Agatha Christie: A Life in Theatre. Julius Green

Windyford to Dick Lane to Nigel Lawrence, and the story’s murderous husband, Gerald Martin, becomes Gerald Strange and eventually Bruce Lovell. Enid’s female friend Doris West, a character introduced in Christie’s play, becomes Cecily’s friend Mavis Wilson in Vosper’s. Christie’s script keeps the cast to an absolute minimum: Enid Bradshaw, Doris, the two men in Enid’s life and a pessimistic but highly entertaining housekeeper in each of her London and country properties. The two housekeepers, Mrs Huggins and Mrs Birch, each outdo the other in their condemnation of the male sex, and are particularly sorely missed in Vosper’s script, which clumsily introduces a gardener from the original story, and adds a maid, a doctor and an unnecessary comic aunt to the cast list.

      Mrs Huggins is clearly cast from the same mould as Stevens in Eugenia and Eugenics:

      MAVIS: According to you Mrs Huggins, married life is a continuous battle.

      MRS HUGGINS: And so it is, Miss. With one party always defeated. And what I say is this – take care as you’re the winning party from the start!

      She goes on to sing to herself, ‘tunelessly’ and prophetically, ‘It brings you but trouble and danger to listen to Love from a stranger’, thereby giving Vosper the title of his version of the play. When Enid arrives at Philomel Cottage, the idyll is somewhat undermined by the presence of Mrs Birch, who ‘has none of Mrs Huggins’ cheerful pessimism’ and who has discovered that her own husband is a bigamist.

      Since the Hughes Massie correspondence archives relating to Christie’s work do not commence until 1940, quite how or why Christie handed over her script and the credit for it to Vosper, not to mention 50 per cent of the theatrical royalty and film rights income, is unclear. One can imagine, though, that he may have been approached about playing the role of Strange and made his own authorship a condition of his involvement. Like Laughton and Sullivan before him, Vosper evidently saw Christie’s work as a vehicle for advancing his own career, and in engaging with it as such inadvertently conspired to delay and compromise the arrival of an interesting new female playwriting voice.

      Vosper’s option gave him a year to write the piece and get it produced in the West End but, as he neared completion of the script, an unexpected problem arose. Thirty-six-year-old actor/writer Vosper was a friend of thirty-year-old actor/writer Emlyn Williams, who tells the extraordinary story in his autobiography of being invited to dinner at Vosper’s house late in 1935:

      One night we were at Frank Vosper’s house in St John’s Wood. I liked him more and more, for his generous character and for the sensitive talent under the buffoonery. He mentioned that he was in the middle of writing a new play. I mentioned that I was too and he asked me how mine was getting on …

      ‘What’s yours about, or aren’t you telling?

      ‘Oh, it’s another murder play …’

      He looked at me. ‘Really? So’s mine.’

      ‘Oh, really?’

      ‘Based on an Agatha Christie short story.’ That sounded safe.

      ‘A detective play like Alibi?’

      ‘Oh no, not a mystery. I’ve turned it round so I could base it on the Patrick Mahon case.’

      I stared at him. He went on. ‘D’you remember it? He cut the woman up and no-one would believe it, he was such a charmer.’

      I had to say something. ‘Mine’s about a charmer too, who cuts up a woman.’

      It was his turn to stare. ‘Is there a girl who falls for him?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘What are you calling yours?’

      I told him.

      ‘Good title. Mine’s Love From a Stranger.’

      That was a good title too. They were interchangeable. Then he said, ‘Are you by any chance writing a part for yourself?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘So am I. Who d’you have in mind for the girl’s part?’

      ‘A star if possible,’ I said, ‘emotional but with restraint. Edna Best, for instance.’

      ‘I’ve just written asking her if she’ll read my play when it’s finished.’

      Another silence. Then he beamed and added, ‘Just as well we like each other. We need a drink.’¹³

      And so started the astonishing parallel histories of Emlyn Williams’ breakthrough play, Night Must Fall, and Vosper’s Christie adaptation. Perhaps as a result of this conversation, Vosper appears not to have pursued the Patrick Mahon angle. Mahon was a killer notorious for having dismembered his victim in a gruesome 1924 murder case, and although this aspect of the murder in question adds a dramatic frisson to Night Must Fall, it would have been an unnecessary embellishment to Christie’s work. Nonetheless, from their beginnings in Scotland to their eventual Broadway presentations, the two plays continued to dog each other’s progress.

      That both writers should have been in pursuit of zEdna Best to play the female lead in their plays was not surprising. Best had been the talk of the town ten years previously when she appeared alongside Noël Coward (replaced soon after opening by John Gielgud) in Margaret Kennedy’s The Constant Nymph, produced, directed and co-adapted from Kennedy’s novel of adolescent sexuality by Basil Dean. She had previously been part of the regular ReandeaN ensemble, playing Meggie Albanesi’s twin sister in Lilies of the Field in 1923. ‘Two of the most popular young actresses of the day’, according to Dean, although Best, he observed, was ‘always true to the limitation of her own talent’.¹⁴ The fact that in 1935 she chose Vosper’s play rather than Williams’ may have had something to do with the fact that they had worked together the previous year in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much. But although Vosper had secured his leading lady of choice, he himself was not in the cast when the production’s pre-West End tour opened in the spring of 1935. On 17 March the Observer had announced that ‘Miss Edna Best and Mr Frank Vosper are to appear together in Love From a Stranger by Mr Vosper and Miss Agatha Christie’, but on 7 April it carried the news that ‘Mr Frank Vosper has given up the leading man’s part in his play, written in collaboration with Miss Agatha Christie, Love From a Stranger. The two chief parts will be played by Mr Basil Sydney and Miss Edna Best.’ The way that Christie’s contribution to the script is acknowledged in these reports is notable; she is credited as joint author of the play rather than simply the writer of a story from which it is adapted. It is unclear what led to this very late change of plan on Vosper’s part; it may be that his instincts told him that the script needed more work and that he felt he could better fulfil his role as writer from a position in the stalls. Basil Sydney, his substitute, was a British film and stage actor who had spent much of his career on Broadway.

      The licensing records for Love From a Stranger in the Hughes Massie ledgers are incomplete, but in April 1935 The Stage announced that ‘Hugh Beaumont, of the firm of Moss Empires and Howard & Wyndham Tours Ltd, is busily engaged upon three new productions. One is “Love From A Stranger” by Frank Vosper and Agatha Christie.’¹⁵ There is also reference in the files to correspondence with ‘H M Tennent’;¹⁶ Harry Tennent, along with Beaumont, had set up Moss Empires and Howard & Wyndham Tours Ltd in 1933 to provide touring productions for the theatre-owning chains that were later to form a cornerstone of the notorious cartel that became known as ‘the Group’. And so it was that Hugh ‘Binkie’ Beaumont, of whom we will hear a great deal more, became one of the first producers of plays from the work of Agatha Christie, although one suspects that twenty-six-year-old Beaumont may have been more attracted by Vosper’s charms than by Christie’s talent.

      According to Williams, ‘the Stage announced that “Emlyn Williams’ new thriller Night Must Fall will open on 29 April at the King’s Theatre, Edinburgh. On the same evening, Frank Vosper’s new thriller Love From a Stranger will open at the King’s Glasgow.” For one bemused moment I thought the two plays were opening not