Curtain Up (57 page)

The man behind all these efforts to get a new script of
Towards Zero
written was Bertie Meyer, whose production of
Murder at the Vicarage
had closed twelve months earlier. In April 1951 he finally took out a one-year option to produce Verner's new adaptation,
⁴⁰
and the following week Cork wrote to Christie by way of explanation:

I am afraid Bertie Meyer is going to do Towards Zero. He held us to the arrangement that you had told him that if he
could get a good version made then he could – because of old associations – do the play. Gerald Verner's version was quite unobjectionable, in fact we think it is damn good, so this is all in train now, and the Howard and Wyndham people who, as you know, control most of the Number One dates, like the play, and are not only giving Bertie a selection of good dates in the autumn, but are taking a share in the show. The Howard and Wyndham participation is contingent on the parts of Neville [sic] and his two wives being played by suitable stars, which is useful reassurance from our point of view!
⁴¹

Christie responded, ‘I must hand it to Bertie Meyer for sticking to it!! Am glad about the “stars” proviso!'
⁴²

On 6 June Cork wrote to Christie, ‘I am sending you a copy of Gerald Verner's version of Towards Zero, which several people think is pretty good. I was talking to Bertie Meyer about it this morning, and he doesn't seem to have got very far with the casting.'
⁴³
The following night, Peter Saunders' production of
The Hollow
opened at the Fortune.

In
The Mousetrap Man
, Saunders recalls that when he asked whether he would be treading on Meyer's toes in taking an option for
The Hollow
he was told by Cork that ‘Bertie had another of her plays which he had never presented and she was not prepared to let him have another one until it was put on in town.'
⁴⁴
Given that this conversation between Cork and Saunders had taken place in September 1950, when the new stage version of
Towards Zero
had not yet been written by Verner or optioned by Meyer, and given Christie's own reticence about the idea, I am not sure that this was entirely the case. Nonetheless the bizarre situation now arose where Bertie Meyer held an option for a new third-party Christie adaptation literally on the eve of the first West End production to be mounted by Peter Saunders, the producer who was to bring her own writing centre stage.

But the planned autumn 1951 tour of
Towards Zero
did not
materialise. At the end of January 1952, with
The Hollow
successfully transferred to the Ambassadors and
Three Blind Mice
also under option to Saunders,
The Stage
printed an article headlined ‘BERTIE MEYER'S JUBILEE – HALF A CENTURY IN MANAGEMENT'. It ran:

A man who has completed 40 or 50 years in any branch of work is usually considered to have earned his retirement. But B.A. Meyer, who this year sees his fiftieth year of active management, plans to celebrate his jubilee with three new projects. It is fitting that one of these should be a new adaptation from Agatha Christie,
Towards Zero
, for he was responsible, in 1928, for the first production of a Christie play,
Alibi
, which Gerald Du Maurier directed and in which Charles Laughton created the part of Inspector [sic] Poirot. He also brought a number of other Christie plays to the West End, including
Ten Little Niggers
,
Appointment with Death
and
Murder at the Vicarage
. One of Mr Meyer's colleagues in his new ventures will be Gerald Verner, who is adapting both the Christie play and a new Peter Cheyney play . . .

Mr Meyer believes that a manager must be guided by public taste to a large extent; attempting to guide taste oneself can often be a costly business. ‘Looking back over the years,' he said, ‘I think taste has changed very little. At the present time it is still very unsophisticated and the long runs are all light-hearted plays. At the same time I have always been a believer in clean plays; those dealing with sordid problems usually have a very limited appeal.
⁴⁵

Gerald Verner, the man who had finally created a script for
Towards Zero
that was deemed to be workable, was a prolific writer for the stage, television and radio, and was himself the author of more than a hundred books. He was said to have been able to write a thriller in a fortnight, and once wrote thirty-five books in five years. Verner had turned to writing in the 1920s after a career as an actor, a nightclub cabaret
producer, a worker in Billingsgate fish market, a calendar designer and a pavement artist. It was while living as a down-and-out on the Embankment in London after the First World War that he wrote
The Embankment Murder
and was paid £70 for his manuscript; now the Duke of Windsor was a fan, and always had Verner's latest works sent to him.

Verner's biggest stage success was to be his other adaptation for Meyer,
Meet Mr Callaghan
, a dramatisation of crime writer Peter Cheyney's 1938 novel
The Urgent Hangman
.
Meet Mr Callaghan
opened at the Garrick Theatre in May 1952; directed by Derrick de Marney, who also alternated the title role with his brother Terence, it ran for almost a year. A sequel the following year, another Verner script based on Cheyney's 1939 novel
Dangerous Curves
and this time with Terence both directing and starring, followed it into the Garrick but was less successful.

Terence de Marney, who made a not insignificant contribution to Christie's own stage work as the original Lombard in
Ten Little Niggers
and the director of
Appointment with Death
, was to die in an accidental fall under a tube train in 1971 at the age of sixty-two. His
Times
obituary commented that he was an actor who had ‘obviously relished the sinister, the indefinably frightening and the strange, but his range was not limited to them and he could provide romantic charm and sheer physical excitement . . . without plunging into extravagance he had the art of harnessing the audience's imagination to the service of any play in which he appeared.
⁴⁶

An advertisement in
The Stage
in January 1952 from the leading tour booker of the day, Renee Stepham, seeks bookings for Peter Saunders' forthcoming production of
To Dorothy, a Son
, the play that Hubert Gregg would later turn down
The Mousetrap
for.
⁴⁷
Both Saunders and Meyer used Stepham to book their tours, and the same advertisement also seeks pre-West End bookings for
Meet Mr Callaghan
(‘One and only Peter Cheyney play' starring Terence de Marney) and for
Towards Zero
(‘New Agatha Christie play' – no mention of Verner). So we know that Meyer at least made an attempt to get
Towards
Zero
on, although the advertisement advises that it was still ‘not fully cast'.

This state of affairs was not without its problems, and threatened to compromise Saunders' ability to schedule first
The Mousetrap
and then
Witness for the Prosecution
. Bizarrely, though, Cork continued to renew Meyer's option on the Verner script, writing to Christie in March 1952:

Bertie Meyer still thinks that he is going to do Towards Zero this Spring. His contract requires production by April 12th, which as I see it, makes it impossible for performance now, but Bertie has written me a long screed hoping that in view of his even longer association with the Christie plays, we will not close down on him. If you are agreeable, what I think we might do is to tell him he must produce either in the country or in London before the end of April, and that if the production is in the country, then he must bring it into the West End in the middle of July. This would give sufficient lapse of time not to interfere with The Mousetrap.
⁴⁸

Exactly a year later, Cork was to write, regarding
Witness for the Prosecution
, ‘The rough idea for this is to have a Number One tour starting in August with the West End production in November, but this is to some extent dependent on Towards Zero. Bertie is still just on the point of completing his plans.'
⁴⁹

In April 1953 Christie wrote to Cork from Iraq, where she had been exchanging letters with Saunders on the development of the script for
Witness for the Prosecution
, ‘P Saunders seems to think he can't do Witness for P when he thought because Bertie Meyer is putting on Towards 0. But is he really? I'm really fed up with Bertie – He's had
years
to get that play on – Peter does
put
my plays on.'
⁵⁰
Cork responded with some interesting news:

I believe you know that Bertie Meyer interested Peter Cotes in Towards Zero. He wanted to produce [i.e. direct] it, and Bertie in his incredible way said ‘well that's marvellous; we
will keep in touch' – and nothing more was heard from him. Peter Cotes rang me up yesterday to say that if Bertie were out, his own production company would like to buy the play, as he feels if certain small things were done to it, he could make it into another Mousetrap. I could not give him any promise, as I think Peter Saunders ought to have first crack at it when Bertie fades away. Peter Saunders has said he would like to do it in order to avoid clashes, and probably when the time comes we can arrange to have the satisfactory business drive of the one Peter combined with the artistic assistance of the other.'
⁵¹

It was not, in fact, Meyer who had suggested to Peter Cotes that he direct
Towards Zero
, but Christie herself; she had presented him with a copy of the script as his first night gift for
The Mousetrap
.
⁵²
The playwright, if not the producer, was clearly an admirer of his work. Three months later, the Peter with the ‘business drive' would write to the ‘artistic' Peter dispensing with his services on
The Mousetrap
.

In August 1953 Meyer finally bowed out and Saunders took an option on Verner's script for
Towards Zero
.
⁵³
A year later he arranged to extend his licence for six monthly periods until six months after the end of
The Mousetrap
, paying £100 for each such extension; it was clearly Saunders' intention to put
Towards Zero
into the Ambassadors Theatre when
The Mousetrap
closed.

Except it didn't. In April 1954, Cork wrote to Christie:

As you know, we have been putting off the production of Towards Zero so that it would not clash with your other plays. These postponements have not been entirely and altogether convenient to Gerald Verner, who is not directly interested in the other plays. He would be willing to dispose of his interest in the play for a cash sum, and I wonder if you would have any objection to . . . buying out Verner? Actually, Verner's rights under his original contract would expire next September if the play is not produced by that time, but I
don't suppose you would mind giving an extension of his rights for say a year, as it was to suit us that the play has not been done.
⁵⁴

Verner thus assigned his rights to Christie, via an intermediary company, for £2,000, no doubt in the belief that at this stage a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush.
⁵⁵
The same quirk in copyright law that was to see the rights of
The Mousetrap
revert to Rosalind in 2001 would mean that in 2005, twenty-five years after Verner's death, these assigned rights reverted to his son; but for now the position was clear-cut. Christie herself owned ‘all rights of copyright' in Verner's work on
Towards Zero
.

With
The Mousetrap
showing no sign of vacating the Ambassadors, it was not until 4 September 1956 that Verner's adaptation of
Towards Zero
eventually reached the West End, in a production presented by Peter Saunders at the St James's Theatre. This followed a short, four-week pre-West End tour which commenced once more at Nottingham. The St James's Theatre had been the home of Saunders' first West End production,
Fly Away Peter
, less than ten years previously. Although now managed by a company which counted Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh amongst its directors, it was actually a joint venture between the Group's ubiquitous Prince Littler and
Witness for the Prosecution
's Broadway producer Gilbert Miller. Whatever the realities of the
Witness for the Prosecution
film sale, on paper it had ultimately been a success, and the Miller connection here cannot have been insignificant. Littler, too, had been known personally to support Saunders' efforts and, indeed, his wife held a small financial interest in
The Mousetrap
's home at the Ambassadors. So while the St James's was by no means a first-rank ‘Group' theatre, Saunders found that on this occasion the doors were open to him.

Saunders entrusted direction of the piece to Murray MacDonald, who had been responsible for the eventual West End production of Frank Vosper's
Love from a Stranger
in 1936. Since then, MacDonald had enjoyed a big West End hit with James Bridie's
Daphne Laureola
in 1949, starring Edith Evans,
which transferred to Broadway for a less successful run the following year. He was also notable for having directed Dodie Smith's stage adaptation of her novel
I Capture the Castle
in 1954. Saunders again engaged Michael Weight as designer, although the standard ‘drawing room' setting was considerably less of a challenge than
Witness for the Prosecution
, or even
Spider's Web
with its revolving bookcase. Film and television actor George Baker, later to become known to television viewers as Inspector Wexford in the Ruth Rendell mysteries, was paid £70 per week to play the leading role of the charismatic Nevile Strange, a man perhaps not unrelated to Gerald Strange in Christie's own script of
The Stranger
. The cast also featured Frederick Leister as Battle, Cyril Raymond as Royd and Gwen Cherrell as Audrey, Nevile Strange's first wife. This was a respectable but by no means stellar line-up, with salaries ranging between £45 and £60 per week, but the casting seems to have been insufficiently impressive for Howard & Wyndham to remain involved; or it may have been that they simply didn't want to switch allegiance from Meyer to Saunders. Unknown actress Mary Law was paid £23 per week to play Strange's second wife, Kay, having turned down the job of understudy. According to Law, in an interview with Gwen Robyns, Christie had been present at auditions and told her that she was delighted that she had been given the role. ‘“I am so glad,” Christie said, “The first day I saw you I wanted you because you are absolutely as I imagined Kay would be so I was determined to have you.”'
⁵⁶