NEXT WEEK a play of mine starts previews at the Rosemary Branch, a neat theatre above a pub on the border between Islington and Hoxton. Stan Laurel performed there, and Chaplin too, they say. It is where my previous play, Oedipus at the Crossroads, was revived last year — and did very well, I’m glad to report. But where that play offered a new version of ancient history this one is set in relatively modern times. The leading characters are a young Noël Coward, a young Lord Louis (“Dickie”) Mountbatten and a youngish Agatha Christie, all at the threshold of their careers, and because the play is centrally concerned with Mountbatten’s anxiety about his forthcoming marriage I call it Making Dickie Happy.
Titles arrive out of the thin blue nowhere but plays come into being from specific stimuli, the news of an odd relationship perhaps, a peculiar setting, a mystery, a mood, or in this case all four swiftly following one another.
Two friends of mine had at last decided to marry and were planning a honeymoon on Burgh Island, off the south coast of Devon. I had never heard of the place but its Art Deco hotel was famous, they told me (see end of article), and much patronised between the wars by the racier elements of Society. Coward and Mountbatten had stayed there, Agatha Christie too, and its tidal isolation had inspired her to write Ten Little Niggers and Evil Under the Sun. Hmm, I thought. Coward, Mountbatten, Christie . . . there ought to be a play in that.
Unfortunately, the hotel had been built in 1929 and, try as I might, I just wasn’t excited by what these three people were doing with themselves in the Thirties. But writers are licensed to tweak reality, and if their meeting could be made to occur near the start of the Twenties instead of at the end there was a lot that could be done with them.
Agatha’s first marriage could be under strain and her presence in the hotel under an assumed name could be a dry run for her celebrated disappearance a few years later. Coward could have written his first, forgotten plays and be there with his boyfriend. Mountbatten and a naval chum could arrive for a weekend, perhaps to take a look at a dashing young waiter they’d heard about from a fellow officer. The play could resemble a Christie detective story with, hopefully, some of the wit of a Coward comedy. But if it was to be a Christie then what was the crime? At which point I discovered the most unexpected fact and the play took off.
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No one would call Lord Mountbatten a literary man but in 1924, while still a naval lieutenant, he wrote a letter to Christie suggesting the plot for a detective story in which the narrator, the Dr Watson figure, turns out to be the murderer. She acknowledged his letter, though not until 1969, and only after he jogged her memory, even then adding that her brother-in-law had come up with the same idea a little earlier. Be all that as it may, she used this idea as the structure of her most innovative and controversial story, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
Initially, she appears to have dismissed the narrator-murderer idea as impossible, and in the play, where Mountbatten offers her the idea and she rejects it, Coward challenges her to have a go by declaring that it can’t be done. “Why would a murderer want to describe his crime? It’s Macbeth keeping a diary. ‘Walked back over the heath, met three old ladies cooking a stew’. ”
But what fascinated me — as in the play it astonishes Coward and dismays Christie — is what inspired him to come up with so treacherous a plot?
It is a puzzle. I make my Agatha decide, albeit for reasons of her own, that instability is evident in this frighteningly ambitious young man. And who can say her little grey cells misled her? There are secrets enough in the short history of the Battenberg/Mountbatten family, and she makes what I hope is a pretty good case for her fears.
I daresay the play is inconsiderate to all three of them but then it doesn’t pretend to be biography. It is an attempt to use suggestions of real people and suggestions of real events to address the matter of what makes relationships work, and what to do when they can’t work.
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As in several of the plays Coward wrote with a part for himself there is a piano on the stage. Agatha Christie was an accomplished pianist and expresses her feelings in the manner she prefers by playing a turbulent piece of Schumann. Mountbatten’s chum haltingly recalls something learned in childhood, and Coward plays one of his own songs. When I looked around for one that would do I discovered that he included in London Calling, his first revue, a number called Devon. After praising lads and chaps from various parts of the country he ends up “But the chaps that live in Devon / Are breezy, bright and gay!” This was clearly the song to use but attempts to locate the score met a complete blank. Official sources were no help. The Mander and Mitchenson Collection had no record of it. Coward seems to have revised it for his cabaret performances in the Fifties but I found no trace of it there either.
At last I approached Peter Greenwell, Coward’s last accompanist, now living in Spain. The oldest version of the lyrics I tracked down was in a 1931 volume of his revue material, and with the help of this he unearthed from his archives a 1923 piano selection of music from London Calling that includes a passage recognisably from Devon. “I had to add the odd semi-quaver to make the words fit,” he explained and they fit well. It is a cheeky, charming little number, and when Robert Forknall (who plays Noël) sings it in the play this may well be the first time anyone other than Coward has sung it in 80 years.
Making Dickie Happy runs from Sept 7-Oct 3 at the Rosemary Branch Theatre, N1 (020-7704 6665)