Curtain Up (56 page)

Kenneth Tynan had replaced Ivor Brown as the
Observer
's theatre critic and, despite his later advocacy of British theatre's ‘new wave', appears to have shared his predecessor's soft spot for Christie's idiosyncratic contributions to the West End stage. ‘Those who grieve that our drama is a ritualistic art no longer should see Mrs Christie's
Spider's Web
and be consoled,' he wrote, ‘for the detective play, in which a nameless avenger strikes down a chosen victim, is governed by conventions every bit as strict as those of Greek tragedy.'
²⁵
He then goes on wittily to explain in some detail the parallels between ancient Greek drama and Christie's work, before lamenting that her characters were too well-drawn to serve the thriller genre and concluding, ‘Audiences who emerged from
Witness for the Prosecution
murmuring “How clever she is” will probably emerge from
Spider's Web
murmuring “How clever I am!” Yet there are, I suppose, more unpleasant things to murmur.'

The
Times
review was less supportive, however: ‘Miss Agatha Christie tries this time to combine a story of murder with a comedy of character. As Edgar Wallace showed more than once, the thing can be done. There is no reason why the special tension of the one should not support the special tension of the other. In this instance, however, the support is at best intermittent . . . the play as a whole is the least exciting and not the most amusing of the three Agatha Christies now running in London.'
²⁶
A view which seems to have been shared by most of the critics.

The royal family continued to be enthusiastic in their support of Christie's work; on 1 March 1955 the Queen Mother saw a performance of
Spider's Web
and the following week the play was attended by the Queen, accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh and Princess Margaret. According to Lockwood, ‘More nerve-wracking than the first night was the night when the Queen came to see the play.'
²⁷
Lockwood's career, like so many in our story, had previously benefited from the unexpected endorsement of Queen Elizabeth's grandmother, Queen Mary, who at the age of seventy-eight had insisted on attending the premiere of her controversial film
The Wicked Lady
. Two months after attending
Spider's Web
, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh would be in Windsor watching
Witness for the Prosecution
.

As with
The Mousetrap
, Cork and Saunders' strategy for
Spider's Web
deliberately excluded New York. Harold Ober reported that the agent of veteran Broadway leading lady Dorothy Stickney had expressed an interest in the play as a possible vehicle for their client, but at fifty-eight she would hardly have been suitable for the role of Clarissa. In January 1955, Cork wrote to Ober that ‘This play was specially written for our film star Margaret Lockwood . . . I think Saunders expects about a four months' run, and there seems to be an idea that Lockwood would then make a film of it, which I suppose would rule out an American production.'
²⁸
Christie herself wrote a two-page treatment for a film – ‘Commence with vast spider's web gradually dissolving into Clarissa studying a spider's web in country house . . .'
²⁹
– but this was not pursued. A low-budget British colour film was eventually made by the Danziger brothers and released by United Artists in 1961. Shown as a ‘second feature' in the UK, it was never released in the USA, although it was seen on television there. Glynis Johns played Clarissa, with the much-loved husband and wife duo of Jack Hulbert as Sir Rowland Delahaye and Cicely Courtneidge as Mildred Peake, the eccentric gardener who had been played on stage to great effect by Judith Furse.

In 1962 Hulbert and Courtneidge, both clients of Herbert de Leon, undertook a lengthy and successful stage tour of
Spider's Web
for Geoffrey Hastings (who had invested £125 in the West End run), under licence from Peter Saunders. On this occasion Courtneidge played the role of Clarissa. At the age of sixty-nine. The New York premiere of
Spider's Web
would eventually take place at the off-off-Broadway Lolly's Theatre Club in 1974, two years before Christie's death.

When Margaret Lockwood eventually left the cast after a run of fifteen months, the role of Clarissa was taken on by the popular thirty-five-year-old film and television actress Anne Crawford, Wallace Douglas's third wife. Tragically suffering from leukaemia, Crawford died on 17 October 1956, and Saunders recalls that
he ‘watched with admiration the gallant but hopeless battle of her last weeks. Often in agony, she never missed a performance until the end.'
³⁰
The understudy, Elizabeth Bird, took over for the last few weeks of the run, but Saunders had arranged for the production to play weeks at Golders Green and Streatham after it finished in the West End. According to Saunders, Bird was pregnant and unable to play these dates, although I suspect that it may have been more of a case of the management not wanting to risk fielding an understudy to headline two potentially lucrative touring dates. In any event it was here, according to Saunders, that ‘Margaret Lockwood showed her professionalism and her generosity. She was having a much needed holiday in the South of France and, without telling me, her agent Herbert de Leon, phoned her and told her of my problems. Margaret immediately flew back from her holiday and played those two touring dates for me. I know of very few stars who would have done this.' I've not seen a record of Margaret Lockwood's deal, but Felix Aylmer and Ann Crawford were each earning £125 per week, and the lowest paid members of the company were on £20. In the week at Golders Green Hippodrome which Lockwood came to the rescue of, the production made a profit of £916 and Christie received a royalty of £348.
³¹

Despite the lukewarm critical response,
Spider's Web
went on to enjoy the longest first run of any Christie play (after
The Mousetrap
, of course), clocking up an impressive 744 performances. Saunders found himself with yet another commercial hit on his hands, courtesy of Christie. The production's finances followed the usual pattern of a £5,000 capitalisation (with an actual production cost of £4,101), in which Saunders himself took the majority share; 72.5 per cent on this occasion, entitling him to 82.8 per cent of overall profit. After Saunders, Herbert de Leon was the biggest investor, backing his star to the tune of £1,000. The final profit on the enterprise was £63,388, calculated in 1963,
³²
seven years after the end of the West End run, and including a share of residual income from a modest film sale and the licensing of two post-West End tours and numerous repertory productions. Although actual dividends
would have been paid over the previous eight years, that's well over a million pounds in today's money, of which de Leon would have received 12.5 per cent.

Under Saunders' diligent stewardship, Agatha Christie on stage had become big business. At the age of sixty-four, she had three big hits running in the West End and she remains, to this day, the only female playwright to have achieved this record.
³³
She was also enjoying huge acclaim on Broadway. Only a dozen Agatha Christie novels were published in the 1950s, and some commentators believe this to indicate that her creative output was slowing down. On the contrary, her dedicated application to her day job had finally put her in a position where she was free to spend time on the work that she really enjoyed and found fulfilling. The journey from the Embassy Theatre in Swiss Cottage had not been an easy one for ‘Mrs Pooper – cheap novelist', and success had been a long time coming, but when it suddenly arrived her position as the Queen of the West End was unassailable. Or so it appeared.

On the night that both Agatha Christie and Wallace Douglas scored their West End hat-tricks, Robert Morley and Wilfrid Hyde-White, both of whom had turned down Christie plays, were appearing at the Lyric in
Hippo Dancing
, and Terence Rattigan's
Separate Tables
was playing at the St James's Theatre. Elsewhere in the West End, theatregoers could see the musicals
Salad Days
,
The Boy Friend
and
The King and I
, or could enjoy an evening with Joyce Grenfell. Prince Littler's two-and-a-half-thousand-seat Stoll Theatre on Kingsway, meanwhile, was hosting the first of several West End Christmas seasons of Enid Blyton's
Noddy in Toyland
, performed largely by a cast of children drawn from the Italia Conti stage school and complete with wicked golliwogs.
Noddy in Toyland
was directed by Andre van Gyseghem, the original director of
Black Coffee
and the author of
Theatre in Soviet Russia
. It was produced by Bertie Meyer.

Blyton's agent George Greenfield notes in his amusing autobiography:

Early in 1954, she rang me and asked, ‘George, do you think I could write a children's pantomime?'

I replied – and I meant it sincerely – ‘If you put your mind to it, Enid, I reckon you could write almost anything.'

She sounded pleased and soon rang off. Two or three weeks later, she sent me the complete book and lyrics of the
Noddy in Toyland
pantomime. When it was staged at the huge Stoll theatre in Kingsway that Christmas, where every performance was fully sold out, neither the producer, B.A. Meyer nor the stage director, Andre van Gyseghem, had changed it to any great extent.

Bertie Meyer was in his seventies when I introduced him to Enid and Kenneth [her husband] as the potential producer. Tall, with luxuriant white hair, a Roman nose and a clipped moustache, he was a commanding and courteous figure. He had been involved in the West End theatre for over fifty years; soon after the turn of the century, Sir Henry Irving had been one of his leading actors.

After the meeting, when Bertie had left us, Kenneth Darrell Walters said in his bleating falsetto, ‘He's far too old. He'll drop dead on us in the middle of a run – and then we'll be stuck.'

I told Kenneth that I had already discussed this delicate point with Bertie Meyer, who had a clean bill of health from his Harley Street doctor and who was quite prepared to undergo any further tests Kenneth might care to suggest . . . Enid said firmly that she liked and trusted Mr Meyer, and wanted to appoint him as the pantomime's producer. Still grumbling, Kenneth half-heartedly assented. In the event, Bertie Meyer produced
Noddy in Toyland
for the next five or six years until the demand did not warrant a West End production. Kenneth died in 1967 and Enid the following year. Bertie Meyer, then close on ninety, though naturally frail still had all his wits about him.
³⁴

Greenfield, who was clearly no fan of Blyton's husband, notes in passing that ‘There is an interesting thesis to be researched
and written on the husbands of successful women writers. The sensible ones, like Dr [sic] Mallowan, get on with their own life's work and maintain their self-respect by establishing a reputation in a separate field.'

Bertie Meyer was to play a key role in the development of the next ‘Christie' work to appear in the West End, although he did not ultimately produce it: in 1956 an adaptation of her 1944 novel
Towards Zero
was finally staged in London, but it was not the play that Christie had written for the Shuberts and its origins are complicated.

In November 1947, shortly after the Shuberts' option on Christie's original script expired, a deal was done with L. Arthur Rose, best known for the book and lyrics of Noël Gay's 1937 musical
Me and My Girl
, giving him two years in which to adapt the novel.
³⁵
It is unclear whether this script was rejected or whether it never materialised. In February 1950, Christie wrote to Cork from Iraq about what appears to have been yet another attempt to dramatise it:

It may be the natural apathy of the Near East, but I don't feel very enthusiastic about the proposed dramatisation of Towards Zero . . . I have become a bit bored with the perennial humorous policeman, but don't really care . . . the Whodunnit with everyone suspected in turn, and plenty of comic red herrings thrown in, really by now quite sickens me on the stage! And it's not the kind of story that Towards Zero is! . . . Don't twist the kind of book that hasn't the right atmosphere. You might just as well start with an entirely new story. There is a large class of my books which is not full of ‘thrills' and ‘humour', such as, for instance Towards Zero, Sparkling Cyanide, Five Little Pigs, Sad Cypress, the Hollow, etc. And you really can't turn a Class B story into a Class A story – it doesn't lend itself to such treatment, and it doesn't seem fair to encourage Robert Brenon who is an intelligent and artistic young man to do so when I probably shan't like the result.

Frankly, as you know, I have never seen Towards Zero as good material for a play . . . its point is
not
suspicion on everybody – but suspicion and everything pointing towards the incrimination of
one
person – and rescue of that victim at the moment when she seems to be hopelessly doomed. But if fun and thrills are wanted, go to some other of my fifty offspring!

I think, really, it might be better to give the whole thing up. What do you think?
³⁶

It may have been at this point that Christie herself started making notes for a ‘new version of Towards Zero', in which the action does not move to the familiar setting of Lady Tressilian's until Act Two.
³⁷
Nothing was to come of the idea, but I do wonder whether it was the exchange with Cork that put her in mind to attempt her own version of
The Hollow
, without Hercule Poirot.

In March 1951 yet another writer, Gerald Verner, was granted the right ‘To make a dramatic adaptation' of
Towards Zero
within six months, provided that a West End contract was entered into within eighteen months, and a West End production presented within two and a half years.
³⁸
Income was to be divided 50/50 with Christie, which, significantly on this occasion, was the usual deal offered to third-party adaptors. A week later, Joseph Lucas at Hughes Massie wrote to Christie, ‘We have not yet received the script of Gerald Verner's version of Towards Zero, but the one scene I have read of it looks most promising.'
³⁹