Curtain Up (51 page)

I am sorry I did not happen to meet you when you were in London, as I should have liked to have discussed the subject with you at length.

Kind regards

Yours sincerely,

Peter Saunders
³¹

Needless to say, Kerr responded positively to Saunders' missive, and the two struck up a dialogue.

For all its populist appeal, or perhaps because of it, Christie's work was also an enduring favourite with the royal family. Both Princess Margaret and the Duchess of Kent attended
Witness for the Prosecution
, the latter on two occasions, and on 1 December 1953 the Duke and Duchess of Windsor made their first appearance at a London theatre since their intended marriage led to the 1936 abdication crisis. The audience stood and applauded when they took their seats. The ultimate royal command performance, though, took place after the end of the West End run, when a production was specially mounted for two weeks in May 1955 by the Theatre Royal Windsor to coincide with a visit to their local theatre by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. John Counsell, the theatre's director, believed that the visit was intended by the royals to be a gesture of support for the repertory movement, and as such it was no doubt a welcome one. He and the Queen's private secretary had both suggested
Witness for the Prosecution
as the play to mark the occasion, as the newly crowned monarch had been sorry to miss it in the West End. When the Duke of Edinburgh enquired of a member of the theatre's staff whether the news of the royal visit had made any difference to business, the response was, ‘Well, sir, to a play by Agatha Christie on a Saturday night, the honest answer must be “No”!'
³²

If ever a playwright could boast of being ‘by Royal Appointment' then it was Agatha Christie; but royal endorsement, of course, wins you no friends amongst the chroniclers of post-war theatre history. And, ironically, neither does
successfully appealing to the widest possible market. Theatre histories tell us that in 1953 Joan Littlewood's pioneering Theatre Workshop took over the Theatre Royal Stratford East, but not that a play by Agatha Christie was filling the Winter Garden.

Amongst the many publicity schemes devised by Saunders to promote
Witness for the Prosecution
, arrangements were made to cancel a performance early in the run so that a five-minute extract could be performed live on
Face the Music
, a television programme then fronted by popular bandleader Henry Hall. Although it is not entirely clear from the surviving paperwork whether this scheme reached fruition, pay rates for the actors were agreed with the BBC and Saunders himself prepared a five-minute script featuring a narrator that he had written in for the occasion. ‘I am no script-writer,' he modestly declared to his BBC contact.
³³

A combination of critical approval and astute marketing ensured that
Witness for the Prosecution
was another financial success for Saunders, despite the perceived disadvantages of its West End home. In a letter to a prospective investor, he had warned, ‘Before definitely deciding to participate, I do feel I should stress the fact that this particular play is a complete speculation, and unlike The Mousetrap has a negligible value as to its subsidiary rights.'
³⁴
He presumably meant by this that the play's large scale was likely to deter repertory productions. Ironically, it was
The Mousetrap
that would fail to realise the full potential of its subsidiary income, owing to the withholding of repertory and amateur rights during the West End run. The investors in
Witness for the Prosecution
, on the other hand, were destined to make an astonishing return on subsidiary rights; when the final accounts were drawn up in 1962, seven years after the end of its West End run, the profit distributed to investors, including income from repertory, touring and international sales, as well as a substantial film deal, stood at £98,812.
³⁵
Not bad for a play that cost £4,200 to put on.

Six investors had between them contributed £2,000 to a
£5,000 capitalisation, including reserve funds, leaving Peter Saunders responsible for £3,000. As Saunders states, the costs of the production were higher than anticipated, meaning that the reserve fund (£800) was unusually low as a proportion of the capital raised, and he is therefore likely to have had to underwrite the project himself in its early performance weeks. It is perhaps indicative of his nervousness that the production was technically mounted by Aurora Productions Ltd, another company he owned, rather than by his main company, Peter Saunders Ltd. This also effectively protected
The Mousetrap
from any potential financial fallout from
Witness for the Prosecution
. In the event, the gamble paid off handsomely. As well as its 37.5 per cent producer's share of the profit, its own investment meant that Aurora Productions benefited from 60 per cent of the investors' 62.5 per cent share; this amounted to 75 per cent of the overall profit, well over a million pounds in today's money. With her £500 investment, Mrs Duke would have received her money back plus £6,176 (around £92,000 today). She would certainly have been able to afford to buy Mrs MacDougall a new dress.

The play's investors were not entitled to a share of amateur licensing income, although, perhaps precisely because of its large number of small roles, it was to prove hugely popular in this market too. Samuel French entered into their usual deal for English language publishing and amateur rights as soon as the play had opened in the West End, and Saunders benefited from half of Christie's 80 per cent of amateur fees for the duration of his own licence.

Forgive me if I pause to quote almost two pages about
Witness for the Prosecution
from Agatha Christie's autobiography. To me, this passage sums up perfectly the huge thrill she got from her involvement with every element of the process of creating a piece of theatre and her deep understanding of and engagement with that process. Nowhere does she share with us the experience of writing a novel with the passion and detail that she does here:

It was one of my plays that I liked best myself. I was as nearly satisfied with that play as I have been with any. I didn't want to write it; I was terrified of writing it. I was forced into it by Peter Saunders, who has wonderful powers of persuasion. Gentle bullying, subtle cajoling.

‘Of course you can do it.'

‘I don't know a thing about legal procedure. I should make a fool of myself.'

‘That's quite easy. You can read it up and we'll have a barrister on hand to clear up anomalies and make it go right.'

‘I couldn't write a court scene.'

‘Yes, you could – you've seen court scenes played. You can read up trials.'

‘Oh, I don't know . . . I don't think I
could
.'

Peter Saunders continued to say that of course I could, and that I must begin because he wanted the play quickly. So, hypnotised and always amenable to the power of suggestion, I read quantities of the
Famous Trials
series. I asked questions of solicitors as well as barristers; and finally I got interested and suddenly I felt I was enjoying myself – that wonderful moment in writing which does not usually last long but which carries one on with a terrific verve as a large wave carries you to shore. ‘This is lovely – I am doing it – it's working – now, where shall we go next?' There is that priceless moment of seeing the thing – not on the stage but in your mind's eye. There it all is, the real thing, in a real court – not the Old Bailey because I hadn't been there yet – but a real court sketchily etched in the background of my mind. I saw the nervous, desperate young man in the dock, and the enigmatic woman who came into the witness box to give evidence not for her lover but for the Crown. It is one of the quickest pieces of writing that I have done – I think it only took me two or three weeks after my preparatory reading.

Naturally it had to have some changes in the procedure, and I also had to fight desperately for my chosen end to the
play. Nobody liked it, nobody wanted it, everyone said it would spoil the whole thing. Everyone said: ‘You can't get away with that,' and wanted a different end – preferably one used in the original short story I had written years ago. But a short story is not a play. The short story had no court scene in it, no trial for murder. It was a mere sketch of an accused person and an enigmatic witness. I stuck out over the end. I don't often stick out for things, I don't always have sufficient conviction, but I had here. I wanted that end. I wanted it so much that I wouldn't agree to have the play put on without it.

I got my end, and it was successful. Some people said it was a double cross, or dragged in, but I knew it wasn't; it was logical. It was what could have happened, what might have happened, and in my view what probably would have happened – possibly with a little less violence, but the psychology would have been right, and the one little fact that lay beneath it had been implicit all through the play . . .

Of all the stage pieces I have had produced this came closest in casting to my own mental picture: Derek Bloomfield [sic] as the young accused; the legal characters whom I had never really visualised clearly, since I knew little of the law, but who suddenly came alive; and Patricia Jessel, who had the hardest part of all, and on whom the success of the play most certainly depended. I could not have found a more perfect actress. The part was a difficult one, especially in the first act, where the lines cannot help. They are hesitant, reserved, and the whole force of the acting has to be in the eyes, the reticence, the feeling of something malign held back. She suggested this perfectly – a taut, enigmatic personality. I still think her acting of the part of Romaine Helder [sic] was one of the best performances I have seen on a stage.
³⁶

There speaks a true playwright, fully engaged with her art on all levels. And, if nothing else, this passage gives the lie to Hubert Gregg's accusation that Christie never credited Saunders sufficiently for her theatrical successes. In her introduction to
Saunders'
The Mousetrap Man
, written after this but published before it, she reiterates, ‘His principal victory was making me write my play,
Witness for the Prosecution
. . . I still think it is the best play I have written and both Peter Saunders and others agree – but without him it would never have been written.'
³⁷

Her husband also agreed with Agatha that it was her best play:

Some of Agatha's plays have earned as much fame and popularity as her books, and I think that most critics would name
Witness for the Prosecution
as the tops: The Old Bailey as the theatrical
mise en scene
held a magnetic attention for the audience, which felt itself in the dock; no-one who has seen the play will be able to forget it – the highest tribute one can pay to a work of art. Patricia Jessel gave a brilliant performance, and the play was destined for a good run, but the size of the cast, the amplitude and inconvenience of the theatre, prevented it from enjoying the long run that it deserved.
³⁸

Max, interestingly, is the name of the female protagonist's alleged lover in the play, taken from the short story which pre-dates Agatha's relationship with Mallowan. There are some jottings which indicate that she toyed with changing the name to Ivan from that of her own husband for the play, but in the end she stuck with the reference to ‘my beloved Max'.

In January 1954 Agatha booked a big group of friends to see
Witness for the Prosecution
and in February, buoyed by her theatrical success, she hosted a party at the Savoy for one hundred friends and relations. The guest list included Dorothy L. Sayers and Campbell and Dorothy Christie, whose successful court-martial drama
Carrington VC
had opened at the Westminster Theatre three months ahead of
Witness for the
Prosecution
. Although a success, it had not proved to be the threat to Agatha's play that Saunders had feared.

In May 1954, declining box office income justified replacing the orchestra with an organist and Saunders negotiated a rent
reduction with his landlords. These belt-tightening measures enabled
Witness for the Prosecution
to continue to run successfully at the Winter Garden until the end of January 1955, where it eventually completed 458 performances. Edmund Cork was a happy man. When the production had been running for just over a month, he wrote to Harold Ober in New York, ‘This play is the biggest success we have had for years. It was put on at the worst time of year in the worst theatre in the West End, and it is just packing out. We are selling rights for it all over Europe on terms which we had only heard about before!'
³⁹
And it wasn't just Europe that was interested. Broadway was also beckoning again, and this time all were agreed that Christie's play was sufficiently ‘first rate' to pass muster on the Great White Way.

As soon as the London production of
Witness for the Prosecution
opened, American producers started to bid for the Broadway rights. In New York Christie was still celebrated for the outstanding success of
Ten Little Indians
a decade earlier. The brief pre-war appearances of Morton's
The Fatal Alibi
and Vosper's
Love From a Stranger
were long forgotten,
Hidden Horizon
had sunk without trace after twelve performances in 1946,
Towards Zero
and
The Suspects
had never made it to Broadway and
The Mousetrap
had deliberately been withheld. The scene was well and truly set for a second Broadway triumph for Christie.

Saunders and Cork's growing impatience with the Shuberts over their handling of
The Hollow
effectively ruled them out as Broadway partners for
Witness for the Prosecution
, and Lee Shubert's death in December 1953 in any case drew a convenient line under their dealings with his company. In his autobiography, Basil Dean recounts how he had found some respite from his own wearisome dealings with the Shuberts in the good company of independent New York producer Gilbert Miller, a Sullivan-sized personality who took Dean under his hospitable wing: ‘I should have had a thin time of it during those first days in New York but for Gilbert Miller's friendliness.'
⁴⁰
Now, over thirty years later, it was to this characterful figure that Saunders also turned.