Spider's Web - Agatha Christie [61]
For her next play after The Hollow, Agatha Christie turned not to a novel, but to her short story ‘Three Blind Mice’, which had itself been based on a radio play she wrote in 1947 for one of her greatest fans, Queen Mary, widow of the British monarch George V. The Queen, who was celebrating her eightieth birthday that year, had asked the BBC to commission a radio play from Agatha Christie, and ‘Three Blind Mice’ was the result. For its transmogrification into a stage play, a new title was found, lifted from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. During the performance which Hamlet causes to be staged before Claudius and Gertrude, the King asks, ‘What do you call the play?’ to which Hamlet replies, ‘The Mousetrap’. The Mousetrap opened in London in November 1952, and its producer, Peter Saunders, told Christie that he had hopes for a long run of a year or even fourteen months. ‘It won’t run that long,’ the playwright replied. ‘Eight months, perhaps.’ Fifty years later, The Mousetrap is still running, and may well go on for ever.
A few weeks into the run of The Mousetrap, Saunders suggested to Agatha Christie that she should adapt for the stage another of her short stories, ‘Witness for the Prosecution’. But she thought this would prove too difficult, and told Saunders to try it himself. This he proceeded to do, and in due course he delivered the first draft of a play to her. When she had read it, Christie told him she did not think his version good enough, but that he had certainly shown her how it could be done. Six weeks later, she had completed the play that she later considered one of her best. On its first night in October 1953 at the Winter Garden Theatre in Drury Lane, the audience sat spellbound by the ingenuity of the surprise ending. Witness for the Prosecution played for 468 performances, and enjoyed an even longer run of 646 performances in New York.
Shortly after Witness for the Prosecution was launched, Agatha Christie agreed to write a play for the British film star, Margaret Lockwood, who wanted a role that would exploit her talent for comedy. The result was an enjoyable comedy-thriller, Spider’s Web, which made satirical use of that creaky old device, the secret passage. In December 1954, it opened at the Savoy Theatre, where it stayed for 774 performances, joining The Mousetrap and Witness for the Prosecution. Agatha Christie had three successful plays running simultaneously in London.
For the next theatre venture, Christie collaborated with Gerald Verner to adapt Towards Zero, a murder mystery she had written ten years previously. Opening at St James’s Theatre in September 1956, it had a respectable run of six months. The author was now in her late sixties, but still producing at least one novel a year and several short stories, as well as working on her autobiography. She was to write five more plays, all but one of them original works for the stage and not adaptations of novels. The exception was Go Back for Murder, a stage version of her 1943 Hercule Poirot murder mystery, Five Little Pigs, and once again she banished Poirot from the plot, making the investigator a personable young solicitor. The play opened at the Duchess Theatre in March 1960, but closed after only thirty-one performances.
Her four remaining plays, all original stage works, were Verdict, The Unexpected Guest (both first staged in 1958), Rule of Three (1962), and Fiddlers Three (1972). Rule of Three is actually three unconnected one-act plays, the last of which, ‘The Patient’, is an excellent mystery thriller