Christie trivia buffs can again spend happy hours identifying the numerous theatrical references, characters and scenarios in her novels; I offer for starters 1952’s They Do It with Mirrors, in which Miss Marple is fascinated by the stage illusion involved in the creation of a production of a play that rejoices in the Christiesque title ‘The Nile at Sunset’. And it is no coincidence that disguise is a recurring plot device in her plays, a number of which feature characters who are impersonating someone else. This conceit accounts for Christie’s two greatest coups de théâtre, in The Mousetrap and Witness for the Prosecution; the latter is carried out with a high level of theatrical skill by a character who is a professional actress, in a plot twist with echoes of her 1923 short story, ‘The Actress’.17
Agatha Christie is herself one of the most written about of writers. Much of what has been published about her, however, engages either with the highly seductive imaginary world of her novels or with endlessly re-examined elements of her personal life; even those writers who do make a serious attempt to place her work in a historical and literary context tend to overlook her contribution as a dramatist. Alison Light’s persuasive study of Christie’s work as an example of ‘conservative modernity’ in Forever England (1991) focuses on the inter-war period and so can be excused for overlooking her plays. But other serious assessments of her work, from Merja Makinen’s Agatha Christie: Investigating Femininity (2006) and Susan Rowland’s From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell (2001) to Gillian Gill’s Agatha Christie: The Woman and her Mysteries (1999) and Agatha Christie in the Modern Critical Views series (edited by Harold Bloom; 2001), are united in their neglect of her work as a playwright. Ironically, many of the writers concerned may well have found an engagement with Christie’s work for the stage to have been beneficial to their arguments.
An honourable exception is Charles Osborne’s 1982 book The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie. Osborne, a theatre critic and former literature director of the Arts Council, is less academic in his tone than the writers listed above, but is diligent in affording Christie’s dramatic work equal prominence with her novels. Other than Osborne’s book, the only significant overviews of Christie’s plays in the context of appraisals of her own work are in J.C. Trewin’s lively and opinionated contribution to Agatha Christie; First Lady of Crime (edited by H.R.F. Keating; 1977) and a chapter in Peter Haining’s workmanlike Murder in Four Acts (1990). Two histories of crime drama, Marvin Lachman’s The Villainous Stage (2014) and Amnon Kabatchnik’s epic, five-volume Blood on the Stage (2009–2014), each contribute some original research to the subject, and at least acknowledge Christie’s significance as a writer of stage thrillers if not as a playwright in a wider context. Several of the multifarious Christie ‘companions’ and ‘reader’s guides’ dutifully list the plays and recite the often inaccurate received wisdom about their origins and first productions (an honourable mention here to Dennis Sanders and Len Lovallo’s 1984 The Agatha Christie Companion, which is a cut above many of its competitors); but I have seen ‘encyclopedias’ of her characters which omit completely those which appear only in the plays.
Perhaps most saddening, though, is the fact that Christie has even been eschewed by feminist theatre academics such as those responsible for The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights (2000), meriting not so much as a footnote in the chapter covering the 1950s in a book that purports to ‘address the work of women playwrights in Britain throughout the twentieth century’. Whilst not notable for chaining herself to railings, Christie challenged the male hegemony in West End theatre more successfully than any other female playwright before or since. She took on her male contemporaries on their own terms, and in many respects beat them at their own game. She created a series of strong and memorable female protagonists of all ages, and any actress complaining that there are not enough substantial stage roles for women need look no further than her plays. Most disappointing is Maggie B. Gale’s West End Women (1996). Although Gale’s book, which covers the period 1918–1962, offers a fascinating insight into a neglected area of theatre history, and acknowledges Christie’s commercial success as a playwright, it largely overlooks her contribution in favour of the usual suspects: Clemence Dane, Enid Bagnold, Gertrude Jennings, Dodie Smith and others. This is a missed opportunity in an otherwise excellent book. Gale does, however, make the following interesting point: ‘Research on women playwrights, let alone performers, managers, directors and designers is, in real terms, only just beginning. It is important that we look at what was there, rather than trying to fit our findings into some preconceived notion of what it is that, for example, women should have been writing.’18
And, examining Clemence Dane’s work in Women, Theatre and Performance (2000), Gale observes that Dane ‘falls foul of many failings in theatre historiography: the unwillingness to view women’s work in the mainstream; the fear of the “conservative”; and the general lack of interest in mid-twentieth century theatre. It remains quite extraordinary that there is so little critical, biographical and historical material on a playwright so recently working in theatre, a playwright, once a household name, who has somehow been removed from fame to obscurity.’19
It could so easily be Agatha Christie to whom Gale is referring that I have gladly taken this as the starting point for my own book. ‘Suffrage theatre’ gets a great deal of attention from historians of women’s writing for the stage, but theatre written by women simply in order to entertain audiences tends to be overlooked. Gender history is a fascinating subject, but the problem with it is that it tends to be written by gender historians. Lib Taylor, in British and Irish Women Dramatists since 1958 (1993), dismisses Christie’s plays solely on the basis that she believes them to exhibit an ‘underlying collusion with patriarchy’. This view is based on a comprehensive misreading of a small number of the later works, and seems to be a common misapprehension amongst academics. And even if it were true, a playwright is surely free to ‘collude’ with whoever they like. In 1983, seven years after Christie’s death, the Conference of Women Theatre Directors and Administrators undertook a major survey of women’s role in British theatre.20 Amongst the many interesting statistics arising from this important exercise was that of the twenty-eight plays written by women produced in the previous year on the main stages of regional repertory theatres, twenty-two (or 80 per cent) were penned by Agatha Christie. More recently, on the eve of her 125th anniversary year, Christie was the only woman with a play running in the West End. It is a shame that the preconceptions and prejudices of many historians of women’s theatre appear to have dictated against a proper analysis of her achievements as a playwright.
Of the two ‘authorised’ biographies, Janet Morgan’s (1984) does its best to examine the importance of theatre in Agatha’s life and work, whilst Laura Thompson’s (2007) marginalises it in favour of an emphasis on the widely accepted thesis that much of Agatha’s work under the pen name of Mary Westmacott was semi-autobiographical. Both contain significant inaccuracies in relation to the plays, the former due mostly to the notorious difficulty of correctly dating Agatha’s correspondence (which Morgan quotes extensively) and the latter due to the author’s evident lack of interest in this area of Agatha’s work. The book you are reading is not a biography; I have had the privilege of being able to investigate in detail a particular aspect of Agatha Christie’s work, and I do not underestimate the task of attempting to chronicle the entire life of such a multi-faceted individual. So if you want to find out more about her personal life, and in particular her family history, then I recommend both of these books.
The journalist Gwen Robyns wrote an unauthorised biography, The Mystery of Agatha Christie, in 1978, based largely on interviews with people who knew and worked with Christie. Although somewhat unorthodox in its approach, it acknowledges the importance of theatre in her work, and is of particular interest in that Robyns appears to have spoken with some of the key players, including Peter Cotes, the original director of The Mousetrap, and Wallace Douglas, who as director of Witness for the Prosecution and Spider’s Web was responsible for two more of Christie’s biggest hits. Whilst inaccurate in a number of respects,