Curtain Up (18 page)

The Times
reserved its praise primarily for the final scene, the acting of which ‘could scarcely be bettered', although it observed that the ‘whole play is an elaborate approach' to this moment.
²¹
Muriel Aked made the most of the gratuitous comedy role of Auntie Loo-Loo and the
Daily Herald
,
Daily Telegraph
and
Daily Mail
were prominent in the general chorus of approval. The production moved to the Queen's Theatre (the owners of which later became major shareholders in H.M. Tennent Ltd) and played for a total of 149 performances; a respectable run, but significantly less successful than
Alibi
. A month after it opened in the West End, members of the cast could be heard performing live extracts from
Love From a Stranger
on BBC Radio's Regional Programme.

Sadly Vosper, like Laughton before him, could not resist the lure of Broadway. On 21 September 1936, he led an American cast, including Jessie Royce Landis (later a Hitchcock regular) as Cecily, in a new production at the Erlanger Theatre, Philadelphia, produced by former press agent Alex Yokel, who had recently enjoyed a huge hit as a producer with
Three Men On a Horse
. The Broadway production of
Love From a Stranger
was directed by British former actress Auriol Lee, who had been successful as the director of a number of West End productions, recently and most notably a three-year run of Merton Hodge's
The Wind and the Rain
, co-produced by Alec Rea and Moss Empires and Howard & Wyndham Tours Ltd. On 29 September,
Love From a Stranger
starring Frank Vosper opened at Broadway's Fulton Theatre. The previous night,
Night Must Fall
starring Emlyn Williams had opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.

Critics were, understandably, bemused by this sudden influx of British psychopaths. The
Daily News
commented:

I don't know how you feel about murder plays, but if you are interested in collecting this season's crop then you may have both of these for all of me. I shall not be using either of them again . . .

Frank Vosper is both author and star of
Love From A Stranger
, which he took from a story by Agatha Christie. Like young Mr Williams of
Night Must Fall
he rather fancies himself, I gather, in roles of violent contrast and psychological significance . . .

It might be wiser in the future to import only the last acts of English murder-melodramas; in fact to import the last acts of three such murder-melodramas simultaneously and then, after rewriting them enough to provide a slight continuity, produce them all on one evening as parts of the same thriller.
²²

Vosper had chosen Christie's work as the vehicle for his Broadway acting debut and, like Laughton and Sullivan, was relentless in his self-promotion. The title page of the playbill is clear that this is ‘A new play by Frank Vosper from a story by Agatha Christie', with his own name in significantly larger type than hers; and the playbill's text notes:

Frank Vosper adapted
Love From a Stranger
from an Agatha Christie story as a result of his interest in criminology, a hobby that has long occupied his off-stage moments. He created his present role in the successful production of the drama in London, where he is one of the ranking stage and screen favourites. The account of Mr Vosper's writing and acting activities takes up two and a half columns in
Who's Who in the Theatre
. A remarkable feat, considering he is still in his thirties. He has played in Shaw, Shakespeare, Pirandello at the Haymarket and Old Vic, and countless British movies.
²³

The
New York Times
, however, felt that ‘Mr Vosper has taken this tale from one of Agatha Christie's stories, and has spun it
out to dangerous length . . . as the leading player Mr Vosper gives the part the works. His interpretation of Bluebeard is a head-holding, shoulder-straightening, partly ranting person instead of a cool and calm characterization that would have seemed more dangerous.'
²⁴

The
New York Evening Journal
concurred: ‘Mr Actor Vosper is in fact almost as disastrous as Mr Author Vosper . . . until he gets to the aforementioned last act. Until that horrorridden business he and his fellow players work pretty hard over a play that is so flagrantly inert that I half expected the actors to resort to sticking pins in it. Or, anyway, into the audience.'
²⁵

The aforementioned inertia is entirely the result of Vosper's own unnecessary embellishments of Christie's original script. Christie's piece is anything but overblown. It is economical in the extreme, and wastes no time in getting to its deadly point. This is perhaps why she herself remembered it as a one-act play, although she had in fact provided two neatly and wittily executed opening acts. She in any case claimed the denouement as being largely her own work, and it was this element of the play that won critical approval and, in the Grand Guignol tradition, allegedly saw audience members fainting on both sides of the Atlantic.

Love From a Stranger
closed at the Fulton after only twenty-nine performances, and Christie's name had now been associated with two Broadway flops, neither of her own making. It can have been little consolation to Vosper that
Night Must Fall
only ran for sixty-four; his Broadway acting debut had been an ignominious failure.

Four months later, under the headline ‘Actor Missing from Liner',
The Times
ran the story that

Mr Frank Vosper, the stage and film actor and author, was missing from the French liner
Paris
when she arrived at Plymouth on Saturday from New York. It is believed that Mr Vosper, who was 37, was lost overboard. He was one of several present at an ‘end of voyage party' in the cabin of
Miss Muriel Oxford, aged 22, who won the title ‘Miss Europe' in 1935, in a beauty contest, and had been undergoing film tests in Hollywood . . . there is no question of a love affair between herself and Mr Vosper.'
²⁶

There certainly was ‘no question' of such an affair. Vosper's lover, the twenty-three-year-old actor Peter Willes, later to be a TV producer and friend of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell, was also at the party.

Vosper was short-sighted and may have been drinking, but the location of the porthole he appears to have fallen through in relation to the cabin balcony on which he had apparently been standing alone, seemed to rule out an accident, leading to speculation that he had taken his own life. It seems unlikely that any interaction at the party between Willes and Oxford would have triggered this, but one wonders how the slightly inebriated star, having just made a humiliating exit from Broadway, might have responded to the news of Hollywood's apparent interest in the ebullient young beauty queen. The press went to town on the story, skirting around the issue of Vosper and Willes' relationship (homosexuality was not decriminalised in England until 1967), but, after the body was washed up near Eastbourne with one leg and a quantity of cash missing, the coroner returned an open verdict. And so shall we.

Unusually, Collins themselves published
Love From a Stranger
in both hardback and paperback in 1936, while Samuel French issued their standard ‘acting' edition for amateurs and repertory companies – with both of which it enjoyed enormous popularity – the following year. In 1937 Basil Rathbone played Gerald Lovell in the first film version of
Love From a Stranger
and in 1938 Edna Best reprised the role of Cecily on television, playing opposite Bernard Lee.

Christie's original version of the play appears never to have been performed although, intriguingly, a script called
L'Inconnu
, with her credited as sole writer, was registered with the French Society of Dramatic Authors in 1935, two months before the
UK premiere of Vosper's version. It was translated by popular French actor Pierre Palau for presentation at the
Th
éâ
tre Des Deux Masques
in Paris, but it is unclear whether the production actually took place.
²⁷
In a strange postscript, playwright Louise Page wrote yet another stage adaptation of the story in 2010, which was performed at the Mill at Sonning Theatre under the title of Vosper's version. Perhaps the people who licensed it were unaware of the two copies of ‘The Stranger by Agatha Christie' held in the Agatha Christie archive. As her first exercise in expanding a short story for the stage rather than, as had been the case with
Chimneys
, compressing a novel, it is arguably the best constructed of the five full-length plays that she had written by 1932. Under the circumstances, a third adaptation seems somewhat surplus to requirements.

Christie followed the same model of expanding a short story for what I believe to have been her next full-length script, although like so many of her writings it is, frustratingly, undated.
The Mysterious Mr Quin
is a collection of short stories published in 1930, having originally appeared in magazines throughout the previous decade, which centre on the enigmatic Harley Quin. Quin's brief and almost spiritual interventions enable his more corporeal friend, Mr Satterthwaite, to resolve a number of problems and mysteries. Although the setting of the stories is contemporary, the elusive protagonist is inspired by the mythical Harlequin figure which featured in Agatha's family's china cabinet and in her script
A Masque from Italy
. Amongst the stories is ‘The Dead Harlequin', first published in the American magazine
Detective Fiction Weekly
in 1929, although neither Quin nor Satterthwaite is technically a detective. The play
Someone at the Window
expands at length upon the plot of ‘The Dead Harlequin' but abandons the characters of both Mr Quin and Satterthwaite.

This is the first of many instances where Christie's dramatisations of her previously published work exclude what appears to be the pivotal character. Following
Black Coffee
, she never wrote another full-length play featuring Poirot, and her four
stage adaptations of novels in which he appears exclude him completely. Similarly, following Superintendent Battle's appearance in
Chimneys
, she cut the role when next adapting a work in which he featured. Although it seems that Christie was not averse to the idea of Miss Marple on stage, she never wrote a play of her own that featured her. In the case of Harley Quin, the very act of physicalising the character would have undermined his spiritual essence. In 1928 there had been a poorly executed film based on one of the stories, and one can well imagine that her worst nightmare would have been the image of Francis L. Sullivan lumbering around a stage in a Harlequin costume.

The Agatha Christie archive holds two loose-leaf draft copies of the script of
Someone at the Window
; one, which is a duplicate of the other, contains a small number of handwritten amendments. There is also a bound final version which appears to be professionally typed, although there is no agency date stamp in evidence. The address of Lawn Road Flats in Belsize Park, where Christie lived in the early 1940s, has been handwritten on the cover, and another name and address has been heavily crossed out. On close examination, the name is that of her friend the occasional director-producer L.E. Berman, who sold the licence for
Black Coffee
to the Embassy Theatre, contactable at a Shaftesbury Avenue address.

The play is a 175-page epic, and is Christie's first theatrical experiment with the themes of time and memory, later to be explored more fully in 1960's
Go Back for Murder
. An intriguing two-hander prologue is set in a first class railway carriage in January 1934, following which there is a two-act flashback to ‘the big hall at Carnforth Castle' in 1919 (very deliberately post-war), and a third-act return to June 1934 in London. In this context, it is a not unreasonable assumption that 1934 is the year of writing, although we should not rule out that it takes place in the past or indeed, being Agatha Christie, in an imaginative leap to the future.

In the opening scene, the two characters who meet in the railway carriage disagree about the potential healing qualities of time:

       
FRANK: . . . Time gives you a new angle of vision – the true angle.

       
SYLVIA: I see what you mean.

       
FRANK: Doesn't it help you?

       
SYLVIA: No, in my case facts were facts.

       
FRANK: You're looking at it as it appeared then. I want you to look at it now.

       
SYLVIA: Nothing can help me but forgetfulness.

       
FRANK: You can't forget to order. You can thrust a thing down out of sight – but it's there still – growing in the dark.
²⁸

On a lighter note the artist Frank, who is endearingly described as ‘a big simple looking likeable young man – rather like a friendly dog that hopes it is welcome but is not quite sure about it', regrets the passing of the Victorian age: ‘I'd love to have lived in the days of good old Victorian melodrama with the heroine turned out into the snow, and a thorough-paced villain with a black moustache. It must have been fun. They did have fun – the Victorians. They had something we haven't got nowadays – gusto – enjoyment of life.'

The play is brimming with witty banter and social commentary about inter-war Britain, courtesy largely of a pair of society
grandes
dames
who we meet when we go back in time to Carnforth Castle. Mrs Quantock, who is married to a colonel, and her friend Lady Emily, delight in making candid observations about relations between the sexes:

       
MRS QUANTOCK: My experience of life has taught me that you can trust nothing and no one. Always expect the worst and you'll be surprised how often you're right . . . Take Arthur now – in the regiment he was considered a perfect martinet – but if any woman were to come to him with a hard luck story – why he'd be as soft as butter. He's much too soft-hearted.