Murder on the Stage

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

Devonshire Park Theatre, 1996

The Queen of Crime

Murder, She Wrote

At the height of her fame as a crime novelist and stage thriller writer, Agatha Christie found herself guest of honour at a writers’ conference. During a lull in the proceedings one of the delegates turned to his neighbour, the wife of a local dignitary, and offered the following soupçon of small talk: “I once acted in Murder in the Cathedral,” he murmured. “Ah yes,” his neighbour replied. “That would have been one of Agatha’s…”

It was an easy mistake to make, but in fact the word ‘murder’ appears in only three of the titles of the seventeen plays Agatha Christie wrote. She obviously didn’t want – or indeed, need – to overdo it. As imaginative in her titles as she was in her plots, her name on the poster was enough to promise that the play, whatever it was called, would deliver all that her fans expected.

At least, most of the time it did. Her second effort, Akhnaton, derived from her interest in Ancient Egypt and tells of the eponymous Pharaoh’s attempt to banish the priesthood and enforce the worship of a single deity. And not a corpse in sight. Obviously a labour of love rather than an exercise in theatrical practicality, Akhnaton requires nine sets and a cast of 22, not to mention a facsimile of the ‘famous bust of Queen Nefertiti’. Hardly surprising that even now the play has yet to enjoy a major professional production.

She had been a novelist for ten years before she wrote her first stage play. Black Coffee, which appeared in 1930, was not, however, the first Christie story to be seen on stage. Two years before, Michael Morton had turned The Murder of Roger Ackroyd into Alibi, starring Charles Laughton as Poirot (“entirely unlike him, but a wonderful actor”, was the authoress’s terse judgement). It is generally thought that Christie’s dissatisfaction with the result led her to try her hand at playwriting herself.

Poirot Without the Belgian

The failure of Akhnaton in 1937 urged her back onto more familiar territory. Just before the war she had published one of her most famous books, which was to become the source of her next adaptation for the stage. (In Britain its original title quickly became the less contentious Ten Little Indians while in America it was called And Then There Were None from the start.) If the book was a technical triumph, it can only have been even more difficult to bring off on stage as the cast was gradually whittled down, as it were, towards zero. But bring it off she did and the play has proved effective ever since. (One small proof of this is that my own mother went to see a production of it in the mid-fifties while she was pregnant with my older brother. Apparently at one point one of the characters dropped a tea tray full of crockery. My mother told me it’s a miracle my older brother isn’t even older…)

Appointment With Death, another Poirot mystery set in the Middle East, came out in book form in 1938 and at the time Christie commented to an interviewer, “Why why why did I ever invent this detestable, bombastic, tiresome little creature?”. When she came to write the stage version seven years later, she experimented by deleting Poirot altogether and, since that seemed to work, she did it again the following year in Murder on the Nile. Poirot, in fact, was never to appear in a Christie-penned stage play. It seems the authoress felt he was simply too overwhelming a personality, his dazzle eclipsing the other characters and unbalancing the plot. After the 1951 adaptation of The Hollow she even went so far as to suggest that the original story would have worked better without the Belgian sleuth.

Queen Mary and The Mousetrap

The fifties marked the golden era of Christie’s writing for the stage, as they produced not only arguably her best thriller (Witness for the Prosecution), but also her most resilient – indeed, the longest-running play in the history of the world. The story of the phenomenon that became The Mousetrap began in 1947 when the BBC asked Queen Mary how they might best honour her birthday. The Queen decided she would like a new radio play by Agatha Christie. Three Blind Mice was the result which, when shown in its full-length stage version to the impresario Peter Saunders, was a ten-character, two-set piece. Too expensive, Saunders decided. But Christie had learnt a thing or two from Akhnaton, and within days she was able to offer the producer a second draft, now minus two of the characters and confining the action to a single room, the now legendary Great Hall of Monkswell Manor.

Richard Attenborough and his wife Sheila Sim were among the original cast which opened on 25 November 1952 at The Ambassadors. The actor left after eighteen months to concentrate on film work, but Saunders, seeing this as an opportunity rather than a setback, drew on his publicity experience to keep the bandwagon rolling. As the years went by, he ensured that each anniversary was marked by a lavish party. At the thousandth performance every member of the audience got a free silk programme. The millionth visitor was showered with gifts. Forty-four years on, nearly nine million people have now seen the show in London alone. It has been translated into 24 languages and performed in 44 different countries.

Witness for the Prosecution the following year was adapted from a short story of 1935 and Agatha Christie thought this her best play. Others agreed. Before The Mousetrap had a chance to make a nonsense of all the record books, Witness received 468 performances in London and 646 in New York, where it also won the Drama Critics’ Circle Award from Best Foreign Play of 1953.

Swansong

Christie’s next three plays were original stage works. Spider’s Web was written for Margaret Lockwood who wanted to escape the wicked woman pigeonhole her recent film roles had shoved her into. A light-hearted comedy thriller about a diplomat’s wife who stumbles across a most inconvenient body in the library, Spider’s Web ran for 774 performances in London, achieving for the authoress the rare feat of having three plays running simultaneously in the West End.

Verdict followed, but was much less successful. Although murder comes into the plot, the theme of the play is more abstract, exploring the theory that an idealist is always dangerous. The play’s fortunes were hardly helped on the first night when a mistaken lighting cue led to the final curtain coming down forty seconds early, thereby ruining the surprise ending. A disappointment, then, but within a few months of its closure, Christie had come up with a far more satisfying successor. The murder victim in The Unexpected Guest was ostensibly based on the writer’s brother, and the message this time was “seeing not believing”. It opened in August 1958 and ran for eighteen highly lucrative months.

It was to be Christie’s stage swansong. In her final three outings as a playwright she never quite hit the thrilling heights she had achieved at her best. Go Back for Murder in 1960 was an adaptation of the Poirot novel Five Little Pigs with the Belgian detective replaced on this occasion by a young solicitor. Some felt its use of flashback was over-complicated and it only lasted 31 performances. Rule of Three in 1962 was a trilogy of one-act plays which met with mixed reviews, and Fiddlers Three ten years later was a powderpuff crime caper that never even made it to London.

Good Honest Enjoyment

During her lifetime a further five books were adapted by other hands. In 1936, Frank Vosper turned the short story Philomel Cottage into Love from a Stranger. In the early years of the war Arnold Ridley (who had written the classic comedy thriller The Ghost Train and who, several decades later, would star as Private Godfrey in Dad’s Army), adapted Christie’s 1932 novel Peril at End House. Poirot on this occasion survived into the stage version in the imposing shape of Francis L Sullivan. In 1949 Murder at the Vicarage was adapted by Moie Charles and Barbara Toy, with Barbara Mullen as Miss Marple, and Towards Zero by Gerald Verner in 1956 achieved notoriety when a sour critic ended his review by naming the murderer – foul play indeed.

Two further stage adaptations of Christie works saw the light of day after her death: A Murder is Announced in 1977 had Dulcie Gray donning the sensible cardigan of St Mary Mead’s famous investigator, and four years later the same adapter, Leslie Darbon, dealt us Cards on the Table.

There are any number of reasons why Agatha Christie continues to be as popular on stage as she is on the page, but surely the basic one is that she provides good honest entertainment. She puts action before character, and if the dialogue is rarely more than functional it is because anything more complex would distract from the matter at hand, and that is the crime and its satisfactory solution. It matters little that the cast is always the same or that the settings are interchangeable; what comes across is not just the consummate skill of the writer, but also her own enjoyment in the exercise of her craft. “I find that writing plays is much more fun than writing books,” she once said. “For one thing you need not worry about those long descriptions of places and people. And you must write quickly if only to keep the mood while it lasts, and to keep the dialogue flowing naturally.”

She may not have written Murder in the Cathedral but, when it comes to the ingenious working out of a complicated murder plot, the Queen of Crime could certainly teach TS Eliot a thing or two!

PS

Given how long ago this was written, you would today almost need to multiply the record-breaking audience numbers and the length of the run of The Mousetrap by a factor of two to get anywhere near the true figures, that’s how phenomenal the piece was and still, happily, is.

In the original programme, this article was interspersed with various stills from ancient productions of the plays, illustrating Christie’s own theme of frequent dissatisfaction with the look of the actors hired to portray her characters. One picture, for instance, shows a dead body slumped over a desk with a knife in its back, being looked down upon by a slender but vaguely familiar figure. The caption reads: ‘Charles Laughton was 26 when he first portrayed Hercule Poirot on stage in Alibi (1928). He later starred in Billy Wilder’s 1957 film version of Witness for the Prosecution.’ Another shows the gentle and self-effacing Janet from the Dr Finlay’s Casebook TV series (the original one from the 1960s with Bill Simpson and Andrew Cruickshank, not the ’90s remake with David Rintoul and Ian Bannen) and is captioned, ‘Barbara Mullen as Jane Marple in Murder at the Vicarage (1949). Christie rarely describes her characters in much physical detail, but Miss Marple was categorically tall with masses of fluffy white hair… On stage it is obviously the manner that matters more than the look.’

It is certainly the case that readers develop their own mental image of a character and largely judge the success or failure of a stage or screen portrayal based on how closely the actor physically conforms to that image. Agatha Christie frequently declared herself bewildered and frustrated with the physically impressive men like Peter Ustinov and Albert Finney who were constantly being cast as her delicate little Belgian detective, which is why, one suspects, she would have been delighted with David Suchet’s eventual incarnation. In the same way, while Joan Hickson may not have the spareness and height of Christie’s own image of Jane Marple, in manner and quiet perception her performance of the part on TV is probably the best we are ever likely to get. (Indeed, having once seen the incomparable Ms Hickson in another play, the author told her she would one day like to see her take on the part of her lady sleuth. It wasn’t until she was 78 that the actor first took up the knitting needles in earnest.

And finally a small cultural note – the word ‘authoress’ is used throughout to refer to the esteemed subject of this piece. That was what we still called female writers in the 1990s. I make no apology for reproducing that usage here, as to wokely edit myself retroactively in order to look more PC than I was, would be dishonest. As it happens, I still find it odd when female performers refer to themselves as actors, but like colour-blind casting, I suppose that’s just the way we do things now, so there’s no point making a fuss about it.