Curtain Up (23 page)

Quite what brought this extraordinary woman to the offices
of Bertie Meyer in the autumn of 1942 is unclear. Her signature appears next to Meyer's in a copy of the nursery rhyme book
Ten Little Niggers
which all those involved in the production signed for Agatha, presumably as a first night gift,
¹⁸
indicating that she enjoyed considerable status within the management of the project. She appears to have had some association with a company called Farndale, which would eventually co-produce the play with Meyer and which took first position producer billing (i.e. before Meyer) in the West End programme. Farndale Pictures had been set up in 1936 with a board of directors consisting mainly of solicitors and accountants; its name implies that it was conceived as a film production company, but it registered as a ‘Theatrical Employer' the following year. Barbara Toy and Moe Charles replaced two female literary agents as directors of the company for almost a year from July 1944 (immediately after the West End run of
Ten Little Niggers
), at which time they were also both directors of Overture Theatres Ltd, which managed the repertory company at the Connaught Theatre, Worthing. Toy and Charles were not shareholders of Farndale, and it is not clear from the paperwork whether their association with the company pre-dates the
Ten Little Niggers
project or whether it came about because of it.

In any event, between signing the rights and opening Christie's play, Farndale produced its first West End venture, Enid Bagnold's first play,
Lottie Dundas
. If Toy was indeed a senior figure within Farndale prior to becoming a director of the company, it is odd that the company appears to have had no involvement in the 1942 production of her own play,
Lifeline
. At this point, though, irrespective of her status within the production companies associated with the project, Toy's only literary qualification for giving Christie notes on her work was the fact that she had anonymously co-authored one modestly successful play.

Unsurprisingly, Christie appears not to have responded to the idea of meeting Barbara Toy. A month later, Cork gave her a nudge: ‘Mr Bertie Meyer has just been talking to me again
about Ten Little Niggers. Apparently several producers [i.e. directors] feel that the play cannot be put on as it stands, but says that his people are convinced that it can be put right if you will only listen to them. The present suggestion is that you might meet Barbara Toye [sic] and Derrick de Marney some time next week to hear their ideas. Shall I arrange such a meeting? I think perhaps it should be held here for reasons I will explain to you before it takes place.'
¹⁹

Thirty-six-year-old Derrick de Marney and his brother, thirty-three-year-old Terence, were a busy pair of actor-directors. Terence had just appeared in Barbara Toy's play
Lifeline
and was to play the role of Lombard in
Ten Little Niggers
, but Derrick spent much of the war involved in documentary film projects. There is a frustrating lack of extant paperwork relating to Meyer's Christie productions, but I am assuming from the role that Derrick de Marney played in later projects that his involvement here was as an investor or even an uncredited co-producer.

Cork's suggestion that the meeting be held at the Hughes Massie office was no doubt simply a tactical ploy to establish that Christie herself was in the driving seat. It took place on 4 November and went well. The next day Agatha wrote to Max:

Another crisis arising with Ten Little Niggers – usual talk of immediate production. I met yesterday ‘under the auspices' of Cork with an eloquent girl with a Cockney accent [had Agatha perhaps mistaken an Australian accent for a Cockney one?] and an intense young man with masses of black hair to discuss the usual alterations. Their suggestions were for once sensible and in fact an improvement – the alternative ‘happy ending' ‘He got married and then there were none', I have always contemplated as a possibility if I can do it my own way which is agreed – well I shall believe nothing until the contract is signed!
²⁰

Christie here refers to two different endings that were used for the nursery rhyme. The one in which the final boy ‘went
and hanged himself, and then there were none' leads to the novel's truly mystifying outcome, where all ten of the visitors to the island are found dead. The alternative, where the final boy ‘got married, and then there were none', offers up the possibility of a ‘happy' ending, and was in fact the version used in the children's book of that time. This was the ending that she now adopted for the playscript, but it necessitated a further twist in that the survivor required someone to marry; so in the event not one, but two, of the play's protagonists escape the killer's clutches. This entails one of the characters, who has apparently been shot dead, standing up and declaring the immortal line, ‘Thank God women can't shoot straight.'

When the play is performed these days, and in the absence of the first version of Christie's script, the last two pages are usually subtly edited to reinstate the far more sinister ending that Christie herself originally intended. Although she appears to have been quite happy with the revised ending, and even takes full credit for it in her autobiography, it clearly came about as the result of pressure from producers and, to a modern playgoer, undermines the carefully crafted tension that has been built up throughout the piece. For wartime Britain, though, it has to be said that the instincts of all concerned (including Christie's in readily agreeing to the alteration) were probably correct, and that the counterpoint of the upbeat and humorous ending to the horrors that preceded it was doubtless appreciated by audiences as they stepped out into war-torn London.

Agatha got down to work immediately on the script amendments, and on 20 November Cork wrote to her, ‘I have just been talking to Barbara Toy on the telephone. She is delighted that you have carried out the alterations so quickly, and she is so anxious to see what you have done that she can't wait for the script to be typed. I have therefore sent it along to them as it is – they can do what retyping is necessary!'
²¹
A week later, Bertie Meyer invited Christie to lunch at the Savoy restaurant, and it seems that at this lunch he confirmed his intention to produce the play.

On Christmas Eve 1942 Cork wrote to Christie, ‘Here is the contract for Ten Little Niggers. Would you sign and return it so that we can complete early next week? It has been tentatively fixed for Monday . . . this deal seems to be “all set” . . .'
²²
On 30 December 1942, the following Wednesday, a stage licence for
Ten Little Niggers
in the territories of Great Britain, Ireland, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand was issued jointly to Bertie Alexander Meyer and Farndale Pictures Limited. A £100 advance was paid against royalties on the usual sliding scale of between 5 and 10 per cent on banded levels of box office income, with the licence to run for seven years from the date of the first performance. The producers were granted an option on the American territory and a share of amateur income, but the film rights to the book had already gone elsewhere.
²³

The play had secured its producers, and they in turn quickly moved to secure a director. On 18 February 1943 Agatha wrote to Max, ‘latest news of Ten Little Nigs good. Irene Hentschel likes it and is willing to produce [i.e. direct] it – hesitated because she likes a rest in between productions – but at this critical moment her husband Ivor Brown got a boil – and anything which she produces when he has a boil is always lucky!!! Can you beat it?! Aren't theatrical people extraordinary? Tentative date April 19th – I said quickly April was my lucky month and 19 my lucky number, and that made a great impression.'
²⁴
Agatha's affection for the quirkiness of theatrical people, and her quick-thinking bluff, paid off. The woman entrusted with the first of Christie's adaptations from one of her novels to reach the stage was one of the most successful and sought-after directors of the day. Notably, she was a regular director for H.M. Tennent Ltd, a new venture established by Harry Tennent and Hugh ‘Binkie' Beaumont and now run solely by Beaumont following Tennent's death in 1941. Hentschel's recent work for the company had included highly regarded productions of Frederick Lonsdale's
On Approval
at the Aldwych Theatre and Shaw's
The Doctor's Dilemma
, starring Vivien Leigh, at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket.

A year younger than Christie, Hentschel had trained as an
actress at RADA and first worked as a director at Hampstead's Everyman Theatre in 1926. According to her 1979
Times
obituary (which, unsurprisingly, fails to mention her successful foray into the work of Agatha Christie),

for a quarter of a century she was among the most skilful and respected members of a highly specialized branch of the theatre that, when she entered it, was dominated by men . . . the 1930s was an exceedingly fruitful decade with seventeen or eighteen successes and very few failures. Priestley's
Eden End
(1934) was the first piece in which people remarked upon Irene Hentschel's loving instance on realism; nothing, in performance or décor, must be out of place. Companies liked acting for her; she was positive, friendly, and a thorough-going professional.
²⁵

Perhaps Hentschel's greatest claim to fame was as the first woman to direct Shakespeare at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford upon Avon where, in 1939, she staged a controversial production of
Twelfth Night
. Designed by the women's design team Motley, who went on to work regularly at Stratford, it featured Joyce Bland as Viola. Bland was the young actress who had caught Agatha's eye in the role of Lucia Amory in
Black Coffee
at the Embassy, and Agatha's unerring theatrical judgement also told her that Hentschel was a formidable talent.

Writing her autobiography some thirty years later, Agatha recalled:

Irene Henschell [sic] produced [i.e. directed] the play, and did so remarkably well, I thought. I was interested to see her methods of production because they were so different from Gerald Du Maurier's. To begin with she appeared to my inexperienced eye to be fumbling, as though unsure of herself, but as I saw her technique develop I realised how sound it was. At first she, as it were,
felt
her way about the stage,
seeing
the thing, not hearing it; seeing the movements
and the lighting, how the whole thing would
look
. Then, almost as an afterthought, she concentrated on the actual script. It was effective, and very impressive. The tension built up well, and her lighting, with three baby spots, of one scene where they are all sitting with candles burning as the lights have failed, worked wonderfully well.
²⁶

Of course, a first-rate director was able to attract a first-rate cast. Christie appreciated this, too: ‘With the play also well acted, you could feel the tension growing up, the fear and the distrust that rises between one person and another; and the deaths were so contrived that never, when I have seen it, has there been any suggestion of laughter or of the whole thing being too ridiculously thrillerish.'

Although the pair only worked together once, the praise Christie heaps on Hentschel's work as a director is unparalleled. Christie recognised theatrical quality when she saw it, and her failure to mention in her autobiography some of the male directors who were later to work with her more frequently, to the considerable chagrin of at least one of them, is, I believe, calculated.

Hentschel's husband Ivor Brown, whose boil was to change the course of Christie's theatrical fortunes, was as theatre critic (and later editor) of the
Observer
one of the most influential (and, indeed, most readable) critics of the day. Professor of Drama at the Royal Society of Literature and CEMA's Director of Drama for the first two years of its existence, Oxford graduate Brown was a distinguished and provocative theatrical commentator, whose reviews of Christie's work, including that directed by his wife, are witty and insightful. Amongst his many writings was a one-act play called
Beauty Spot
, contained in the same 1939 collection as Margery Vosper's Christie adaptation
Tea For Three
. The man with the boil wrote a play called
Beauty Spot
.

As it happens ‘lucky' 19 April was not to be, and Christie's scepticism about the ‘immediate' production proved justified. Hentschel spent April directing J.B. Priestley's
They Came To
a City
, produced by Tennent Plays Ltd (a sister company to H.M. Tennent Ltd) at the Globe, the theatre which housed the blossoming empire's offices. She then went on to direct Enid Bagnold's first play, the Farndale-produced
Lottie Dundas
, which opened at the Vaudeville Theatre on 21 July 1943. It must have been a bad year for boils for Ivor Brown.

On 23 June an excited Agatha wrote to Max, ‘10 Little Niggers
really
coming on – I believe Sept 6th. I wish it was later now.'
²⁷
The rescheduled production dates had brought the opening perilously close to the anticipated birth date of Agatha's first (and, as it happened, only) grandchild, and Agatha would clearly have preferred to know that all was well with her growing family before throwing herself into her new theatrical venture. In the end, the dates were indeed pushed back, but the outcome was not to Agatha's advantage: the opening of the production's pre-West End tour at Wimbledon Theatre eventually came so close to the date the child was due that Agatha was unable to attend the performance.

Her daughter Rosalind had married Welsh Fusilier Hubert Prichard in 1941, and the absence at war of each of their husbands contributed to the anxiety of both Agatha and Rosalind. Perhaps as a result, Agatha may not have been in the best of moods when she attended the dress rehearsal of
Ten Little Niggers
on 19 September (theatrical folk don't seem to have minded working on a Sunday in those days). The next day she wrote hurriedly to Max in handwriting even less legible than usual; it is difficult to make out many of the words, but it is clear that she is less than happy. ‘Dress rehearsal of 10 Little Niggers yesterday and I really was
furious
! – between Friday's rehearsal and Sunday they had altered the whole of the . . . and made it . . . idiotic . . . all down to this girl Barbara Toy – and without a word to me . . . and no shot at the right moment . . . I'm delighted not to be going to the first night tonight – shall come back end of week if all is well and see it then.'
²⁸