Curtain Up (3 page)

Whilst the received wisdom is that Christie's novels are to a certain extent formulaic, and much scholarly time has been devoted to analysing these alleged formulae, the same most definitely cannot be said of her work as a playwright, and it almost seems that she found herself enjoying greater freedom of expression as a writer in this genre. A repertoire encompassing the edge-of-your-seat chiller
Ten Little Niggers
, the definitive courtroom drama
Witness for the Prosecution
, the Rattiganesque psychological drama
Verdict
and the ‘time play'
Go Back for Murder
can hardly be described as formulaic and there is no such thing as a ‘typical' Agatha Christie play. Despite the enduring perception of her work as little more than an extended game of Cluedo, Christie's plays tend to be character-led rather than plot-led, and she clearly relishes entrusting the entire momentum of the story-telling to the voices of her ever-colourful dramatis personae. Her dialogue fairly trips off the tongue and is spiced with witticisms and observational comedy frequently worthy of Wilde. In her plays the detectives and police inspectors are usually relegated to minor roles, with the solving of a crime taking second place to the human drama that is being played out. It is as if we come closer to what Christie wants to say as a writer without the dominating presence of Poirot and Marple. With the exception of Poirot's appearance in
Black Coffee
, the first play of hers to be produced (in 1930), neither character features in any of her own stage plays, and indeed she removed Poirot from the storyline when undertaking her own adaptations of four of the novels in which he appears, maintaining, doubtless correctly, that he would pull focus on stage.

Explorations of guilt, revenge and justice loom large in Christie's stage work and are timeless subjects that go back to the very dawn of playwriting, but although the concept of justice and the many forms that it can take is central to many of her plays, the image of the policeman leading away the
guilty party in handcuffs is rarely part of her theatrical vocabulary. An inability to escape the past is a recurring theme, and man's infidelity is often the catalyst for its exploration, a frequently used storyline that some have attributed to the philandering of Christie's own first husband. In Christie's work for the stage, the murder itself is usually nothing more than a plot device to move forward the action and to set the scene for Christie's exploration of the human condition and the dilemmas faced by her characters. ‘Who' dunit is far less important than ‘Why'.

Agatha was a regular theatregoer from childhood and engaged in theatrical projects from an early age, was hugely theatrically literate and drew on a broad frame of reference from Grand Guignol to Whitehall farce, all of which can be seen in her work. But her lifelong passion was for Shakespeare, and her theatrical vocabulary was defined in particular by an enjoyment and understanding of his works, gained as an audience member and a reader rather than a scholar. In a 1973 letter to
The Times
she wrote: ‘I have gone to plays from an early age and am a great believer that that is the way one should approach Shakespeare. He wrote to entertain and he wrote for playgoers.'
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And in her autobiography she says,

Shakespeare is ruined for most people by having been made to learn it at school; you should see Shakespeare as it was written to be seen, played on the stage. There you can appreciate it quite young, long before you take in the beauty of the words and the poetry. I took my grandson, Mathew, to
Macbeth
and
The Merry Wives of Windsor
when he was, I think, eleven or twelve. He was very appreciative of both, though his comment was unexpected. He turned to me as we came out, and said in an awestruck voice, ‘You know, if I hadn't known beforehand that that was
Shakespeare
, I should
never
have believed it.' This was clearly meant to be a testimonial to Shakespeare, and I took it as such.
⁸

Agatha and her grandson particularly enjoyed the knockabout comedy of
The Merry Wives of Windsor
:

In those days it was done, as I am sure it was meant to be, as good old English slapstick – no subtlety about it. The last representation of the
Merry Wives
I saw – in 1965 – had so much arty production about it that you felt you had travelled very far from a bit of winter sun in Windsor Old Park. Even the laundry basket was no longer a laundry basket, full of dirty washing: it was a mere symbol made of raffia! One cannot really enjoy slapstick farce when it is symbolised. The good old pantomime custard trick will never fail to rouse a roar of laughter, so long as custard appears to be actually applied to a face! To take a small carton with Birds Custard Powder written on it and delicately tap a cheek – well, the symbolism may be there, but the farce is lacking.
⁹

Agatha's letters to her second husband, Max, during the war are full of enthusiastic descriptions of her visits to the major Shakespearian productions of the day, including those presented by the Old Vic Company at the New Theatre, their London home at the end of the war. Her critiques of the productions and the performances of the leading classical actors of the day, and her insightful interpretations of the characters' motivations, display a comprehensive knowledge of the Shakespearian repertoire. She also shows a keen interest in Shakespeare's craft as a playwright. Commenting on the fact that he did not devise original plots she says, of the era in which he wrote:

I think the playwright was rather like a composer – he had to find a libretto for his art (like a ballet nowadays). ‘I should like to do a setting of Hamlet, or my version of Macbeth etc.' Inventing a story was not really thought of. ‘What is the argument?' Claudius asks in Hamlet before the players begin. The argument was a set thing – you then exercised your art on it . . . I think plays tended to be loose on construction, because they incorporated certain ‘turns' – like the music
halls . . . He saw a play as a series of scenes in which actors got certain opportunities. Rather like beads on a necklace – the thing to him remained always individual beads strung together.
¹⁰

Shakespeare's portrayal of female characters particularly engaged Agatha – ‘All Shakespeare's women are very definitely characterized – he was feminine enough himself to see men through their eyes'
¹¹
– and she was intrigued by Oxford academic A.L. Rowse's disputed identification of the ‘Dark Lady' of Shakespeare's sonnets. Rowse, in turn, was an admirer of Christie; ‘We must not underrate her literary ambition and accomplishment, as her publishers did, simply because she was the first of detective story writers.'
¹²
Meanwhile, Christie trivia buffs can spend many happy hours identifying the numerous Shakespearian references in the titles and texts of her works. To get the ball rolling, I will pose the question, what were the
two
plays she wrote that took their titles from
Hamlet
?

Agatha was as enamoured with the backstage world of theatre as she was with the performance itself. ‘I don't think you know, that there is anything that takes you so much away from real things and happenings as the acting world,' she wrote to Max in 1942.
¹³
‘It
is
a world of its own and actors never are thinking of anything but themselves and their lines and their business, and what they are going to wear!' And she says in her autobiography, ‘I always find it restful to stay with actors in wartime, because to them, acting and the theatrical world are the
real
world, any other world was not. The war to them was a long drawn-out nightmare that prevented them from going on with their own lives, in the proper way, so their entire talk was of theatrical people, theatrical things, what was going on in the theatrical world, who was going into E.N.S.A. – it was wonderfully refreshing.'
¹⁴
To Agatha Christie, whose imaginary world has offered a welcome escape for so many, the world of theatre offered one to her.

Agatha shared with her theatrical friends the excitements
and disappointments of live performance – ‘Lights that do not go out when the whole point is that that they
should
go out, and lights that do not go on when the whole point is that they
should
go on. These are the real agonies of theatre'
¹⁵
– and in particular the agonies of first nights:

First nights are usually misery, hardly to be borne. One has only two reasons for going to them. One is – a not ignoble motive – that the poor actors have to go through with it, and if it goes badly it is unfair that the author should not be there to share their torture . . . The other reason for going to first nights is, of course, curiosity . . . you have to know
yourself
. Nobody else's account is going to be any good. So there you are, shivering, feeling hot and cold alternately, hoping to heaven that nobody will notice you where you are hiding yourself in the higher ranks of the Circle.
¹⁶

Christie trivia buffs can again spend happy hours identifying the numerous theatrical references, characters and scenarios in her novels; I offer for starters 1952's
They Do It with Mirrors
, in which Miss Marple is fascinated by the stage illusion involved in the creation of a production of a play that rejoices in the Christiesque title ‘The Nile at Sunset'. And it is no coincidence that disguise is a recurring plot device in her plays, a number of which feature characters who are impersonating someone else. This conceit accounts for Christie's two greatest
coups de théâtre
, in
The Mousetrap
and
Witness for the Prosecution
; the latter is carried out with a high level of theatrical skill by a character who is a professional actress, in a plot twist with echoes of her 1923 short story, ‘The Actress'.
¹⁷

Agatha Christie is herself one of the most written about of writers. Much of what has been published about her, however, engages either with the highly seductive imaginary world of her novels or with endlessly re-examined elements of her personal life; even those writers who do make a serious attempt to place her work in a historical and literary context tend to
overlook her contribution as a dramatist. Alison Light's persuasive study of Christie's work as an example of ‘conservative modernity' in
Forever England
(1991) focuses on the inter-war period and so can be excused for overlooking her plays. But other serious assessments of her work, from Merja Makinen's
Agatha Christie: Investigating Femininity
(2006) and Susan Rowland's
From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell
(2001) to Gillian Gill's
Agatha Christie: The Woman and her Mysteries
(1999) and
Agatha Christie
in the Modern Critical Views series (edited by Harold Bloom; 2001), are united in their neglect of her work as a playwright. Ironically, many of the writers concerned may well have found an engagement with Christie's work for the stage to have been beneficial to their arguments.

An honourable exception is Charles Osborne's 1982 book
The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie
. Osborne, a theatre critic and former literature director of the Arts Council, is less academic in his tone than the writers listed above, but is diligent in affording Christie's dramatic work equal prominence with her novels. Other than Osborne's book, the only significant overviews of Christie's plays in the context of appraisals of her own work are in J.C. Trewin's lively and opinionated contribution to
Agatha Christie; First Lady of Crime
(edited by H.R.F. Keating; 1977) and a chapter in Peter Haining's workmanlike
Murder in Four Acts
(1990). Two histories of crime drama, Marvin Lachman's
The Villainous Stage
(2014) and Amnon Kabatchnik's epic, five-volume
Blood on the Stage
(2009–2014), each contribute some original research to the subject, and at least acknowledge Christie's significance as a writer of stage thrillers if not as a playwright in a wider context. Several of the multifarious Christie ‘companions' and ‘reader's guides' dutifully list the plays and recite the often inaccurate received wisdom about their origins and first productions (an honourable mention here to Dennis Sanders and Len Lovallo's 1984
The Agatha Christie Companion
, which is a cut above many of its competitors); but I have seen ‘encyclopedias' of her characters which omit completely those which appear only in the plays.

Perhaps most saddening, though, is the fact that Christie has even been eschewed by feminist theatre academics such as those responsible for
The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights
(2000), meriting not so much as a footnote in the chapter covering the 1950s in a book that purports to ‘address the work of women playwrights in Britain throughout the twentieth century'. Whilst not notable for chaining herself to railings, Christie challenged the male hegemony in West End theatre more successfully than any other female playwright before or since. She took on her male contemporaries on their own terms, and in many respects beat them at their own game. She created a series of strong and memorable female protagonists of all ages, and any actress complaining that there are not enough substantial stage roles for women need look no further than her plays. Most disappointing is Maggie B. Gale's
West End Women
(1996). Although Gale's book, which covers the period 1918–1962, offers a fascinating insight into a neglected area of theatre history, and acknowledges Christie's commercial success as a playwright, it largely overlooks her contribution in favour of the usual suspects: Clemence Dane, Enid Bagnold, Gertrude Jennings, Dodie Smith and others. This is a missed opportunity in an otherwise excellent book. Gale does, however, make the following interesting point: ‘Research on women playwrights, let alone performers, managers, directors and designers is, in real terms, only just beginning. It is important that we look at what was there, rather than trying to fit our findings into some preconceived notion of what it is that, for example, women should have been writing.'
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