| And Then There Were None | |
|---|---|
 Samuel French 2011 edition | |
| Written by | Agatha Christie |
| Date premiered | 20 September 1943 |
| Place premiered | New Wimbledon Theatre, Wimbledon, London |
| Genre | Mystery |
And Then There Were None is a 1943 play by crime writer Agatha Christie. The play, like the 1939 book on which it is based, was originally titled and performed in the UK as Ten Little Niggers. It was also performed under the name Ten Little Indians.
Christie had been pleased with the book, stating in her autobiography "I wrote the book after a tremendous amount of planning, and I was pleased with what I made of it." [1] The book was very well received upon publication and Christie received a request from Reginald Simpson to be allowed to dramatise it. Christie refused, because she relished the challenge herself [2] although it would take her two years to carry out the task. She knew the ending would have to be changed because all of the characters die in the book and therefore "I must make two of the characters innocent, to be reunited at the end and come safe out of the ordeal." [3] The original nursery rhyme that inspired the title had an alternative ending:
This allowed Christie to portray a different conclusion on stage. [4]
After the play had been written, most people she discussed it with considered it impossible to produce. She received some encouragement from Charles Cochrane but he was unable to find financial backers. Finally, Bertie Mayer, who had produced the 1928 play Alibi , agreed to stage it. [5]
After a try-out at the Wimbledon Theatre starting on 20 September 1943, the play opened in the West End at the St James's Theatre on 17 November. It gained good reviews and ran for 260 performances until 24 February 1944 when the theatre was bombed. It then transferred to the Cambridge Theatre opening on 29 February and running at that venue until 6 May. It then transferred back to the restored St James' on 9 May and finally closed on 1 July.
Although she did not feel it to be her best play, Christie did declare it was her best piece of "craftsmanship". She also considered it to be the play which formally started her career as a playwright, despite the success of Black Coffee in 1930. [5]
The stage adaptation's plot largely follows that of the novel. The story begins when eight disparate guests arrive at an isolated mansion located on an island off the coast of Devon, and are tended to by two married domestics who prepared the house for their arrival. During the first evening a gramophone recording accuses all ten people of past crimes that went unpunished by the law. Soon they start dying one at a time, and the remaining guests deduce that the murderer is one of their own.
The scene of the play is the living-room of the house on Indian Island (Nigger Island in the 1943 UK production), off the coast of Devon. The time – the present.
ACT I
ACT II
ACT III
Ivor Brown reviewed the play in The Observer's issue of 21 November 1943 when he said, "Miss Agatha Christie does not stint things. Like Hotspur, who could kill six dozen Scots at breakfast, complain of his quiet life, and then ask for work, she is not one to be concerned about a mere singleton corpse. But she can add quality to quantity in her domestic morgue. In Ten Little Niggers she shows an intense ingenuity in adapting that very lethal rhyme (so oddly deemed a nursery matter) to modern conditions." Mr. Brown concluded that Henrietta Watson's portrayal of Emily Brent was, "the most authentic member of a house party with 'no future in it. played the airmen say. That gently lugubrious phrase certainly does not hold of the play." [6]
Director: Irene Hentschel
Decor by: Clifford Pember
William Murray – Rogers
Reginald Barlow – Narracott
Hilda Bruce-Potter – Mrs Rogers
Linden Travers – Vera Claythorne
Terence De Marney – Philip Lombard
Michael Blake – Anthony Marston
Percy Walsh – William Blore
Eric Cowley – General MacKenzie
Henrietta Watson – Emily Brent
Allan Jeayes – Sir Lawrence Wargrave
Gwyn Nicholls – Dr Armstrong [7]
A production in New York opened at the Broadhurst Theatre under the title Ten Little Indians on 27 June 1944. On 6 January 1945, it transferred to the Plymouth Theatre where it ran from 9 January until 30 June 1945. The total run on Broadway was 426 performances. [8]
Director: Albert de Courville
Neil Fitzgerald – Rogers
Georgia Harvey – Mrs. Rogers
Halliwell Hobbes – Sir Lawrence Wargrave
Nicholas Joy – General MacKenzie
Anthony Kemble Cooper – Anthony Marston
Claudia Morgan – Vera Claythorne
Patrick O'Connor – Fred Narracott
J. Pat O'Malley – William Blore
Michael Whalen – Philip Lombard
Estelle Winwood – Emily Brent
Harry Worth – Dr. Armstrong
The play was first published by Samuel French Ltd as a paperback in 1944. It was first published in hardback in The Mousetrap and Other Plays by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1978 ( ISBN 0-396-07631-9) and in the UK by HarperCollins in 1993 ( ISBN 0-00-224344-X).
At some point after the end of the Second World War, a survivor of Buchenwald concentration camp contacted Christie and told her that the inmates had staged their own production there, undoubtedly writing their own script as they would not have had access to the author's version. Christie was told that they found that it had "sustained them". [9]
In November 2007, Lakota East High School in West Chester, OH, was set to perform the play but plans were cancelled after the NAACP protested about the production because of the original title of the novel. [10] Lakota East High School officials subsequently revised their plans and decided to perform the play on 29 November under the title "And Then There Were None". [11]
On 14 October 2005 a new version of the play, written by Kevin Elyot and directed by Steven Pimlott opened at the Gielgud Theatre in London. For this script, Elyot restored the original book ending where both Vera and Lombard die and the murderer commits suicide. The versions of the rhyme and island name used were "Ten Little Soldiers" and "Soldier Island" as per current printings of the novel. Despite some positive reviews, [12] [13] the play closed on 14 January 2006. [14]
Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, was an English writer known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. She also wrote the world's longest-running play, the murder mystery The Mousetrap, which has been performed in the West End of London since 1952. A writer during the "Golden Age of Detective Fiction", Christie has been called the "Queen of Crime"—a moniker which is now trademarked by her estate—or the "Queen of Mystery". She also wrote six novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. In 1971, she was made a Dame (DBE) by Queen Elizabeth II for her contributions to literature. Guinness World Records lists Christie as the best-selling fiction writer of all time, her novels having sold more than two billion copies.
Five Little Pigs is a work of detective fiction by British writer Agatha Christie, first published in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in May 1942 under the title Murder in Retrospect and in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in January 1943. The UK first edition carries a copyright date of 1942 and retailed at eight shillings while the US edition was priced at $2.00.
"Ten Little Indians" is an American children's counting out rhyme. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 12976. In 1868, songwriter Septimus Winner adapted it as a song, then called "Ten Little Injuns", for a minstrel show.
Ten Little Indians is a 1965 British crime mystery film directed by George Pollock. It is the second film version of Agatha Christie's 1939 novel. It was produced by Oliver A. Unger, with co-producer Harry Alan Towers also credited as co-writer under his pen name Peter Welbeck.
And Then There Were None is a 1974 mystery film and an adaptation of Agatha Christie's best-selling 1939 mystery novel of the same name. The film was directed by Peter Collinson and produced by Harry Alan Towers. This was the second of three versions of Christie's novel to be adapted to the screen by producer Harry Alan Towers. Two film adaptations were previously released. An American made-for-television version was broadcast in 1959. Towers produced a third version in 1989.
Agatha Christie: And Then There Were None is a 2005 point-and-click adventure game developed by AWE Productions and published by The Adventure Company for Microsoft Windows. It was the first in The Adventure Company's Agatha Christie series. The game is a detective murder-mystery; it begins with nine people, including Patrick Narracott, the playable character, who meet and journey to the fictional Shipwreck (Soldier) Island. There, two additional onscreen characters are introduced, and the story then follows the events that unfold.
Desyat Negrityat is a 1987 Soviet mystery thriller film adaptation of Agatha Christie's 1939 novel of the same name, now known as And Then There Were None. It was directed by Stanislav Govorukhin, who also penned the script.
And Then There Were None is a 1939 novel by Agatha Christie, originally titled Ten Little Niggers and later also published as Ten Little Indians.
Appointment with Death is a 1945 play by crime writer Agatha Christie. It is based on her 1938 novel of the same name.
Three Blind Mice is the name of a half-hour radio play written by Agatha Christie, which was later adapted into a television film, a short story, and a popular stage production.
The Hollow is a 1951 play by crime writer Agatha Christie. It is based on the 1946 book of the same name.
Ten Little Indians is a 1989 mystery film directed by Alan Birkinshaw. The fourth English-language screen adaptation of Agatha Christie's 1939 novel And Then There Were None, it was the third version to be produced by Harry Alan Towers, following his 1965 and 1974 adaptations.
Ten Little Niggers may refer to:
"Ten Little Indians" is a modern children's rhyme.
Personal Call is a half-hour radio play written by Agatha Christie and first performed on the BBC Radio Light Programme on Monday, 31 May 1954. The play reuses the character of Inspector Narracott from the 1931 novel The Sittaford Mystery.
And Then There Were None is a mystery novel by the English writer Agatha Christie, who described it as the most difficult of her books to write. It was first published in the United Kingdom by the Collins Crime Club on 6 November 1939, as Ten Little Niggers, after an 1869 minstrel song that serves as a major plot element. The US edition was released in January 1940 with the title And Then There Were None, taken from the last five words of the song. Successive American reprints and adaptations use that title, though American Pocket Books paperbacks used the title Ten Little Indians between 1964 and 1986. UK editions continued to use the original title until 1985.
Kevin Elyot was a British playwright, screenwriter and actor. His most notable works include the play My Night with Reg (1994) and the film Clapham Junction (2007). His stage work has been performed by leading theatre companies including the Royal Court, National Theatre, Bush Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company, Donmar Warehouse and in the West End. He finished his final play, Twilight Song, not long before he died in 2014, which received a posthumous premiere at London's Park Theatre in 2017.
And Then There Were None is a 1945 film adaptation of Agatha Christie's 1939 mystery novel of the same name, directed by René Clair. It was released in the United Kingdom as Ten Little Indians, in keeping with the third United Kingdom title of Christie's novel. The film was produced by 20th Century Fox and due to the lapsed copyright, it is now in the public domain. The film has been remastered multiple times and is freely available online.
And Then There Were None is a 2015 mystery thriller television series that was first broadcast on BBC One from 26 to 28 December 2015. The three-part programme was adapted by Sarah Phelps and directed by Craig Viveiros and is based on Agatha Christie's 1939 novel of the same name. The series features an ensemble cast, including Douglas Booth, Charles Dance, Maeve Dermody, Burn Gorman, Anna Maxwell Martin, Sam Neill, Miranda Richardson, Toby Stephens, Noah Taylor, and Aidan Turner. The programme follows a group of strangers who are invited to an isolated island where they are murdered one by one for their past crimes.
Lists of adaptations of the works of Agatha Christie:
Media related to And Then There Were None (play) at Wikimedia Commons
