Curtain Up (11 page)

Rather than John divorcing Nan for her infidelity, Nell and John vow to elope and allow Nan to divorce him, so that the shame of her own indiscretion is thereby not revealed. ‘Let the disgrace be ours,' says Nell, ‘We're doing a far worse thing than she has done.' At this moment Nan walks in and, oblivious to developments between her husband and her sister (of
which she continues to remain blissfully ignorant), falls to her knees, confesses her infidelity and begs John to forgive her. In a final twist, Nell fights her sister's corner and begs John to return to the realities of married life rather than pursuing the fantasy of what might have been, echoing her mother's words: ‘A moment comes to everyone – a moment when they hold their life in their hands . . . Sometimes – it's not only
one
life – there might be
three
– three lives and we hold them all! It's our moment!'

John is persuaded to forgive his wife and is reconciled with her, forgoing the possibility of a relationship with the younger Nell, and unwittingly echoing his mother-in-law, ‘We'll both start again, Nan – together . . . Someday – who knows? – happiness may come . . .' In the final moments of the play Nell is left alone on the stage, repeating John's words:

Someday – who knows? – happiness may come . . . Someday . . . (she stands over the lamp, preparing to blow it out. In a final tone of doubt and wonder.) Someday? (she blows out the lamp. The stage is in darkness. Curtain.)

This play is about many things: infidelity and divorce, sisterly and motherly love, and the familiar Christie theme of choosing between the excitement of dangerous, passionate love and the perceived tedium of steady commitment. One thing it may at first not appear to be about is incest.

However, as with all things Christie it is important to set the subject matter in context. In 1907, the Deceased Wife's Sister's Marriage Act had ended decades of controversy by allowing widowers to marry the sister of their deceased spouse. This form of marital union had been made illegal in 1835, and remained a topic of lively debate, both inside and outside Parliament, throughout the Victorian period. The controversy centred around the effects of sexual desire on the purity of the English family, not to mention the ability of government to legislate on issues of morality, control individual behaviour and regulate the family. During the second half of the nineteenth
century, the relationship between sisters was used to make the domestic sphere part of the public, political world. The sisterly bond was used by politicians as the catalyst for discussions about marriage, the sanctity of family life and even threats to the authority of the Church of England. The issue even merits a mention in Gilbert and Sullivan's
Iolanthe
(1882); when Strephon is sent by the Queen of the Fairies to stir up Parliament, one of his tasks is to ‘prick that annual blister, Marriage with deceased wife's sister'. In the end, the change in law was to an extent an acknowledgement of the status quo. It was common in the nineteenth century for single women to move in with a sister's family and assist with the raising of the children; and it was a small logical step, at least in nineteenth-century terms, for that role to be formalised in the event of the married sister's death.
⁵⁴

The Deceased Wife's Sister's Marriage Act, however, permitted only what was referred to in its somewhat convoluted title. It was not until the 1960 Marriage (Enabling) Act that a man could marry his former wife's sister whether that wife was ‘living or not'. So, when Christie started writing her autobiography in 1955, she might well still have regarded the relationship between John and Nell as ‘incestuous' (although there are wider theological issues here that we need not concern ourselves with). Readers who have been paying close attention to the intricate legislative subplot of this chapter will note that, prior to 1923, the ‘incestuous' nature of John's relationship with Nell may well have assisted Nan in obtaining a divorce from him. Meanwhile, John and Nell discuss fleeing the country, perhaps not only in order to escape the scandal but possibly also so that they can marry, once his divorce comes through, without the requirement for Nan to be ‘deceased'.

Christie underlines this theme in the play when John declares to Nell, ‘I love you – and you love me – Oh! Why did I marry Nan?
Nan
– when you were there, growing up day by day, from childhood to womanhood . . . You! My Nell!' He goes on to refer to her as his ‘little sister', asserting ‘I look upon you
as my sister' and ‘Haven't I always been a brother to you?' Further emphasis is given to the relationship between John and his sister-in-law by a change in title in the second draft from ‘The Lie' to ‘The Sister-In-Law'. I prefer the original. All of this, I am sure, was done in ignorance of the darker side of life in the Phillpotts household.

The fact that ‘The scene represents a typical suburban drawing room' and not some distant, imagined country house, only serves to add to our discomfort, and gives the astonishing subject matter of this relentlessly unfolding drama even more impact. This could happen to any of us, Christie seems to be saying. John sums up the frustrations of the daily grind that have led both his wife and himself to seek illicit adventure elsewhere: ‘Oh! I know! I was keen on my work – that dull, plodding work, the same day after day! It seems incredible now to think of it! I meant to wear the collar steadily year after year. I never dreamed of any other life. The 8.16 train up to town every morning, the 5.10 back, the annual holiday to the sea side – I thought all that was life! How narrow and paltry it all seems now! Why did I do it? Because everyone does. There's a reason for you!'

But, however enticing the forbidden fruit, as Nell reminds us, ‘It's the dull brown earth that endures, not the gay flowers that grow there.' Feminist writers would no doubt consider the play's resolution as somehow involving ‘an underlying collusion with patriarchy', but I believe there is a far more complex appraisal of human emotions going on here than there is in Clemence Dane's
A Bill of Divorcement
.

The circumstances of Christie's own 1928 divorce were, as it happens, every bit as dramatic as something on the West End stage. Following their return from the Grand Tour at the end of 1922, and reunited with Rosalind (who had been left in the care of her grandmother and aunt), Agatha and Archie settled in Sunningdale in Berkshire, eventually moving into a house they bought together, which they named Styles. Agatha bought a two-seater Morris Cowley coupé and took on a secretary, Charlotte Fisher (‘Carlo'), who made a
substantial contribution to her employer's wellbeing in the following years, and whose arrival, amongst other things, coincided with a vast improvement in the typing of Agatha's draft playscripts.

Agatha's six-book deal with The Bodley Head ended with
The Secret of Chimneys
in 1925, and her new agent, Edmund Cork of Hughes Massie, negotiated much-improved terms for her with her new publisher, Collins. The following year Collins published
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
, which proved to be her biggest success to date. Archie, meanwhile, resumed work in the City. Perhaps the excitement of their round-the-world adventure underlined the relative dullness of the return to normality, or perhaps their wartime separation and lengthy travels in the company of others meant that they had never really got to know each other properly, but in any event Archie the City commuter was no longer Archie the dashing young airman and adventurer. In 1926, following the death of her beloved mother, Agatha spent time at Ashfield in Torquay, where she found the process of clearing out her mother's belongings enormously stressful. This was exacerbated when Archie arrived and announced that he was in love with Nancy Neele, a younger woman with whom he shared an interest in golf, and wanted Agatha to divorce him. Agatha's autobiography describes this distressing period of her life with moving sincerity and economy. Clearly to the frustration of many, she offers no detail at all about what happened next. I will keep it brief.

We will never know what exactly motivated Agatha's sudden decision to abandon her cherished car, take a train to Harrogate and there book into a hotel, in a name similar to that of her husband's mistress, between 4 and 14 December 1926. Whether it was the result of some sort of stress-induced anxiety attack, or the botched playing-out of a scenario intended to win back her husband, or – as seems most likely – a combination of the two, the only winners at the time were the press, who succeeded in boosting their circulations by drumming up one of the first celebrity media frenzies; an
outcome which appears to have surprised and distressed the very private Agatha in equal measure. One of the many who has subsequently perpetuated this intrusive reportage by claiming to ‘provide the answers to the mystery' is Jared Cade who, in his book
Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days
(1998), bases his claims on information received from Judith Gardner, the daughter of Agatha's close friend Nan Kon. Cade incorrectly describes Nan as Agatha's ‘sister-in-law', when she was not in fact a relation, but simply Agatha's sister's husband's sister. Cade informs us that Nan told her daughter, amongst other things, that Agatha stayed with her on 3 December, the one night on which her whereabouts is unaccounted for. Biographer Laura Thompson gleefully employs antique train timetables to disprove this theory and goes on to berate Cade for describing scenes that ‘he cannot possibly know about', having herself given the most extraordinary and lengthy fictionalised account of events. Surely the biggest flaw in Cade's theory is that we are asked to assume that the ‘sister-in-law', Nan, if she did indeed claim that Agatha stayed with her on the night in question, was actually telling the truth.

Following a recuperative sojourn in the Canary Islands with Rosalind and Carlo, Agatha attended a court hearing in April 1928, at which, in order to avoid embarrassment to Nancy Neele, falsified evidence of Archie's adultery with an unknown party was offered. Agatha was granted the divorce that Archie wanted in October of that year. Unlike in
Ten Years
, the fact that the couple had a young child proved insufficient to keep them together; Agatha was granted custody of Rosalind. And Archie was never to speak John's line from
The Lie
, ‘We'll both start again – together . . . Someday – who knows? – happiness may come . . .' Archie stuck to his own script, and life on this occasion failed to imitate art.

Christie's early, unpublished playwriting, much of it very accomplished, takes an often witty and always idiosyncratic look at many of the burning social issues of the day, particularly
as they affected women. As Christie herself implies, in the mid-1920s
The Lie
was undoubtedly ahead of its time, not only in terms of its themes but also of its setting and characters. If a producer had been brave enough to accept it, then the Lord Chamberlain's office may well have raised objections. The script is perhaps too short, and is by no means perfect in its construction, but with the benefit of a little dramaturgy from an experienced director it could have made for a highly impactful evening of theatre. Had it been performed when it was written, and been presented to the public as Christie's first play, then the history of Agatha Christie, playwright might have been very different.

As it turned out, though, all her early playwriting efforts were to be upstaged by a moustachioed French detective, who inevitably stole the show as soon as he set foot in front of an audience. Yes, French.

By early 1928, at the age of thirty-seven, Agatha had become a best-selling novelist, a media celebrity, a mother and a soon-to-be divorcee. As a playwright she had experimented with a wide variety of genres, including
commedia dell'arte
, Grand Guignol, American pulp fiction, comedy and passionate domestic drama. Much of her work had touched on socio-political issues such as divorce and eugenics, and some of it had embraced controversial subject matter that would have raised eyebrows in the Lord Chamberlain's office.

It must have been particularly frustrating for her, then, not only that her sister achieved her West End debut before she did, but also that the first time her own name appeared on a theatre marquee was in relation to another playwright's less than satisfactory adaptation of one of her detective novels.

In April 1927, touring actor-manager Lionel Bute paid £200 to Hughes Massie for the right to produce an adaptation of Christie's hugely popular 1926 novel
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
.
¹
The script was not yet written at this point, but the chosen adaptor was Michael Morton, a prolific playwright who between 1897 and his death in 1931 would be responsible for numerous dramas and comedies, as well as a number of successful stage thrillers including
The Yellow Passport
(1914),
In the Night Watch
(1921) and
The Guilty One
(1923). Since the archives of Hughes Massie in relation to the agency's dealings
with Christie do not commence until 1940, it is difficult to establish why Morton was chosen as the adaptor, and indeed whether it was Bute or Hughes Massie who commissioned the play. Given Christie's penchant for playwriting, it seems odd that the job wasn't given to her, particularly as it is highly likely that she had herself by this time delivered an original play featuring Poirot and called
After Dinner
; although the engagement of an adaptor may well have been due to the reluctance of Hughes Massie's Edmund Cork to see his novelists spending their time writing plays. The £200 Bute paid was by way of an advance against royalties, which were to be paid at between 5 and 15 per cent on different levels of box office income. Morton was to share this royalty income 50/50 with Christie, a ratio that would become standard with respect to third-party stage adaptations of her work.

In 1921 Bute had created Lionel Bute Ltd, ‘to send out on tour London successes played by first rate artists'. As an actor-manager he saw himself as having his performers' ‘artistic as well as their material welfare at heart, and he would be deeply hurt if anyone regarded the firm as merely commercial'.
²
He was a popular character whose troupe affectionately adopted the motto ‘Bute-iful plays Bute-ifully acted'. A sort of touring repertory company, Lionel Bute's players enjoyed great success throughout the 1920s, with up to five units on the road simultaneously.

Hughes Massie had given Bute until 1 November 1928 to produce the play or lose his £200, but for some reason in February 1928 he assigned his licence to the West End impresario Bertie Meyer. Bute presumably felt that his chances on tour would be enhanced by a West End production (the remit of his company was, after all, to tour ‘London successes') but that he needed a heavyweight partner in order to achieve this. Once Morton had delivered the script, he therefore seems to have gone about finding a business partner with the resources to create a West End production, but in a deal that would still give him the ability subsequently to tour the title. There are no records of the detail of this arrangement, but
the West End programme, whilst stating that it is presented by ‘B.A. Meyer', notes in the small print that it is ‘produced by arrangement with Lionel Bute'.
³
It also notes that the actor Norman V. Norman (playing Roger Ackroyd) appears ‘by permission of Basil Dean', Dean having allowed him an early release from Margaret Kennedy's
Come With Me
.

Bertie Meyer, the man who built the St Martin's Theatre, had originally been a tea planter in Ceylon. Whilst on a visit to London in 1902, he became engaged to Dorothy Grimston, daughter of celebrated actress Mrs Kendal, and having married into a theatrical dynasty, decided to apply his business acumen to theatrical matters. As a French speaker, he was engaged in a management role by the company presenting Réjane's 1903 London season at the Garrick Theatre, where the actress who was later to so impress the young Agatha in Paris scored a great hit. Continuing with the French theme, he himself presented the legendary Coquelin in his defining role as Cyrano at the Shaftesbury Theatre in 1905. His marriage to Dorothy didn't last, but his love affair with theatre did and, following these early successes, he went on to become one of the most respected London producers and theatre managers of the day. In 1927 he enjoyed a big hit with Edgar Wallace's
The Terror
at the Lyceum Theatre, a drama which, like much of the hugely popular crime novelist's work for the stage, owed a substantial debt to Grand Guignol.

Meyer's two big coups in the production of the stage version of
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
, which – after the issue of its licence but before the script's submission to the Lord Chamberlain's office – had been retitled
Alibi
by its adaptor, were the engagement of Gerald du Maurier to direct and Charles Laughton to play Poirot. Du Maurier, one of the most respected actors and directors of the day, was the son of the novelist George du Maurier (of
Trilby
fame) and the father of novelist Daphne du Maurier, who was herself to enjoy three West End hits as a playwright in the 1940s. Gerald du Maurier, who had been knighted in 1922, is credited with having masterminded Edgar Wallace's first big West End success,
The Ringer
, a melodramatic
adaptation of his 1925 novel
The Gaunt Stranger
. Engaged as director of
The Ringer
, du Maurier was generous with his dramaturgical assistance in the preparation of the script, which generosity Wallace reciprocated by sharing his royalty income with him. Wallace even revised the original novel and reissued it as
The Ringer
, taking on board the lessons learned from du Maurier. We should note in passing that, during the play's successful 1926 run at Wyndham's Theatre, Wallace had jumped on the bandwagon of press speculation about Christie's disappearance by contributing a piece on the subject to the
Daily Mail
at the height of the furore.

With Meyer as producer and du Maurier as director, the credentials of the team responsible for the production of
Alibi
were promising. All that remained was to cast the role of Poirot, who had already appeared in four novels and a book of short stories, for what was to be the character's stage debut. In February 1928 Meyer had produced
A Man With Red Hair
at the Little Theatre; in this gruesome shocker, adapted from a Hugh Walpole novel by Benn Levy, the leading role of the grotesque sadist Crispin was played to great acclaim by a twenty-eight-year-old RADA graduate, Charles Laughton, ‘a very gargoyle of obscene desires' according to the
Observer
critic.
⁴
The production ran for only seventy-nine performances, but served as the springboard to Laughton's distinguished acting career. Although borrowing from the Little Theatre's Grand Guignol repertoire of horrors, this play lacked the essential larkiness of the genre, and Meyer decided to replace it with a successful revival of ‘London's Grand Guignol' itself, taking a large advertisement for the season in the programme for
Alibi
.

Despite his recent critical success in
A Man With Red Hair
, Laughton was by no means the obvious choice for the role of Poirot. Too young, and physically too portly, there was also the problem that he was now associated in people's minds with the unsavoury Crispin. Christie herself was more concerned with changes to the storyline and characterisation made by Michael Morton. As she states in her autobiography:

Alibi
, the first play to be produced from one of my books –
the Murder Of Roger Ackroyd
– was adapted by Michael Morton. He was a practised hand at adapting plays. I much disliked his first suggestion, which was to take about twenty years off Poirot's age, call him Beau Poirot and have lots of girls in love with him . . . I strongly objected to having his personality completely changed. In the end, with Gerald Du Maurier backing me up, we settled on removing that excellent character Caroline, the doctor's sister . . . one of the things that saddened me most was Caroline's removal. Instead the doctor was provided with another sister – a much younger one – a pretty girl who could supply Poirot with romantic interest.
⁵

In a 1961
Sunday Times
interview Christie comments, ‘I disliked Poirot being made into a young man, and having a sort of sentimental love affair. Charles Laughton played Poirot extremely well, but it was made into rather a sentimental part.'
⁶
And in her introduction to Peter Saunders'
The Mousetrap Man
, she remarks that Laughton was ‘entirely unlike Hercule Poirot but a wonderful actor'.
⁷
Christie herself believed that Miss Marple, who was to make her first print appearance in 1930's
The Murder at the Vicarage
, may have been inspired by the discarded character of Caroline, ‘an acidulated spinster, full of curiosity, knowing everything, hearing everything; the complete detective service in the home'.
⁸

The frustrations of the rehearsal process were many for the would-be playwright: ‘I had no idea when it was first suggested what terrible suffering you go through with plays, owing to the alterations made in them.'
⁹
In the end, ‘Beau Poirot' remained in the version of the script licensed for performance by the Lord Chamberlain, but perhaps the biggest surprise is that Christie appears not to have made any objection to her famous Belgian creation being referred to as French.
¹⁰

In the event the cast, which also included ‘Lady Tree' (Helen Maud Holt – Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree's widow) as Mrs Ackroyd, acquitted themselves well and the play, though
attracting only mediocre reviews, enjoyed a successful run of 250 performances. It opened at the Prince of Wales Theatre on 15 May 1928, a few weeks after the initial court hearing relating to Agatha's divorce, and transferred to the Haymarket on 20 August, where it ran until the end of the year. On 6 August Lionel Bute opened a touring production at the Grand Theatre, Swansea, with the ensemble temporarily renamed ‘Lionel Bute and B.A. Meyer's Company'.
¹¹

The play itself suffered from the fact that the impact of the book's denouement
relies on a device that is simply not transferable from page to stage. And the script's obvious shortcomings appear only to have been emphasised by Laughton's consciously stellar performance. As playwright St. John Ervine put it, reviewing for the
Observer
:

This is an actor. Let me not be afraid to use superlatives. Mr Laughton is about to become a
great actor.
I hereby announce to the world that this young man, whose age is less than thirty, is likely to be as fine a character actor as Coquelin. He has the most malleable body and pliable face of any actor I know. He acts with his mind and with his body. He knows that he has a face and he acts with it. He acts with his hands and with his legs and feet, and I should not be at all astonished to find that if his boots were removed, each one of his toes would be acting hard. He seizes the stage and firmly controls the audience. He fills me with a sense of his power, and makes me intensely aware of him from the moment he comes on to the stage until the moment he leaves it . . . The play begins badly but steadily improves; the first two scenes, which are dull and slow, might be telescoped . . . Mr Laughton, however, added so much to the part of Poirot that the play seemed far bigger than it is. I am about to repeat myself. Mr Laughton, I say, is an actor. The whole of the cast is excellent. They must pardon me if I do no more than note their names . . . It was Mr Laughton's night. An actor, ladies and gentlemen.
¹²

Laughton was the first of numerous actors to appropriate the role of Poirot as a vehicle for their own talents, and Christie herself was disconcerted by the manner in which the character pulled focus on stage. The function of a detective, after all, is to observe; and in a detective novel the reader is invited to join the detective in this process. On film, camera angles and editing can focus the audience's attention on specific characters and events. But on stage the audience is liable to be distracted from the observational process by the detective's constant presence in their line of vision. Ironically, rather than observing what the detective is observing (as in a book or a film), they end up observing the detective; especially if a particularly flamboyant actor has commandeered the role.

For all its frustrations, the process was hugely enjoyable for Agatha, as it had been for her sister. Agatha, of course, had no one at home at this time other than her nine-year-old daughter to share her excitement with, but the following interview in
The Star
gives an insight into the enjoyment she derived from her involvement in the production of
Alibi
(it is interesting to note that, even at this early stage, a play not actually written by Agatha Christie is referred to as an ‘Agatha Christie play'):

‘It's all great fun!' Such was the enthusiastic comment with which Agatha Christie today greeted a ‘Star' woman who went along to the flower-like Kensington home of the novelist-playwright to see how she felt about last night's production of her play, ‘Alibi'.

This new piece at the Prince Of Wales theatre, in which Charles Laughton has made so great a hit as the famous fictional detective Hercule Poirot, is the first Agatha Christie play to be staged. It has been dramatised by Michael Morton from the Christie novel called
The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd
. Mrs Christie confessed today that this was not her idea of a title at all, ‘I wanted to call the book “The man who grew vegetable marrows” but nobody would let me!' she said sadly.
¹³