How Agatha Christie got her claws

The drama that turned the crime writer into a box-office phenomenon is coming to television. Laura Thompson reports

‘AChristie for Christmas” was the slogan dreamt up in the Fifties by Agatha Christie’s publisher William Collins. Now the BBC has followed suit, putting Christie at the heart of its Christmas schedule this year with a two-part adaptation of Witness for the Prosecution.

Witness, which became a hit play in 1953, began life as a short story, written in 1925. It centres on the investigation of a charming, slightly feckless young man accused of murdering a rich old lady – not so much a whodunit as a did-he-do-it. Like everything Christie wrote, it’s clever – but it would have been hard for its early readers to foresee the sensational success it would enjoy when dramatised for the London stage.

Christie adapted the book herself while living in Iraq, working in a mud-hut-cum-study on the archaeological dig run by her husband, Max Mallowan. She kept to the original plot, but revved it up into a full-throttle courtroom drama. Then, just as she was about to deliver the typescript, she wrenched it back and added a final twist, which her literary agent disliked (fortunately, she never took much notice of him) but her producer, the peerless impresario Peter Saunders, recognised as a masterstroke.

“Mrs Christie has got the audience in her pocket,” wrote a reviewer. “Best you’ve written yet, dearie!” shouted a woman as the author departed after the first night for a party at the Savoy. Quite simply, Witness worked. “It was put on at the worst time of year in the worst theatre in the West End,” wrote Edmund Cork, Christie’s agent, to his US counterpart, “and it is just packing out.”

When the play transferred from Drury Lane to Broadway, the same thing happened: queues around the block and a New York Drama Critics Circle award. The screen rights were sold for a then-noteworthy $116,000, and Billy Wilder’s 1957 film – starring Marlene Dietrich and Charles Laughton – was also a hit. In fact, of all the material produced by Agatha Christie’s prodigious brain, it is arguably Witness for the Prosecution that turned her from a success into a phenomenon. What now seems extraordinary is that Witness opened a year after The Mousetrap, the play that now symbolises the success of Agatha Christie but which, oddly enough, opened in 1952 to little fanfare. Indeed, Cork thought it best not to send the play to the US on the heels of Witness in case it hampered her newly glittering reputation on Broadway.

So why was it such a triumph? A feat of suave expertise, Witness for the Prosecution is certainly Christie’s most accomplished drama. Today, we are familiar with every trope of the courtroom showdown and the grandstanding barrister – Sir Wilfrid Robarts, as played by Laughton, could be seen as a precursor to John Mortimer’s Horace Rumpole – but in the early Fifties these generated an unfamiliar theatrical frisson. There is, as always with Christie at her best, a kind of shadowy wisdom behind all the showiness. The depth to the story comes from the character of the accused, Leonard Vole, who may be a killer but

was a worldwide hit, and made Christie a star