Agatha Christie: A Life in Theatre. Julius Green

Act One

       SCENE ONE

       The Early Plays

      Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was fascinated by theatre from an early age. In sleepy, Victorian middle-class Torquay, ‘one of the great joys in life was the local theatre. We were all lovers of the theatre in my family,’ she writes in her autobiography. Older siblings Madge and Monty visited the Theatre Royal and Opera House in Abbey Road practically every week, and the young Agatha was usually allowed to accompany them. ‘As I grew older it became more and more frequent. We went to the pit stalls always – the pit itself was supposed to be “rough”. The pit cost a shilling and the pit stalls, which were two rows of seats in front, behind about ten rows of stalls, were where the Miller family sat, enjoying every kind of theatrical entertainment.’¹ Clara and Frederick Miller clearly did everything they could to encourage this interest in their children, and Agatha was always captivated by the colourful dramas unfolding in front of her:

      I don’t know whether it was the first play I saw, but certainly among the first was Hearts and Trumps, a roaring melodrama of the worst type. There was a villain in it, the wicked woman called Lady Winifred, and there was a beautiful girl who had been done out of a fortune. Revolvers were fired, and I clearly remember the last scene, when a young man hanging from a rope from the Alps cut the rope and died heroically to save either the girl he loved or the man whom the girl loved.

      I remember going through this story point by point. ‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘that the really bad ones were Spades’ – father being a great whist player, I was always hearing talk of cards – ‘and the ones who weren’t quite so bad were Clubs. I think perhaps Lady Winifred was a Club – because she repented – and so did the man who cut the rope on the mountain. And the Diamonds’ – I reflected. ‘Just worldly,’ I said, in my Victorian tone of disapproval.²

      The first story Agatha ever wrote took the form of a play, a melodrama concerning ‘the bloody Lady Agatha (bad) and the noble Lady Madge (good) and a plot that involved the inheritance of a castle’. Madge only agreed to take part in the production on condition the epithets were switched round. It was very short, ‘since both writing and spelling were a pain to me’, and amused her father greatly.³ Agatha’s parents often travelled, and when they did so she would stay in Ealing with great-aunt Margaret, who had been responsible for the upbringing of Agatha’s mother and was thus referred to by her as ‘Auntie-Grannie’. Even when Agatha was away from home, theatre ‘never stopped being a regular part of my life’, she recalls. ‘When staying at Ealing, Grannie used to take me to the theatre at least once a week, sometimes twice. We went to all the musical comedies, and she used to buy me the score afterwards. Those scores – how I enjoyed playing them!’⁴

      The family spent some time in France during her childhood, and seven-year-old Agatha, inspired by the local pantomime in Torquay, began staging her own work for the enjoyment of her parents, using the window alcove in their bedroom as a stage, and assisted by her long-suffering young French chaperone, Marie. ‘Looking back, I am filled with gratitude for the extraordinary kindness of my father and mother. I can imagine nothing more boring than to come up every evening after dinner and sit for half an hour laughing and applauding whilst Marie and I strutted and postured in our home-improvised costumes. We went through the Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast and so forth.’⁵ Although young Agatha studied piano, dance and singing, and at one point had aspirations to become an opera singer, she appears to have gained the greatest fulfilment from her various youthful theatrical ventures, a natural progression from the dreamy childhood role-play games that, as a home-educated child, she created to pass the time.

      The Christie archive contains a delightfully witty, meticulously handwritten twenty-six-page ‘acting charade in three acts’ called Antoinette’s Mistake, with a colourful hand-drawn cover that is clearly the work of a child. The play concerns the exploits of a French maid in the house of one Miss Letitia Dangerfield and her niece Rosy, and features characters called Colonel Mangoe and Major Chutnee. The closest handwriting match with that of family members is to Frederick’s, and I like to think that this piece was perhaps penned by Agatha’s father as a tribute to the long-suffering Marie (Antoinette?), whose performance in one of Agatha’s fairy tale dramatisations ‘convulsed my father with mirth’. Agatha’s father was a leading light of the local amateur dramatics, and it was perhaps in recognition of the enjoyment which this brought the family that she agreed, in later life, to become president of the Sinodun Players, an amateur group based in Wallingford where she owned a house. She received numerous such requests throughout her life, but the local amateur dramatics and the Detection Club were the only societies of which she accepted the presidency.

      Frederick died aged fifty-five, when Agatha was eleven and both of her siblings had already left Ashfield, the family home in Torquay; but her mother continued to nourish young Agatha’s enthusiasm for theatre, whisking her off to see Irving perform in Exeter. ‘He may not live much longer, and you must see him,’ she insisted.⁶ Agatha herself, notoriously averse to public speaking in later life, enjoyed venturing onto the stage in her youth, and an ambitious production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Yeomen of the Guard, produced by a group of young friends at the Parish Rooms in Torquay, gave her the opportunity to show off her singing voice in the role of Colonel Fairfax. ‘As far as I remember I felt no stage fright … There is no doubt that The Yeomen of the Guard was one of the highlights of my existence.’⁷

      Finishing school in Paris at the age of sixteen was an opportunity to sample the French capital’s theatrical delights. She enjoyed herself in drama class, and had a remarkable ability to appreciate a fine theatrical performance:

      We were taken to the Comedie Francaise and I saw the classic dramas and several modern plays as well. I saw Sarah Bernhardt in what must have been one of the last roles of her career, as the golden pheasant in Rostand’s Chantecler. She was old, lame, feeble, and her golden voice was cracked but she was certainly a great actress – she held you with her impassioned emotion. Even more exciting than Sarah Bernhardt did I find Rejane. I saw her in a modern play, La Course aux Flambeaux. She had a wonderful power of making you feel, behind a hard repressed manner, the existence of a tide of feeling and emotion which she would never allow to come out in the open. I can still hear now, if I sit quiet a minute or two with my eyes closed, her voice, and see her face in the last words of the play: ‘Pour sauver ma fille, j’ai tué ma mere,’ and the deep thrill this sent through one as the curtain came down.⁸

      After spending a ‘season’ as a seventeen year old in Cairo with her mother, Agatha found herself a regular guest on the house party circuit. This served its purpose of introducing her to a number of eligible young bachelors, and she also became friends with the colourful theatrical impresario C.B. Cochran and his devoted and long-suffering wife, Evelyn. Charles Cochran was indisputably the greatest showman of his generation, in a career that included productions of Ibsen alongside the promotion of boxing, circus and rodeo as well as the management of Houdini. He was also to be instrumental in launching the career of Noël Coward. That was still ahead of him when he met the young Agatha, but for one thing he could take credit. Cochran was responsible for introducing the rollerskating craze which swept the country in the early 1900s, and a famous photograph shows Agatha and her friends enjoying some skating on Torquay’s Princess Pier. The Cochrans eventually invited her to their house in London, where she was ‘thrilled by hearing so much theatrical gossip’.

      As a young woman, Agatha continued her own forays onto the stage. Photographs show her and her friends gloriously costumed for The Blue Beard of Unhappiness, which the programme (printed on blue paper of course) reveals to be ‘A drama of Eastern domestic life in two acts’.⁹ An open air production with a dozen in the cast, it is, we are told, set on a part of the terrace in Blue Beard’s castle in ‘Bagdad’. The folktale of wife-murderer Bluebeard