Curtain Up (65 page)

As with the first set of notes for
The Unexpected Guest
there is, unusually, also a date on the last: ‘Nov 1957'.
Towards Zero
had closed in March that year, and it may be that Christie had been toying with the idea of this as a somewhat superior successor; a conclusive demonstration that Agatha Christie, unaided, could do it better than Gerald Verner. In any event, the concept was clearly sufficiently developed by late May 1958 for a completed script to be on Saunders' desk within a month,
and he forwarded it immediately to Hubert Gregg, who was in the midst of his seven-year stint as resident director of
The Mousetrap
. Six Christie pieces had been produced since Gregg had directed
The Hollow
for Saunders in 1951 but, despite his claims to have ensured
The Hollow
's success through extensive rewrites of the text, none of them had been staged by Gregg. Now Saunders needed a safe pair of hands who would deliver a straightforward thriller, who was immediately available and who would not be phased by the timeframe.

Saunders was also no doubt responding to the fact that Gregg's most recent West End directorial offering, the American thriller
Speaking of Murder
, had just opened at the St Martin's, opposite
The Mousetrap
, advertising itself with a press quote that called it ‘The Best Thriller in Town'. The skilfully plotted and entertaining play by prolific husband and wife mystery novelists Audrey and William Roos (known jointly to their readers as Kelley Roos), had been underfunded by its Canadian producers and only ran for 173 performances, but was nonetheless a highly regarded critical success. Now Gregg, back in the Saunders fold, began to cast
The Unexpected Guest
. ‘Again, I couldn't get any major stars', notes Saunders. Agents were, perhaps, wary after the critical response to
Verdict
, although in this case the extremely short notice can't have made the casting process any easier.

In the end, a highly credible if not immediately commercial cast was led by forty-three-year-old Renee Asherson in the challenging role of Laura Warwick. Asherson was a well-regarded classical stage actress of the sort who would these days doubtless consider Christie's work as being beneath them. A graduate of Webber Douglas, where she had been a contemporary of Hubert Gregg's, she had worked with Barry Jackson's Birmingham Rep before going on to enjoy critical acclaim as a regular leading actress with the Old Vic company and memorably playing Princess Katherine to Laurence Olivier's Henry V in Olivier's film. She had also appeared regularly on stage and screen with her husband Robert Donat. Another respected Old Vic and West End player, thirty-nine-year-old Nigel Stock, took
second billing as Starkwedder. His supporting roles in
Brighton Rock
(1947) and
The Dam Busters
(1955) did not qualify him as a ‘name' in 1958 but he was later to become a popular television star, initially in the role of Doctor Watson in the long-running 1960s Sherlock Holmes series, opposite Douglas Wilmer and then Peter Cushing as Holmes. Veteran character actress Violet Farebrother, celebrating her seventieth birthday shortly after the play opened in London, completed the trio of ‘above title' performers in the role of Mrs Warwick.

Despite the fact that the excellent cast Saunders had assembled was hardly stellar, he once again billed the performers far more prominently than the playwright on the production's publicity material,
¹⁷
in what was doubtless a case of post-
Verdict
bet-hedging. If you don't have ‘major stars' then at least make it look like you have, particularly when the writer's last piece was a major flop. The line in the
Times
classified advertisements ran, ‘RENEE ASHERSON, NIGEL STOCK, VIOLET FAREBROTHER THE UNEXPECTED GUEST AGATHA CHRISTIE'S NEW WHODUNIT!' A lot of water had flowed under the bridge since Saunders, at Christie's insistence, had refrained from publicising
The Hollow
as a ‘whodunit'.

The opening at Bristol Hippodrome was not without its problems. Clearly a last-minute booking, the huge theatre, which normally hosted musicals and which was in the habit of projecting advertisements on to its safety curtain during the interval, was entirely inappropriate for the presentation of a Christie play. Designer Michael Weight offered to make changes to the set in order to accommodate the vast expanses of the Hippodrome stage, but Gregg wisely opted to allow the actors to prepare for the West End run on a design configured in a way that would mirror the confined stage of the tiny Duchess, even though the result, he said, looked like a ‘peep show'. There was also a practical issue with the fog idea. As Gregg was inevitably quick to point out, the play is set indoors, and it is difficult to achieve a fog effect on stage where it is seen through a window without it seeping onto the rest of the set; ‘I should have said to myself “she thinks she's writing a book.
Forget it,”' he notes.
¹⁸
But, in fairness, he seems to have persevered, and a grateful Agatha sent him a first night telegram jokingly reminding him of their difference of opinion over the climactic thunderstorm in
The Hollow
: ‘WOT NO THUNDER STOP ONLY MISERABLE MISSED STOP APOLOGIES NEXT PLAY WILL BE CALLED LIGHTNING STRIKES TWICE GOOD WISHES AND THANKS AGATHA'.
¹⁹
(For ‘missed' read ‘mist' – clearly a misunderstanding by the telegraphist!)

Western Daily Press
reporter Peter Rodford managed to grab a rare first night interview with Christie in her seat at the front of the circle during the interval and, despite the considerable challenges presented by the space, she was evidently very pleased with how the performance was going. Responding to a question about how long it took her to write a play, Christie said, ‘This one I did quite quickly, but then usually I spend some time thinking about them before writing. I have to make sure I have got all the ends tied up.'
²⁰
This certainly seems a fair enough comment on the writing of
The Unexpected Guest
; she appears to have spent at least eight years thinking about it. Rodford then enquired whether Christie found crime plays or novels easier to write, eliciting the response, ‘Crime plays. Keeping the plot in one setting is a help.' He went on to ask what she thought of third-party stage adaptations of her novels, and she replied tactfully, ‘They are sometimes not stern enough. They try to leave too much in – too many clues.' I like the sound of Peter Rodford; he certainly knew which questions to ask this particular playwright in the very short time available to him.

A week later,
The Unexpected Guest
opened at the Duchess. Elsewhere in the West End that night, Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews and Stanley Holloway in
My Fair Lady
were continuing to compete successfully for the musical theatre audience with the long-running
The Boy Friend
and
Salad Days
; while, alongside their star-studded Drury Lane production, Tennents' repertoire included Peter Shaffer's West End debut
Five Finger Exercise
, directed by John Gielgud at the Comedy Theatre. The Prince's Theatre, by contrast, was hosting Michael V. Gazzo's
A Hatful of Rain
, a hard-hitting play about drug dealing and addiction heralded by Saunders' friend Walter F. Kerr as ‘an electrifying social study' and advertised as ‘London's first Method Production'. At the New, Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester were appearing in Jane Arden's
The Party
, no doubt basking in the publicity generated by the release of the film of
Witness for the Prosecution
earlier in the year, while at the Winter Garden, previously the London home of Christie's greatest theatrical triumph, the Folies Bergeres had taken up residence with their ‘all French revue'.

The heady days of
Witness for the Prosecution
at the Winter Garden were long gone, but with Christie at least on the face of it reclaiming what was regarded as familiar territory – the clown no longer aspiring to play Hamlet, to use Gregg's analogy – the theatre critics appear to have breathed a collective sigh of relief. It is as if Christie thrillers were perceived as inhabiting a territory of their own, no doubt offering some respite from the war zone of Aunt Edna versus Jimmy Porter, and she was consequently welcomed back to her pigeonhole with open arms, like an errant child returning home. ‘Mrs Christie returns to her old form,' ran the headline in
The Stage
, above a review that started, ‘Agatha Christie's latest play,
The Unexpected Guest
, which opened at the Duchess on Tuesday last, is an intriguing, deft and sharply characterised whodunnit which should go a long way towards restoring the author to public favour after the fiasco of
Verdict
.'
²¹
The
Telegraph
agreed: ‘After the failure of her last play,
Verdict
, it was suggested in some quarters that Scotland Yard ought to be called in to discover who killed Agatha Christie. But
The Unexpected Guest
, turning up last night at the Duchess before even the reverberations of her last failure have died away, indicates that the corpse is still very much alive. Burial of her thriller reputation is certainly premature.'
²²
The
Daily Mail
noted, ‘In
Verdict
the motherly queen of whodunits tried for a change to substitute character for suspense but last night she beamed down from her box on the routine parade of thriller puppets playing the old guessing game.'
²³
The
Star
added, ‘After her recent failure – with
Verdict
– to climb into a higher dramatic bracket, Agatha Christie has reverted to the old formula that has paid her so well in
The Mousetrap
.'
²⁴
The
Manchester Guardian
damned with faint praise: ‘
The Unexpected Guest
is standard Agatha Christie. It has nothing as ingenious or exciting as the court scene and double twist of
Witness for the Prosecution
. . . I have known more tension and greater surprise from other of Mrs Christie's classics but this is quite a decent specimen of her craft.'
²⁵

Even a lukewarm review in
The Times
seemed reassured that as the play opened, ‘we are already deep in the Christie country with its famous landmarks, the French windows, the lonely house, and the closed ring of suspects. But the author is vigilantly resourceful in suggesting throughout the first act that these surroundings are unfamiliar.'
²⁶
By Act Two the play is running ‘to formula, with repetitious police interviews, each one disclosing some fresh particle of evidence, none of which gives any clue to Miss Christie's closely guarded secret'. The review concludes, ‘one's sympathy goes out to Mr Phillip Newman, as the dead man, for all the nightly vigils ahead.'

Laurence Hitchin in the
Observer
, deputising for Kenneth Tynan who was at the Edinburgh Festival, noted that ‘The corpse in Agatha Christie's
Unexpected Guest
cools un-regarded in a wheel-chair while the widow and an intruder embark on complicated exposition. Provided you can accept such unreality and the abysmal humour, there is an ingenious display of suspects, as if lids were being taken off wells of depravity and hastily put back.'
²⁷
This latter echoes Tynan's own comment on
Towards Zero
, when he noted that ‘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.' Perhaps offering the glimpses of ‘wells of depravity' in humanity, as represented in a more forthright manner by Laurence Steene in
A Daughter's a Daughter
, comes closer to the playwright's real concerns than playing a game of Cluedo with the audience.

If Christie herself continued to harbour aspirations to ‘climb into a higher dramatic bracket', her producer evidently didn't.
Saunders' marketing strategy was relentless in driving home the message that
The Unexpected Guest
was indeed ‘standard Agatha Christie' and would not disappoint whodunit fans in the way that
Verdict
had. The production's publicity leaflet deliberately ran with a selection of quotes from the press underlining the fact that the Thriller Queen was back on form:

‘The impact is tremendous . . . when the murder seems solved, all the ends tied up and you are groping for your hat, Miss Christie pulls her almighty knock-out punch. From a dazed, horizontal position I admit her complete victory.' (
Evening News
)

‘Agatha Christie is back with a bang . . . a really well-tangled whodunit.' (
The People
)

‘It's Okay this time, Agatha!' (Herbert Kretzmer,
Daily Sketch
)

‘Whodunnit? You won't guess.' (
Sunday Pictorial
)

‘You will be kept guessing to the end.' (Harold Hobson,
Sunday Times
)

‘This one is authentic Agatha.' (
News of the World
)

‘Mrs Christie has us all groping in another little fog, mental this time, as we try to find out who did kill Richard Warwick.' (
Daily Telegraph
)

‘Agatha hears the applause again.' (
Daily Mail
)

‘I was completely baffled.' (
News Chronicle
)

‘It kept the audience in a state of stunned uncertainty, guessing wrongly to the last.' (
Manchester Guardian
)

‘Gasping at the final adroit twist sent me home grumbling “Fooled again”.' (
The Star
)

‘Agatha Christie is back with a success.' (
Daily Herald
)

‘You will never guess who did the murder.' (
Sunday Empire News
)
²⁸

Amongst those joining in the guessing game was the Queen, who made her now traditional visit to the latest Christie play, accompanied by fellow Christie fans Lord and Lady Mountbatten.
On the night they visited in February 1959 further drama was added to proceedings when nineteen-year-old Christopher Sandford, playing Jan, was taken ill and replaced in at the interval by twenty-eight-year-old company manager and understudy Peter Fox.