'The Unexpected Guest' Programme Notes

When my agent suggested that I direct three Agatha Christie plays for the Westcliff  Agatha Christie Festival in 2001, I thought she was mad.

I had always loved the books. I once infuriated my parents by spending a magnificent railway journey down the length of Italy with my head buried in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.  However my perception of the plays was that they were pale imitations of the books with watered down plots and inspectors who asked everyone the immortal question ‘And where were you when the shot was fired?’

Under pressure, I agreed to read the scripts. The three I was sent were Go Back For Murder, Spider’s Web and The Unexpected Guest.  I began reading what I expected; a box set, French windows, a drinks cabinet, a sofa and armchair and the usual French’s acting edition stage directions – ‘He moves slowly to table above sofa and lights her cigarette in an off-hand manner’.  It was all as I had feared.  But then I began to perceive something which surprised me.  There were characters.  Real characters; not just two-dimensional types.  Women failed to behave as the constraints of the time expected.  The lower classes did not tug forelocks and keep their place.  They questioned and argued and undermined.  And above all, everyone was complicated and unpredictable.  I began to realise that not only did I not know what was going to happen next I also actually cared about these people.

Whether I am directing Shakespeare or Pinter, my task as a director is to tell a story which is going to take the audience on a journey with a group of characters they care about in some way.  I now felt sure that Christie was offering me material which would certainly do this.  I agreed to direct the plays.

Christie knew and loved the theatre world and clearly understood the radical differences in story-telling technique between the stage and the page.  Above all she recognised that plot is only of interest if the people affected by it are of interest.  The irony is that many productions of her work in the past have cut ‘the character bits’ because they were believed to get in the way of the plot.  The result is that her work became undervalued by both audiences and theatre practitioners who believed she wrote mere ‘whodunnits’.  The truth is that Christie is seldom terribly interested in whodunit so much as whydunnit.

Fascination with the ugly side of life and of people is what makes the books and the plays so endlessly appealing.  Christie’s own life was complex in its relationships. Her own unhappy first marriage, the public aftermath and very different, happy second marriage are seldom far beneath the surface as inspiration.  Without a doubt she had a great understanding of the deep well of frustration which unfulfilled relationships and lives could lead people to.  In many of the plays, women whose husbands or lovers treat them with contempt are led to such a pitch of frustration at their inability to exert control over their lives that murder becomes an inevitable only option.    For Christie, erotic tension and death are always bubbling beneath a surface maintained by only the thinnest veneers of social behaviour.  Once adherence to that behaviour breaks down, it is always the case that every character shows that they are far from as pleasant as they would like to be seen.  If this were not the case, of course, there would never be enough suspects! 

Perhaps part of the enduring power of Christie is that she recognised and put on stage a fact the modern media likes to shun; that everyone is capable of murder if provoked enough.  Society likes to maintain that criminal acts – murder, rape, robbery, embezzlement – are perpetrated by ‘other’ people.  We like to believe that acts we label ‘evil’ are performed by people we could easily identify as ‘evil’ and thus avoid.  The truth, as Christie knew, is much more unpalatable than that.  You are far more likely to be murdered by someone you know well – usually a close relative – than by a stranger.  You are most likely to be defrauded by a friend or colleague.  And most sexual attacks on adults and children occur within the family home.  These are facts which have not altered much over the decades, perhaps even the centuries.  Time and time again Christie challenges us to look round a room full of pleasant, well-behaved characters and ask ‘who can have done this evil thing? And why?’ 

There is a myth that Christie wrote to formula.  There was even a computer model run to identify the similarities across all her work.  Of course it is true there are similarities in theme and style but to suggest that once you’ve seen one Christie play you’ve seen them all is a nonsense.  Go Back For Murder is as different in structure from The Unexpected Guest as Henry the Fifth is from Waiting for Godot.  Much of this, I am sure, is a function of her theatre going.  I feel sure she was not averse to borrowing elements from other writers on stage and screen both contemporary and historical.  There is a worthy undergraduate thesis to be written on what theatrical influences recur across her stage work!  JB Priestly’s time plays seem much in evidence in Go Back For Murder; Noel Coward’s Relative Values in The Hollow; and influences as varied as Hemmingway and Hitchcock can be seen in The Unexpected Guest.

The challenge to us in The Agatha Christie Theatre Company is to serve her writing by creating strong productions which both capture the time in which they were written (a time when everyone smoked for example and the casual lighting of a cigarette could speak volumes) without unexcitingly preserving them in aspic.  She wrote to excite, challenge and thrill.  She wanted her audience to be engaged with her characters and understand their world.  Above all she wanted us to consider why someone might be driven to kill.

We hope you enjoy the performance and that you feel we have risen to the challenge.

Joe Harmston

January 2007