by Julius Green [Biography Christie]
I was part of the play reading committee for our local community theatre last year, as that group was contemplating producing an Agatha Christie play. As part of that process, I read a dozen of Christie’s sixteen published/produced stage plays, helping the Lincoln Community Playhouse select “Black Coffee” (Christie’s one-and-only full-length Hercule Poirot play), and the Beatrice Community Players select “A Murder is Announced” (an adaptation for stage of one of Christie’s Miss Marple novels).
In the process of reading all of these plays, I became fascinated by Christie’s long and successful relationship with the world of the theatre, so I was incredibly please to stumble across this marvelous book and be able to recommend it as a purchase for the libraries. Curtain Up is a biography of Christie, but focusing only on her involved with writing and producing stage plays. There are many other excellent biographies about Christie that cover the rest of her life, but few of them take much notice of her play-authoring experiences. From a very young age, Agatha Christie was fascinated with the world of the theatre. In her teens and twenties she acted in a few plays and/or musicals, and wrote many playscripts, none-of-which were produced at that early age. It was not until 1930, nearly a decade after she had achieved success as a novelist, that her first full-length play was produced in London — Black Coffee, a Hercule Poirot story written directly for the stage (and not novelized until 20 years after her death). Christie took a bit of a hiatus from writing her mystery novels in the early 1950s and wrote several successful plays — in fact, she still holds the record of being the only female playwright to have three hit shows running in London’s West End theater district simultaneously (in 1954).
Of Christie’s play output, readers may already be familiar with The Mousetrap (which has run now for 67 straight years in London), And Then There Were None, and Witness for the Prosecution. But she has several other very entertaining works to her credit. I have to admit to a little bit of bias in enjoying Black Coffee (since I ended up getting to actually portray Poirot in the Lincoln production of the play), but I also recommend Spider’s Web, Towards Zero, Verdict and The Unexpected Guest. This highly-detailed and extensively-annotated volume goes into the writing and producing of each and every one of her plays, as well as those that have never been produced. If you have even the slightest interest in Agatha Christie, play-writing in general, or the the history of the British theater scene, you’ll enjoy this book.
In all honesty, I will have to admit, even I found the writing of this one a bit dry and academic at times, but at the same time, author Julius Green injects quite a bit of humor into his writing, which lightens the academic parts quite a bit!
[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try The Mousetrap and Other Plays, by Agatha Christie — a collection of 8 of her 16 produced plays (sadly not including Black Coffee!] [ publisher’s official Curtain Up web page, including online addendums ]
Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library
Bennett Martin Public Library
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