Peril at End House (play)
Encyclopedia
Peril at End House is a 1940 play based on the 1932 novel
Peril at End House
Peril at End House is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie first published in the US by the Dodd, Mead and Company in February 1932 and in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in March of the same year...

 of the same name by Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie
Dame Agatha Christie DBE was a British crime writer of novels, short stories, and plays. She also wrote romances under the name Mary Westmacott, but she is best remembered for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections , and her successful West End plays.According to...

. The play is by Arnold Ridley
Arnold Ridley
Major William Arnold Ridley, OBE was an English playwright and actor, first notable as the author of the play The Ghost Train and later in life for portraying the elderly Private Charles Godfrey in the popular British sitcom Dad's Army .-Early life:Ridley was born in Walcot, Bath, England where...

, who much later played Private Godfrey in Dad's Army
Dad's Army
Dad's Army is a British sitcom about the Home Guard during the Second World War. It was written by Jimmy Perry and David Croft and broadcast on BBC television between 1968 and 1977. The series ran for 9 series and 80 episodes in total, plus a radio series, a feature film and a stage show...

. . Ridley was granted permission to adapt the book in an agreement with Christie dated July 18, 1938.

Background

It was first performed on April 1, 1940 at the Richmond Theatre
Richmond Theatre
The present Richmond Theatre, in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, is a British Victorian theatre located on Little Green, adjacent to Richmond Green. It opened on 18 September 1899 with a performance of As You Like It, and is one of the finest surviving examples of the work of theatre...

 in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

 before moving to the Vaudeville Theatre
Vaudeville Theatre
The Vaudeville Theatre is a West End theatre on The Strand in the City of Westminster. As the name suggests, the theatre held mostly vaudeville shows and musical revues in its early days. It opened in 1870 and was rebuilt twice, although each new building retained elements of the previous...

 where it opened on May 1, 1940. Despite some positive reviews, the play closed on May 18 after just twenty-three performances. The part of Hercule Poirot
Hercule Poirot
Hercule Poirot is a fictional Belgian detective created by Agatha Christie. Along with Miss Marple, Poirot is one of Christie's most famous and long-lived characters, appearing in 33 novels and 51 short stories published between 1920 and 1975 and set in the same era.Poirot has been portrayed on...

 was played by Francis L. Sullivan
Francis L. Sullivan
Francis Loftus Sullivan was an English film and stage actor. He attended Stonyhurst, the Jesuit public school in Lancashire, England whose alumni include Charles Laughton and Arthur Conan Doyle.A heavily built man with a striking double-chin and a deep voice, Sullivan made his acting debut at the...

 who had previously played the role in Christie's 1930 play Black Coffee
Black Coffee (play)
Black Coffee is a play by the British crime-fiction author Agatha Christie which was produced initially in 1930. The first piece that Christie wrote for the stage, it launched a successful second career for her as a playwright....

.

Ridley changed the name of two of the characters from the novel. Freddie Rice was renamed Frances Rice and Jim Lazarus (who in the novel was Jewish and was the subject of some Semitic references) became Terry Ord. Freddie's drug-addicted husband was billed as "A Stranger".

Scenes

The action of the play takes place at St. Loo in Cornwall
Cornwall
Cornwall is a unitary authority and ceremonial county of England, within the United Kingdom. It is bordered to the north and west by the Celtic Sea, to the south by the English Channel, and to the east by the county of Devon, over the River Tamar. Cornwall has a population of , and covers an area of...

 during the course of five days.

ACT I
  • Scene 1 - Terrace of the Majestic Hotel
  • Scene 2 - Hall at End House. The same evening.

ACT II
  • Scene 1 - The same. Two nights later.
  • Scene 2 - The same. Early next morning.
  • Scene 3 - The same. The next day.

ACT III
(During the course of this Act, the curtain is dropped to indicate the lapse of four hours.)
  • The same. The next afternoon.

Reception

The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...

reviewed the play twice, firstly in its edition of April 3, 1940 when they commented on Sullivan's portrayal of Poirot stating that he "preserves the essentials of the man, and there is never any doubt that he is indeed the greatest detective in the world". They further commented that the nature of Christie's books meant that they "do not struggle and protest against the limitations of the stage as so many detective stories seem to do when they are adapted". The role of the 'stranger' in the play was felt to belong "to a cruder tradition" however "for the most part, the play is less a 'thriller' than a satisfactory exercise for those little grey cells M. Poirot possesses in such abundance".

The second reviewer, in the edition of May 2, 1940, felt that Poirot was too talkative and that "there are times when we should prefer that the syllogisms were acted rather than spoken, but talk is on the whole agreeably lucid and vivid, and though the solution, when it comes with a sudden rush of action, seems larger and more complicated than the mystery, it cannot be said that the tale anywhere conspicuously hangs fire".

Ivor Brown
Ivor Brown
Ivor John Carnegie Brown was a British journalist and man of letters.-Biography:Born in Penang, Malaya, Brown was the younger of two sons of Dr. William Carnegie Brown, a specialist in tropical diseases, and his wife Jean Carnegie. At an early age he was sent to Britain, where he attended Suffolk...

 reviewed the play in The Observer
The Observer
The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...

s issue of May 5, 1940 when he said, "Miss Christie knows how to complicate a crime. Mr. Ridley sustains the mystery. The Cornish seas are packed with red herrings, and solvers will also have to keep an eye on some strange old trout. There let the matter rest. The form of entertainment is familiar. It took my mind back to the days of
The Bat
The Bat (1926 film)
The Bat is a silent film based on the 1920 hit Broadway play by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood, directed by Roland West and starring Jack Pickford and Louise Fazenda...

. In these affairs time does not march on, but M. Poirot agreeably passes by."."

"A.D." in
The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...

s review of May 4, 1940 said that the play was, "for those who delight in the complications of the crime novel in its most recent phases. It is wildly complicated, but is it engagingly so?" The reviewer seemed to prefer characters like Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes is a fictional detective created by Scottish author and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The fantastic London-based "consulting detective", Holmes is famous for his astute logical reasoning, his ability to take almost any disguise, and his use of forensic science skills to solve...

 as a detective rather than Poirot and the "bafflement" that his cases brought. The reviewer then committed the cardinal sin of identifying the murderer in his somewhat ironically-written final paragraph when he said, "There can be no harm in divulging that this play's apparent heroine is really its villainess. Mrs. Christie's readers will know it already. To the ignorant the fact will only be an exhausted torch in a cloudy black-out."

Bernard Buckham in the Daily Mirror of May 3, 1940 said the production, "has its exciting moments , but more action and less talk would have made it a better play."

Cast of 1940 London production

Francis L Sullivan as Hercule Poirot

Wilfred Fletcher as A Stranger

Donald Bisset as Henry

Tully Combe as Terry Ord

Phoebe Kershaw as Frances Rice

Ian Fleming
Ian Fleming (actor)
Ian Fleming was an Australian born character actor with credits in over 100 British movies.He is perhaps best known for playing Dr. Watson in a series of Sherlock Holmes movies of the 1930s opposite Arthur Wontner's Holmes...

as Captain Hastings
Arthur Hastings
Captain Arthur Hastings, OBE, is a fictional character, the amateur sleuthing partner and best friend of Agatha Christie's Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot...



Olga Edwardes as "Nick" Buckley

William Senior as Commander Challenger

Beckett Bould
Beckett Bould
-Selected filmography:* Holiday's End * South Riding * Old Mother Riley's Circus * The Day Will Dawn * Anna Karenina * Portrait of Clare * Pool of London * What Every Woman Wants...

as Stanley Croft

Josephine Middleton as Ellen

Isabel Dean
Isabel Dean
Isabel Dean was an English film and television actress.Born as Isabel Hodgkinson on 29 May 1918 in Aldridge, Staffordshire. She studied painting at the Birmingham Art School and from 1937 joined the Cheltenham Repertory Company as a scenic artist...

as Maggie Buckley

Brian Oulton
Brian Oulton
Brian Oulton was an English character actor.Born in Liverpool, he made his acting debut in 1939 as a lead actor...

as Charles Vyse

May Hallatt as Mrs Croft

Charles Mortimer as Inspector Weston

Margery Caldicott as Dr. Helen Graham

Nancy Poultney as Janet Buckley

Publication and further adaptations

The play was first published by Samuel French
Samuel French
Samuel French was a U.S. entrepreneur who, together with British actor, playwright and theatrical manager Thomas Hailes Lacy, pioneered in the field of theatrical publishing and the licensing of plays....

 in February 1945 as French's Acting Edition 962, priced four shillings.

A radio version of the play was presented on the BBC Home Service
BBC Home Service
The BBC Home Service was a British national radio station which broadcast from 1939 until 1967.-Development:Between the 1920s and the outbreak of The Second World War, the BBC had developed two nationwide radio services, the BBC National Programme and the BBC Regional Programme...

 on Saturday, May 29, 1948 from 9.20 to 10.45pm as part of the Saturday Night Theatre strand. The play was adapted by Mollie Greenhalgh, produced by William Hughes and starred Austin Trevor
Austin Trevor
Austin Trevor was a Belfast born actor who had a long career in British films and television.He was the first actor to play Agatha Christie's detective Hercule Poirot on screen in three British films during the early 1930s: Alibi , Black Coffee and Lord Edgware Dies...

 who had appeared in three films in the 1930's as Poirot: Alibi (1931), Black Coffee (1931) and Lord Edgware Dies (1934). Ian Fleming also reprised his role as Hastings from the stage version. The broadcast was repeated on Monday, May 31, 1948 on the Light Programme at 4.15pm as part of Monday Matinée.

Cast:

Austin Trevor as Hercule Poirot

Donald Bisset as Henry

Graeme Muir as Terry Ord

Althea Parker as Frances Rice

Wilfred Fletcher as a Stranger

Ian Fleming as Captain Hastings

Jenny Lovelace as 'Nick' Buckley

William Senior as Commander Challenger

William Collins as Stanley Croft

Josephine Middleton as Ellen

Meg Simmons as Maggie Buckley

Brian Oulton
Brian Oulton
Brian Oulton was an English character actor.Born in Liverpool, he made his acting debut in 1939 as a lead actor...

as Charles Vyse

May Hallatt as Mrs Croft

Howieson Culff as Inspector Weston

Joan Clement Scott as Dr. Helen Graham

Joan Hart as Janet Buckley
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK