Curtain Up (34 page)

Notable by its absence from both these projects, given its association with Charles and Toy, was Farndale, the co-producer of
Ten Little Niggers
. Farndale had produced a tour of a previous Moie Charles play,
To-morrow's Eden
, in 1944 – the year in which both she and Barbara Toy sat on the board of the company.
To-morrow's Eden
was directed by Irene Hentschel, who had directed Enid Bagnold's
Lottie Dundas
for the company in 1943 immediately prior to
Ten Little Niggers
. According to Christie biographer Janet Morgan, Hentschel also directed
Murder at the Vicarage
, which would have made perfect sense given all this; but it was in fact directed by Reginald Tate, who also played the role of Lawrence Redding. And in any case, I rather doubt whether the play itself would have been Hentschel's cup of tea. In the meantime, Farndale's last contribution to West End theatre appears to have been the enormously successful R.F. Delderfield comedy
Worm's Eye View
, which opened at the Whitehall Theatre in 1945 and closed at the Comedy Theatre in 1951, having given a total of 2,245 performances.

The production of
Murder at the Vicarage
cost £2,500 to mount (there is no record of its running costs) and the powerful theatre chain Howard & Wyndham Ltd took an investment of almost a fifth of this,
⁷⁹
its interest in the project doubtless
securing valuable touring dates. Contrary to some accounts, other than giving her notes on it Christie had no involvement with the script, a fact confirmed by Christie herself in a letter to a researcher: ‘I had no connection with the dramatisation of Alibi, Murder at the Vicarage and Peril at End House . . . I did not consider that any of the dramatisations were in any sense my plays.'
⁸⁰
The style of the piece, in any case, is clearly not hers. A reasonably efficient, two-act, thirteen-hander adaption of the novel, with a colourful array of characters, it is set entirely in the (unusually busy) study of the Reverend Leonard Clement, and simplifies the novel's plot whilst updating its action to the 1940s. Although it alters the book's ending, the identity of the murderer remains the same. It is the kind of linear ‘whodunit' detective narrative that Christie herself preferred to avoid on stage, and its dialogue lacks her trademark sparkiness.

As for Moie Charles, she appears to be one of theatre history's ‘missing persons'. What we do know is that she was born in 1911, three years after Barbara Toy. Like Toy, she was a company director of Overture Theatres Ltd and briefly, in 1944, of Farndale. She wrote a number of screenplays (including
The Gentle Sex
, produced by Derrick de Marney in 1943) and, like Toy, she wrote other plays and had other collaborators; but
Murder at the Vicarage
was the only work of hers to reach the West End. She died in her Chelsea flat in 1957 aged forty-six, as a result of what appears to have been a domestic gas leak, at which time she was in a relationship with the celebrated bisexual actress and chanteuse Frances Day.
⁸¹
According to Hughes Massie's accounts records, Charles left her share of the royalties from the play to Toy, who had by then reinvented herself as a Land Rover-driving adventurer and travel writer whose writings give us no clues at all about her theatrical past. The following extract from a
Times
article published in June 1959 under the headline ‘Day and Night on a Haunted Peak' is how the public came to know Toy:

Miss Barbara Toy, the traveller and writer, has just spent a day and a night alone on the summit of the 19,000 ft Wehni Peak, in Northern Ethiopia, from which she landed by a helicopter . . . with a sleeping bag, a camera and some food . . . She found a dilapidated church, wells filled with leaves and stones, and a crumbling fort with its heavy wooden doors ajar. She also found many passages leading to tiny cells and rooms. At the end of her stay she was taken off by the same helicopter. The lowland natives were surprised to see her return alive.
⁸²

All of this seems a million miles away from the vicarage at St Mary Mead. My instincts tell me that there is probably a good story to be told about Barbara Toy, who abandoned an apparently promising career in the theatre to travel the world, her lesbian friend and collaborator Moie Charles who died young, and a theatrical production company called Farndale.

Charles and Toy's adaptation of Christie's
Murder at the Vicarage
opened on 17 October 1949 at the New Theatre, Northampton, where
The Stage
reported that it was very well performed, particularly by Barbara Mullen as Miss Marple (‘It would be hard to find a part that suited Barbara Mullen better'
⁸³
) but let down by a long drawn-out final act. The publicity leaflet at Liverpool's Royal Court Theatre, the last venue on the eight-week pre-West End tour, once again fails to distinguish between Christie's own work for the stage and that of her various adaptors:

This thriller-masterpiece, adapted for the stage from her ‘best-seller' of the same name, is perfect theatre and comes with its forceful dramatic impact and full-blooded appeal at a time when playgoers, surfeited with a procession of namby-pamby milk and water histrionics, are crying out for virile and dynamic pyrotechnics in their plays.

Crime, brilliantly handled as it was in Agatha Christie's earlier smash-hit successes such as
Alibi
,
Ten Little Niggers
,
Love From a Stranger
and
Appointment with Death
has
proved to be the most completely satisfactory of dramatic fare, which is not surprising since it is also the most effective escapism for playgoers who yearn to be carried magically away from the monotonous humdrum of everyday life.
⁸⁴

The copy-writer was no less restrained in praising the production's two key players. Of American-born Barbara Mullen, who had forged a notable career as a West End leading lady after training in London at the Webber-Douglas School, they proclaimed, ‘she is able to bring to life with quite startling brilliance the personality of the alert-brained old lady whose penetrating perception elucidates seemingly unfathomable mysteries. Barbara Mullen, in fact, adds another gem to her collection of widely contrasting roles . . . Roles varying from 18 to 75 have been taken with equal success by Miss Mullen since she arrived in England, so the mature Miss Marple presents no difficulties.' The last line, presumably, was by way of reassurance to those who might have feared that, at thirty-five, Mullen was unsuitably young for the role. Of popular West End leading man Reginald Tate we are told that he is ‘Equally distinguished as actor and producer [i.e. director]' and that he ‘fills both these roles in
Murder at the Vicarage
. His staging of the play is carried through to achieve the dramatic results essential to a murder mystery and to retain the excitement and suspense without which a “thriller” would lose its hold and appeal. In his leading role as the easy-going artist, Lawrence Redding, he gives a performance of unusual strength and great charm.'

Meyer appears to have secured a West End theatre well in advance on this occasion and, following the week in Liverpool, the production opened at the Playhouse Theatre on 14 December 1949. The
Times
reviewer commented that ‘Everyone has a motive for killing. Nobody, unhappily, has a reason for living. It is not until the final scene . . . that we become aware that there was, after all, an effective one act play in Miss Christie's novel . . . Miss Barbara Mullen is Miss Marple, and once she is allowed to take a firm practical hold on the story
she manipulates it with all possible skill.'
⁸⁵
Ivor Brown in the
Observer
was complimentary of his wife's associates' input – ‘Neatly knit together and tidied up for the stage by Moe Charles and Barbara Toy' – and joined the general chorus of approval for the leading lady, whilst harbouring doubts about the production: ‘Barbara Mullen is excellent as that sharp eyed Prodnose Miss Marple, and her performance along with that of Reginald Tate and of Jack Lambert as the nice, dull, dutiful vicar, gives West End quality to a production otherwise on a less exalted level . . . the second act was very much more persuasive than the first.'
⁸⁶

The production played for 126 performances and closed on 1 April 1950. Both Cork and the PES blamed the 1950 General Election for its demise; the PES' annual report for the year stated that ‘The returns of the production
Murder at the Vicarage
, at the Playhouse, London, were adversely affected, in common with other shows, by the General Election, and it had to be withdrawn.'
⁸⁷
There was indeed a great deal of interest in the election, which was effectively the public verdict on the Labour Party's post-war programme of nationalisation and welfare reforms, and it turned out to be a cliff-hanger, resulting in a very slim majority for Labour. But it took place on 23 February, over five weeks before the production's eventual demise, and it seems somewhat disingenuous to link the two events. Cork wrote to Christie in Baghdad to reassure her that the production had run for long enough to become a valuable property for amateur and repertory companies.
⁸⁸
And the People's Entertainment Society, the co-operative movement's unusual and initially highly successful venture into show business, continued until 1955 when, following a decline in its fortunes, it went into voluntary liquidation.

In the summer of 1944, with Irene Hentschel's masterful production of
Ten Little Niggers
still running in the West End and on tour, and the Shuberts about to open their hugely successful production on Broadway, Agatha Christie, playwright, had the theatrical world at her feet. By the end of 1946
that dream had been shattered. Her highly imaginative script for
Towards Zero
had been rejected, the exotically located
Appointment with Death
had sunk without trace, and
Hidden Horizon
(without its ‘alternative' ending) was a laughing stock on Broadway. Perhaps more damagingly yet, her producers, and even her own agent, had started to characterise her dramatic work as something that could yield huge dividends in secondary markets and subsidiary rights if given even the most perfunctory of ‘first-class' presentations, and they had no hesitation in deliberately confusing the issue of who had actually penned a particular script if that assisted sales of tickets or licences. Here, of course, Christie's popularity as a writer of detective novels was, to an extent, undermining her legitimacy as a playwright. Christie herself was, as a playwright, more than happy to work in a number of different genres and to tackle all sorts of scenarios and issues; but whilst egotistical actors leapt at the chance to play Poirot on stage, her domestic drama
A Daughter's a Daughter
, arguably her finest dramatic work to date, remained on the shelf in the office of Basil Dean, the producer who had given Clemence Dane her West End playwriting debut. And whilst Dane's agent, Spencer Curtis Brown, would no doubt have wept to see the global income generated by the dramatisations of both
Ten Little Niggers
and
Murder on the Nile
, not to mention some of the third-party adaptations, it was to be his client who would secure page after page in the history of female playwriting.

It is my belief that a proper understanding of when, where, how, why and by whom a play was first presented is critical to an appreciation of the subsequent fortunes and reputation of both the play and its writer. Biographer Laura Thompson's succinct summary of events may arguably be easier to digest (‘The play
Hidden Horizon
flourished after its initial difficulties and it, too, went to New York'),
⁸⁹
but this is to overlook the complexities of the production process and the extraordinary array of personalities involved in it; the very elements of theatre which Christie herself found endlessly fascinating, if at times perplexing.

‘I should always write my one book a year,' Christie wrote in her autobiography, ‘I was sure of that. Dramatic writing would be my adventure – that would always be, and always must be hit and miss. You can have play after play a success, and then for no reason, a series of flops. Why? Nobody really knows. I've seen it happen with many playwrights. I have seen a play which to my mind was just as good or better than one of their successes fail – because it did not catch the fancy of the public; or because it was written at the wrong time; or because the cast made such a difference to it. Yes, play-writing is not a thing I could be sure of. It was a glorious gamble every time, and I liked it that way.'
⁹⁰

Despite her apparent acceptance of the vagaries of theatre, we should not underestimate the damage to Christie's confidence as a playwright caused by the setbacks of the 1940s; the fact that she allowed Moie Charles and Barbara Toy to adapt a book that she herself had previously earmarked for dramatisation (although many other such requests, from both established writers and amateurs, were turned down) is indicative of the insecurity that she must now have felt about her own playwriting abilities. Perhaps even more telling is the following passage from her autobiography: ‘I suppose it was
Ten Little Niggers
that set me on the path of being a playwright as well as a writer of books. It was then that I decided that no-one was going to adapt my books except myself: I would choose what books would be adapted, and only those books that were suitable for adapting. The next one I tried my hand on, though several years later, was
The Hollow
. . .'
⁹¹

This is to ignore completely her own
Towards Zero
,
Appointment with Death
and
Murder on The Nile
, as well as Charles and Toy's
Murder at the Vicarage
. Such rewriting of history specifically in order to exclude mention of a period of heartache is in a league with the phrase ‘so ended my first married life' at the point in her autobiography where one might expect some explanation of her expedition to Harrogate. As far as she is concerned, the events simply didn't happen.