Curtain Up (66 page)

With Christie apparently writing successful ‘whodunits' to order again, the question now arose as to whether to attempt a large-scale production of
The Unexpected Guest
in America, or to hold back in order to protect the brand, as had been the case with
The Mousetrap
and
Spider's Web
. The play itself did not fall into the more melodramatic category of Christie's work that appeared to find favour on Broadway.
Ten Little Indians
and
Witness for the Prosecution
are both exceptional works of high drama; but the (at least on the face of it) ‘by the book' English country house setting and police procedural format of
The Unexpected Guest
seemed in danger of predestining it to the same ‘lost in translation' fate as had befallen
The Suspects
. And it has to be said that American producers were not exactly falling over themselves to sign up the new play, as they had been only five years earlier with Christie's extraordinary courtroom drama.

The careful strategy according to which the release of Christie's dramatic work in America was organised also suffered a sad setback when Harold Ober, her tireless American agent, died of a heart attack in New York in 1959 at the age of seventy-eight. Edmund Cork's ally and co-conspirator in the tactful management of Christie's hugely complex business affairs was indeed a sad loss. His witty and perceptive correspondence with Cork offers an invaluable insight into the challenges faced by those responsible for licensing Christie's intellectual property on both sides of the Atlantic, particularly in the context of the ascendancy of television as the dominant medium. The two men shared a healthy cynicism about the realities of staging theatrical productions and the people responsible for doing so, and whilst in hindsight some of their strategies may appear to have been naïve or ill-informed there can be no doubt about their absolute integrity in attempting to safeguard the long-term interests of their client. Ober himself had an excellent under
standing of the extraordinary contractual complexities of American theatrical production and of how to deal with colourful personalities like the Shuberts and Gilbert Miller, and his advice on these matters, when Cork and Saunders chose to take it, was invariably accurate. Harold Ober's successor as president of the agency which he had founded in 1929 was the formidable Dorothy Olding, who had been with the company for twenty-one years. She already enjoyed a good working relationship with Cork and with Ober's distinguished clients, who as well as Christie included the notoriously reclusive J.D. Salinger and the crime novelist and theatre director Ngaio Marsh, who was also a client of Hughes Massie.

Saunders appears not to have exercised his own American option on
The Unexpected Guest
, although he was quick to secure his share of UK amateur income from this handy, single-set ten-hander, and the ‘acting edition' was published within months by Samuel French.
²⁹
In May 1965, an American licence was eventually issued by Dorothy Olding to Bruce Becker
³⁰
who, with his wife Honey Waldman, had recently renovated the Broadway Theatre in Nyack, New York, and was about to reopen it as the Tappan Zee Playhouse. This enterprising couple were later to found the off-Broadway Bouwerie Lane Theatre, converted from the German Exchange Bank building; but for now
The Unexpected Guest
would be the first play of their opening season at Nyack from 5 to 10 July 1965, following a gala opening with Jack Benny (he who had expressed an interest in
The Mousetrap
a decade previously).

But this was only part of the strategy;
The Unexpected Guest
actually opened at the Town and Country Playhouse in Rochester, New York, on 29 June, and the week at Nyack was to be the second date on a ten-week tour that was evidently intended to prepare it for Broadway. And key to this was the casting of Hollywood legend Joan Fontaine in the role of Laura Warwick. Forty-eight-year-old Fontaine had won the 1942 Best Actress Oscar playing opposite Cary Grant in Hitchcock's
Suspicion
, and had also been nominated for the prize for Hitchcock's
Rebecca
, playing opposite Laurence Olivier, in 1941,
and for Margaret Kennedy and Basil Dean's
The Constant Nymph
in 1944. On paper, at least, she was one of the biggest names to be cast in a Christie role. The
New York Times
announced, ‘
The Unexpected Guest
, a revised version of Agatha Christie's mystery play that ran in London in 1958, may be shown on Broadway with Joan Fontaine in the starring role. The presentation will be made by Bruce Becker, operator of the Tappan Zee Playhouse in Nyack, New York.'
³¹

We know from press reports that the tour was a big success at the box office (it won a gold cup for breaking the attendance record at Westport Country Playhouse
³²
) but for some reason the production never made it to Broadway. The answer as to why may lie in the
Palm Beach Post
's review, headlined ‘An Unexpected Mistake at Grove', which commented: ‘Agatha Christie has written so many books and plays she's bound to make a mistake now and again. One of them,
The Unexpected Guest
, opened last night at the Coconut Grove Playhouse . . . more than 200 million Christie murder mysteries have been sold, so the 74-year-old writer doesn't really need this play to add to her reputation.'
³³

How much the critic's intense dislike of the play was down to yet another ‘revised' American version of Christie's work we will never know, but he had no problem with Fontaine's performance, saying that she ‘did a fine job, all things considered . . . That's the main redeeming feature of the play – looking at Miss Fontaine. I'm not sure just how old she is, but she's still a doll.' If this was indicative of the overall critical response, then there was clearly no basis on which to take the gamble of Broadway and, having cleaned up at the box office on the touring circuit, the producers took the no doubt wise decision to quit while they were ahead.

It must also be remembered that Fontaine, though not yet fifty, had all but quit her Hollywood career and was no stranger to lending her name to dinner theatre and out-of-town productions. Her only Broadway experience consisted of taking over from Deborah Kerr in the hit
Tea and Sympathy
in 1954 and she would later appear, again as a take-over, in the long-running
Forty Carats
. Such are the vagaries of show business that the Hollywood legend seems to have been good novelty billing for boosting dinner theatre and touring box office revenues, but perhaps simply not regarded as a sufficient stage heavyweight to sustain a Broadway opening in her own right. Or maybe she just preferred it that way, having left Hollywood for New York, she claimed, when they tried to cast her as Elvis Presley's mother.
³⁴
As well as various TV appearances, Fontaine went on to tour regularly in
Dial M for Murder
and, in the summer of 1967, played Clarissa in a tour of Christie's
Spider's Web
(no doubt in a ‘revised' version) seven years before its off-off-Broadway New York premiere.

Although it never played Broadway,
The Unexpected Guest
's numerous international productions included a notable Parisian staging in 1968, adapted by French playwright Robert Thomas, whose
Trap for a Lonely Man
had enjoyed a successful run at the Savoy in 1963. Less happily, in 1999
The Unexpected Guest
was the second of three original Christie plays to be ‘novelised' by Charles Osborne;
Black Coffee
(1997) and
Spider's Web
(2000) were similarly adapted. I readily acknowledge that Osborne's 1982 book
The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie
made a significant contribution to her readers' appreciation of Christie's work as a playwright, but to me the idea of turning her original stage plays into novels seems to be a curiously retrograde step. At least
Verdict
was spared.

On 8 January 1960, Saunders optioned Christie's latest play,
Go Back for Murder
;
³⁵
and, with the next one in the bag, he closed
The Unexpected Guest
on 30 January.
Go Back for Murder
opened its short pre-West End tour in Edinburgh three weeks later. Saunders, who had perhaps been lulled into a false sense of security by
The Unexpected Guest
, and maybe by the fact that the title of the new piece contained the word ‘murder', had booked the Duchess Theatre for a 23 March opening. The Duchess had provided a happy home for
The Unexpected Guest
, and had also hosted two other successes for Saunders; William Douglas Home's
The Manor at Northstead
and Ronald Millar's
The Bride and the Bachelor
. Now that the Christie stage thriller production line appeared to have overcome its brief malfunction, the Duchess had evidently been earmarked as a regular home for her work. But if Saunders had been expecting another detective yarn to keep the Queen of Crime's seemingly insatiable whodunit fans happy, he should perhaps have paid a little more attention to her chosen subject matter.

Go Back for Murder
(the only play Christie ever wrote with the word ‘murder' in the title) is based on her novel
Five Little Pigs
, originally serialised as
Murder in Retrospect
in the American magazine
Colliers Weekly
in 1941, and first published by Dodd, Mead & Co. in America the following year. Christie herself had not adapted a play from one of her novels since 1951's
The Hollow
had finally laid to rest the memories of her struggles in the 1940s with
Hidden Horizon
,
Towards Zero
and
Appointment with Death
. Having enjoyed in the interim four major successes with plays that did not use her novels as their source material, this seemed like an odd moment to return to a formula where her hands were tied by the logistics of the adaptation process. It also seems perverse that she should have specifically chosen one of five titles that she had highlighted to Cork in 1950 (when discussing the folly of adapting
Towards Zero
) as being unsuitable for adaptation as stage thrillers.
³⁶
But that list, of course, had also included
The Hollow
, a challenge to which she had successfully risen. And, as
Ten Little Niggers
had amply demonstrated, if there was one thing that Agatha Christie, playwright, enjoyed it was a challenge.

Like other works of the period which Christie adapted for the stage (1937's
Death on The Nile
, 1944's
Towards Zero
and 1946's
The Hollow
),
Five Little Pigs
presents us with a man who finds himself under the same roof as both his new and old loves: a scenario which proves the catalyst for murder. In this case, the artist Amyas Crale is working on a portrait of his mistress Elsa, in the presence of his wife, Caroline. But who in the household put the poison in his beer? On stage, this question keeps the audience's eyes glued on the drink in question in the same way that they try to spot who is tampering with
those ten notorious little figurines. But it is not the premise of the plot that fascinated Agatha so much as the unusual narrative structure by which the book delivers it. The action actually starts sixteen years after these events. Amyas and Caroline's daughter, Carla, is attempting to clear the name of her mother, who died in prison having been convicted of her father's murder. She enlists Poirot to interview five potential witnesses (the ‘five little pigs' of the title), and he obtains both verbal and written accounts from them giving their own differing recollections of the circumstances leading up to the murder, and of the event itself. Simply by comparing these accounts, Poirot is eventually able to ascertain the truth of the matter.

At the centre of Christie's narrative premise is the critical legal conundrum of how far it is possible to ascertain the accuracy of personal testimony. Every individual's view of events is clouded by their own perception and prejudices and, in this case, also by the distance of time. Christie's contention here is that it is by identifying the very contradictions and inconsistencies in different individuals' recollections of events that the truth can be ascertained; and it is this that becomes Poirot's fascinating challenge. As a literary experiment this is ingenious; and it is deeply satisfying for the detective novel reader, who can work alongside Poirot to piece it all together by analysing the characters' various written and verbal communications. Like
Ten Little Niggers
, it is a masterpiece of narrative construction of the sort on which Christie's reputation as a novelist was based. As the basis for a piece of theatre, though, the problems it presents would appear to be well-nigh insurmountable; particularly if the first thing you do is to cut the character of Poirot. But I have no doubt that this is precisely why she took it on; and the solutions she provides are ingenious and, in terms of stagecraft at least, show Christie at the top of her game.

At the age of sixty-nine, Christie, buoyed up by her West End success, had set herself arguably the biggest challenge of her playwriting career. Like her fellow beneficiary of the People's Entertainment Society, J.B. Priestley, she had always
been fascinated by the dramatic potential of the concept of time but, while ‘murder in retrospect' had become a recurring theme in her novels, it was not something that she had ever achieved on stage. The unperformed
Someone at the Window
presents us with a substantial sequence in which we see a number of the same characters in flashback, and the ‘alternative ending' to
Hidden Horizon
would have to some extent replicated the denouement of Priestley's 1932 play
Dangerous Corner
. Now, Christie was to produce a work which would push director, designer and actors to their limits but which, if successfully delivered, should have created an astonishing
coup de théâtre
.