The English Crime Play in the Twentieth Century

291 Pages·2015·1.034 MB·English

by  Beatrix Hesse (auth.)

Crime Files Series
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Titles include:
Maurizio Ascari
A COUNTER-H ISTORY OF CRIME FICTION
Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational
Pamela Bedore
DIME NOVELS AND THE ROOTS OF AMERICAN DETECTIVE FICTION
Hans Bertens and Theo D’haen
CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CRIME FICTION
Anita Biressi
CRIME, FEAR AND THE LAW IN TRUE CRIME STORIES
Clare Clarke
LATE VICTORIAN CRIME FICTION IN THE SHADOWS OF SHERLOCK
Paul Cobley
THE AMERICAN THRILLER
Generic Innovation and Social Change in the 1970s
Michael Cook
DETECTIVE FICTION AND THE GHOST STORY
The Haunted Text
Michael Cook
NARRATIVES OF ENCLOSURE IN DETECTIVE FICTION
The Locked Room Mystery
Barry Forshaw
BRITISH CRIME FILM
Subverting the Social Order
Barry Forshaw
DEATH IN A COLD CLIMATE
A Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction
Emelyne Godfrey
FEMININITY, CRIME AND S ELF-D EFENCE IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND
SOCIETY
From Dagger- Fans to Suffragettes
Emelyne Godfrey
MASCULINITY, CRIME AND S ELF- DEFENCE IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE
Duelling with Danger
Beatrix Hesse
THE ENGLISH CRIME PLAY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Lee Horsley
THE NOIR THRILLER
Merja Makinen
AGATHA CHRISTIE
Investigating Femininity
Fran Mason
AMERICAN GANGSTER CINEMA
From Little Caesar to Pulp Fiction
Fran Mason
HOLLYWOOD’S DETECTIVES
Crime Series in the 1930s and 1940s from the Whodunnit to H ard- Boiled Noir
Linden Peach
MASQUERADE, CRIME AND FICTION
Criminal Deceptions
Steven Powell (editor)
100 AMERICAN CRIME WRITERS
Alistair Rolls and Deborah Walker
FRENCH AND AMERICAN NOIR
Dark Crossings
Susan Rowland
FROM AGATHA CHRISTIE TO RUTH RENDELL
British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction
Melissa Schaub
MIDDLEBROW FEMINISM IN CLASSIC BRITISH DETECTIVE FICTION
The Female Gentleman
Adrian Schober
POSSESSED CHILD NARRATIVES IN LITERATURE AND FILM
Contrary States
Lucy Sussex
WOMEN WRITERS AND DETECTIVES IN N INETEENTH- CENTURY CRIME FICTION
The Mothers of the Mystery Genre
Heather Worthington
THE RISE OF THE DETECTIVE IN EARLY NINETEENTH- CENTURY POPULAR
FICTION
R.A. York
AGATHA CHRISTIE
Power and Illusion
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Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England
The English Crime Play
in the Twentieth Century
Beatrix Hesse
Professor of English and Cultural and Media Studies,
Universität Passau, Germany
© Beatrix Hesse 2015
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-46303-6
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First published 2015 by
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DOI 10.1057/9781137463043
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
1 The Body in the Library and the Body on Stage 1
Part I A History of the Crime Play
2 From Victorian Melodrama to the End of the Twenties 21
3 From the 1930s to the End of World War II 34
4 From the End of World War II to 1955 48
5 From 1956 to the End of the Sixties 64
6 From Sleuth to I n- Yer- Face Theatre 78
Part II A Poetics of the Crime Play
7 Settings and Stage Sets 97
8 Timing and Plot “Construction” 117
9 Dramatic Characters 134
10 Violence, Crime and Punishment 154
11 Genre, Generic Development and Subgenres 171
Part III The Crime Play and Detective Fiction
12 Stage Adaptations of Agatha Christie’s Detective Stories 197
13 Other Types of Detective Fiction Adapted for the Stage 218
Coda: The Twentieth- Century English Crime
Play – A View from 2015 238
Notes 242
Bibliography: The Plays 261
Bibliography: Works Cited 271
Index 279
v
Acknowledgements
The preliminary research for this book was funded by two equal opportuni-
ties programmes: the HSP III and HWP (now sadly both extinct), for which
I am profoundly grateful. I have also long wanted to thank my academic
teacher, Professor Klaus Peter Jochum, who had already retired at the time
I was working on this book and still gave generously of his time and
expertise. His patience and critical intelligence have been invaluable.
Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to Iris Wagner, who proofread
the manuscript at very short notice and removed a number of mistakes.

vi
1
The Body in the Library and the
Body on Stage
Many of the most popular English stage plays of the last century were con-
cerned with crime, most frequently murder, and its detection. The present
study will examine these plays, which in some ways are so like detective
fiction and in other respects are very different. The title phrase of this chap-
ter, “the body in the library and the body on stage” plays on the contrast
between the popular image of a dead body found in the midst of “fossil-
ized,” dead, written language and theatrical performance in which living
bodies utter living, spoken language. Twentieth- century English detective
fiction created a massive output of stories revolving around the discovery
of a dead body and the reconstruction of how that body came to be a dead
body. Since drama is concerned with the actions of living bodies one might
assume that no comparable genre has evolved in the theatre. This is far from
the case.
The term used for this kind of play in this study will be “crime play,”
since this is a fairly neutral and comprehensive term which does not imply
preconceived ideas about the structure or focus of these plays.1 “Crime play”
is defined as a play revolving around a crime and its detection. The crime
must be the central topic of the play, which means that, for instance, plays
on family conflicts that happen to escalate into violence will not be consid-
ered unless the focus is on the illegality of such violence. “Crime” is defined
according to the textbooks on criminal law. The definition that states the
essential aspects most clearly seems to be the one formulated by the House
of Lords in 1957 (Board of Trade v. Owen): “an unlawful act or default which
is an offence against the public and renders the person guilty of the act
liable to legal punishment”.2 The term “unlawful act” already contains sev-
eral important aspects. “Unlawful” stresses the principle of legality: before
an action can be a crime, there must be a law that prohibits it. “Act” refers
to the legal principle of “actus reus,” meaning a willed, voluntary act com-
mitted in “mens rea,” a wrongful state of mind, for instance intent – the
classic “malice aforethought,” – in the case of murder. Besides, the term
“unlawful act” draws attention to the difference between legal and moral
1
2 The English Crime Play in the Twentieth Century
wrong. A traffic violation may be illegal, though not immoral, while lying or
adultery may be immoral but not illegal unless defined as such by the laws
of the country. The fact that a crime is considered “an offence against the
public” and “liable to legal punishment” differentiates criminal law from
civil law. In civil law, a specific person has been offended and the remedy
for such an offence is not punishment but compensation.
As the above definition of “crime” suggests, this study will not be primar-
ily concerned with moral wrong, with questions of guilt, responsibility – or
Sin – but largely with the aspect of illegality and the threat of punishment
resulting from it. The emphasis on this aspect implies that the crime play is
understood to be a thoroughly secularized genre that deals with crime and
its accompanying intense emotions of aggression and fear in a predomi-
nantly rational manner. Hence, treatments of the themes of fear and aggres-
sion which present these topics in the context of the operation of occult
forces, e.g. Hamilton Deane’s Dracula, have been excluded from the present
study. Plays concerned with terrorism in the context of civil warfare have
also been ignored, since they are arguably better discussed together with
other plays about war and political conflict.
So much on the aspect of “crime.” “Play” in the context of this study
means “stage play,” excluding TV plays and radio drama, since the condi-
tions of production are vastly different and the three formats are hence not
necessarily comparable. Likewise, the present study focuses on full- length
plays and largely ignores one- act plays because they present different prob-
lems of plot construction. A handful of plays that are less than full- length
have nevertheless been considered because they introduced important inno-
vations to the format, for example Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound
and Howard Brenton’s Christie in Love. Since the focus of the present study
will be on the development of specific traditions and conventions of the
crime play, it turns out to be necessary to limit the selection of plays to those
performed in a specific location – in this case, the London West End.3 Plays
that only had a short run in a remote area of the British Isles obviously had
little opportunity of establishing a new tradition. In this respect, the study
of the crime play necessarily differs from the study of the detective novel:
while a novel can be read anywhere, provided the reader is familiar with
the language, you can only watch a play in a specific theatre. A historical
study of a particular type of play has to be based largely on a study of the
published play text. For the present study, only published plays have been
considered, in order to render the resulting observations verifiable for the
reader.
Finally, only plays of English origin have been considered for the present
study, that is, plays usually written by English playwrights that saw their
first performance in London or elsewhere in the British Isles. As the study
of detective fiction has shown, different countries tend to produce different
varieties of crime fiction. Therefore, it seems advisable to limit oneself to
The Body in the Library and the Body on Stage 3
one national tradition at a time. For the same reason, plays adapted from
foreign detective novels have also been excluded from the present study.
The term “crime play” is not yet established in critical discourse; however,
there seems to be a latent awareness that some kind of generic label for the
type of play described above is indeed desirable. The website “officiallon-
dontheatre.com” and the regularly published free leaflet “Official London
Theatre Guide” offer theatregoers the subgenre of the “thriller” next to
established dramatic genres such as “tragedy” and “comedy.” John Russell
Taylor dubs a play concerned with crime and detection a “whodunit”4 in
imitation of the terminology employed in detective fiction criticism, and
Stanley Richards calls his collections of crime plays “Mystery and Suspense
Plays.”5 None of these terms, however, is particularly satisfactory, since
“thriller” and “whodunit” all by themselves do not clearly announce that
they refer to plays, and “mystery play” invites confusion with medieval
religious drama. As a neutral and unambiguous term, “crime play” clearly
is to be favoured.
As the absence of a uniformly used term suggests, critical discussion of
the crime play has so far been virtually non- existent. There is an American
dissertation on the subject, Charles LaBorde’s Form and Formula in Detective
Drama (1976), and one monograph that attracted a somewhat wider audi-
ence, Marvin Carlson’s Deathtraps of 1993. Since the number of secondary
texts is comparatively small and the texts themselves are not widely known,
it may be appropriate to discuss them in some detail.
LaBorde’s thesis was subsequently published in The Armchair Detective
under the somewhat more journalistic title of “Dicks on Stage,” but failed
to trigger off a lively critical debate on the format. At the outset of his
study, LaBorde deplores the lack of secondary criticism on the crime play,
remarking: “It remains a major twentieth- century theatre form without
detailed scholarly analyses of either its history, development, or structure.”6
While acknowledging the work done by Willson Disher and Frank Rahill
in the field of melodrama, LaBorde believes that disproportionately little
space is allotted to thrillers and mysteries in their respective works. Besides,
he notes that studies of detective novelists like Christie and Wallace also
devote but minimal space to the authors’ dramatic work. LaBorde limits
himself to the discussion of published English and American plays that
had substantial runs in London or New York, “substantial” meaning over
70 performances before 1940 and 200 or more after 1940.7 Besides, he only
examines one type of crime play in any detail: the kind he christens the
“confined mystery,” “a drama in which a group of characters is detained
primarily in a single locale until a crime is solved.”8 Although this defini-
tion also applies to courtroom drama, this type is explicitly excluded from
LaBorde’s study.9
In his analysis of the structure of crime plays, LaBorde largely relies
on Aristotelian dramatic theory and terminology. Like Dorothy Sayers in