went (flicking his fingers)– like that. That’s why I advised you to start threatening now. Then you may not have to leave later.
SYLVIA: Since you seem so frank about it, perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling me why your wife left you?
BRANDON: (lightly) – You mean why I left my wife. Certainly. We couldn’t agree on how to pronounce ‘Wagner’. She would call him ‘Oo-agner’. She was an American. They said it was incompatibility of temperament. Anyway, I never loved her.
SYLVIA: Oh dear!
BRANDON: Yes, it distressed me greatly, in fact, almost as much as her quite indecent mispronunciation of Wagner! (slight pause, then seriously) But perhaps the real trouble was that neither of us would give in to the other. In married life you have to have a master – or a mistress.30
Again, there are echoes of Shaw’s preface to Getting Married, in which he asserts, ‘the sole and sufficient reason why people should be granted a divorce is that they want one’, and indeed to the play Getting Married itself, which involves a couple who are hesitant to marry and another who are divorced. In Agatha’s play, as in Shaw’s, the happy outcome follows a traditional dramatic convention. The newlyweds split up and then reunite, and the divorced couple are eventually reconciled. In the first version, New Moon, Brandon concludes, ‘This is just the beginning of a new era of our married life – a new moon.’ In the wittily retitled Marmalade Moon he states, ‘This is just the beginning of a new era of our married life – our second honeymoon! Our Marmalade Moon. That’s it – a little less sweet, perhaps, but a lot less sticky, and a thousand times more satisfying!’
It is not clear for what purpose the four playlets Teddy Bear, Marmalade Moon, Eugenia and Eugenics and Ten Years were intended; it may be that they were designed to be Guignol comic interludes. They appear to have been written over a number of years, but in terms of their subject matter they share a frame of reference informed by Shavian explorations of the theme of marriage. If performed together the effect would not have been dissimilar to Noël Coward’s popular 1936 short play compilations Tonight at 8.30.
Agatha’s early playwriting experiments demonstrate a natural aptitude in a variety of styles, but she had yet to see any of her work reach the stage. Then, in 1924, her sister Madge (or, perhaps, a clever agent working on her behalf) suddenly raised the stakes by somehow persuading impresario Basil Dean to produce her own full-length play, The Claimant, in the West End. Madge’s penning of short stories for magazines had ceased when she married the wealthy and quietly charming businessman James Watts and moved into his impressive Victorian mansion Abney Hall, near Manchester. Meanwhile, Agatha’s career as a writer had been successfully launched with three novels in three years for The Bodley Head. But now, suddenly, it was Madge’s name that was in lights, albeit the non-gender specific name ‘M.F. Watts’ under which she now wrote. ‘Awfully exciting about her play!’ Agatha wrote to her mother from the Grand Tour in May 1922. ‘And I shall be furious if she arrives “on film” before I do! It seems as though there was such a thing as an agent who is some good.’31
Basil Dean, who at this time was in his mid-thirties, had abandoned a career on the Stock Exchange in favour of training as an actor in repertory at Manchester, before becoming the first director of the Liverpool Repertory Theatre (later Liverpool Playhouse). During the First World War, in which he became a captain in the Cheshire Regiment, he had been director of the Entertainment Branch of the Navy and Army Canteen Board, supervising fifteen theatres and ten touring companies. Such experience served him well when he set up a theatrical production company in partnership with businessman Alec Rea, one of the principal sponsors of the Liverpool Rep project. As the Theatre Royal Windsor’s Curtain Up magazine commented: ‘One of the great men of the theatre of our time, Basil Dean began his remarkable career as a West End producer and manager in 1919 in partnership with Alec Rea. For the twenty years between 1919 and 1939, which at the beginning saw Galsworthy at his height and later Priestley at his prime, Basil Dean held a position in the West End theatre quite as powerful and influential as any of the big London managements of our post-war days. Under his sure guidance, plays by nearly all the leading dramatists of that period saw the light of day.’32
A passionate commentator on theatre, and an early advocate of a National Theatre, Dean wrote a highly readable two-part autobiography, in which he remembers Alec Rea’s offer to him to go into business:
had I dreamed for a hundred years I could not have imagined an opportunity more suited to my circumstances … I needed a business manager whom I could trust. My choice fell on E.P. Clift, who was doing an excellent job as manager of the latest garrison theatre at Catterick Camp. He jumped at the chance, and thereafter wove himself in and out of my story with persistent self-interest … Meanwhile Alec [Rea] busied himself with the legal formalities of registering our company, to which he gave the name ReandeaN, always printed with capital letters at either end. People scoffed to see this name at the head of our playbills … Eventually the public came to accept it as the hallmark of an efficient presentation … I felt an urge to replace the ramshackle productions of the wartime theatre by the standards of acting and homogeneity of production in which I had been trained … Inspiring the new company with these ideals would not be easy. Actors trooping back from the battlefields and munitions factories were discomfited, more anxious about future employment than present perfection.33
Rea paid Dean a salary of £20 per week, and set about looking for a theatre to use as a base for their operations. He settled on the St Martin’s, a small and elegant playhouse and London’s newest theatre, built by theatrical manager Bertie Meyer for Lord Willoughby de Broke and opened in 1916. C.B. Cochran had taken a lease on the building but failed to make a success of it and was keen to dispose of it. Rea eventually paid £20,000 for the remaining nineteen and a half years of the lease – as Dean put it, his ‘enthusiasm overcame his business caution’ – and ReandeaN took over the theatre on 11 February 1920.
The new company’s first major success was to be a play by a new female playwright. ‘Still walking the tight-rope between success and failure,’ writes Dean, ‘I decided that my only course was to go forward boldly … so I chose A Bill of Divorcement, a first play by Clemence Dane, a young writer who had already attracted the attention of the literary critics with two early novels. This moving play would have stood no chance of acceptance by a commercial management because the subject of madness was taboo on the London stage.’34 Clemence Dane was the pen name of Winifred Ashton, whose work merits many a chapter in the established histories of female playwriting. The production, directed by Dean himself, was by all accounts an extraordinary one, not least due to the performance of ReandeaN’s ill-fated young starlet Meggie Albanesi, and it ran at the St Martin’s for over four hundred performances. It was also to launch Dane’s career as one of the best known and most prolific women dramatists of the inter-war years. A friend of Noël Coward, who based Blithe Spirit’s Madame Arcati on her, she continued writing plays until her death in 1965.
As with Agatha’s early plays, the issues of the divorce laws and eugenics were primary themes of Dane’s West End debut. Following the First World War the divorce rate in England had quadrupled, fuelled by hurried courtships, enforced separations, wartime adultery (both at home and abroad) and a new-found independence enjoyed by women, not least in the realm of employment. The resulting public and political debate lent renewed urgency to the recommendations of a 1912 Royal Commission, which had suggested a liberalisation of the divorce laws, and Clemence Dane’s 1921 play, set in 1933, controversially considered a future in which some of the proposed reforms had been introduced. As a dramatic exercise, this was not dissimilar to Agatha’s examination of the potential consequences of the fictional ‘Marriage Supervision Bill’ in Eugenia and Eugenics. When, in 1923, the Matrimonial Causes Act removed the additional exacerbating circumstances that women needed to prove in order to obtain a divorce, the immediate result was that the number of cases brought by women rose
