of achieving a production of A Daughter’s a Daughter as late as 1943, it was not to be, and the play would not be heard of again until the 1950s.
A Daughter’s a Daughter was not the only Christie theatrical project to be interrupted by the war. In July 1938 Agatha had entered into an agreement with Arnold Ridley, another Hughes Massie client, allowing him to adapt her 1932 Poirot novel Peril at End House for the stage.54 Hughes Massie’s records refer to the licence granted to Ridley as a ‘collaboration agreement’,55 a description which might more correctly have been applied to that granted to Frank Vosper; it is clear though that in this instance Christie was the ‘author’ and Ridley the ‘adaptor’. At this stage it was agreed that royalty income was to be split 50/50, although Hughes Massie would later take half of Ridley’s share, possibly as a result of some sort of ‘buyout’. A month later, Francis L. Sullivan’s company, Eleven Twenty Three Ltd, paid an advance against royalties of £100 to commission a script from Ridley for delivery by the end of September.56 Given the promptness of Sullivan’s arrival on the scene, it seems likely that he had been involved in the deal from the outset. In any event, whoever’s idea it was, a Ridley adaptation of a Christie novel with Sullivan as Poirot certainly had commercial potential.
Ridley was, on the face of it, an ideal adaptor for Christie. He had begun his career as an actor, joining Birmingham Rep after the First World War, in which he was wounded at the Somme. He continued to act in plays and films, and occasionally to direct for the stage, once his playwriting career took off with the enormously successful 1925 melodrama, The Ghost Train. The original production of The Ghost Train played 655 performances and, having opened at the St Martin’s, transferred to three further West End theatres. It is perhaps ironic that this enormously busy and successful playwright and actor, who fought in both world wars and was awarded an OBE for service to theatre, is best remembered for his role as Private Godfrey in the television comedy series Dad’s Army.
The script for Peril at End House was duly delivered, and on 23 November Sullivan paid a further £100 advance against royalties (of between 5 and 10 per cent on different levels of box office income) for an option to produce the play which, if exercised, would also have given him the American rights and a one-third share in any film sale.
The credited producer, however, when the play was eventually staged in 1940, was Ellen Terry’s nephew, the film director Herbert Mason.57 Although he had worked as a stage manager, Mason had no track record of presenting West End productions and I suspect that he may have been something of a front man in order for Sullivan to avoid appearing to be self-producing his return to the stage in the role of Poirot. There may also, of course, have been some hope of a film deal arising from the production; as was standard practice, the film rights in the book and play were ‘indissolubly merged’. Mason may well have been a director of Eleven Twenty Three Ltd but, in common with many other theatrical production companies of this era, its company records no longer exist. In any event, the engagement of Charles Landstone as general manager for the production indicates that the nominal producer may not himself have been actively at the helm. Landstone was more than a safe pair of hands, and in 1942 was to become Assistant Drama Director of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), the wartime precursor to the Arts Council. His book Off-Stage: A Personal Record of the First Twelve Years of State Sponsored Drama in Great Britain, offers an interesting counterpoint to Basil Dean’s book about the work of ENSA.
In January 1940, Cork wrote to Agatha, ‘We will pay your membership dues to the Dramatists Guild. Their organisation has a “closed shop” in America and managers cannot make a contract with any dramatist who is not a member. I have no doubt we shall ultimately have a production of Peril at End House. I understand Francis Sullivan’s present plan is to take it out in the country about the end of March and to bring it into town towards the end of his option period, which expires in May.’58
Cork was not wrong. On 7 March he wrote:
I was talking to Francis Sullivan this morning. I find he has completed all his arrangements for the Richmond production of Peril at End House on April 1st. It is a little unusual that he shouldn’t have consulted anybody about them, but he seems to be within his legal rights. I don’t know very much about any of the people that he has got, but he seems to be satisfied that they will give a very good show, and of course if he should happen to be wrong about any of them then they can be changed before the play comes to the West End. AR Whatmore is to produce [i.e. direct] – I don’t think he is at all bad, although once again he is not very well known.
Everyone was delighted that you will be able to attend some of the rehearsals. The play is to be read over next Wednesday and obviously rehearsals start on the following Monday, but Sullivan is getting in touch with you himself about the arrangements.59
As artistic head of the Embassy during Alec Rea’s tenure, A.R. Whatmore had been instrumental in the West End transfer of Black Coffee nine years previously. Sullivan’s wife, Danae Gaylen, was one of a number of female stage designers coming to prominence at this time, and she was put in charge of the production’s design.
Peril at End House opened at Richmond and, following a short tour, on 1 May in the West End, at the independently owned Vaudeville Theatre. Despite the play’s somewhat cumbersome three-act, seven-scene construction, reviews were encouraging, both at Richmond and in the West End, and it was generally felt that the suspense was sustained, although Sullivan inevitably stole the limelight once again. The Daily Telegraph’s review, headed ‘FRANCIS SULLIVAN AS POIROT’, remarked that ‘The Belgian sleuth has been highly theatricalised and, as impersonated by Francis Sullivan, physically he will be a slight shock to Mrs Christie’s admirers. But it is a good performance, in which his charming conceit is admirably justified … The play has been effectively produced by A.R. Whatmore.’60
Critics also particularly enjoyed the performances of character actor Ian Fleming (no, not that Ian Fleming!) as Captain Hastings and young South African actress Olga Edwardes (later to be known as artist Olga Davenport) in her first West End leading role as ‘Nick’ Buckley.
Despite the favourable critical reception, the West End run only lasted for twenty-three performances, and in this case there can be no mystery as to why. Ten days after it opened, German forces began the invasion by air and land of Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain resigned, enabling Winston Churchill to form a coalition government. Chamberlain, like Akhnaton, had paid the price of advocating a policy of appeasement. As Charles Landstone notes, ‘Any further theatrical activities were interrupted by the end of the “phoney war”. At the time of the German invasion of the Netherlands, I was at the Vaudeville with aspiring actor-manager, Francis Sullivan, with a new Agatha Christie play. The audience melted away, and practically the whole of London theatre closed down for the second time.’61 Landstone clearly considered himself to be working for Sullivan rather than Herbert Mason.
A touring production of the play was licensed the following year, but Samuel French Ltd did not enter into their usual agreement for amateur and publishing rights until 1944, and publication was held back until the end of the war. Of the income generated for the writers by the deal with French’s (including the usual 50 per cent of amateur licensing income), Ridley’s share was payable to ‘Mrs Ridley’ and Hughes Massie’s to ‘Mrs Cork’,62 a manoeuvre that one suspects probably had less to do with husbandly devotion than with avoiding the attentions of the taxman. Unsurprisingly, the American production that Cork had anticipated did not occur.
Shortly after Ridley completed his adaptation of Peril at End House, Frank Vosper’s sister, Margery, wrote a very straightforward, one-act, four-hander play called Tea For Three, based on Christie’s short story ‘Accident’. The story had first been published, under a different title, in the Sunday Despatch in 1929 and was subsequently
