Unexpected Guest - Agatha Christie [50]
Through the character of Michael Starkwedder, ‘the unexpected guest’, Mrs Christie makes the interesting assertion that:
Men are really the sensitive sex. Women are tough. Men can’t take murder in their stride. Women apparently can.
The character of the murdered man, as described by his wife, was based, at least in part, on someone whom Agatha Christie had known very well. Here is Laura Warwick, describing one of her late husband’s nocturnal habits:
Then he’d have this window open and he’d sit here looking out, watching for the gleam of a cat’s eyes, or a stray rabbit, or a dog. Of course, there haven’t been so many rabbits lately. But he shot quite a lot of cats. He shot them in the daytime, too. And birds…a woman came to call one day for subscriptions for the vicarage fête. Richard sent shots to right and left of her as she was going away down the drive. She bolted like a hare, he said. He roared with laughter when he told us about it. Her fat backside was quivering like a jelly, he said. However, she went to the police about it and there was a terrible row.
And here is Agatha Christie, in her autobiography, describing her brother Monty, as an invalid towards the end of his life:
Monty’s health was improving, and as a result he was much more difficult to control. He was bored, and for relaxation took to shooting out of his window with a revolver. Trades people and some of mother’s visitors complained. Monty was unrepentant. ‘Some silly old spinster going down the drive with her behind wobbling. Couldn’t resist it–I sent a shot or two right and left of her. My word, how she ran’…Someone complained and we had a visit from the police.
The Unexpected Guest was an original Christie, not only in the sense that it was written by the author herself and not dramatized by someone else from a Christie novel or story, but also in being, like Spider’s Web but unlike The Mousetrap or Witness for the Prosecution, completely new and not an adaptation by the author of an earlier work of hers. It is, in fact, one of the best of her plays, its dialogue taut and effective and its plot full of surprises despite being economical and not over-complex. It demonstrates, incidentally, the profound truth that seeing is not believing. The leading roles in 1958 were played by Renee Asherson (Laura Warwick), Nigel Stock (Michael Starkwedder) and Violet Farebrother (Mrs Warwick, senior), with Christopher Sandford (Jan Warwick), Paul Curran (Henry Angell), Roy Purcell (Julian Farrar), Winifred Oughton (Miss Bennett), Michael Golden (Inspector Thomas), Tenniel Evans (Sergeant Cadwallader) and Philip Newman (the corpse). The play was directed by Hubert Gregg.
Reviews were uniformly enthusiastic, many of them contrasting the success of the new play with the recent failure of Verdict. ‘After the failure of her last play, Verdict,’ wrote the Daily Telegraph critic, ‘it was suggested in some quarters that Scotland Yard ought to be called in to discover who killed Agatha Christie. But The Unexpected Guest, turning up last night at the Duchess before even the reverberations of her last failure have died away, indicates that the corpse is still very much alive. Burial of her thriller reputation is certainly premature.’ The Guardian combined reportage and criticism: ‘Only seven weeks after Agatha Christie’s last play was booed off the stage, the old lady of 66 [sic] stumped defiantly back into a London theatre last night. She had a new whodunit ready. She watched from the back of the circle, white-faced and apprehensive…But no boos came this time. No rude interruptions. At the end she heard the kind of applause that has given her Mousetrap a record six-year run.’
ALSO AVAILABLE BY CHARLES OSBORNE
The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie was the author of over 100 plays, short story collections