Spider's Web - Agatha Christie [60]
Henry looked at her questioningly, and she recited, ‘O what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive.’
Suddenly conscious of her, Henry leaned over the armchair and put his arms around her. ‘My adorable spider!’ he said.
Clarissa put her arms around his shoulders. ‘Do you know the facts of life about spiders?’ she asked him. ‘They eat their husbands.’ She scratched his neck with her fingers.
‘I’m more likely to eat you,’ Henry replied passionately, as he kissed her.
The front door bell suddenly rang. ‘Sir John!’ gasped Clarissa, starting away from Henry who exclaimed at the same time, ‘Mr Jones!’
Clarissa pushed Henry towards the hall door. ‘You go out and answer the front door,’ she ordered. ‘I’ll put coffee and sandwiches in the hall, and you can bring them in here when you’re ready for them. High level talks will now begin.’ She kissed her hand, then put it to his mouth. ‘Good luck, darling.’
‘Good luck,’ Henry replied. He turned away, then turned back again. ‘I mean, thanks. I wonder which one of them has got here first.’ Hastily buttoning his jacket and straightening his tie, he rushed off to the front door.
Clarissa picked up the plate and dish, began to go to the hall door, but stopped when she heard Henry’s voice saying heartily, ‘Good evening, Sir John.’ She hesitated briefly, then quickly went over to the bookshelves and activated the panel switch. The panel opened, and she backed into it. ‘Exit Clarissa mysteriously,’ she declaimed in a dramatic stage whisper as she disappeared into the recess, a split second before Henry ushered the Prime Minister into the drawing-room.
The Plays of Agatha Christie
Alibi, the earliest Agatha Christie play to reach the stage, opening at the Prince of Wales Theatre, London, in May 1928, was not written by Christie herself. It was an adaptation by Michael Morton of her 1926 crime novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and Hercule Poirot was played by Charles Laughton. Christie disliked both the play and Laughton’s performance. It was largely because of her dissatisfaction with Alibi that she decided to put Poirot on the stage in a play of her own. The result was Black Coffee, which ran for several months at St Martin’s Theatre, London, in 1930.
Seven years passed before Agatha Christie wrote her next play, Akhnaton. It was not a murder mystery but the story of the ancient Pharaoh who attempted to persuade a polytheistic Egypt to turn to the worship of one deity, the sun-god Aton. Akhnaton failed to reach the stage in 1937, and lay forgotten for thirty-five years until, in the course of spring cleaning, its author found the typescript again and had it published.
Although she had disliked Alibi in 1928, Agatha Christie gave her permission, over the years, for five more of her works to be adapted for the stage by other hands. The earliest of these was Love From a Stranger (1936), which Frank Vosper, a popular leading man in British theatre in the twenties and thirties, adapted from the short story ‘Philomel Cottage’, writing the leading male role for himself to play. The 1932 Hercule Poirot novel, Peril at End House, became a play of the same title in 1940, adapted by Arnold Ridley, who was well known as the author of The Ghost Train, a popular play of the time. With Murder at the Vicarage, a 1949 dramatization by Moie Charles and Barbara Toy of a 1940 novel of the same title, Agatha Christie’s other popular investigator, Miss Marple, made her stage debut.
Disillusioned with one or two of these stage adaptations by other writers, in 1945 Agatha Christie had herself begun to adapt some of her already published novels for the theatre. The 1939 murder mystery Ten Little Niggers (a title later changed, for obvious reasons, to And Then There Were None) was staged very successfully both in London in 1943 and in New York the following year.
Christie’s adaptation of Appointment with Death, a crime novel published in 1928, was staged in 1945, and two other novels which she subsequently turned into plays were Death