Agatha Christie: A Life in Theatre. Julius Green

Frank Vosper, the stage and film actor and author, was missing from the French liner Paris when she arrived at Plymouth on Saturday from New York. It is believed that Mr Vosper, who was 37, was lost overboard. He was one of several present at an ‘end of voyage party’ in the cabin of Miss Muriel Oxford, aged 22, who won the title ‘Miss Europe’ in 1935, in a beauty contest, and had been undergoing film tests in Hollywood … there is no question of a love affair between herself and Mr Vosper.’²⁶

      There certainly was ‘no question’ of such an affair. Vosper’s lover, the twenty-three-year-old actor Peter Willes, later to be a TV producer and friend of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell, was also at the party.

      Vosper was short-sighted and may have been drinking, but the location of the porthole he appears to have fallen through in relation to the cabin balcony on which he had apparently been standing alone, seemed to rule out an accident, leading to speculation that he had taken his own life. It seems unlikely that any interaction at the party between Willes and Oxford would have triggered this, but one wonders how the slightly inebriated star, having just made a humiliating exit from Broadway, might have responded to the news of Hollywood’s apparent interest in the ebullient young beauty queen. The press went to town on the story, skirting around the issue of Vosper and Willes’ relationship (homosexuality was not decriminalised in England until 1967), but, after the body was washed up near Eastbourne with one leg and a quantity of cash missing, the coroner returned an open verdict. And so shall we.

      Unusually, Collins themselves published Love From a Stranger in both hardback and paperback in 1936, while Samuel French issued their standard ‘acting’ edition for amateurs and repertory companies – with both of which it enjoyed enormous popularity – the following year. In 1937 Basil Rathbone played Gerald Lovell in the first film version of Love From a Stranger and in 1938 Edna Best reprised the role of Cecily on television, playing opposite Bernard Lee.

      Christie’s original version of the play appears never to have been performed although, intriguingly, a script called L’Inconnu, with her credited as sole writer, was registered with the French Society of Dramatic Authors in 1935, two months before the UK premiere of Vosper’s version. It was translated by popular French actor Pierre Palau for presentation at the Théâtre Des Deux Masques in Paris, but it is unclear whether the production actually took place.²⁷ In a strange postscript, playwright Louise Page wrote yet another stage adaptation of the story in 2010, which was performed at the Mill at Sonning Theatre under the title of Vosper’s version. Perhaps the people who licensed it were unaware of the two copies of ‘The Stranger by Agatha Christie’ held in the Agatha Christie archive. As her first exercise in expanding a short story for the stage rather than, as had been the case with Chimneys, compressing a novel, it is arguably the best constructed of the five full-length plays that she had written by 1932. Under the circumstances, a third adaptation seems somewhat surplus to requirements.

      Christie followed the same model of expanding a short story for what I believe to have been her next full-length script, although like so many of her writings it is, frustratingly, undated. The Mysterious Mr Quin is a collection of short stories published in 1930, having originally appeared in magazines throughout the previous decade, which centre on the enigmatic Harley Quin. Quin’s brief and almost spiritual interventions enable his more corporeal friend, Mr Satterthwaite, to resolve a number of problems and mysteries. Although the setting of the stories is contemporary, the elusive protagonist is inspired by the mythical Harlequin figure which featured in Agatha’s family’s china cabinet and in her script A Masque from Italy. Amongst the stories is ‘The Dead Harlequin’, first published in the American magazine Detective Fiction Weekly in 1929, although neither Quin nor Satterthwaite is technically a detective. The play Someone at the Window expands at length upon the plot of ‘The Dead Harlequin’ but abandons the characters of both Mr Quin and Satterthwaite.

      This is the first of many instances where Christie’s dramatisations of her previously published work exclude what appears to be the pivotal character. Following Black Coffee, she never wrote another full-length play featuring Poirot, and her four stage adaptations of novels in which he appears exclude him completely. Similarly, following Superintendent Battle’s appearance in Chimneys, she cut the role when next adapting a work in which he featured, and although it seems that Christie was not averse to the idea of Miss Marple on stage, she herself never wrote a Marple play. In the case of Harley Quin, the very act of physicalising the character would have undermined his spiritual essence. In 1928 there had been a poorly executed film based on one of the stories, and one can well imagine that her worst nightmare would have been the image of Francis L. Sullivan lumbering around a stage in a Harlequin costume.

      The Agatha Christie archive holds two loose-leaf draft copies of the script of Someone at the Window; one, which is a duplicate of the other, contains a small number of handwritten amendments. There is also a bound final version which appears to be professionally typed, although there is no agency date stamp in evidence. The address of Lawn Road Flats in Belsize Park, where Christie lived in the early 1940s, has been handwritten on the cover, and another name and address has been heavily crossed out. On close examination, it is that of L.E. Berman, who sold the licence for Black Coffee to the Embassy Theatre, and seems effectively to have been Christie’s play agent at this time.

      The play is a 175-page epic, and is Christie’s first theatrical experiment with the themes of time and memory, later to be explored more fully in 1960’s Go Back for Murder. An intriguing two-hander prologue is set in a first class railway carriage in January 1934, following which there is a two-act flashback to ‘the big hall at Carnforth Castle’ in 1919 (very deliberately post-war), and a third-act return to June 1934 in London. In this context, it is a not unreasonable assumption that 1934 is the year of writing, although we should not rule out that it takes place in the past or indeed, being Agatha Christie, in an imaginative leap to the future.

      In the opening scene, the two characters who meet in the railway carriage disagree about the potential healing qualities of time:

      FRANK: … Time gives you a new angle of vision – the true angle.

      SYLVIA: I see what you mean.

      FRANK: Doesn’t it help you?

      SYLVIA: No, in my case facts were facts.

      FRANK: You’re looking at it as it appeared then. I want you to look at it now.

      SYLVIA: Nothing can help me but forgetfulness.

      FRANK: You can’t forget to order. You can thrust a thing down out of sight – but it’s there still – growing in the dark.²⁸

      On a lighter note the artist Frank, who is endearingly described as ‘a big simple looking likeable young man – rather like a friendly dog that hopes it is welcome but is not quite sure about it’, regrets the passing of the Victorian age: ‘I’d love to have lived in the days of good old Victorian melodrama with the heroine turned out into the snow, and a thorough-paced villain with a black moustache. It must have been fun. They did have fun – the Victorians. They had something we haven’t got nowadays – gusto – enjoyment of life.’

      The play is brimming with witty banter and social commentary about inter-war Britain, courtesy largely of a pair of society grandes dames who we meet when we go back in time to Carnforth Castle. Mrs Quantock, who is married to a colonel, and her friend Lady Emily, delight in making candid observations about relations between the sexes:

      MRS QUANTOCK: My experience of life has taught me that you can trust nothing and no one. Always expect the worst and you’ll be surprised how often you’re right … Take Arthur now – in the regiment he was considered a perfect martinet – but if any woman were to come to him with a hard luck story – why he’d be as soft as butter. He’s much too soft-hearted.

      LADY EMILY: It is a good thing he has you to look after him.

      MRS QUANTOCK: It takes a woman to see through women. Men say ‘Poor little woman, all the others are so down on her.’

      The bitter governess, here in conversation with the seventeen-year-old