Curtain Up (58 page)

Mary Law had recently finished her second run as Mollie in
The Mousetrap
(which she played in 1957–8 and 1975–6) when she was interviewed by Robyns, famously remarking of Christie's dialogue that it ‘does not bear any resemblance to what one says in normal life'. She noted in particular that actors rehearsing
Towards Zero
‘all found her lines very difficult to say', but that Christie, quite rightly in Law's opinion, was resistant to changing them. Law identifies her as the playwright because, since Saunders had taken over the option from Meyer, the play had somehow become a ‘co-adaptation' between Verner and Christie herself. Logic dictates that if
Christie had indeed been the co-writer of the script from the start then she would have received her usual 50 per cent of the writer's royalty as the author of the original book plus half of the adaptor's 50 per cent share. But this was not the case in Verner's original deal, in which he took the full adaptor's share of the royalty.

Saunders had by now presented four successful scripts from Christie's own pen, and Cork's standard response to the numerous enquiries from would-be adaptors of Christie's novels was that Christie wrote her own adaptations these days. And yet, following the closure of
Witness for the Prosecution
, the play that was to run alongside
The Mousetrap
and
Spider's Web
and take the number of Christie's works in the West End back up to three, was not actually written by her and had indeed been trailed by Bertie Meyer as an adaptation by Verner alone. Anticipating this problem, it appears that Saunders had succeeded in persuading Christie to undertake some work on the script so that he could legitimately put her stamp on it. This she undertook grudgingly. In a 1968 letter to a researcher she diplomatically states that she ‘had a certain amount of collaboration with Gerald Verner in Towards Zero';
⁵⁷
in a 1971 letter to Rosalind she was more blunt, writing that Saunders ‘urged me into helping with Towards Zero' and that she ‘never liked it'.
⁵⁸

There is no evidence that Christie made any significant changes to Verner's version, although in the absence of any working drafts or indeed any correspondence between the two writers, it is impossible to identify either Verner's original material or the exact extent of her contribution. Intriguingly, the scripts held in the Christie archive credit neither of the ‘collaborators' and even the copy submitted to the Lord Chamberlain's office carries neither of their names, although it is filed under Christie's alone. There are some desultory scribbles from her on what appears to be, to all intents and purposes, a performance-ready typescript, and this already includes a sequence in the opening stage directions for which, from Notebook 17, we know she was responsible. Some unde
tailed jottings relating to her work on this version of the play can be found elsewhere in the notebooks, and at some point between the undated typescripts a few minor changes are made and the action is reordered from two acts of three scenes each to the three two-scene acts with which we are now familiar. Most notably, all available typescripts of the play contain a dramatic plot twist which does not feature in the book but for which there is a prototype in Christie's 1944 version.

Other than that, there are remarkably few parallels with her original adaptation. Instead of Christie's ambitious open air setting, the entire ‘action of the play passes in the drawing room at Gull's Point, Lady Tressilian's house at Saltcreek, Cornwall'.
⁵⁹
The specification of Cornwall is unique to this version of the play – the novel and Christie's script appear to be set in Salcombe, Devon. Superintendent Battle has been reinstated and Angus McWhirter, the failed suicide who features in the novel and makes a significant contribution to Christie's adaptation, is absent. Of Christie's 1944 thirteen-person dramatis personae only six are shared with Verner's eleven-person script, sadly not including an entertainingly dour Scottish housekeeper. Like
Ten Little Niggers
and
The Hollow
the drama is underscored with the time-honoured dramatic device of a storm, but the plot twists of the novel and its extraordinary premise are less successfully achieved on stage. Christie's instincts about its unsuitability for stage adaptation were ultimately to prove correct and it is little wonder that her heart wasn't in it.

In asking her to contribute to the script, it cannot have been lost on Saunders that Verner's rights in his work had been assigned to Christie, who consequently now received Verner's adaptation royalty as well as her own for the original source material. Saunders' promotion of the play took ruthless advantage of this, implying a much greater authorial input from Christie than I believe actually to have been the case. The classified advertisements for the production in
The Times
were worded simply ‘George Baker in Towards Zero by Agatha Christie' and on the title page of the programme the play was billed as

TOWARDS ZERO

By Agatha Christie

Adapted from Agatha Christie's book by the authoress and Gerald Verner
⁶⁰

The critics responded as if they were simply watching an unusually weak offering from the writer of
The Mousetrap
,
Witness for the Prosecution
and
Spider's Web
; and matters weren't helped when Milton Shulman gave away the identity of the killer in the
Evening Standard
. The
Times
critic, in a substantial review headlined ‘Towards Zero by Agatha Christie' (with no mention of Gerald Verner), was relatively supportive, concluding that ‘The piece, compactly full of all the ripest ingredients, remains a fair specimen . . . a not too strenuously diverting evening in which we do not smell a rat until too late.'
⁶¹
Kenneth Tynan in the
Observer
, however, did smell a rat:

Agatha Christie's
Towards Zero
is a double parlour-game; before guessing the killer's name, we are invited to guess who is going to be killed. The writing is flat, and the setting one of those impregnable fortresses which pass in such plays for country houses. Among the accused are George Baker, stiff and shrill, and Mary Law, a dashing redhead. This tame affair taught me, if nothing else, why murder plays are so popular in London. All the characters must perforce be represented as harbouring dark and repressed criminal impulses, which gives them a likeness to everyday British life seldom approached by other dramatic conventions.
⁶²

Once again, this critical heavyweight was tickled by the genre, but he had noted correctly the inadequacy of the writing. Christie's own writing may be accused of many things, including being difficult for actors to deliver, but ‘flat' it is never is. This is why I do not believe the play to be to any significant extent of her authorship. The strategy of marketing what I believe to have been essentially Verner's work in Christie's name had backfired,
and the playwright whose last four West End plays had been hits was suddenly seen to be responsible for one that wasn't. The 1956 adaptation of
Towards Zero
, in my view, is a fake, and not a particularly good one at that. And as such, it should have no place in Christie's ‘collected works' as a dramatist.

I don't believe that Christie herself was complicit in the subterfuge; no doubt she was cajoled by Saunders into putting her name to whatever contribution she made and probably didn't think twice about her billing. She dutifully attended rehearsals, but clearly felt uneasy about the outcome; significantly, she makes no mention at all of the play in her autobiography. Perhaps even more significantly, Saunders himself only gives it a few lines in his own book; we are told nothing at all about its origins or the process of its production other than that ‘later that year I put on another Agatha Christie play,
Towards Zero
'
⁶³
and that it got a ‘medium' press and was not a success: ‘We struggled along for six months but it was the most I could manage.' He does, however, give some space to the occasion on which the Queen visited unexpectedly and, to his horror, witnessed a half-full auditorium.

Towards Zero
cost £3,456 to put on, notably less than
Witness for the Prosecution
and
Spider's Web
, and, after 205 West End performances, went out on a national tour under licence to Geoffrey Hastings Ltd. Thereafter it thrived in repertory and amateur productions throughout the country courtesy of Samuel French's 1958 ‘acting edition' although, unusually, it had been published the previous year in America by the Dramatists Play Service.

On 9 July 1956, exactly a month before
Towards Zero
opened at Nottingham, the premiere of Christie's pre-war play
A Daughter's a Daughter
finally took place. Christie had reminded Edmund Cork about the piece at the end of 1950, and its production would have been of a great deal more interest to her than that of Verner's play. Cork had duly sent
A Daughter's a Daughter
to Peter Saunders, who at that point had optioned
The Hollow
but not yet produced it.

A Daughter's a Daughter
is set in a London flat, where widowed thirty-nine-year-old Ann Prentice lives with her daughter, Sarah. Sarah objects to her mother's suitor, Richard Cauldfield, to whom she takes an instant, jealous dislike, not helped by his view that ‘Girls take on a job just like men do nowadays'. Ann abandons her plans to remarry in order to pacify her daughter but, as her friend the formidable Dame Laura Whitstable remarks, ‘The trouble with a sacrifice is that once it's made it's not over and done with.' The tables are then turned when Sarah has to choose between two suitors – the hapless and impecunious but devoted Jerry Lloyd and the dangerous, wealthy bounder Lawrence Steene – and Ann appears to encourage her daughter to marry the one who will make her least happy. Dame Laura is a wry and knowing observer as events unfold.

Saunders suggested some minor updates to make the vocabulary and references less specifically pre-war. Setting the end of the play, which covers a five-year timespan over its three acts, in ‘the present' of 1950 neatly placed its opening scene at the end of the war, and Christie duly rewrote it in this context, with Sarah returning from service with the WAAF rather than a skiing holiday at the start of the play and Jerry introduced as a squadron leader. This serves the piece very well, adding a sense of post-war displacement to the characters' efforts to redefine themselves in a period of accelerated social change. Jerry's new status as a demobbed airman means that we also, thankfully, lose a sequence in which he reports that he has been fired from his job for having the girls at work ‘in fits' of laughter by impersonating a ‘frightful old Jewboy' who visits his employer. Although we are clearly not intended to empathise with Jerry's predicament, Christie herself needed no prompting from the Anti-Defamation League to appreciate that it was no longer acceptable even for her characters to adopt the casual anti-semitism that had been prevalent in her own Edwardian youth. Interestingly, Jerry's personality has improved in the process. In the early draft he is described as ‘A dark, lazy-looking creature with charm
and a slight air of ineffectiveness' but in the updated version he simply ‘has a charm and is obviously in love with Sarah'.

The Agatha Christie archive holds a number of typescripts for
A Daughter's a Daughter
, the earliest of which appears to be the version incorporating the revisions requested by Basil Dean in 1939. This includes a number of handwritten notes, resulting in a revised typescript which sets the opening of the play firmly in 1945. As ever, the scripts themselves are not dated, but the final draft I believe to have been prepared in late 1950 or early 1951.

Much has been made of whether the play's scenario of a loving but mutually destructive mother–daughter relationship reflects elements of Christie's relationship with her own daughter, or indeed that of her friend Nan Kon with her daughter Judith. Certainly both Rosalind and Judith were of an age that could have informed the role of Sarah when the piece was originally written in the late 1930s. Of more interest than these resonances, though, is the play's portrayal of a young woman whose life-changing choices are ultimately dictated by a desire for excitement and danger, rather than dutiful stability, effectively making it the third in a trio which starts with
The Lie
and includes Christie's own version of
The Stranger
.

For Sarah, her excitement and danger come in the form of the dissolute Lawrence Steene, ‘an attractive, rather dissipated-looking man of forty. He has a lazy voice and a vicious mouth – the kind of man most women find attractive and most men dislike.' In Act Two, the loyal housekeeper, Edith, cannot hide her obvious mistrust of Steene, leading him to question Sarah:

       
LAWRENCE: She hates me, doesn't she?

       
SARAH: She oughtn't to be so rude.

       
LAWRENCE: Oh, I don't mind. It gives me a kick – it's so in keeping. She's a period piece, of course. The faithful family servant – now almost extinct. Besides, quite a lot of people dislike me. I'd feel terribly upset if they didn't.

       
SARAH: I agree with you. I hate people whom everybody likes. They are usually too frightful.

       
LAWRENCE: Mothers won't let me talk to their daughters.

       
SARAH: Why? Do you seduce them?

       
LAWRENCE: Oh no, darling, nothing so crude. I'm supposed to have nameless orgies at my house.

       
SARAH: You do have rather peculiar parties, don't you?

       
LAWRENCE: (Smiling) I'm not conventional. There's so much to be done with life if you've only got the courage to experiment.