composition nowadays. There should be proper grouping in a picture – light and shade.
LADY EMILY: How right you are, Maud. I was very artistic as a girl. I used to do flower painting when I was at school in Paris.
MRS QUANTOCK: You sang, too, Emily.
LADY EMILY: Oh, I only had a very small voice.
MRS QUANTOCK: Nobody sings nowadays. They turn on that atrocious wireless. Even expect you to play Bridge with some annoying American voice wailing about Bloo-oos, or else a dreadful lecture on pond life – or some nonsense about Geneva.
LADY EMILY: What do you think about the League of Nations?
MRS QUANTOCK: What every sensible person thinks. (looks at catalogue) ‘Three Women’. H’m. I suppose you could call them women at a pinch.
LADY EMILY: Their faces seem to have been squeezed sideways and they’ve got no tops to their heads. Even an artist can’t think women look like that.
(Enter MIDGE … a charming young woman with great assurance of manner.)
MIDGE: Hullo, darlings. Fancy finding you here. (looks at picture) Oo-er, scrumptious. That’s amusing. I say, the man can paint, can’t he?
LADY EMILY: They’re all so ugly.
MIDGE: Ugly? Oh, no, they’re not. They’re marvellous. Do you think that rather attractive-looking man is the artist?
MRS QUANTOCK: Very likely. He looks very odd.
MIDGE: I thought he looked rather nice. So alive. Like his pictures.
LADY EMILY: Do you call these women alive?
MIDGE: I know. One looks at these pictures and one says no women were ever like that and then one goes out into the street and one suddenly sees people that remind one of the pictures.
MRS QUANTOCK: I don’t.
Thank you for indulging me with that lengthy quotation; I hope that you found it as entertaining as I do.
Someone at the Window is a theatrically ambitious piece with a colourful sixteen-person dramatis personae, and as such would not have been immediately attractive to repertory theatres of the time. It is, sadly, let down slightly by the clumsy staging of the murder at a fancy dress ball and a rather contrived and rushed ending. The murderers plot and carry out their plan in front of the audience; this is not a whodunit, but a ‘will-they-get-away with it’. Plodding police investigations undertaken in the middle of the play by Inspector Rice and Sergeant Dwyer only serve to slow down the action. They conclude, as the murderers intended, that the victim committed suicide as a result of shellshock sustained in the First World War, but the murderers’ plan to inherit a fortune goes unexpectedly askew when the victim’s young wife gives birth to an heir after his death.
There is no reference to Someone at the Window in Christie’s autobiography, in her correspondence or in the licensing records of Hughes Massie, although her notebooks do contain some work in progress. The final script appears to be ‘performance ready’, but was never submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s office, and neither does there appear to be any record of it having been tried out by one of the club theatres, where the audience had to sign up as members and which therefore did not require a licence. Unlike other unperformed work of hers, she appears not to have returned to it, reworked it or lobbied for its production. She perhaps appreciated that its dramatic construction rendered it unattractively cumbersome as a production proposition. With its loss, sadly, we have in my opinion been deprived of some of her best dialogue for the stage.
One work which Christie did return to was the similarly lengthy Akhnaton, her remarkable historical drama about the idealistic pharaoh, father of Tutankhamun. Akhnaton, who dreams of ‘a kingdom where people dwell in peace and brotherhood’ and spends much of his time composing poetry, attempts to promote a pacifist philosophy and to unite the polytheist Egyptians under one god; policies which inevitably do not go down well with either the army or the priesthood. The action of the play takes place over seventeen years, moving from Thebes to Akhnaton’s purpose-built Utopia, the City of the Horizon, and involves a cast of twenty-two named roles, including an Ethiopian dwarf, not to mention scribes, soldiers and other extras, as well as a spectacular parade featuring ‘wild animals in cages’ and ‘beautiful nearly nude girls’.
Christie commentators tend to be united in their praise for the piece; including even biographer Laura Thompson, who is generally dismissive of her work for the theatre. In the absence of a response from critics, Charles Osborne sums it up well: ‘Akhnaton is, in fact, a fascinating play. It deals in a complex way with a number of issues: with the difference between superstition and reverence; the danger of rash iconoclasm, the value of the arts, the nature of love, the conflicts set up by the concept of loyalty, and the tragedy apparently inherent in the inevitability of change. Yet Akhnaton is no didactic tract, but a drama of ruthless logic and theatrical power, its characters sharply delineated, its arguments humanized and convincingly set forth.’30
The play, eventually published in 1973 and not performed in Agatha’s lifetime, is usually dated as having been written in 1937. The earliest surviving copy is clearly stamped by the Marshall’s typing agency as having been completed on 12 August of that year, and the ancient Egyptian subject matter certainly makes sense in the context of her involvement with the archaeological community since her marriage to Max Mallowan. In introductory material written for its publication, Christie refers to the date of its writing as 1937,31 although thirty-six years later she may well simply have been using the date on the typescript’s cover as an aide memoire.
Mallowan himself touches briefly but perceptively on a small number of Agatha’s plays in a chapter towards the end of his autobiographical Mallowan’s Memoirs, published in 1977, a year after her death. Akhnaton, he says, is
Agatha’s most beautiful and profound play … brilliant in its delineation of character, tense with drama … The play moves around the person of the idealist king, a religious fanatic, obsessed with the love of truth and beauty, hopelessly impractical, doomed to suffering and martyrdom, but intense in faith and never disillusioned in spite of the shattering of all his dreams … In no other play by Agatha has there been, in my opinion, so sharp a delineation of the characters; every one of whom is portrayed in depth and set off as a foil, one against the other … the characters themselves are here submitted to exceptionally penetrating analytical treatment, because they are not merely subservient to the denouement of a murder plot, but each one is a prime agent in the development of a real historical drama.32
Mallowan appreciates the play’s classical dramatic construction – ‘the play moves to its finale like an Aeschylean drama’ and, like other commentators on the piece, notes its contemporary relevance: ‘Egypt between 1375 and 1358 BC is but a reflection of the world today, a recurrent and eternal tragedy’. He does, however, appreciate why theatrical producers might hesitate. ‘Good judges of the theatre have deemed it beautiful, but would-be promoters are daunted by the frightening thought of an expensive setting and a large cast.’
Max introduced Agatha to Howard Carter at Luxor in 1931, describing the man who discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 as ‘a sardonic and entertaining character with whom we used to play bridge at the Winter Palace hotel’, and also to his friend Stephen Glanville, another leading Egyptologist who later became Provost of King’s College Cambridge and who Max claims offered Agatha guidance relating to source material for her historical drama. However, although Agatha’s new-found archaeological connections were understandably instrumental in the realisation of the script
