Curtain Up (12 page)

Christie goes on to reiterate her own interest in playwriting. ‘Certainly I hope to write more plays – now! . . . I have not actually got one begun, and I am not sure whether my next work will be a novel or a play.' Her beloved dog Peter was at rehearsals with her. ‘He is such a sensible dog, and knows everybody connected with the play, and sometimes at rehearsals he has taken orders from Sir Gerald Du Maurier.'

Impressively, on 5 July 1928, less than two months after this interview, Christie's own stage adaptation of her 1925 novel
The Secret of Chimneys
came back from the Marshall's typing bureau.
¹⁴
Her response as a playwright to seeing Poirot on stage was thus to adapt a book in which he did not feature. One of her notebooks (that now numbered 67) contains some thoughts on the adaptation, and there is nothing in these notes or the chronology of the surrounding material to indicate that the play itself could not have been written between May and July 1928. I suspect that nothing would have pleased her more than to see this Buchanesque romp, with its echoes of Arthur B. Reeve, presented as her own first work for the stage. But ironically it was Poirot who was to facilitate her own playwriting debut.

Christie's own world and the post-war world around her were changing, and the certainties of her Victorian and Edwardian upbringing were being challenged on all fronts. In 1922 Stalin became General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. 1924 had seen the short-lived first Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald, while 1926 had brought the disruption of a general strike. On 2 July 1928 the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act finally enabled women to vote on the same basis as men and, as a result of the election in May the following year (dubbed ‘the flapper election' in recognition of the newly enfranchised young female voters), MacDonald again became Prime Minister.

Throughout the ‘Roaring Twenties' London's entertainment scene thrived as never before, and amongst the numerous women playwrights who found a voice alongside Clemence
Dane in the West End were Gertrude Jennings, Adelaide Phillpotts (in collaboration with her father) and Basil Dean's latest discovery, Margaret Kennedy. Meanwhile the public's appetite for thrillers remained unabated, and at the end of the decade audiences flocked to the West End premieres of Patrick Hamilton's
Rope
,
Murder on the Second Floor
(a hit for writer/director/actor Frank Vosper), Emlyn Williams'
A Murder Has Been Arranged
, and Edgar Wallace's
On the Spot
(starring Charles Laughton). No one in theatreland yet fully appreciated the significance of the British premiere, at the Piccadilly Theatre on 27 September 1928, of
The Jazz Singer
– the first ‘talkie'; and the long-term economic impact of the 1929 Wall Street Crash had yet to be felt.

In October 1928 the Christies' divorce was finalised and Archie married Nancy Neele, although it was agreed that Agatha would continue to use ‘Christie' as her
nom de plume.
That autumn, she travelled on the Orient Express and visited Baghdad and the archaeological dig at Ur, staying as a guest of the renowned archaeologist Leonard Woolley and his wife Katharine. Edmund Cork had been working hard on her behalf, and the year also saw her sign lucrative new contracts with publishers Collins (in the UK) and Dodd, Mead & Co. (in America). Agatha's wayward older brother Monty died in 1929, and at the end of the year she was invited back to Ur where she was introduced to the archaeologist Max Mallowan. Although Max was fourteen years her junior, the pair fell in love. There was an undoubted intellectual meeting of minds that had been notably absent with Archie, but it is clear from their letters to each other that Agatha and Max's mutual devotion went far deeper than that, and on 11 September 1930 they married in Edinburgh. Max was obliged to return to Ur without Agatha that winter, but in subsequent years she was to accompany her husband on his expeditions. As his reputation as an archaeologist grew she became a valued contributor to his work, cataloguing and photographing artefacts as they were unearthed. A few years after their marriage Max and Agatha bought a house in London, 58 Sheffield Terrace on
Campden Hill, with another, Winterbrook House in Wallingford, as a weekend retreat. But Agatha was to spend the first winter of her second marriage alone with her daughter.

It was at this moment that, suddenly and unexpectedly, Agatha made her debut as a playwright. Although she herself clearly had hopes for her 1928 adaptation of
The Secret of Chimneys
, the success of
Alibi
had inevitably popularised the idea of Poirot on stage, and
After Dinner
, a play she had written some years previously featuring the Belgian sleuth, was consequently now in demand. It is not clear exactly when
After Dinner
dates from. Her autobiography is vague and inaccurate about this play on a number of levels (including its original title, the theatre that premiered it and the length of its run), while her introduction to
The Mousetrap Man
dates it as 1927. However, John Curran in an entertaining article for
Crime and Detective Stories
magazine makes a persuasive argument for it having actually been written in 1922, based partly on a meticulous chronology of Captain Hastings' love life.
¹⁵
The history of the play's production does nothing to contradict this theory, and the script lodged with the Lord Chamberlain is quite clearly an early work, very different from the heavily revised version that was eventually published by Alfred Ashley and Son in 1934. The script is not typed by the Marshall's agency, which she used for
Chimneys
in 1928, does not carry a Hughes Massie label and, intriguingly, includes the note ‘Left and Right are seen from the point of view of the audience'; a very basic error corrected in
The Clutching Hand
and
The Lie
, in both of which Christie makes a point of stating, unnecessarily, that stage directions are given from the point of view of the actors. This would not only appear to suggest that
After Dinner
is Christie's first full-length stage play, but, given that
The Clutching Hand
may well pre-date 1922, could indicate that its origins are even earlier than Dr Curran has deduced.

According to Christie's autobiography, ‘at the time of
Alibi
I had already written a detective play of my own, I can't remember exactly when. It was not approved of by Hughes Massie; in fact they suggested it would be better to forget it
entirely, so I didn't press on with it . . . It was a conventional spy thriller, and although full of clichés it was not, I think, at all bad. Then, in due course, it came into its own. A friend of mine from Sunningdale days, Mr Burman, who was connected with the Royalty Theatre, suggested to me that it might perhaps be produced.'
¹⁶

It seems likely that Christie presented the play to her new agency when she joined them in 1923 and they discouraged their valuable new signing from getting involved with dramatic distractions. Believing that the project had been abandoned, she rescued the character of Tredwell the butler from Sir Claud Amory's house Abbotts Cleve in
After Dinner
, and relocated him to Lord Caterham's house Chimneys, where he made his debut two years later in
The Secret of Chimneys
. By 1930 he had also appeared at Chimneys in the novel
The Seven Dials Mystery
(1929); but audiences for Agatha's debut play now found the familiar character in his originally intended location.

The 650-seat Royalty Theatre in Dean Street, which had hosted the West End transfer from the Hampstead Everyman of Noël Coward's
The Vortex
in 1924, would indeed have been a suitable home for
After Dinner
, and a Mr L.E. Berman was staging work there at that time. But in the end the producer who took the play on was Alec Rea, who in partnership with Basil Dean had produced Madge's play
The Claimant.
The Hughes Massie paperwork relating to Rea's licence is headed ‘not our sale. For reference only' and lists the deal as having been done ‘by L.E. Berman'.
¹⁷
It seems that Christie's friend Berman had approached Rea directly with a copy of the play which he must have had in his possession since the early 1920s, thus accounting for the fact that the script itself had not been updated or retyped.
Alibi
had suddenly put a premium on a Poirot play written by Christie herself and, in a wonderful piece of opportunism, Berman appears to have taken the initiative and presented the script to one of London's leading producers. One can only imagine that, at the time, Edmund Cork was less than delighted by this development.

The ReandeaN company, which had become one of the West End's leading producing managements, had experienced a high-profile rollercoaster of success and failure in equal measure. In 1925 Alec Rea had terminated his contract with Basil Dean, appointing the company's business manager, E.P. Clift, in his place and continuing to trade under the banner of Reandco. Dean's hectic personal life (a close friendship with the tragic Meggie Albanesi, a divorce and a remarriage), an ill-advised and short-lived attempt by him to juggle the joint managing directorship of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane with his ReandeaN responsibilities, and his not always successful attempts to balance the demands of the company's ever-growing production portfolio with the need to provide a programme of work for the St Martin's Theatre, had tested the patience of his mild-mannered business partner to breaking point.

The ending of ReandeaN was not a good thing for either partner, says Basil Dean in his autobiography:

Alec Rea, its financial head, loved the theatre, not because he was a playwright
manqué
, not because of some professional diva whose interests he sought to advance, but for its own sake. Yet he never really understood it, and his judgement of plays was poor, as the subsequent record shows. He was suspicious of plays breaking fresh ground, especially if they revealed leftist tendencies, a surprising trait in a member of a distinguished Liberal family. His rejection of Shaw's
Heartbreak House
was a case in point. Generally speaking, the plays he produced during the remainder of his tenancy of the St Martin's Theatre with Paul Clift as his manager, lacked distinction and brought only limited commercial success. Yet he deserves high place in the annals of the English Theatre, for as Patrick Hastings [an MP and barrister who wrote plays produced by ReandeaN] pointed out in his autobiography: ‘ReandeaN was virtually the last organised management under a private patron.'

The parting was largely my fault. I should have restrained my impatience to conquer on so many fields at once . . .
When all's said I owe Alec Rea an incalculable debt, for without his warm friendship and loyal support during my early struggles I might not have achieved anything very much.
¹⁸

After the end of ReandeaN, Alec Rea and Basil Dean continued to be linked by a number of joint business ventures, but the partnership was effectively over. Rea's new company, Reandco, continued its involvement with the St Martin's and then, in September 1930, announced that it had also taken over the lease of the Embassy Theatre in Swiss Cottage and was establishing a repertory company there, a move that was widely welcomed in the theatrical community. Sydney W. Carroll, who two years later was himself to found the Regents Park Open Air Theatre, wrote in the
Daily Telegraph
, under the heading ‘Latest Repertory Idea',

Keep both eyes on the Embassy Theatre, Swiss Cottage, Hampstead. It is a beacon flaming on the heights that overlook London. It can only be seen, at the moment, gallantly flickering through the fog. But when the mists break and the sky grows clear the blaze will be apparent to all theatre lovers, brilliant and leaping to the sky . . . It is a Repertory venture, and out of repertory and repertory alone will come salvation for modern theatre. The Embassy has recently been taken over by Alec L. Rea, a manager who has been creditably associated with the repertory movement for years, first chairman of the Liverpool Repertory Company, a position he held for six years, and who, in conjunction with Basil Dean, has been identified with some of the most notable and distinguished productions in the West-end theatre of recent years.

Mr Rea believes, as I do, that actors must be properly and thoroughly trained. They must get constant exercise in their craft. And repertory, with its quick succession of different experiences in play by play, offers the young actor and actress the ideal and only public opportunity for a thorough practical grounding in the actor's art. Nothing is more deadening to
the mind, the soul, and the sensibilities of a player than to be compelled to enact the same role night after night for months . . .

Mr Rea is ambitious of finding, with the aid of the Embassy, new players, new dramatists with original ideas. He hopes after the fashion of Miss Horniman at Manchester to found a school of young playwrights. He has catholic tastes and aspirations. His arms embrace equally both classic and commercial. He will do his best to encourage both highbrow and box-office alternately in the hope of making a unison ultimately between them . . .
¹⁹

The Embassy Theatre had opened in 1928 in a building that had originally housed the Hampstead Conservatoire of Music. It initially operated as a ‘try-out house', much like the Q Theatre at Kew Bridge, giving often challenging plays a run of a fortnight in the hope that they might prove attractive to West End managements; but prior to Rea's takeover its programming had become increasingly
ad hoc
. The short-lived Everyman Theatre in nearby Hampstead had served much the same purpose from 1920 to 1926, and had enjoyed a number of West End transfers before a succession of box office failures forced its closure; and it is the Everyman that Christie erroneously credits in her autobiography as the theatre which premiered her own play. Such theatres always found it difficult to maintain a permanent company of actors on the salaries they could offer, and it was Rea's commitment to establishing a full-time team of players at the Embassy in a proper two-weekly repertory system that endeared him to the theatrical establishment.