Appointment With Death - Agatha Christie [86]
If you were my husband, sir, I would poison your coffee.
If you were my wife, madam, I would swallow it.
Seven years after publication as a novel, Agatha Christie turned Appointment with Death into a play. In doing so, she made a number of significant changes. Chief among these is the deletion of Poirot from the cast of characters. (She had done this once before, in her dramatization of Death on the Nile.) The investigation of Mrs Boynton’s death is now undertaken alone by Colonel Carbery (formerly ‘Carbury’, but then Agatha Christie was often careless about spelling), but it is one of the suspects, and not Carbery, who discovers what really happened. Also, the ending of the play is different from that of the novel. The character who, in the novel, turned out to be the murderer, is, in the play, perfectly innocent. More than this it would not be proper to reveal, though it is probably safe to add that the play has a new character: not a substitute for Poirot, but a comical local politician called Alderman Higgs (or, as he pronounces it, ‘Halderman ’Iggs’). ‘Ah coom from Lancashire—same as you do’, he says with a chuckle to Lady Westholme. He is, of course, of a different political colour from the Conservative Lady Westholme, and intends to oppose her as an Independent candidate at the next by-elections. The role of the Arab guide or Dragoman has also been built up to provide the conventional comic relief which used to be thought necessary in plays of this kind.
After a short, pre-London tour which opened in Glasgow, 162 Appointment with Death came to the Piccadilly Theatre, London, on 31 March 1945. Mary Clare was greatly liked as the evil Mrs Boynton, and other leading roles were played by Ian Lubbock (Lennox Boynton), Beryl Machin (Nadine), John Wynn (Raymond), Carla Lehmann (Sarah King), Owen Reynolds (Colonel Carbery), Janet Burnell (Lady Westholme) and Percy Walsh (Alderman Higgs). The play was directed by Terence de Marney.
In 1988 a feature film version of the story was released by the Cannon Group, starring Peter Ustinov as Poirot for the third time. Adapted by Anthony Shaffer and directed by Michael Winner, the film was shot in Israel with a big-name cast including Lauren Bacall, Carrie Fisher, Hayley Mills, Michael Sarrazin and Sir John Gielgud.
About Charles Osborne
This essay was adapted from Charles Osborne’s The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie: A Biographical Companion to the Works of Agatha Christie (1982, rev. 1999). Mr. Osborne was born in Brisbane in 1927. He is known internationally as an authority on opera, and has written a number of books on musical and literary subjects, among them The Complete Operas of Verdi (1969); Wagner and His World (1977); and W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet (1980). An addict of crime fiction and the world’s leading authority on Agatha Christie, Charles Osborne adapted the Christie plays Black Coffee (Poirot); Spider’s Web; and The Unexpected Guest into novels. He lives in London.
44 Max Mallowan: op. cit.
45 Quoted in Earl F. Bargainnier: The Gentle Art of Murder (1980).
About Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie is known throughout the world as the Queen of Crime. Her books have sold over a billion copies in English and another billion in 100 foreign languages. She is the most widely published author of all time and in any language, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Mrs Christie is the author of eighty crime novels and short story collections, nineteen plays, and six novels written under the name of Mary Westmacott.
Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was written towards the end of World War I (during which she served in the Voluntary Aid Detachments). In it