Curtain Up by Julius Green

Author:Julius Green
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-10-27T16:00:00+00:00

SCENE THREE

Saunders’ Folly

Witness for the Prosecution is Agatha Christie’s undisputed theatrical masterpiece. This accomplished three-act courtroom drama with its classic ‘quadruple twist’ ending sets the benchmark for the genre and is a bold departure from her previous plays. In plotting terms it is another variation on the theme of female revenge on the philandering male, and once again it is a woman who is at the centre of events. It is also Christie’s most detailed examination of the concept of justice in all its forms. Like The Mousetrap, Witness for the Prosecution is expanded from a short story, although a much shorter one than ‘Three Blind Mice’. First published as ‘Traitor Hands’ in January 1925 in Flynn’s Weekly in the USA, it was subsequently retitled and included in the short story collections The Hound of Death (published in the UK in 1933) and The Witness for the Prosecution (published in the USA in 1948).

It was Peter Saunders who came up with the idea of turning the story into a play, and of centring the piece on the courtroom, which is only briefly referred to in the story. He first suggested it to Christie in the summer of 1951 on one of his regular visits to Greenway, where he ‘felt completely at home, and was now one of the family’, but she was not immediately taken with the idea. Once The Mousetrap had opened Saunders reminded her of it again, and she responded that if he wanted a play of Witness for the Prosecution then he should write it himself. And that is exactly what he did. ‘Every night,’ he recalls, ‘I would go to bed and set the alarm clock for three in the morning because it was at this time I felt freshest. And, on a portable typewriter in bed, I wrote the play based on her short story.’1

Saunders eventually presented Christie with the fruits of his labours, and his perseverance had the desired effect. Six weeks later (as Saunders remembers it) or three weeks later (as Christie remembers it) she presented him with her own version. Sadly, there appears to be no copy of Saunders’ script either in the Agatha Christie archive or amongst Saunders’ own papers; that would indeed be a historic document to unearth. Whether there are any traces of Saunders’ work in the play as we now know it we can only speculate. I believe not, as there is a great deal of correspondence between Saunders and Christie as she develops her own script from its first draft, and no reference at all is made to Saunders’ version.

In 1978, two years after Christie’s death, a courtroom drama called Scales of Justice, which takes its inspiration from a court case in which a naturalised German sued a popular MP for allegedly instigating his internment during the First World War, would open at Perth repertory theatre.2 It was directed by Joan Knight, who had been a notable resident director on The Mousetrap. And it was written by Peter Saunders.

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