Curtain Up (13 page)

The permanent ensemble of performers, who Sydney W. Carroll described as ‘remarkably talented', included Joyce Bland, Judy Menteath, Francis L. Sullivan, John Boxer and Donald Wolfit, all of whom were to appear in Christie's play, and Andre van Gyseghem, who directed it. Robert Donat also appeared regularly, though not in this particular production, and further performers were engaged on a show-by-show basis
as required. ‘These facts,' concludes Carroll, ‘are of sufficient importance and interest to justify circulation all over Greater London. Already, I understand, people are coming from considerable distances to see the art of these players, and my own experience of their work leads me cordially to recommend them to the public patronage.'

Rea's creative partner in the venture was A.R. Whatmore, who had been running the Hull Repertory Theatre Company to great acclaim for the previous six years. And, of course, if any of the productions did merit a West End transfer, then Rea still owned the lease on the St Martin's, so such a thing would be easy enough to facilitate.

Agatha's excitement at being included in the opening season of this widely publicised venture was justified. In an early November 1930 letter to Max, who had returned to the excavations at Ur, she wrote: ‘Very exciting – I heard this morning an aged play of mine is going to be done at the Embassy Theatre for a fortnight with the chance of being given West End production by the Reandco – of course nothing may come of it – but it's exciting anyway – shall have to go to town for a rehearsal or two end of November, I suspect – I wish you were here to share the fun (and the agony when things go wrong and everyone forgets their part!!) But it's awfully fun all the same.'
²⁰

After Dinner
was licensed to Reandco on 18 November 1930, for a two-week try-out at the Embassy Theatre within three months, with a West End option to be taken up within six weeks of the Embassy production on payment of £100. The Lord Chamberlain's office issued a licence on 4 December to the play – which was now called
Black Coffee
, the title having been changed by hand on the script they received
²¹
– and the production opened on 8 December. To today's theatre producers these lead-times would seem unfeasible, but with a permanent company on retainer, and rehearsing the next show whilst playing the current one, the repertory system allowed for the confirmation of future programming to be left until the very last minute. The extraordinary logistics
of scheduling in the London and regional repertory theatres and London ‘try-out' theatres at this time, and the manner in which they constantly fed new productions into the West End system alongside a seemingly inexhaustible supply of new plays generated by the West End's own managements, all of it without the benefit of a penny of public subsidy, makes the operation of today's theatre industry look positively leisurely.

On 26 November Agatha wrote to Max from Ashfield: ‘“After Dinner” or (according to my
Sunday Times
which seems to know more than I do!)
“Black Coffee” – comes on on Dec 8th – so I will have to go up to town for rehearsals next week . . . Six
eminent
detective story writers have been asked to broadcast again – we're all getting together on December 5th to plan the thing out a bit – Me, Dorothy Sayers, Clemence Dane, Anthony Berkeley EC Bentley and Freeman Wills Croft . . . all rather fun.'
²²

Here she is referring to a project which was to be broadcast on the radio in early 1931, in which members of the Detection Club created a sort of literary game of consequences, each writing and broadcasting an episode of a crime story which was to be aired over a number of weeks. The Detection Club, comprising the elite of British crime writers, had undertaken a similar project with great success in 1930, and the authors contributed their income from the BBC to the club's coffers.

In 1928 Clemence Dane had co-authored with Helen Simpson the first of two crime novels she was to pen,
Enter Sir John
, about an actress wrongly convicted of murder. Filmed as
Murder!
by Alfred Hitchcock in 1930, it earned Dane a place in the Detection Club. I do hope that Agatha and Clemence Dane did actually meet on 5 December. The successful forty-two-year-old playwright who had just published her first detective novel and the successful forty-year-old detective novelist, who was about to have her own first play performed, would have got on well, I think. Clemence Dane's name appears on a reading list of Agatha's in one of her notebooks.

The opening night of
Black Coffee
at the Embassy was a success. Although Max was absent, Agatha's sister Madge was in the audience, just as Agatha had been for
The Claimant
six years previously, and with Madge was her husband, James, along with his sister Nan and her husband George Kon. Agatha wrote to Max two days after the opening:

Oh it has all been fun – Black Coffee. I mean it was fun going to rehearsals and everything went splendidly on the night itself except that when the girl said (in great agitation!): ‘This door won't open!' it immediately did! Something like that always happens on a first night. They had a larger audience . . . than they've ever had before, and the Repertory Company were so pleased . . . The girl was
awfully
good – couldn't have had anyone better – well, let us hope ‘something will come of it' as they say – preferably in May. The Reandco have an option for six months. I do hope they take it up. This week has been simply
hectic
.
²³

The actress she so admired playing the role of Lucia Amory was Joyce Bland, who had just completed a busy and successful season at Stratford. Agatha was wrong about the length of the West End option; Reandco actually had six weeks in which to take it up, and they did, although a log-jam of productions at the St Martin's meant that, following the two-week run at the Embassy in December 1930, the play would not appear in the West End until the following April.

Although there is a sub-plot relating to spies, and a remarkably prescient storyline relating to weapons of mass destruction created by ‘disintegration of the atom',
Black Coffee
is, to all intents and purposes, an efficient and well-crafted, if relatively simple, country house murder mystery. It engages both some of the plot devices and some of the characters – not only Poirot but also Captain Hastings and Inspector Japp – who, at the most likely time of the play's writing, had just been introduced to the public in Christie's first novel,
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
.
Black Coffee
thus ticks all the boxes for a ‘typical Agatha
Christie play' and, ironically, was both the first and last that she wrote in this idiom.

As with
Alibi
, Christie's own principal concern was with the portrayal of Poirot. Although she ultimately preferred Francis L. Sullivan's interpretation to Charles Laughton's, she laments in her autobiography, ‘It always seems strange to me that whoever plays Poirot is always an outsize man. Charles Laughton had plenty of avoirdupois, and Francis Sullivan was broad, thick and about 6'2” tall.'
²⁴

Sullivan, like Laughton, saw Poirot as an ideal vehicle for his talents, and had actually first performed the role in the post-West End tour of
Alibi
. In fact he made something of a career of being the poor man's Charles Laughton, not only taking over his role in
Alibi
but also starring in a 1942 revival of
A Man With Red Hair
. Sullivan would receive his final ‘review' in 1956 in the form of his
Times
obituary, which opined, ‘Corpulence, sharp eyes embedded in florid features, and a deep, plummy voice suited him admirably for the part of the suave but foxy lawyer. He was generally too much of a caricature to be unrelievedly sinister, and though he was sometimes cast as a comic, his talents were wasted if there was no streak of evil in the part. His acting had a wider range than his exaggerated physique might suggest. He was an obvious choice for Bottom, and perhaps for Mr Bumble, but not for Hercule Poirot . . .'
²⁵

Although Christie had objected to the amorous antics of a French ‘Beau Poirot' in
Alibi
, she was not above introducing an element of romantic frisson when it came to her own portrayal of her Belgian sleuth. Here are the final moments of
Alibi
, as performed by Charles Laughton:

       
CARYL (softly) I don't care what anyone says, you will always be “Beau Poirot” to me! (holds out her hand) Good-night!

       
POIROT: (Taking both her hands, kisses first one, then the other) Good-bye. (Still holding her hands) Believe me, Mees Caryl, I do everything possible to be of service to you! (drops her hands)

(CARYL goes out)

Good-bye!

       
POIROT stands at the open window looking out after her as the Curtain slowly falls.
²⁶

And here are the not dissimilar final moments of
Black Coffee
, written several years before
Alibi
, in the original script approved by the Lord Chamberlain and performed by Francis L. Sullivan at the Embassy:

       
LUCIA: M Poirot – (she holds out both hands to him)

       
Do not think that I shall ever forget . . .

       
(Lucia raises her face. Poirot kisses her.)

       
(She goes back to Richard [her husband]. Lucia and Richard go out together . . . Poirot mechanically straightens things on the centre table but with his eyes fixed on the door through which Lucia has passed.)

       
POIROT: Neither – shall I – forget.
²⁷

Reviews from the Embassy, as with
Alibi
, inevitably focused largely on the interpretation of Poirot. ‘Mr Sullivan is obviously very happy in the part, and his contribution to the evening's entertainment is a considerable one,' said
The Times
.
²⁸
Amongst the other characters are Dr Carelli – played at the Embassy by Donald Wolfit – the archetypal Christie ‘unexpected guest' who has echoes in
The Mousetrap
's Mr Paravicini; and, more interestingly, a wittily executed portrayal of a young ‘flapper' girl, the murder victim's niece. The flapper phenomenon was at its height in 1922, as a generation of young women threw off the restrictions of the Victorian and Edwardian era and defined their own agenda in terms of fashion, entertainment and social interaction with men. The sexual revolution of the 1920s, in its subversion of what went before it, was arguably far more radical than anything that happened in the 1960s, and although Agatha herself would have been a decade too old to qualify as a flapper or to embrace their style and philosophy, there is a distinct affection in her writing for what they
stood for, albeit informed by her trademark observational humour. In
Black Coffee
, Barbara Amory is described as ‘an extremely modern young woman of twenty-one'. She dances to records on the gramophone and flirts mercilessly with Hastings, describing him as ‘pre-war' (‘Victorian' in the original script) and exhorting him to ‘come and be vamped'. When criticised by her aunt for the brightness of her lipstick, she responds, ‘take it from me, a girl simply can't have too much red on her lips. She never knows how much she is going to lose in the taxi coming home.'

When the play did finally open in the West End, at the St Martin's Theatre, it was in a much-changed production. Christie had undertaken rewrites, as she had felt that her ‘aged' play seemed out of date when she saw it at the Embassy. ‘Have been working very hard on Black Coffee. Some scenes were a little old fashioned, I thought,'
²⁹
she wrote to Max. Tricks she uses in order to achieve a more ‘contemporary' feel include a joke about the brand-name vitamins Bemax, which were advertised widely in 1930. The script published by Arthur Ashley in 1934 included these changes, along with the following more straight-laced version of the final scene:

       
LUCIA: (Down to Poirot, takes his hand, she also has Richard's hand) M.Poirot, do not think I shall forget – ever.

       
POIROT: Neither shall I forget (kisses her hand.)

       
(Lucia and Richard go out together through window. [Poirot] follows them to window, and calls out after them.)

       
POIROT: Bless you, mes enfants! Ah-h!

       
(Moves to the fireplace, clicks his tongue and straightens the spill vases.)
³⁰

At the Embassy,
Black Coffee
had been directed by Andre van Gyseghem, a radical young director who, as a RADA-trained actor, had worked for the theatre's creative head A.R. Whatmore in his previous post at the Hull Repertory Theatre. A leading light of the Workers' Theatre Movement, van Gyseghem was to become a member of the Communist Party and a frequent visitor
to the Soviet Union, and later penned a surprisingly readable book entitled
Theatre in Soviet Russia
(1943). The West End production of
Black Coffee
was redirected by Oxford-educated Douglas Clarke-Smith, an actor-director who appears to have had no association with the Embassy, but who had cut his teeth at Birmingham Rep after distinguished service in the First World War, and who went on to direct over twenty productions for pioneering touring group the Lena Ashwell Players, the peacetime incarnation of the company that had provided entertainment for the troops throughout the conflict.

As well as a new director, all but one of the supporting cast to Sullivan's Poirot were also new to the piece. Joyce Bland was amongst those who were replaced, along with van Gyseghem himself, who had doubled his directing duties with the small but significant role of Edward Raynor. Given that the delay in transferring had allowed for the luxury of a new rehearsal period, the Embassy had clearly decided not to commit too many of their core ensemble to a potentially lengthy West End run. On 9 April 1931, the day Alec Rea presented the West End premiere of
Black Coffee
,
The Times
was listing attractions at thirty-one West End theatres, including revivals of Shaw's
Man and Superman
at the Court, Ibsen's
Hedda Gabler
at the Fortune and Somerset Maugham's
The Circle
at the Vaudeville. At the Queen's Theatre, Rudolf Besier's
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
, directed by Barry Jackson, was advertising itself as ‘London's Longest Run' (which, of the productions then running in London, it was; it went on to complete 530 performances).