in America in her lifetime. Not only did I find exactly what I was looking for, but also a whole lot more . . .
The only other play of Christieâs to transfer to Broadway was an even bigger hit there: Witness for the Prosecution in 1954. By this time Saunders was at the helm in the UK, and he was not alone in finding the Shuberts frustrating to deal with. The more affable Gilbert Miller was therefore offered the licence to co-produce on Broadway, and while I was in New York unearthing the Christie treasures in the Shubert archive I also tracked down some of Millerâs papers, which resulted in a visit to the Library of Congress in Washington DC. Several other important theatrical archives in both the UK and the USA have assisted hugely in completing the picture of Agatha Christie, playwright from the âbackstageâ perspective.
So, what is this book exactly? It is not a biography â if you want the story of Agathaâs childhood or her two marriages, or an analysis of how her life is reflected in some of her lesser-known works, then please look elsewhere. It is not about the âeleven missing daysâ, or âone missing nightâ, as I prefer to call it, since we know exactly where she was for the rest of the time. One of the âmissingâ plays, I believe, may have some bearing on this over-reported episode; but you must draw your own conclusions, and my book will no doubt avoid the best-seller list by failing to come up with yet another âdefinitiveâ new theory on the subject. It is not a literary analysis; there is no point at all in engaging in the long-running debate between the âhighbrowâ and the âmiddlebrowâ when it comes to popular culture. I have neither the vocabulary nor the patience for it. Neither is it a âreaderâs companionâ. If you want to find out about the plots and the characters then I suggest you read the plays themselves or, better still, go and watch a production of them; and if you want to play âspot the differenceâ between the novels and short stories and their adaptations then read the originals as well. This is not a book about Christieâs imaginary world, it is about the very real world of a playwright struggling to get her work produced, enduring huge disappointment and finally enjoying success on a scale that she could only have dreamt of. Because the playwright concerned happens to be female, it is unusual in not having been written by a feminist academic; as a theatre producer I have no agenda other than to set the record straight about Christieâs contribution to theatre on a number of levels. I am hoping that by offering more detail about what she achieved, particularly as an older woman in a male-dominated industry, working at a time of enormous social, political and cultural change, the value of her work for the theatre, over and above its purely monetary one, may come to be more widely acknowledged than it currently is.
To understand the unique trajectory of Christieâs playwriting career, it needs to be set within the theatrical history of the time. In Christieâs case this means charting a timeline from around 1908, when she made her first attempts at writing scripts, through to the last premiere of her work in 1972. In so doing, I will introduce a whole new cast of characters to the oft-told story of this extraordinary lady; the colourful andeccentric cast that populated Agatha Christieâs much-cherished world of theatre.
One thing that this book is definitely not about is detectives, and I am sorry if that disappoints some readers. But I have often felt like a detective myself as I have hunted down, assembled and analysed the evidence from a variety of different sources, and from often conflicting accounts of the same events. I hope that Hercule Poirot would have approved of my efforts and that what emerges is something approaching the truth behind the remarkable and