fact that the impact of the book’s denouement relies on a device that is simply not transferable from page to stage. And the script’s obvious shortcomings appear only to have been emphasised by Laughton’s consciously stellar performance. As playwright St. John Ervine put it, reviewing for the Observer:
This is an actor. Let me not be afraid to use superlatives. Mr Laughton is about to become a great actor. I hereby announce to the world that this young man, whose age is less than thirty, is likely to be as fine a character actor as Coquelin. He has the most malleable body and pliable face of any actor I know. He acts with his mind and with his body. He knows that he has a face and he acts with it. He acts with his hands and with his legs and feet, and I should not be at all astonished to find that if his boots were removed, each one of his toes would be acting hard. He seizes the stage and firmly controls the audience. He fills me with a sense of his power, and makes me intensely aware of him from the moment he comes on to the stage until the moment he leaves it … The play begins badly but steadily improves; the first two scenes, which are dull and slow, might be telescoped … Mr Laughton, however, added so much to the part of Poirot that the play seemed far bigger than it is. I am about to repeat myself. Mr Laughton, I say, is an actor. The whole of the cast is excellent. They must pardon me if I do no more than note their names … It was Mr Laughton’s night. An actor, ladies and gentlemen.12
Laughton was the first of numerous actors to appropriate the role of Poirot as a vehicle for their own talents, and Christie herself was disconcerted by the manner in which the character pulled focus on stage. The function of a detective, after all, is to observe; and in a detective novel the reader is invited to join the detective in this process. On film, camera angles and editing can focus the audience’s attention on specific characters and events. But on stage the audience is liable to be distracted from the observational process by the detective’s constant presence in their line of vision. Ironically, rather than observing what the detective is observing (as in a book or a film), they end up observing the detective; especially if a particularly flamboyant actor has commandeered the role.
For all its frustrations, the process was hugely enjoyable for Agatha, as it had been for her sister. Agatha, of course, had no one at home at this time other than her nine-year-old daughter to share her excitement with, but the following interview in The Star gives an insight into the enjoyment she derived from her involvement in the production of Alibi (it is interesting to note that, even at this early stage, a play not actually written by Agatha Christie is referred to as an ‘Agatha Christie play’):
‘It’s all great fun!’ Such was the enthusiastic comment with which Agatha Christie today greeted a ‘Star’ woman who went along to the flower-like Kensington home of the novelist-playwright to see how she felt about last night’s production of her play, ‘Alibi’.
This new piece at the Prince Of Wales theatre, in which Charles Laughton has made so great a hit as the famous fictional detective Hercule Poirot, is the first Agatha Christie play to be staged. It has been dramatised by Michael Morton from the Christie novel called The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd. Mrs Christie confessed today that this was not her idea of a title at all, ‘I wanted to call the book “The man who grew vegetable marrows” but nobody would let me!’ she said sadly.13
Christie goes on to reiterate her own interest in playwriting. ‘Certainly I hope to write more plays – now! … I have not actually got one begun, and I am not sure whether my next work will be a novel or a play.’ Her beloved dog Peter was at rehearsals with her. ‘He is such a sensible dog, and knows everybody connected with the play, and sometimes at rehearsals he has taken orders from Sir Gerald Du Maurier.’
Impressively, on 5 July 1928, less than two months after this interview, Christie’s own dramatisation of her 1925 novel The Secret of Chimneys came back from the Marshall’s typing bureau.14 Her response as a playwright to seeing Poirot on stage was thus to adapt a book in which he did not feature. One of her notebooks (that now numbered 67) contains some thoughts on the adaptation, which she called simply Chimneys, and there is nothing in these notes or the chronology of the surrounding material to indicate that the play itself could not have been written between May and July 1928. I suspect that nothing would have pleased her more than to see this Buchanesque romp, with its echoes of Arthur B. Reeve, presented as her own first work for the stage. But ironically it would be Poirot who was to facilitate her own playwriting debut.
Christie’s own world and the post-war world around her were changing, and the certainties of her Victorian and Edwardian upbringing were being challenged on all fronts. In 1922 Stalin became General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. 1924 had seen the short-lived first Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald, while 1926 had brought the disruption of a general strike. On 2 July 1928 the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act finally enabled women to vote on the same basis as men and, as a result of the election in May the following year (dubbed ‘the flapper election’ in recognition of the newly enfranchised young female voters), MacDonald again became Prime Minister.
Throughout the ‘Roaring Twenties’ London’s entertainment scene thrived as never before, and amongst the numerous women playwrights who found a voice alongside Clemence Dane in the West End were Gertrude Jennings, Adelaide Phillpotts (in collaboration with her father) and Basil Dean’s latest discovery, Margaret Kennedy. Meanwhile the public’s appetite for thrillers remained unabated, and at the end of the decade audiences flocked to the West End premieres of Patrick Hamilton’s Rope, Murder on the Second Floor (a hit for writer/director/actor Frank Vosper), Emlyn Williams’ A Murder Has Been Arranged, and Edgar Wallace’s On the Spot (starring Charles Laughton). No one in theatreland yet fully appreciated the significance of the British premiere, at the Piccadilly Theatre on 27 September 1928, of The Jazz Singer – the first ‘talkie’; and the long-term economic impact of the 1929 Wall Street Crash had yet to be felt.
In October 1928 the Christies’ divorce was finalised and Archie married Nancy Neele, although it was agreed that Agatha would continue to use ‘Christie’ as her nom de plume. That autumn, she travelled on the Orient Express and visited Baghdad and the archaeological dig at Ur, staying as a guest of the renowned archaeologist Leonard Woolley and his wife Katharine. Edmund Cork had been working hard on her behalf, and the year also saw her sign lucrative new contracts with publishers Collins (in the UK) and Dodd, Mead & Co. (in America). Agatha’s wayward older brother Monty died in 1929, and at the end of the year she was invited back to Ur where she was introduced to the archaeologist Max Mallowan. Although Max was fourteen years her junior, the pair fell in love. There was an undoubted intellectual meeting of minds that had been notably absent with Archie, but it is clear from their letters to each other that Agatha and Max’s mutual devotion went far deeper than that, and on 11 September 1930 they married in Edinburgh. Max was obliged to return to Ur without Agatha that winter, but in subsequent years she was to accompany her husband on his expeditions. As his reputation as an archaeologist grew she became a valued contributor to his work, cataloguing and photographing artefacts as they were unearthed. A few years after their marriage Max and Agatha bought a house in London, 58 Sheffield Terrace on Campden Hill, with another, Winterbrook House in Wallingford, as a weekend retreat. But Agatha was to spend the first winter of her second marriage alone with her daughter.
It was at this moment that, suddenly and unexpectedly, Agatha made her debut as a playwright. Although she herself clearly had hopes for her 1928 adaptation of The Secret of Chimneys, the success of Alibi had inevitably popularised the idea of Poirot on stage, and After Dinner, a play she had written some years previously featuring the Belgian sleuth, was consequently now in demand. It is not clear exactly when After Dinner dates from. Her autobiography is vague and inaccurate about this play on a number of levels (including its original title, the theatre that premiered it and the length of its run), while her introduction to The Mousetrap Man dates it as 1927. However, John Curran in an entertaining article for Crime and Detective Stories magazine makes a persuasive
