Curtain Up (69 page)

The earliest reference to the project in Christie's papers is in Notebook 3, in a list headed ‘General projects 1955' which also includes ‘The Unexpected Guest'. The relevant note reads,

Three plays (Rule of Three?)

        
1. Accident?

        
2. Rajah's Emerald?

        
3. SOS?
⁵⁷

All three titles were existing Christie short stories, 1929's ‘Accident' having been the subject of Margery Vosper's one-act play,
Tea for Three
, in 1939. Perhaps Christie had considered including Vosper's piece in
Rule of Three
, but it seems more likely that she had simply forgotten that it existed. It may also have been ruled out because it shares a poisoning theme with ‘SOS' (1926). There are quite extensive notes that appear to develop the idea of turning ‘SOS' into a play, but as it features the arrival at a remote house of a stranger whose car has broken down, it may be that she felt the premise was too
similar to that of
The Unexpected Guest
, which she was also developing at the time. Of the three titles, the only one that was pursued is ‘The Rajah's Emerald' (1926), which contains elements that were to appear in the piece eventually known as
An Afternoon at the Seaside
. By Notebook 24 the list of plays has been amended to ‘The Patient', ‘Seaside Holiday' and ‘SOS', and is headed ‘Rule of Three 3 1-act plays for PS', thus acknowledging Saunders' influence on the project.

Rule of Three
(more often referred to in correspondence between Cork, Christie and Saunders as ‘Triple Bill') ended up comprising three short plays:
The Rats
,
An Afternoon at the Seaside
and
The Patient
(performed in that order). In the first play, the titular ‘rats' in a trap are secret lovers Sandra and David, who are lured to a flat whose owners have gone away. There, bizarre and terrifying events unfold in an atmosphere of increasing tension and claustrophobia, as it becomes apparent that they are being framed for the murder of Sandra's husband, John, whose body they find in a chest where he appears to have hidden himself for the purpose of spying on their clandestine activities.

In Christie's original version, their gay acquaintance, Alec, who briefly joins the two lovers in the flat, actually murders the concealed John before their eyes. In the following extraordinary sequence Alec opens the chest in which Sandra's husband is hiding and kills him, without them (or probably most of the audience) noticing. But first, he is at pains to point out that the balcony would offer the perfect opportunity for suicide:

       
ALEC: (goes out through door onto balcony) Perfect for suicide! Five flights and concrete at the bottom. (comes back in and shuts the door. Picks up knife from where David has put it down, holding it rather carefully towards the middle) Now let's see what else we can explore. Nothing very much is there, except the chest. That I believe is what they call a Kuwait Bride Chest. Oh listen, darling, do you think somebody could be hiding inside it? I must see.
(opens lid, leans down inside. He holds the knife in his hand. There is a faint groaning noise masked by Alec's rather high-pitched voice) Delicious embroideries. Do you think the Torrances smuggled all these things through customs? (shuts down lid again) Well, I must say I'm disappointed.
⁵⁸

In the published version, the reference to suicide is recontexualised so as not to be so suggestive of the act, and Alec does not carry out the murder of John on stage, evidently having killed him at some point before Sandra and David's arrival at the deserted flat. In both versions he gets their fingerprints on the murder weapon, an ornamental knife, before departing, although only in the published script does he ‘accidentally' drop the knife over the balcony. Sandra and David discover John's body and, realising that they are locked in the room and are being framed, they argue and their love quickly turns to hate.

By contrast,
An Afternoon at the Seaside
is just what it says on the tin; a delightful observational comedy set in the English resort of ‘Little-Slippyng-on-Sea', it pokes gentle fun at the British on holiday, and is framed in a wafer-thin plot about stolen jewellery. The third play,
The Patient
, is set in a private nursing home, where a paralysed woman is attempting to use a ‘new electrical gadget' to assist with the identification of the person who pushed her off a balcony. The suspects are assembled and eventually the villain is entrapped. The play's conclusion involves the victim's assailant melodramatically stepping out from behind a curtain just as Inspector Cray identifies them by name as the culprit.

On the face of it,
Rule of Three
presents us with three unconnected plays, each in different styles and each with a crime element. But, as with much of Christie's stage work, there is a lot more to it than may at first appear.
The Rats
draws its storyline, of a murdered man concealed in a chest from which he had been spying on his unfaithful wife, from the 1932 Poirot short story ‘The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest'.
First published in the
Strand Magazine
, it was later reworked into the longer ‘The Mystery of the Spanish Chest', published in
Women's Illustrated
in 1960. Christie would have been working on the expanded version, with its references to marital jealousy that draw parallels with
Othello
, at a time when the idea for ‘The Rats' was already well-developed. In the original version of the story, Hastings comments that the events it concerns would make a good plot for a play, and Poirot responds that it has already been done. Poirot could be referring to
Othello
or to the 1928 Patrick Hamilton play,
Rope
, in which party guests are served a buffet from the lid of a trunk containing a dead body. But I suspect that it may in fact be a reference to a short play called
Crime
, which featured in the first London Grand Guignol season at the Little Theatre.
Crime
, which premiered in November 1921, starred Sybil Thorndike and her brother Russell, and was written by her husband Lewis Casson.
⁵⁹
In it, a woman is murdered with a breadknife by an unsavoury pair of characters and her body put in a trunk. Due to circumstances beyond their control, they are forced to remain in the room with their victim, and fall out between themselves. In their nervousness, they eventually give the game away to a third party and the trunk is opened, exposing her horribly mutilated corpse; in the ensuing fracas, one of the killers shoots the other.

The Times
was not impressed, saying that there was ‘not a single thrill' in the piece and that the corpse was ‘an obvious dummy', although the actors ‘make the best of a bad job'.
⁶⁰
But there was to be a real-life twist to the tale; Russell Thorndike, in his book about his sister's work, tells the tale of a rehearsal at which Sybil became trapped inside the trunk, which did not have air holes, and fainted.
⁶¹
All of this – the killing with the knife, the conspirators falling out with each other, the question of air holes – finds resonances in
The Rats
. As Christie's
The Last Séance
demonstrates, she was well aware of the Grand Guignol concept, and we know that she attended a Grand Guignol performance when visiting France with Archie in 1924.
Black Coffee
had played at the Little
Theatre in 1931; and it is more than likely that, if Christie had not actually seen
Crime
ten years earlier, she at least read the reviews and heard the stories about it, and that it is therefore this that Poirot is referring to in ‘The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest' when he says that a play has already been made out of the scenario. By 1961, of course, Christie was a friend of Sybil Thorndike and would have heard all about it first hand. Whatever the origins of its storyline,
The Rats
, particularly in its original version featuring an onstage murder, is clearly an exercise in Grand Guignol and, as such, is Christie's second. A few of the critics picked up on this, and even the censor, in recommending it for licence, refers to it as ‘Quite a good Guignol.'
⁶²

The Grand Guignol programmes had, of course, provided some light relief from the horrors by including short comedy plays of the sort that Christie herself had once written, and even Noël Coward had contributed such a piece to the original London Grand Guignol season. As a concept,
Rule of Three
is not dissimilar to Coward's own collections of short plays,
Tonight at 8.30
, with which he and Gertrude Lawrence enjoyed huge success in 1935–6; and it is also in Coward's work that we can find a direct inspiration for
An Afternoon at the Seaside
. Elements of the setting, and of the plot such as it is, had been borrowed by Christie from her own short story, ‘The Rajah's Emerald', published in 1926 in
Red
magazine; but in theatrical terms the play appears to find its inspiration in a Coward piece written two years later. Coward's 1928 musical revue,
This Year of Grace
, was the show in which his enduringly popular song ‘A Room with a View' first appeared. Produced by Agatha's friend, the impresario C.B. Cochran, it enjoyed successful runs at the London Pavilion and at the Selwyn Theatre (now the American Airlines Theatre) on Broadway.

The Act Two opener was a routine called ‘The Lido Beach' (showing the English upper classes holidaying abroad), followed by ‘The English Lido Beach' (showing the English working-class holiday at home). In the foreground of the first piece there is
‘a row of cabanas with coloured, striped awnings' facing the audience, which are replaced in the second by a row of bathing machines. In Christie's piece, over thirty years later, ‘Three bathing huts face the audience on a rostrum.' After we have observed the upper classes at play in ‘The Lido Beach', the compere announces, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, it has been suggested in several newspapers of late that English seaside resorts hold out fewer attractions to visitors than Continental ones. Any true patriotic Englishman naturally resents this reflection on our national gaiety, and Mr Cochran perhaps more keenly than anyone – so he has determined to prove conclusively once and for all that no holiday resort in the world can equal in charm, gaiety and light-hearted carefree enjoyment an average watering-place on the shores of the English Channel.'
⁶³

What follows is, in spirit, very similar to
An Afternoon at the Seaside
, although considerably shorter and obviously without the ‘crime' element. Coward's piece, of course, also contains musical sequences, although for good measure Christie does specify a chorus of ‘I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside' (‘rather out of tune') as the curtain goes up. There is no direct duplication of dialogue, and Christie puts her own unique stamp on the whole thing, yet
An Afternoon at the Seaside
as a piece of theatre seems likely to have been inspired by an affectionate memory of the
mise en scène
and characters in Coward's ‘The English Lido', a fact which more than one reviewer of Christie's play would make reference to. She may also have been remembering the title of another sketch in
This Year of Grace!
, a spoof of the dramatic style of J. M. Barrie, Frederick Lonsdale and Edgar Wallace called ‘Rules of Three'.

Christie's own
Rule of Three
, with its direct references to Grand Guignol and pre-war revue, is I believe a very specific theatrical exercise; but one that it is possible her younger producer and his team did not fully appreciate. She herself was an enthusiastic and well-informed theatregoer, and we know that she attended the plays of Samuel Beckett alongside those of Terence Rattigan. She would have been fully aware of current
theatrical trends, and when critics found the experience of
Rule of Three
old-fashioned I have no doubt that Christie had deliberately crafted it to be so. But if the staging and marketing of the piece failed to reflect this fact, then inevitably she simply appeared to be out of date.

One of Christie's notes for
The Patient
suggests a number of different endings for the piece, including, intriguingly, ‘Patient is really policewoman – whole thing is rigged'; as it happens, the idea of a policewoman in disguise was eventually to be used in
An Afternoon at the Seaside
. More helpfully than the notebooks, though, in the case of
Rule of Three
the Agatha Christie archive also includes loose-leaf first drafts for each of the three plays. Apparently typed by Agatha herself, they are (inevitably) undated, and are covered in handwritten notes, amendments and corrections. At this stage
The Rats
is a three-hander, without the second female role of Jennifer, and
An Afternoon at the Seaside
(or ‘Beside the Seaside') has an ‘alternative' ending in which the play is split into two scenes; Scene One is set in ‘Late afternoon' and Scene Two ‘Five hours later. Follows immediately. Moonlight. Beach deserted. Harlequinade atmosphere. Distant voice singing Me and My Girl.'
⁶⁴
The singing of ‘Me and My Girl' is, again, evocative of a bygone era, and I particularly like the fact that, after all her intervening theatrical adventures, Christie's mind turns once again to the childhood delights of a Harlequinade.

Although hospital rooms were a favourite Guignol setting, and helpless patients a favourite premise, the plotting of
The Patient
, unlike the other two plays, appears to have no antecedents in Christie's own work. The first draft concludes with the highly original concept that the curtain should come down just as the culprit is about to be revealed, so that the audience never discovers their identity. We hear instead a poem containing a wonderful sideswipe at the critics:

                    
Don't let whodunnit make you mad,