Free Curtain Up by Julius Green Page B

with the firm was to establish her profile as an author, but it was to be another ten years until a play of hers was produced.
    In 1922, Archie was engaged to take part in a world tour to promote the forthcoming British Empire exhibition, and Agathatook the opportunity to join her husband on this eye-opening voyage, which took in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii and Canada, with a stop for Agatha in New York in November on the way back, while Archie continued his work in Canada. In New York, Agatha stayed with her elderly American godmother Cassie Sullivan, and it is her name and address, along with the date 9 November 1922, that tantalisingly appears in handwriting on the front of the typed one-act playscript The Last Séance. In her autobiography, Agatha remembers this as one of her very first short stories, later rewritten for publication (which occurred in the American magazine Ghost Stories in 1926). The scenario works much better as a short play, however, and I believe that it was in this format that she first envisaged and wrote it, as an exercise in the then popular theatrical genre of Grand Guignol. In a letter to her mother from Melbourne in May 1922, Agatha writes, ‘I’ve been rather idle – but have written a Grand Guignol sketch and a short story.’ 22 Notes for The Last Séance (titled ‘The Mother’) appear in Notebook 34, along with those for the novel The Man in the Brown Suit (1924). ‘Passed Tenerife last night’ she observes at one point. 23
    At the time of Agatha’s stay in Paris as a teenager, the original Parisian Théâtre de Grand-Guignol was under the direction of Max Maurey, and at its height as a ‘horror theatre’ venue, with André de Lorde its celebrated and prolific principal writer. An ever-changing programme of evening entertainments consisting of a collection of graphically bloodthirsty and macabre one-act plays, occasionally interspersed with comedies by way of light relief, were the talk of the town. It was widely advertised that audience members frequently passed out from fear, but the public proved themselves more than happy to rise to the challenge, and flocked to the small theatre in the Quartier Pigalle. It seems unlikely that those responsible for the education of a group of teenage girls would have allowed their charges to sample the delights of the Grand Guignol, but in 1908 the French company made headlines when it toured to London, including in its repertoire a play called L’Angoisse ( The Medium ) .
    In the early 1920s the Little Theatre on the Strand hosted London’s own Grand Guignol season, with a poster so horrifying that it was banned from the London Underground. A total of forty-three plays were produced in its rolling repertoire and the Lord Chamberlain’s office added to the publicity by refusing a licence to several more. Rarely out of the newspapers, the regular casts included such stalwarts of the English stage as Sybil Thorndike and her husband Lewis Casson, and a repertoire of work that included translations of some of the original French pieces (including The Medium ) along with pieces by several English writers of the day. Noël Coward even contributed a short play, although he opted for a comic interlude rather than a horror piece. The Better Half , which was another play highlighting the inadequacies of the divorce laws, culminates in this heartfelt plea from its heroine:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  ALICE: I tried to make him strike me, so that I could divorce him for cruelty – but No. He wouldn’t! He did just twist my arm a teeny bit but not enough even to bruise it . . . As somebody so very truly remarked the other day, the existing Divorce laws put a premium on perjury and adultery! Therefore I am going to find a lover and live in flaming sin – possibly at Claridges. 24
    As regards the horror element of the programme, the following review from The Times sums up