading and often show the censor in the role of would-be critic. There is also a file of correspondence between the Lord Chamberlain's office and the producer of each production.

The card index is by play title and the handwritten, 17-volume chronological list of plays submitted for licensing between 1900 and 1968 is similarly far from user-friendly when it comes to identifying works by a particular writer; but amongst the collection's many Christie treasures is a rare copy of the script for
Chimneys
, which was cancelled at the last minute in 1931, and some interesting correspondence that gives lie to the assumption that the censor never found cause to interfere with her work.

Another significant copy of any play that gets as far as production is the ‘prompt copy' used by the stage manager to record technical cues and stage directions in rehearsal. Few of these still exist, although
The Mousetrap
's is housed in the V&A Theatre Archive. The ‘acting edition' of Christie's plays, which was usually published by Samuel French within a year of the first performance, would often incorporate stage directions from the prompt copy which Christie herself had not actually written.

Christie researchers and biographers are also fortunate to have access to the archives of Hughes Massie Ltd, her agent, relating to her work. Edmund Cork, who took over the company from the eponymous Massie, started representing Christie in 1923 and masterminded her business affairs until his death in 1988. Central to this extensive collection are the file copies of his regular updates to Christie on the progress of her work with publishers and theatre producers. What is immediately apparent from this correspondence is that under Cork's guidance ‘Agatha Christie' rapidly became the first truly global, multi-media business empire based on the intellectual property of one individual. One woman with a typewriter was creating the work and one man with a typewriter (assisted by a small staff that latterly included his daughter, Pat) was responsible for selling it throughout the world; in print and on stage, as well as on film, sound recording, radio and television. Cork not only had to grapple with prototype contracts in many of the media concerned, but also with the complex and burdensome UK and international tax implications of individual worldwide royalty income on such an unprecedented scale. His unceasing labours on Christie's behalf, and his unfaltering loyalty, charm, tact, discretion and good humour, led Christie to place a complete and deserved trust in her agent, who was four years her junior. Taking on a role which these days would be described as ‘personal manager', he dealt with everything from organising tickets for her regular theatre visits to dealing with troublesome tenants and the purchase of a new car. So complete was the trust between them that she would give him power of attorney when she and Max were away together on archaeological digs, to avoid their work being interrupted by business matters.