Curtain Up (72 page)

The problem with the 1962 London presentation, however, was not so much the play's title as the universal critical condemnation with which the production itself was met, although the former may well have informed the latter by firmly positioning the piece as a product of a bygone theatrical era, and it is perhaps instructive to consider in this context Christie's own concern about whether the play ‘dates'. The director of this unfortunate enterprise, which closed after twenty-six performances, was none other than Wallace Douglas. Perhaps his alignment with a rival management was by way of protest at being overlooked by Saunders for Christie's plays since
Spider's Web
, but in any event the result comprehensively put paid to his successful association with Christie's stage work.

By contrast, the critical response to the second tour of Christie's latest work was initially encouraging.
The Stage
's regional reviewer remarked:

Agatha Christie's trio of plays,
Rule of Three
, with some rewriting since they were tried out in the North and at Oxford last year, are now running for a week at the Grand Wolverhampton as the start of a pre-London tour. Miss Christie brings to the horror piece, The Rats, a highly ingenious plot, and to the whodunnit piece, The Patient, an electronic machine that enables an almost completely paralysed woman to answer questions. The author has to establish the basic situation so quickly that more than usual concentration is required to follow her. Miss a couple of words and one is done for: but Christie addicts are not likely to do this. In these plays it is often at her least typical that Miss Christie scores best.
⁸⁶

Of
An Afternoon at the Seaside
, he felt that its ‘comedy is very much in the usual run but is served up most professionally and it is in this play that the director, Hubert Gregg, can make his stamp more obvious. The acting fulfils the requirements of the author.'

But Saunders was to have less luck with one of the leading national critics of the day. His files relating to
Rule of Three
include an entertaining exchange with Bernard Levin, who had recently moved from his job as theatre critic of the
Daily Express
to fulfil the same role at the
Daily Mail
.

In November 1962 Levin wrote to Saunders objecting to a leaflet advertising the forthcoming West End run of the production. Although the leaflet itself made it clear that all the glowing reviews quoted on it were from ‘provincial' newspapers (in fact, from the previous year's tour), it included one from the
Mail
's Northern edition calling the plays ‘vintage Christie' and credited simply ‘Daily Mail'.
⁸⁷
Levin felt this implied that the review was his, and pointed out that the protocol whereby national critics did not attend ‘out of town' performances should work both ways, and that producers should not quote reviews from national newspapers prior to a West End opening. Saunders responded that, in his opinion, he was entitled to quote a review from the Northern edition in this context, but that he would in future clarify that this was the case.

This, of course, did little to satisfy Levin, and Saunders eventually agreed to stop using the quote in question. For all Saunders' efforts to please him, Levin, who had mercilessly attacked the revival of
Ten Little Niggers
in verse, gave
Rule of Three
a bad review as well. A few days later, Saunders wrote to fellow theatre-owner Leslie Macdonnell, managing director of Moss Empires, expressing his outrage that Levin had eaten sandwiches throughout ‘The Rats' and had been absent from his seat for much of the rest of the evening. Saunders told Macdonnell that there was no point in the theatre managements complaining to the
Mail
about their critic's behaviour, as ‘the more fuss one makes of Levin the more likely they are to keep him on',
⁸⁸
but asked if there was anything that could be done
to ensure that Levin ‘sees shows that he criticizes through from beginning to end, and that he doesn't behave like a peasant'. Despite all this, as Saunders makes clear in his book, he, along with most other producers at the time, actually had a sneaking admiration for Levin and the publicity he brought to theatre through his forthright critical style.

Levin was by no means the only national critic to dislike
Rule of Three
, and the now traditional critical drubbing of Agatha Christie's stage work was pretty well universal. Once again,
The Stage
's London reviewer proved much harder to please than his regional counterpart:

Not much need be said about
Rule of Three
. The first play is a Grand Guignol in which a couple of lovers are trapped in a Hampstead flat by a homosexual who has lured them there . . . Afternoon at the Seaside is the sort of thing one saw in West End revue years ago – fun at the expense of ‘ordinary' people on holiday. But in revue we would have a sketch of five or seven minutes. . . . the Patient is the feeblest of the plays . . . the play creaks and pants through stuff that would be laughable if it were not so depressing. . . . Hubert Gregg has obviously put a lot of work into his direction. The players all work extremely hard. Alas, they are defeated.
⁸⁹

The
Guardian
's Philip Hope-Wallace, who was no fan of Agatha Christie, commented that ‘These Grand Guignol playlets may be feebly popular . . . but judged by the standards obtaining for the authoress of
Witness for the Prosecution
I fear I must call them cheap, coarse, obvious and forced.'
⁹⁰
Under the headline ‘LOOSE ENDS IN TRIPLE BILL – NAÏVE EVENING WITH AGATHA CHRISTIE', the
Times
critic wrote:

As the talents of short story writer and novelist often do not go hand in hand, so the successful writer of one-act plays quite frequently fails with a full length play. And vice versa of course, as the new Agatha Christie programme demonstrates. Although the advertisements describe it as ‘Agatha
Christie's latest play', it is in fact a bill of three plays, two dramatic and one comic sandwiched in between . . . In short, it is a harmless, naïve evening . . . it will probably appeal to amateurs and to the less demanding reps, but it is hardly, one would have thought, a probable addition to West End entertainments. Unfortunately, the actors do little to change one's opinion on this score . . .
⁹¹

Kenneth Tynan, back from his sojourn in New York and now firmly established as an advocate of the theatrical ‘new wave', finally seems to have run out of patience with Christie on stage.
Rule of Three
, he wrote in the
Observer
, is ‘a trio of playlets devoted, like the rest of her work, to whetting one's appetite for retribution. . . . the writing is banal, the titillation unthrilling, and the implied view of life suggestive of Broadstairs in the Baldwin epoch.'
⁹²
Next to his review, Tynan pays tribute to Charles Laughton, who had died a few days previously. Laughton, he said, was ‘exorbitant, overweening and unskilled in the humility of teamwork, but a prodigious orator, a man of voluminous mind, and a master of showmanship, who bestowed on the science of scene-stealing a unique dimension of kleptomania. Even those he robbed will mourn him.'
⁹³

The Broadstairs/Baldwin comment presumably refers specifically to
An Afternoon at the Seaside
, and is hardly a criticism. Christie specifies that the ‘time' setting of the play is simply ‘a summer afternoon'; when she wants to set her plays in ‘the present' she does so. Although the ‘daring bikini' worn by ‘The Beauty' tells us that we are very much in the 1960s, the whole piece is a deliberately constructed stylistic exercise in nostalgia for an era that if it is not Baldwin's may be even earlier. The tragedy is that, to read Tynan and many of the other critics, one would get the impression that Christie was just an old lady of seventy-two whose portrayal of contemporary Britain was pitifully out of date. Gregg, in his book, treats us to several pages about his genius in taking his cue for the play from ‘naughty seaside postcards', and his consequent directorial and textual embellishments of a scene where a lady gets changed from her
swimming costume under a towel whilst attempting to preserve her modesty. In fairness, this routine (as delivered by Patricia Heneghan in the first tour and Betty McDowall in the West End) does appear to have brought the house down, but Gregg notes that whilst he had seen the play as the theatrical equivalent of a naughty seaside postcard, ‘I don't think Agatha had. She didn't complain at the result but she didn't thank me.'
⁹⁴

The postcards he refers to were presumably those of Donald McGill, whose hugely popular saucy cartoons, with their classic double entendres, enjoyed their heyday in the 1930s and 1940s. Extraordinarily, in 1954 at the age of seventy-nine, McGill had been tried and found guilty of publishing obscene images, and a number of his works had been banned. He died two months before
An Afternoon at the Seaside
reached the West End. Whilst the play undoubtedly lends itself to this interpretation, it presents it in a context which, I suspect, was not intended and, in doing so, arguably coarsens it. Christie's ‘alternative ending' for the play, with its ‘Harlequinade atmosphere', includes this delightful moment:

       
SOMERS: I don't look like a burglar, do I?

(suddenly flings off coat and begins springing about, turning handsprings)

       
GEORGE: (alarmed) Stop it – stop it, you Clown! Have you gone mad?

       
SOMERS: I feel a bit mad. It's the moonlight. Relax, you old Pantaloon.

       
GEORGE: What do you think this is? A Pantomime? The silent young lovers. Me, Pantaloon. You playing the Clown. All we need now is a comic policeman.
⁹⁵

Needless to say, they get one.

Philip Hope-Wallace had found the playlet ‘vulgar and patronising'. As directed by Gregg it may well have been, but Christie seems have found her own inspiration for the piece in a much older comic tradition than 1940s McGill.

The
Telegraph
's critic appears to have been pretty much
alone in finding something to enjoy in
Rule of Three
, and the advertisements for the production subsequently quoted a line from his review, ‘Three thrilling denouements for the price of one.' ‘What a spiteful lot critics are,' concluded Christie in a letter to Cork,
⁹⁶
pointing out that, contrary to the assertion in one review that she was ‘quite out of touch with today's beach life' she was, in fact, ‘an AUTHORITY', as a result of regular trips to Devon beaches with young relatives.

To make matters worse, in January 1963, in a round-up of the previous theatrical year, the
Financial Times
upset Saunders by claiming that
Rule of Three
had ‘only just struggled into the New Year'.
⁹⁷
Never one to countenance misreporting, Saunders took up the matter of this ‘most damaging' article with the paper's editor, claiming that
Rule of Three
was in the best of health and stating that he hoped the journalist concerned would have the ‘grace to blush' when the production celebrated its first anniversary.
⁹⁸

The
Financial Times
article in question actually offers a fascinating snapshot of London theatre at that time. Business in 1962, we are told, had suffered because ‘Over the Cuba crisis, theatre-goers stayed at home listening to the news, while the economic gloom has been accurately reflected in the barometer of theatre attendances.' Nonetheless
My Fair Lady
and
Beyond the Fringe
had both returned a substantial profit. The Royal Shakespeare Company, which had been founded in 1961, was presenting
King Lear
at the Aldwych, and there were high hopes for the National Theatre, which was due to present its inaugural season at the Old Vic later in 1963. A list of theatrical hits that had opened in 1962 and were still running in January 1963 included
Signpost to Murder
,
Boeing-Boeing
,
Come Blow Your Horn
,
Blitz!
,
The Private Ear and the Public Eye
and Arnold Wesker's
Chips with Everything
, ‘the only play to come out of the Kitchen Sink revolution' to have been a success that year. The corresponding list of the previous year's flops of course now included
Ten Little Niggers
, which was thereby humiliatingly demoted from its previous status as a West End hit.

Much of Saunders' own optimism hinged on the fact that he had clinched a deal with the BBC for a live television broadcast of
An Afternoon at the Seaside
(or ‘A Day by the Seaside' as it was referred to on the licence) which was due to take place on 7 February. The BBC paid Christie £75 for the broadcast rights, of which Saunders was entitled to keep a third.
⁹⁹
Saunders and Cork had high hopes that this exposure would revive the production's fortunes but, according to Saunders, although ‘it seemed to televise beautifully' it ‘had absolutely no effect on the box office whatsoever'.
¹⁰⁰
Writing to Anthony Hicks on 12 February, Cork said that the broadcast ‘made me laugh . . . but, alas, the box office has not responded.'
¹⁰¹

Rule of Three
closed on 9 March after a run of ninety-two performances over eleven and a half weeks, so the
Financial Times
' reporter, as it turned out, had no need to blush. I have not seen budgets or accounts, but the financial outcome cannot have been good. ‘I felt dreadfully responsible over this one . . . I don't think I have ever fought so hard for a play,' says Saunders. And the production's failure, of course, meant that he was also facing the expensive prospect, as a theatre owner, of seeing the Duchess go ‘dark'.
Rule of Three
eventually staggered on until a replacement could be found: a ‘new revue' called
See You Inside
. It may have been some consolation to Saunders that, two weeks later,
Goodnight Mrs Puffin
closed at the Duke of York's.