Curtain Up (73 page)

The Times
' summation that
Rule of Three
was likely to find a home with amateur and repertory companies proved remarkably prescient. Saunders had no hesitation in paying an advance of £200 to take up his 50 per cent share of Christie's income from amateur rights for the seven-year duration of his licence, and the three plays were rushed into print by Samuel French, published separately under their own titles. In May 1963 Hughes Massie took an advertisement in
The Stage
announcing that they were ‘available for repertory', the author's royalty being 4 per cent for each play or 10 per cent if the three were presented together.
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As it turned out, they did indeed end up as three plays for the price of one, although not in the way
that the publicity had originally intended. As a business strategy for these particular works, it wasn't a bad one – but it was a sad West End finale for the playwright who, less than ten years before, had been the toast of London and Broadway.

It should not be forgotten, though, that none of the three plays was presented as Christie herself had originally envisaged. By the time the production reached the West End, the Grand Guignol ‘before your very eyes' stabbing and the implied suicide, which she had seen as the centrepiece and the denouement of
The Rats
, had been cut completely; and her unique ending for
The Patient
had been replaced with something far more conventional, eventually scribbled by her on some small sheets of hotel notepaper at the start of the second tour in Wolverhampton. And
An Afternoon at the Seaside
, which seems likely to have taken its cue from the revues of the 1920s, had been reinterpreted as a naughty postcard, complete with a line added by Gregg for a lady complaining that there was sand in her bra. As was so often the case, Christie's own theatrical imagination displayed a far more intriguing frame of reference than that of those responsible for delivering her work. Christie had written ‘The Rule of Three Doth Puzzle Me . . . Old Rhyme' on the front page of her script, and the line also appeared on the title page of the play's programme. It certainly puzzled her producer, her director and the critics. I shall leave the last word on
Rule of Three
with Agatha herself; in a 1971 letter to Rosalind she says simply, ‘I wrote the three short plays entirely to please Peter Saunders but I didn't enjoy them – and they were not really successful.'
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Rule of Three
was the last occasion on which Peter Saunders premiered a play by Agatha Christie. There can be no doubt that she owed her theatrical success in the early 1950s very largely to Saunders' diligence, honesty and perspicacity; he was a tireless and resourceful ambassador for her plays, a charming, witty and skilful business ally and a loyal and valued friend. But, as an independent theatre producer launching his career in the early 1950s, he faced unprecedented challenges from within the industry, which he overcame to a large extent
by characterising Christie's work in a manner that suited his own agenda. For a good deal of the time the playwright and her producer were creative fellow travellers, and when they were they created some of the West End's most legendary successes. But, on the occasions when they were not, the results could be disastrous. Against considerable odds, Saunders successfully maintained his position in a hugely competitive marketplace by defining himself as a purveyor of ‘beer' rather than ‘wine'. Agatha, however, continued to regard playwriting as an activity that allowed for creative experimentation and, right up to the end, she would continue to be full of surprises.

In 1964, when asked by the
Evening Standard
for his views on ‘dirty' plays in the context of Joe Orton's
Entertaining Mr Sloane
, Saunders said, ‘Filth and obscenity have become an unhappy trend in recent years, and if there is to be a place in theatre for this kind of thing, let the Lord Chamberlain issue F for Filth certificates. The public would at least be warned about what they are likely to see.'
¹⁰⁴
Christie's other principal producer held similar views; in an article in
The Stage
two years later, celebrating Bertie Meyer's sixty years in show business, we hear that ‘Mr Meyer prefers plays with a good story, well told, and free from kitchen sink associations' and that he was in favour of the censorship role of the Lord Chamberlain, with whom he had ‘had the happiest of relationships for the past sixty years. His presence lends dignity to the theatre in Mr Meyer's estimation.'
¹⁰⁵
Christie herself believed that theatre should be accessible to people of all ages, and had been delighted to discover that the British Ambassador to India had taken his entire family, aged eleven to seventy-nine, to see
Spider's Web
. In old age, her cherished ambition became to write another comedy for family audiences in the same vein as
Spider's Web
, partly as a deliberate counterpoint to what she saw as current trends.

Comedy had always been one of Christie's strong suits.
Ten Little Indians
had been advertised on Broadway as a ‘comedy thriller' (which would doubtless have horrified Christie had she
known at the time) and there had been much debate during the pre-West End tour of
The Mousetrap
about whether the play's comedy element was at risk of eclipsing its thrills. Her early one-act plays are mostly comedies, and the observational humour and witty dialogue that pervades all of her work are skilfully crafted; Saunders himself had felt that ‘An Afternoon at the Seaside' might have made a good full-length play.
¹⁰⁶
Key to the success of
Spider's Web
had been the casting of Margaret Lockwood, who went on to work for Saunders on several more projects. ‘She was a wonderful person to have in a company,' he writes. ‘She was always punctual, never complained if she was kept hanging around, and rather disconcerted the cast because, having a photographic memory, she used to come to the first rehearsal knowing her lines.'
¹⁰⁷
Spider's Web
had been one of Christie's happiest theatrical experiences, and she envisaged that the new comedy on which she now spent much of her time would be another vehicle for Lockwood, along with her daughter Julia. In 1972 Julia was to become the third wife of Ernest Clark, who had played John Cristow in
The Hollow
and Mr Myers QC in
Witness for the Prosecution
on Broadway.

Amongst the many treatments for the new ‘M and J play' is the following from Notebook 4a, with ‘M' indicating Margaret Lockwood and ‘J' indicating Julia. These brief, intriguing aides-memoires for a work in progress are typical of the gloriously jumbled and frequently indecipherable jottings that fill the 73 volumes of Christie's notebooks:

Spy Trial background Play

M. good-natured landlady – ex actress

Spivy boy Ronnie – soft spot for him

J. comes through window – girl ‘wanted' in bank

robbery (at Worthing)

M. packs her off as Miss Jones – Rumanian student

who is due to arrive –

Other lodgers – one borrows M.'s shopping bag –

‘She's always doing it' – Another – man – has

done his own decorating etc.

Spy ring head waiter with M. as fall guy –

Ron is ‘taken' with Miss I. (J)

End of 1st Act Revealing sentences between J. + R

‘She fell for it like a lamb' Inference is J + R

are the bank robbery ‘Wanteds' –

Act II

Appearing + disappearing papers – a

Murder? – +so on

M. taken off by police for questioning – her shopping

Bag. End of Act – Is it she who is crook?

Act III ends with unmasking of Murderer

Mrs. K(?) or Mr. Lewis (nice New Zealander?)

Or Finkelstein who has set up M. – in business –

really for his own ends –

Denouement – J + R are MI5 Security agents
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An outline for another of these ‘Lockwood' plays,
Miss Perry
, appears in Notebook 53, and there are also a number of ‘work in progress' scripts for it in the Christie archive; most interestingly one that appears to be a first draft typed by Christie herself, with numerous handwritten corrections, annotations and amendments. The dramatis personae in this draft has ‘ML' written next to the role of Poppy and ‘JL' next to that of Miss Perry. There is also a ‘clean' typed version, incorporating the amendments. This copy has timings scribbled next to the scenes (23, 21 and 45 minutes) and has the letter ‘M' next to male characters. The timings, and the clarification about casting, indicate that at some point a reading of the play probably took place. There are three plastic-bound copies of a retyped version, which looks as if it may have been created for such a reading, with a typist's telephone number which indicates that it dates from after 1966. In 2011, Dutch collector Ralf Stultiëns purchased a copy of
Miss Perry
, evidently from a stock of Christie's manuscripts that appear to have been ‘recycled' by a former Hughes Massie employee. From what I have seen of pictures of this, it may be the first draft of the professionally typed version, containing Christie's corrections of the typist's
work. In a television interview, Stultiëns either misstates (or is mistranslated as stating) that the play is ‘about an elf who takes part in a bank robbery'.
¹⁰⁹
This is not actually the case.

A twelve-hander, two-act play,
Miss Perry
is a full-length (but relatively short) piece which reads rather in the style of an episode of a television sitcom. It is set in the fictional village of Saddlebridge, where the residents are organising a pageant under the watchful eye of Poppy, ‘a handsome woman with a vast fund of vitality'. They are using the front room of the Queen of Diamonds pub as their headquarters. A young woman, who introduces herself as Miss Perry, turns up and convinces the local residents that she is a fairy by performing a series of magic tricks, including turning someone into a tortoise and rustling up a live elephant: interesting challenges for a theatre designer. Of course, nothing is quite as it seems. ‘Miss Perry' turns out to be an actress called Tania, and her ‘magic tricks' are part of a plot to expose the criminal activities of a local bigwig and to put right a historic miscarriage of justice, whereby the wrong man was imprisoned for a bank heist.

In the play, Christie enjoys a couple of sideswipes at recent trends in theatre. Here Martin Wylie, the young writer who has been brought in to prepare a script for the pageant, is upbraided by his father:

       
MR WYLIE: Nothing degrading about money, my boy. It's useful. I can use it. Your mother can use it – and I've no doubt in spite of your sentiments that you can use it. You can put on some of those new-fangled plays about a tramp and a drunk and a tart all meeting in a public lavatory . . .
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Martin later recruits Tania to appear in his next play, which is evidently no country house whodunit:

       
TANIA: He says I'm a very good actress. He's writing a play and he thinks I'd be good enough to play the leading part in it. It's a wonderful part – wonderful.

       
POPPY: Not a fairy queen, I presume!

       
TANIA: No indeed! It's a girl in a remand home. She's had two abortions and has tried to be a prostitute. She falls in love with this man, but it's no good. She goes back to fulfilling her real nature. Back to the brothel.

       
POPPY: Well really – (laughs) – you children nowadays!

Another sign of the times is the distinctly Cold War, comically ‘reds-under-the bed' police superintendent, here in conversation with the PC who is assisting him:

       
SUPERINTENDENT: Tania's a Russian name, and for all we know she may be a prominent member of the Communist party.

       
BARNSTABLE: I wouldn't think that's likely, sir. She seems a very nice young lady.

       
SUPERINTENDENT: They catch 'em young, boy. So as to indoctrinate them proper. And naturally she'd seem a nice young lady. Because she's supposed to make converts, see?

And, when Miss Perry magics up a suitcase full of clothes, we hear Christie's view on the latest fashion trends; ‘everything a young lady of today wants,' declares Miss Perry, naming the items as she unpacks them ‘as though it was a foreign language':

       
MISS PERRY: A skirt. A Blouse . . . a play suit? An evening dress. A little black number. That's a funny name! Stockings. Shoes. Panties. And – (frowns) – oh yes, a brassiere . . . a . . .

       
MARTIN: (embarrassed) Stop.

       
WILLIAM: Gorblimey!

       
MISS PERRY: And something – very odd. (holds up jeans)

       
WILLIAM: Jeans.

       
MISS PERRY: Jeans? They are not pretty at all.

Once ‘Miss Perry' becomes Tania we see her quite happily ‘wearing jeans and a sloppy sweater'. Whatever Christie's
personal wardrobe preferences, her female characters were, as ever, moving with the times.

On 22 March 1962, Christie lunched with Margaret Lockwood, an arrangement she apparently made without telling Peter Saunders. The previous day Cork had written to her, ‘We had arranged to have a serious talk with Peter Saunders today, but he has apparently heard from Margaret Lockwood of tomorrow's lunch, and he has suggested that we put off our talk to see if anything transpires tomorrow that might alter the situation.'
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Three weeks later, in a letter that starts with an update on Cork's efforts to track down a particular brand of American maple sugar that Agatha had requested, we find the following intriguing reference to
Miss Perry
: ‘There have been no developments regarding the musical of Miss Perry, but there is nothing sinister in this as it is due to Mr Sekers being in Italy. He wrote me a civil note saying he would be in touch the moment he got back. I daresay you will hear from Peter that he is very excited about this project. I told him about it in general terms, as we and Sekers agreed that it would be treating him rather badly, if after the long and close association we did not give him a chance of coming in on it.'
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