| To the world she may have been the Queen of Crime, but to Mathew Prichard she was simply grandmother.
"It wasn’t until I was well into my teens that I realized what a famous person she was," says Agatha Christie’s 60-year-old grandson. "My best memories of her are of a very kindly, intelligent and generous grandmother. I was very lucky."
Lucky, indeed. When Prichard was still only a boy, Christie began giving members of her family what she called "a few little presents" – the royalties to some of her works. Young Mathew famously received the income for The Mousetrap, which would become the longest running play in history.
"Of course, there’s no means of telling whether a play is going to be a little present or a big present," says Prichard, chuckling over the telephone from his country home in South Wales.
Prichard is making a rare visit to Canada – and his first to Calgary – to see what could well be the world première of his grandmother’s forgotten play, Chimneys. "It’s quite an exciting theatrical event," he says. Details are still coming to light about the obscure work and there’s an unconfirmed rumour it may have had a one-off performance in the resort city of Bath back in the early 1930s. "But don’t put your last dollar on it," says Prichard.
Even more intriguing, the play was originally scheduled for production in London in 1931 with a cast that apparently would have included the young Laurence Olivier as its dashing hero, Anthony Cade. Was Olivier’s name on the cast list just wishful thinking, or was he approached to do the role? We may never know. We do know the great actor was in the U.S. at the time, beginning his Hollywood film career.
Prichard has now read the play a few times and believes the fact that it remained unproduced during Christie’s lifetime may have less to do with quality than with genre. Chimneys is a political thriller, rather than a whodunit, and by the 1930s Christie had begun to make her name as a master of the murder mystery. According to Janet Morgan’s 1984 biography of the author, Christie did suggest to her agent in 1951 that he consider trying to get Chimneys produced, but nothing came of it.
Prichard says the play "reads like quite an amusing thriller," but he hesitates to pass critical judgment on it yet. "I never know what I think of a play until I’ve seen it in the flesh, as it were, and seen and heard an audience’s reaction to it."
Prichard is Christie’s only grandchild, the son of her only daughter, Rosalind, who is now in her 80s and resides with her husband (Prichard’s stepfather) at Greenway, the famed Christie summer home in Devon. It has fallen to Prichard to manage the literary estate as chairman of Agatha Christie Ltd., a job he describes as "brand management."
"I have to make sure that the way in which the plays are put on and the books adapted for TV and film is tasteful and in keeping with my grandmother’s memory," he says.
Although they are no longer on the best-seller lists, Christie’s books remain popular and her plays continue to be revived. The estate pulls in about $4 million US in royalties each year.
"Considering that my grandmother has been dead for nearly 30 years, I think the worldwide sales of the books are truly remarkable, and we have never had so much interest as we do now in TV adaptations," says Prichard.
"There’s huge interest in this property and I believe my grandmother would’ve been very flattered had she been around to see it." |
Copyright ©2003 FFWD. All rights reserved.