Causes Act, which additionally allowed for cruelty, desertion or incurable insanity to be cited as reasons. The latter reason, of course, was kept firmly on the agenda by the eugenics movement.35
Dane’s play concerns war veteran Hilary Fairfield, who suddenly returns to his wife and daughter one Christmas Day, having been hospitalised for over seventeen years with mental problems, thought to be shellshock. Citing the ‘incurable insanity’ clause in the fictional new divorce law, his wife Margaret has divorced him and is on the verge of remarriage. His daughter Sydney, meanwhile, is about to marry the son of the local rector. Although he claims to be cured, it comes to light that the mental illness from which Fairfield is suffering is in fact hereditary, and the play’s debate, whilst sympathetic to his predicament, involves a wide-ranging consideration of the issues of women’s rights in the matter of divorce and the ethical implications of knowingly passing on hereditary illness to the next generation. Eventually Sydney, fearful of passing on the illness to her own children, gives up her own aspirations of marriage in order to care for her father, thus liberating her mother to find happiness with a new husband.
Critics and audiences welcomed the play’s bravery and, as Dean’s obituary in The Times summed it up, ‘Basil Dean excelled himself as a director, and his young contract players, Meggie Albanesi and Malcolm Keen, excelled themselves in the roles of the daughter and the father.’36 In Dean’s words, the response to Albanesi’s sensational performance as Sydney was ‘The only instance within my memory of a young actress achieving an international reputation by virtue of her performance in a single play.’37 Three years later the object of Dean’s heartfelt admiration was dead, at the age of twenty-four, most probably as the result of a botched abortion.
Quite what attracted Basil Dean to produce and direct Madge Watts’ The Claimant is unclear. He perhaps hoped to repeat his success promoting the work of a female writer and The Claimant, like A Bill of Divorcement, concerns a man re-entering the family circle after a long absence. But there the similarities end. The play was cleared by the censor on 9 August 1924 for ‘performance at St Martin’s in a few weeks’,38 but actually opened on 9 September at the Queen’s Theatre. It ran for forty-four performances and was not a success, although Madge’s letters from rehearsals to her husband and son are full of theatrical gossip and details of her involvement – clearly encouraged by Dean – in the process of creating the production.39 She stayed in London during rehearsals and frequently visited Agatha and Archie, entertaining them with news of the latest dramas from the rehearsal rooms. Agatha herself attended rehearsals on at least one occasion, and doubtless enjoyed her first experience of the making of professional theatre. She also may well have noted the immaculate work of Marshall’s typing agency in the preparation of her sister’s playscript, and certainly entrusted them with much of her work thereafter.
As for the play itself, it has been said that it is inspired by the notorious case of the ‘Tichborne Claimant’, Roger Tichborne, who having been assumed dead in an 1854 shipwreck, turned up almost twenty years later to claim his inheritance. This resulted in a celebrated 1874 court case, following which the claim was rejected and the ‘claimant’ subsequently imprisoned for perjury. Madge’s play is a relatively light-hearted domestic drama, in which the protagonist abandons his claim and admits his true identity when it is discovered that the man he is impersonating was married, and that if he keeps up the pretence he will thus be unable to marry the young lady with whom he has fallen in love. There is an almost incomprehensible back-story and the central family’s relationships are so labyrinthine that a family tree is included in the script by way of explanation. This relatively trivial affair is a long way from the courtroom drama that gripped the nation in the 1870s. As G.S. Street at the Lord Chamberlain’s office put it, ‘I see no harm in the play. The Tichborne case has inspired many stories; in this case (except for calling the hero Roger) the resemblance is quite remote.’40
The Times, which the week before opening had announced a new play by ‘Mr M.F. Watts’,41 corrected itself with its review headline ‘Woman Dramatist’s new play’ and went on to say
The history of the Tunstall family is a little complicated, even with the aid of a genealogical table kindly issued by the management with the programme … The author, Mrs M.F. Watts is, we take it, new to the stage, and inexperienced dramatists are apt to be over-lavish with their plots. There was, for instance, a first act exhibiting various members of the Tunstall family who were never seen again. You identified them carefully by the aid of the genealogical table, but it was labour wasted; the play got on very well without them … But there is plenty of competent acting from an exceptionally choice cast … And, for an ‘extra’, there was Mrs Lottie Venne, in a yeomanry helmet and Union Jack as Britannia ruling the waves and evidently wondering, as well she might wonder, why she was there.42
The latter is a reference to a fancy dress party scene, which may have inspired a scene in Agatha’s 1930 short story, ‘The Dead Harlequin’, later adapted by her for the stage as Someone at the Window. In The Claimant, a footman comments on seeing the cream of society in fancy dress: ‘To see all these ’Arliquings and Pantomimes and Columbias, and then to think ’oo they are … well, reelly!’
The Claimant, which appears to have been the only play by Madge to reach the stage, sank without trace and has never been revived, although forty-five years later the seventy-nine-year-old Agatha would request a copy of it from the Lord Chamberlain’s office; to what purpose we will probably never know.43 The irrepressible Madge, undaunted by the reception of her play, expressed her intentions to write a piece about Warren Hastings, but the only other script of hers that remains is another three-act drama, Oranges and Lemons, in which the widow Octavia has to choose between Junius, the young radical MP, and Rockhaven, the Conservative Prime Minister, both of whom are up against the machinations of a Labour leader of the opposition. The saying ‘Life’s a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel’, usually attributed to seventeenth-century French playwright Jean Racine, appears on the title page. Yet again, there are shades of eugenics in the play’s debates, as in this conversation between young Junius and the older Octavia:
JUNIUS: We’re not intended to be saints. We’ve got bodies. We’re born into a cruel animal world whose only design is – creation …
… if you deny … frustrate my love, I’ve nothing. Nothing left. It’s all of me.
OCTAVIA: It isn’t natural. You must turn to Spring, not autumn.
JUNIUS: I want no April to freeze me. I want the gold of October. Can’t you see, can’t you understand?44
The central political argument, however, is a debate about land value tax, a policy advocated by the American political economist Henry George in the late nineteenth century which found favour with Asquith and Lloyd George, and subsequently the Labour Party, in the early twentieth:
JUNIUS: All that results from unimproved land should be sacred.
ROCKHAVEN: Humph! You differ from the socialists there.
JUNIUS: Land is different from everything else. It’s not for some men, or a few men, but for all men. Man must pay that one tax to mankind, then, for God’s sake leave him alone to work or starve! He’s had his opportunity.
ROCKHAVEN: How are you going to value your land?
JUNIUS: The value of land alters from day to day. But there’s already a rent paid for every plot and field in England. Deduct the value of buildings and improvements and there’s your ground rent.
ROCKHAVEN: You wouldn’t collect enough from this one source to run the country.
JUNIUS: The rent roll of England is
