Amongst Margery’s clients was Dorothy L. Sayers, who in 1936 had enjoyed an extraordinary West End hit with Busman’s Honeymoon, the only stage appearance of ‘gentleman detective’ Lord Peter Wimsey, a play co-written with her friend Muriel St Clare Byrne and novelised the following year as the last in the Wimsey series. And with playwriting clients also including Emlyn Williams and John Osborne, the Margery Vosper agency was to become a major force in the West End. As her Times obituary remarked, ‘Next to her family the theatre was Margery’s life; a dedication largely attributable to her devotion to her famous actor brother, Frank, twelve years her senior, whose tragic death at sea in 1937, when Margery was 25, ended prematurely a brilliant career on stage and screen.’63 Quite how or why Tea for Three came to be written is unclear, but it was published in 1939 in Book Two of Nelson’s Theatrecraft Plays, a book of one-act plays by various writers, and appears to have been aimed entirely at performance in the amateur market.
The London theatrical calendar in the 1930s had been even busier than in the previous decade. Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence were the hot ticket in Tonight at 8.30, audiences were fascinated by J.B. Priestley’s ‘time plays’, T.S. Eliot left his dramatic calling card with Murder in the Cathedral and, almost a decade after his successful 1929 thriller Rope, Patrick Hamilton followed it with Gas Light. Compared to now, women playwrights were relatively well represented in the West End. Clemence Dane continued to have work performed, and in 1937 A.P. Herbert’s Matrimonial Causes Act finally introduced the divorce legislation anticipated by A Bill of Divorcement in 1921. Amongst a number of other women who saw their plays premiered in the West End at this time was Gertrude Jennings, whose 1934 success Family Affairs was directed by Auriol Lee, director of the Broadway production of Love From a Stranger. But the decade belonged to Dodie Smith, who enjoyed a succession of hits from Autumn Crocus in 1931 through to Dear Octopus in 1938. The latter, produced by the fledgling production company H.M. Tennent Ltd and starring John Gielgud, won her particular acclaim and ran for 376 performances at the Queen’s Theatre. And just as Christie the novelist was to blossom as a playwright in later life, so Smith the playwright was later also to achieve success as a novelist.
Despite her own disappointments in pursuing her vocation as a playwright, the 1930s had proved a remarkably productive decade for Christie in her day job as a thriller writer. Successfully combining her writing career with accompanying her husband on his archaeological digs, she had published no fewer than seventeen mystery novels, including such classics of the genre as The Murder at the Vicarage (1930), Peril at End House (1932), Lord Edgware Dies (1933), Murder on the Orient Express (1934), The ABC Murders (1936), Death on the Nile (1937) and 1939’s Ten Little Niggers, which under various titles was to become one of the best-selling novels of all time. It is little wonder that Cork had to explain to Basil Dean that she was rather busy. Agatha’s happy marriage to Max, marred only by a miscarriage in 1932, was fulfilling and intellectually stimulating, and in October 1938, they bought Greenway, a classic Georgian house built in 1771 and set in thirty acres of woodland on the banks of the River Dart. Agatha dubbed it, with good reason, ‘The most beautiful place in the world’, and it was to become the Mallowans’ regular summer retreat.
To some commentators, the decade that began with the Depression, saw the death of the monarch and the abdication crisis, and ended in war, was for Agatha, professionally and personally, her most fulfilling. But for Agatha Christie, playwright, it had been full of frustration and disappointment. In 1940 Christie turned fifty and, despite having penned seven full-length plays encompassing a variety of styles and subjects, had so far seen only one of them performed, and that for an interrupted West End run of just two months. Her name had, admittedly, frequently been seen by the public on theatre marquees, but most often in the context of its appropriation by egotistical showmen like Charles Laughton, Francis L. Sullivan and Frank Vosper.
The outbreak of war, which had put paid to Arnold Ridley’s Peril at End House and to Christie’s own A Daughter’s a Daughter, was however destined to change everything. Within four years, Agatha Christie would have established herself as a celebrated West End and Broadway playwright in her own right.
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