Curtain Up (6 page)

To understand the unique trajectory of Christie's playwriting career, it needs to be set within the theatrical history of the time. In Christie's case this means charting a timeline from around 1908, when she made her first attempts at writing scripts, through to the last premiere of her work in 1972. In so doing, I will introduce a whole new cast of characters to the oft-told story of this extraordinary lady; the colourful and
eccentric cast that populated Agatha Christie's much-cherished world of theatre.

One thing that this book is definitely not about is detectives, and I am sorry if that disappoints some readers. But I have often felt like a detective myself as I have hunted down, assembled and analysed the evidence from a variety of different sources, and from often conflicting accounts of the same events. I hope that Hercule Poirot would have approved of my efforts and that what emerges is something approaching the truth behind the remarkable and previously untold story of Agatha Christie, playwright.

The People's Playwright

Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was fascinated by theatre from an early age. In sleepy, Victorian middle-class Torquay, ‘one of the great joys in life was the local theatre. We were all lovers of the theatre in my family,' she writes in her autobiography. Older siblings Madge and Monty visited the Theatre Royal and Opera House in Abbey Road practically every week, and the young Agatha was usually allowed to accompany them. ‘As I grew older it became more and more frequent. We went to the pit stalls always – the pit itself was supposed to be “rough”. The pit cost a shilling and the pit stalls, which were two rows of seats in front, behind about ten rows of stalls, were where the Miller family sat, enjoying every kind of theatrical entertainment.'
¹
Clara and Frederick Miller clearly did everything they could to encourage this interest in their children, and Agatha was always captivated by the colourful dramas unfolding in front of her:

I don't know whether it was the first play I saw, but certainly among the first was
Hearts and Trumps
, a roaring melodrama of the worst type. There was a villain in it, the wicked woman called Lady Winifred, and there was a beautiful girl who had been done out of a fortune. Revolvers were fired, and I clearly remember the last scene, when a young man hanging from a rope from the Alps cut the rope
and died heroically to save either the girl he loved or the man whom the girl loved.

I remember going through this story point by point. ‘I suppose,' I said, ‘that the really bad ones were Spades' – father being a great whist player, I was always hearing talk of cards – ‘and the ones who weren't quite so bad were Clubs. I think perhaps Lady Winifred was a Club – because she repented – and so did the man who cut the rope on the mountain. And the Diamonds' – I reflected. ‘Just worldly,' I said, in my Victorian tone of disapproval.
²

The first story Agatha ever wrote took the form of a play, a melodrama concerning ‘the bloody Lady Agatha (bad) and the noble Lady Madge (good) and a plot that involved the inheritance of a castle'. Madge only agreed to take part in the production on condition the epithets were switched round. It was very short, ‘since both writing and spelling were a pain to me', and amused her father greatly.
³
Agatha's parents often travelled, and when they did so she would stay in Ealing with great-aunt Margaret, who had been responsible for the upbringing of Agatha's mother and was thus referred to by her as ‘Auntie-Grannie'. Even when Agatha was away from home, theatre ‘never stopped being a regular part of my life', she recalls. ‘When staying at Ealing, Grannie used to take me to the theatre at least once a week, sometimes twice. We went to all the musical comedies, and she used to buy me the score afterwards. Those scores – how I enjoyed playing them!'
⁴

The family spent some time in France during her childhood, and seven-year-old Agatha, inspired by the local pantomime in Torquay, began staging her own work for the enjoyment of her parents, using the window alcove in their bedroom as a stage, and assisted by her long-suffering young French chaperone, Marie. ‘Looking back, I am filled with gratitude for the extraordinary kindness of my father and mother. I can imagine nothing more boring than to come up every evening after dinner and sit for half an hour laughing and applauding whilst Marie
and I strutted and postured in our home-improvised costumes. We went through the Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast and so forth.'
⁵
Although young Agatha studied piano, dance and singing, and at one point had aspirations to become an opera singer, she appears to have gained the greatest fulfilment from her various youthful theatrical ventures, a natural progression from the dreamy childhood role-play games that, as a home-educated child, she created to pass the time.

The Christie archive contains a delightfully witty, meticulously handwritten twenty-six-page ‘acting charade in three acts' called
Antoinette's Mistake
, with a colourful hand-drawn cover that is clearly the work of a child. The play concerns the exploits of a French maid in the house of one Miss Letitia Dangerfield and her niece Rosy, and features characters called Colonel Mangoe and Major Chutnee. The closest handwriting match with that of family members is to Frederick's, and I like to think that this piece was perhaps penned by Agatha's father as a tribute to the long-suffering Marie (Antoinette?), whose performance in one of Agatha's fairy tale dramatisations ‘convulsed my father with mirth'. Agatha's father was a leading light of the local amateur dramatics, and it was perhaps in recognition of the enjoyment which this brought the family that she agreed, in later life, to become president of the Sinodun Players, an amateur group based in Wallingford where she owned a house. She received numerous such requests throughout her life, but the local amateur dramatics and the Detection Club were the only societies of which she accepted the presidency.

Frederick died aged fifty-five, when Agatha was eleven and both of her siblings had already left Ashfield, the family home in Torquay; but her mother continued to nourish young Agatha's enthusiasm for theatre, whisking her off to see Irving perform in Exeter. ‘He may not live much longer, and you must see him,' she insisted.
⁶
Agatha herself, notoriously averse to public speaking in later life, enjoyed venturing onto the stage in her youth, and an ambitious production of Gilbert and Sullivan's
The Yeomen of the Guard
, produced by a group of young
friends at the Parish Rooms in Torquay, gave her the opportunity to show off her singing voice in the role of Colonel Fairfax. ‘As far as I remember I felt no stage fright . . . There is no doubt that
The Yeomen of the Guard
was one of the highlights of my existence.'
⁷

Finishing school in Paris at the age of sixteen was an opportunity to sample the French capital's theatrical delights. She enjoyed herself in drama class, and had a remarkable ability to appreciate a fine theatrical performance:

We were taken to the
Comedie Francaise
and I saw the classic dramas and several modern plays as well. I saw Sarah Bernhardt in what must have been one of the last roles of her career, as the golden pheasant in Rostand's
Chantecler
. She was old, lame, feeble, and her golden voice was cracked but she was certainly a great actress – she held you with her impassioned emotion. Even more exciting than Sarah Bernhardt did I find Rejane. I saw her in a modern play,
La Course aux Flambeaux
. She had a wonderful power of making you feel, behind a hard repressed manner, the existence of a tide of feeling and emotion which she would never allow to come out in the open. I can still hear now, if I sit quiet a minute or two with my eyes closed, her voice, and see her face in the last words of the play: ‘
Pour sauver ma fille, j'ai
tué ma mere
,' and the deep thrill this sent through one as the curtain came down.
⁸

After spending a ‘season' as a seventeen year old in Cairo with her mother, Agatha found herself a regular guest on the house party circuit. This served its purpose of introducing her to a number of eligible young bachelors, and she also became friends with the colourful theatrical impresario C.B. Cochran and his devoted and long-suffering wife, Evelyn. Charles Cochran was indisputably the greatest showman of his generation, in a career that included productions of Ibsen alongside the promotion of boxing, circus and rodeo as well as the management of Houdini. He was also to be instrumental in
launching the career of Noël Coward. That was still ahead of him when he met the young Agatha, but for one thing he could take credit. Cochran was responsible for introducing the roller-skating craze which swept the country in the early 1900s, and a famous photograph shows Agatha and her friends enjoying some skating on Torquay's Princess Pier. The Cochrans eventually invited her to their house in London, where she was ‘thrilled by hearing so much theatrical gossip'.

As a young woman, Agatha continued her own forays onto the stage. Photographs show her and her friends gloriously costumed for
The Blue Beard of Unhappiness
, which the programme (printed on blue paper of course) reveals to be ‘A drama of Eastern domestic life in two acts'.
⁹
An open air production with a dozen in the cast, it is, we are told, set on a part of the terrace in Blue Beard's castle in ‘Bagdad'. The folktale of wife-murderer Bluebeard was to provide Agatha with inspiration on more than one later occasion. In the ‘Confessions Album', in which members of the Miller family regularly made light-hearted entries listing their current likes and dislikes, a 1910 entry from Agatha nominates Bluebeard as one of two characters from history whom she most dislikes.
¹⁰
The other is nineteenth-century Mormon leader Brigham Young, the founder of Salt Lake City: another extravagantly bearded polygamist, though in this case not a serial killer. ‘Why did they Bag-dad?' asks
The
Blue Beard of Unhappiness
's programme, and goes on to state ‘Eggs, fruit and other Missiles are to be left with the Cloak Room Attendant'. No playwright is credited and, sadly, no script survives.

Many of Agatha's earliest writings were in verse, and her first published dramatic work took this form.
A Masque from Italy
, originally written in her late teens, was later included (with the subtitle ‘The Comedy of the Arts') in the 1925 self-published poetry volume
Road of Dreams
, and has thus been overlooked as a playscript. Although it is structured as a series of solo songs (which she set to music shortly before the book was published), the piece is clearly intended as a short theatrical presentation, as indicated by, the word ‘masque' in its
title, and may have been written as a puppet show. There is a cast list, consisting of six characters from Italian
commedia dell'arte
; and a clear dramatic through-line based on the love triangle between Harlequin, Pierrot and Columbine, delivered in a prologue, seven songs and an epilogue. Punchinello serves as a master of ceremonies and is here envisaged as a marionette rather than as the ‘Mr Punch' glove puppet. We know that Agatha was intrigued by a Dresden China collection of these characters owned by her family, but the piece shows a thorough understanding of their traditional dramatic functions and motivations (apart from some ambiguity over a female counterpart of Punchinello), and it is more than possible that local pantomimes were still including a traditional Harlequinade sequence featuring them when she was in the audience as a child at the turn of the century. Her lifelong interest in the Harlequin figure, later to manifest itself in the Harley Quin short stories, is here informed by his role as the dangerous and exciting stranger stealing women's hearts, which was to be a recurring theme in her early plays.

                    
And when the fire burns low at night, and

                         
Lightning flashes high!

                    
Then guard your hearth, and hold your love,

                         
For Harlequin goes by.
¹¹

The pain of lost love and the tensions between these passionate and flamboyant characters are well drawn, and with Harlequin in his ‘motley array' and Punchinello inviting the audience to ‘touch my hump for luck', the whole effect is deeply theatrical. Whether performed by puppets or people, it would have been fun to watch.

Encouraged by her mother, and perhaps in the hope of emulating her sister who had had some success with the publication of short stories in
Vanity Fair
, Agatha began writing stories in her late teens. ‘I found myself making up stories and acting the different parts and there's nothing like boredom to make you write.'
¹²
Adopting the pseudonyms Mac Miller,
Nathaniel Miller and Sydney West, Agatha set about composing a number of short stories on her sister's typewriter, but they failed to impress the editors of the magazines she sent them to.

‘Sydney West' had a particularly idiosyncratic style, and was responsible for a short one-act play entitled
The Conqueror
which, like the short story ‘In the Market Place', also authored by West, is a parable with a mythological flavour. The Ealing address of Agatha's great-aunt is inked on the script, which does not list a dramatis personae. Subtitled ‘A Fantasy', the scene is ‘a great Mountain overlooking the Earth. On a throne sits a huge, grey Sphinx like figure, veiled and motionless. Around her are Messengers of Fate, and the air is full of winged Destinies who come and go ceaselessly.'
¹³
A blind youth ascends the mountain and exposes the Sphinx, who appears to represent Fate, as a sham. Like ‘In the Market Place', the whole thing is rather baffling and appears to be some sort of morality tale. It is intriguing to imagine what future Agatha envisaged for this play, particularly given the practicalities of ‘winged destinies'. Though atmospheric, and not without its interest as a stylistic experiment, it is hard to imagine that it would have proved particularly popular with the local teams responsible for putting together
Antoinette's Mistake
and
The Blue Beard of Unhappiness
. What this odd little offering does do, though, is once again confirm the broad range of Agatha's theatrical vocabulary.

When eighteen-year-old Agatha produced her first novel,
Snow Upon the Desert
, her mother suggested that she send it to local author Eden Phillpotts for his comment. Phillpotts became Agatha's valued mentor, and it was his literary agent Hughes Massie & Co. which, having rejected
Snow Upon the Desert
, would eventually take her under their wing fifteen years later, the imposing Massie himself having by then been succeeded by the more affable Edmund Cork.