Agatha Christie: A Life in Theatre. Julius Green

Royal Birmingham the previous week, but both plays were well received in Scotland, and Vosper’s cast, and Scottish director Campbell Gullan, were praised by critics. Although Vosper himself did not appear, his sister Margery played the role of the feisty maid Edith and, intriguingly, the dramatis personae included a ninth character, a female role listed simply as ‘A Stranger’, who appears in no versions of the script other than that for this first tour.¹⁸

      ‘Whichever play got to London first would kill the other, and nothing to be done about it,’ concluded Williams. It seemed to him for a moment that both productions might be competing for a potential West End slot at the Duchess Theatre but, following a short tour, Vosper and Beaumont decided that Vosper should spend some time on rewrites and should re-rehearse the production with himself in the leading role, as had originally been intended. J.B. Priestley was running the Duchess independently of the big theatre-owning cartels at the time, and Night Must Fall opened there on 31 May 1935, running for 436 performances before transferring to London’s Cambridge Theatre where it ran for a further 205. The production was Williams’ first big success as a playwright.

      On Sunday 2 February 1936, the revamped version of Love From a Stranger was presented for one performance at Wyndham’s Theatre, with Vosper taking the role of Bruce Lovell and his sister Margery demoted to assistant stage manager. The new production was directed by Murray MacDonald and, in the absence of Edna Best, who was presumably no longer available, the role of Cecily was played by Marie Ney, who had appeared alongside Best in The Constant Nymph. At this time it was common practice to present one-off performances of new plays on Sundays in West End theatres in the hope of securing them a future life. In The Stage’s review of this presentation by one of the ‘Sunday societies’, the 1930 Players, it commented, ‘in the desirable event of the play being put into an evening bill it should be played by the same cast … the play, effectively produced [i.e. directed] by Murray Macdonald, was enthusiastically received by an audience which included many well-known theatrical folk.’¹⁹ This showcase performance had the desired effect: nine days later, Moss Empires and Howard & Wyndham Tours Ltd took up the West End option, opening it at one of their parent company’s own theatres, the New in St Martin’s Lane, on 31 March 1936.

      The production was very well reviewed. Ivor Brown in the Observer remarked that ‘this play soon sails away into those profusions of homicidal mania and sadistic frenzy which are the cordials and sweetmeats of this curious age.’ He felt that Vosper’s performance maybe gave the game away too soon: ‘it is unwise to make us so early certain that Lovell is fully qualified for the chairmanship of the United Society of Operative Homicides and Dirty Workers. Or else he should declare himself straight away, as the author-actor of “Night Must Fall” has done.’ But he was full of praise for the ‘authentic and tremendous suspense about the struggle between Bruce and his captive wife’, admiring Vosper’s ‘very clever performance, a first rate study of disintegration’, and Marie Ney’s ‘charming and persuasive picture of the fluttering and rather foolish young woman … with a very powerful grip on the second half of her part, when the amorous lady becomes the Amazon and fiercely fights for her life with wit and grit, since tooth and claw are of no avail.’²⁰

      The Times reserved its praise primarily for the final scene, the acting of which ‘could scarcely be bettered’, although it observed that the ‘whole play is an elaborate approach’ to this moment.²¹ Muriel Aked made the most of the gratuitous comedy role of Auntie Loo-Loo and the Daily Herald, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail were prominent in the general chorus of approval. The production moved to the Queen’s Theatre (the owners of which later became major shareholders in H.M. Tennent Ltd) and played for a total of 149 performances; a respectable run, but significantly less successful than Alibi. A month after it opened in the West End, members of the cast could be heard performing live extracts from Love From a Stranger on BBC Radio’s Regional Programme.

      Sadly Vosper, like Laughton before him, could not resist the lure of Broadway. On 21 September 1936, he led an American cast, including Jessie Royce Landis (later a Hitchcock regular) as Cecily, in a new production at the Erlanger Theatre, Philadelphia, produced by former press agent Alex Yokel, who had recently enjoyed a huge hit as a producer with Three Men On a Horse. The Broadway production of Love From a Stranger was directed by British former actress Auriol Lee, who had been successful as the director of a number of West End productions, recently and most notably a three-year run of Merton Hodge’s The Wind and the Rain, co-produced by Alec Rea and Moss Empires and Howard & Wyndham Tours Ltd. On 29 September, Love From a Stranger starring Frank Vosper opened at Broadway’s Fulton Theatre. The previous night, Night Must Fall starring Emlyn Williams had opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.

      Critics were, understandably, bemused by this sudden influx of British psychopaths. The Daily News commented:

      I don’t know how you feel about murder plays, but if you are interested in collecting this season’s crop then you may have both of these for all of me. I shall not be using either of them again …

      Frank Vosper is both author and star of Love From A Stranger, which he took from a story by Agatha Christie. Like young Mr Williams of Night Must Fall he rather fancies himself, I gather, in roles of violent contrast and psychological significance …

      It might be wiser in the future to import only the last acts of English murder-melodramas; in fact to import the last acts of three such murder-melodramas simultaneously and then, after rewriting them enough to provide a slight continuity, produce them all on one evening as parts of the same thriller.²²

      Vosper had chosen Christie’s work as the vehicle for his Broadway acting debut and, like Laughton and Sullivan, was relentless in his self-promotion. The title page of the playbill is clear that this is ‘A new play by Frank Vosper from a story by Agatha Christie’, with his own name in significantly larger type than hers; and the playbill’s text notes:

      Frank Vosper adapted Love From a Stranger from an Agatha Christie story as a result of his interest in criminology, a hobby that has long occupied his off-stage moments. He created his present role in the successful production of the drama in London, where he is one of the ranking stage and screen favourites. The account of Mr Vosper’s writing and acting activities takes up two and a half columns in Who’s Who in the Theatre. A remarkable feat, considering he is still in his thirties. He has played in Shaw, Shakespeare, Pirandello at the Haymarket and Old Vic, and countless British movies.²³

      The New York Times, however, felt that ‘Mr Vosper has taken this tale from one of Agatha Christie’s stories, and has spun it out to dangerous length … as the leading player Mr Vosper gives the part the works. His interpretation of Bluebeard is a head-holding, shoulder-straightening, partly ranting person instead of a cool and calm characterization that would have seemed more dangerous.’²⁴

      The New York Evening Journal concurred: ‘Mr Actor Vosper is in fact almost as disastrous as Mr Author Vosper … until he gets to the aforementioned last act. Until that horror-ridden business he and his fellow players work pretty hard over a play that is so flagrantly inert that I half expected the actors to resort to sticking pins in it. Or, anyway, into the audience.’²⁵

      The aforementioned inertia is entirely the result of Vosper’s own unnecessary embellishments of Christie’s original script. Christie’s piece is anything but overblown. It is economical in the extreme, and wastes no time in getting to its deadly point. This is perhaps why she herself remembered it as a one-act play, although she had in fact provided two neatly and wittily executed opening acts. She in any case claimed the denouement as being largely her own work, and it was this element of the play that won critical approval and, in the Grand Guignol tradition, allegedly saw audience members fainting on both sides of the Atlantic.

      Love From a Stranger closed at the Fulton after only twenty-nine performances, and Christie’s name had now been associated with two Broadway flops, neither of her own making. It can have been little consolation to Vosper that Night Must Fall only ran for sixty-four; his Broadway acting debut had been an ignominious failure.

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