Spider's Web - Agatha Christie [62]
Christie’s final work for the theatre, Fiddlers Three, did not even reach London. It toured the English provinces in 1971 as Fiddlers Five, was withdrawn to be rewritten, and reopened at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford, in August 1972. After touring quite successfully for several weeks, it failed to find a suitable London theatre and closed out-of-town.
Verdict, which opened at London’s Strand Theatre in May 1958, is unusual in that, although a murder does occur in the play, there is no mystery attached to it, for it is committed in full view of the audience. It closed after a month, but its resilient author murmured, ‘At least I am glad The Times liked it,’ immediately set to work to write another play, and completed it within four weeks. This was The Unexpected Guest, which, after a week in Bristol, moved to the Duchess Theatre, London, where it opened in August 1958 and had a satisfactory run of eighteen months. One of the best of Agatha Christie’s plays, its dialogue is taut and effective, and its plot full of surprises, despite being economical and not over-complex. Reviews were uniformly enthusiastic, and now, more than forty years later, it has begun a new lease of life as a novel.
A few months before her death in 1976, Agatha Christie gave her consent for a stage adaptation to be made by Leslie Darbon of her 1950 novel, A Murder is Announced, which featured Miss Marple. When the play reached the stage posthumously in 1977, the critic of The Financial Times predicted that it would run as long as The Mousetrap. It did not.
In 1981, Leslie Darbon adapted one more Christie novel, Cards on the Table, a Poirot murder mystery published forty-five years earlier. Taking a leaf from the author’s book where Hercule Poirot was concerned, Darbon removed him from the cast of characters. To date, there have been no more stage adaptations of Agatha Christie novels. With Black Coffee, The Unexpected Guest, and now Spider’s Web, I have started a trend in the opposite direction.
CHARLES OSBORNE
ALSO BY AGATHA CHRISTIE
The Mousetrap and Selected Plays
The first-ever publication in book form of The Mousetrap, the longest-running play in the history of London’s West End, plus three other Christie thrillers.
The Mousetrap
A homicidal maniac terrorizes a group of snowbound guests to the refrain of ‘Three Blind Mice’…
And Then There Were None
Ten guilty people, brought together on an island in mysterious circumstances, await their sentence…
Appointment With Death
The suffocating heat of an exotic Middle-Eastern setting provides a backdrop for murder…
The Hollow
A set of friends convene at a country home where their convoluted relationships mean that any one of them could be a murderer…
Christie’s plays are as compulsive as her novels. Their colourful characters and ingenious plots provide yet more evidence of her mastery of the detective thriller.
ISBN: 0 00 649618 0
ALSO BY AGATHA CHRISTIE
Witness for the Prosecution and Selected Plays
The first-ever publication in book form of Witness for the Prosecution, Christie’s highly successful stage thriller which won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best foreign play, plus three of her classic mysteries.
Witness for the Prosecution
A stunning courtroom drama in which a scheming wife testifies against her husband in a shocking murder trial…
Towards Zero
A psychopathic murderer homes in on unsuspecting victims in a seaside house, perched high on a cliff…
Go Back For Murder
When the young feity Carla, orphaned at the tender age of five, discovers 16 years later that her mother was imprisoned for murdering her father, she determines to prove her dead mother’s innocence…
Verdict
Passion, murder and love are the deadly ingredients which combine to make this one of Christie’s more unusual thrillers, which she described as ‘the best play I have written with the exception