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 was to provide Agatha with inspiration on more than one later occasion. In the ‘Confessions Album’, in which members of the Miller family regularly made light-hearted entries listing their current likes and dislikes, a 1910 entry from Agatha nominates Bluebeard as one of two characters from history whom she most dislikes.10 The other is nineteenth-century Mormon leader Brigham Young, the founder of Salt Lake City: another extravagantly bearded polygamist, though in this case not a serial killer. ‘Why did they Bag-dad?’ asks The Blue Beard of Unhappiness’s programme, and goes on to state ‘Eggs, fruit and other Missiles are to be left with the Cloak Room Attendant’. No playwright is credited and, sadly, no script survives.
Many of Agatha’s earliest writings were in verse, and her first published dramatic work took this form. A Masque from Italy, originally written in her late teens, was later included (with the subtitle ‘The Comedy of the Arts’) in the 1925 self-published poetry volume Road of Dreams, and has thus been overlooked as a playscript. Although it is structured as a series of solo songs (which she set to music shortly before the book was published), the piece is clearly intended as a short theatrical presentation, as indicated by, the word ‘masque’ in its title, and may have been written as a puppet show. There is a cast list, consisting of six characters from Italian commedia dell’arte; and a clear dramatic through-line based on the love triangle between Harlequin, Pierrot and Columbine, delivered in a prologue, seven songs and an epilogue. Punchinello serves as a master of ceremonies and is here envisaged as a marionette rather than as the ‘Mr Punch’ glove puppet. We know that Agatha was intrigued by a Dresden China collection of these characters owned by her family, but the piece shows a thorough understanding of their traditional dramatic functions and motivations (apart from some ambiguity over a female counterpart of Punchinello), and it is more than possible that local pantomimes were still including a traditional Harlequinade sequence featuring them when she was in the audience as a child at the turn of the century. Her lifelong interest in the Harlequin figure, later to manifest itself in the Harley Quin short stories, is here informed by his role as the dangerous and exciting stranger stealing women’s hearts, which was to be a recurring theme in her early plays.
And when the fire burns low at night, and
Lightning flashes high!
Then guard your hearth, and hold your love,
For Harlequin goes by.11
The pain of lost love and the tensions between these passionate and flamboyant characters are well drawn, and with Harlequin in his ‘motley array’ and Punchinello inviting the audience to ‘touch my hump for luck’, the whole effect is deeply theatrical. Whether performed by puppets or people, it would have been fun to watch.
Encouraged by her mother, and perhaps in the hope of emulating her sister who had had some success with the publication of short stories in Vanity Fair, Agatha began writing stories in her late teens. ‘I found myself making up stories and acting the different parts and there’s nothing like boredom to make you write.’12 Adopting the pseudonyms Mac Miller, Nathaniel Miller and Sydney West, Agatha set about composing a number of short stories on her sister’s typewriter, but they failed to impress the editors of the magazines she sent them to.
‘Sydney West’ had a particularly idiosyncratic style, and was responsible for a short one-act play entitled The Conqueror which, like the short story ‘In the Market Place’, also authored by West, is a parable with a mythological flavour. The Ealing address of Agatha’s great-aunt is inked on the script, which does not list a dramatis personae. Subtitled ‘A Fantasy’, the scene is ‘a great Mountain overlooking the Earth. On a throne sits a huge, grey Sphinx like figure, veiled and motionless. Around her are Messengers of Fate, and the air is full of winged Destinies who come and go ceaselessly.’13 A blind youth ascends the mountain and exposes the Sphinx, who appears to represent Fate, as a sham. Like ‘In the Market Place’, the whole thing is rather baffling and appears to be some sort of morality tale. It is intriguing to imagine what future Agatha envisaged for this play, particularly given the practicalities of ‘winged destinies’. Though atmospheric, and not without its interest as a stylistic experiment, it is hard to imagine that it would have proved particularly popular with the local teams responsible for putting together Antoinette’s Mistake and The Blue Beard of Unhappiness. What this odd little offering does do, though, is once again confirm the broad range of Agatha’s theatrical vocabulary.
When eighteen-year-old Agatha produced her first novel, Snow Upon the Desert, her mother suggested that she send it to local author Eden Phillpotts for his comment. Phillpotts became Agatha’s valued mentor, and it was his literary agent Hughes Massie & Co. which, having rejected Snow Upon the Desert, would eventually take her under their wing fifteen years later, the imposing Massie himself having by then been succeeded by the more affable Edmund Cork.
A long-time neighbour of the Millers in Torquay – his daughter Adelaide attended the same ballet class as Agatha Eden Phillpotts was forty-six when he started advising Agatha, and already a successful novelist. A sort of Thomas Hardy of Dartmoor, specialising in work written in Devon dialect and set in Devon locations, his prolific output would eventually exceed even Agatha’s, and he enjoyed some success latterly with detective fiction. Well connected in literary circles – he had undertaken collaborations with Arnold Bennett and Jerome K. Jerome – Phillpotts had originally trained as an actor in London but had been forced to abandon his thespian aspirations due to a
