Overview

A revealing and witty new examination of how Agatha Christie became the world’s most successful and popular female playwright, including details of never-before-published scripts and stories. Agatha Christie is revered worldwide for her books and her many film and TV adaptations. Less well-known today is her extraordinary repertoire of stage plays that firmly established her as the most successful female dramatist of all time. Now Julius Green raises the curtain on Agatha Christie’s towering contribution to popular theatre, from her first serious attempts at playwriting – in a very different style to the whodunits for which she became famous – to her record-breaking achievements in the West End and her conquest of Broadway. Astonishing revelations about this often disregarded side of her life are illustrated with extracts from hitherto unknown plays, deleted scenes from her theatrical classics, and unpublished private letters, including her extensive correspondence with the legendary ‘Mousetrap Man’, theatrical impresario Sir Peter Saunders. Meticulously researched and full of groundbreaking discoveries, this book adds a fascinating new layer to Agatha Christie’s remarkable story.

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9780007546961

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Reviews

‘A magisterial reassessment of Christie's work for the stage.’—Lucy Worsley ‘Agatha Christie: A Life in Theatre is the pivot around which criticism of Christie's theatrical works revolves; there is before Green and there is after Green, and it is hard to imagine that any serious criticism on the subject could be written in the future without a rigorous engagement with this book. It is a project marked by intricate research and illuminating insights into the conditions within which the plays were written and produced.’—Benedict Morrison, The Bloomsbury Handbook to Agatha Christie ‘A thrilling look at the Queen of Crime … Having sifted through the evidence in her personal archives both here and in the US, Christie expert Julius Green spends almost 600 pages proving the case for Dame Agatha's pole position in the pantheon of female playwrights … Extensive quotations from unpublished and/or unperformed plays reveal a wit and nuanced understanding of human nature far beyond the novels.’—Daily Express ‘Her theatrical masterpieces have made her the most successful female playwright of all time … Now, on the 125th anniversary of Agatha Christie's birth, ten new plays by her have been unearthed by British theatre producer Julius Green … Exploring her plays from 'page to stage' he shows that Christie regarded writing books as her day job but found true “creative fulfilment” in the theatre.’—Daily Mail ‘Green turned detective himself and scoured archives around the world to uncover a number of unpublished, unknown works … This book is a treat.’—Independent

'A thrilling look at the Queen of Crime ... Having sifted through the evidence in her personal archives both here and in the US, Christie expert Julius Green spends almost 600 pages proving the case for Dame Agatha's pole position in the pantheon of female playwrights ... Extensive quotations from unpublished and/or unperformed plays reveal a wit and nuanced understanding of human nature far beyond the novels.'-Daily Express 'Her theatrical masterpieces have made her the most successful female playwright of all time ... Now, on the 125th anniversary of Agatha Christie's birth, ten new plays by her have been unearthed by British theatre producer Julius Green ... Exploring her plays from 'page to stage' he shows that Christie regarded writing books as her day job but found true creative fulfilment in the theatre.'-Daily Mail 'Green turned detective himself and scoured archives around the world to uncover a number of unpublished, unknown works ... This book is a treat.'-Independent

Author Information

Julius Green has numerous West End plays and musicals to his credit as a theatre producer. In 2001 he produced the twelve-week Agatha Christie Theatre Festival, uniquely presenting a repertoire of Christie’s complete plays as then known, and in 2006 he created the Agatha Christie Theatre Company. He studied history at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and is a Fellow of the Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre, University of London. He has served on the Board of Management of the Society of London Theatre and the Board of Directors of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and is a director of the Academy of Circus Arts. Julius is a regular columnist for The Stage newspaper and was invited by HarperCollins to write the introduction to a new edition of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap and Other Plays celebrating The Mousetrap’s 60th anniversary in 2012. In the same year Oberon published his first book, How to Produce a West End Show, described by WhatsOnStage as ‘An exceptionally well-written, drily inflected and amusing book… full of useful words of wisdom’. He lives in Cambridge.

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