So nasty you'd never guess Agatha Christie wrote it
Robert Tanitch reviews a new play based on Agatha Christie's A Daughter's Daughter

8 January 2010

A Daughter's Daughter
Trafalgar Studios

Jenny Seagrove plays the widowed mother in A Daughter's Daughter Agatha Christie wrote this play under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, the name she used for her psychological romantic novels. It ran for a week in Bath in 1956 and hasn't been seen since, which is a bit unfair.

Her family didn't like the play, finding the subject matter too autobiographical for comfort. The daughter doesn't want her widowed mother to remarry and forces her to choose between her and the man she adores. The final confrontation between the two women, interestingly acted by Jenny Seagrove and Honeysuckle Weeks, feels like something almost out of Strindberg, so nasty is it in its bitterness and hatred.

You would never guess Christie had written it; if she had, as opposed to Westmacott, the truly ghastly selfish daughter would most certainly have been murdered by the end of the first act.

Twelfth Night
Duke of York's

Shakespeare's bittersweet comedy is set on the Byronic shores of the Adriatic at the beginning of the 19th century; the setting is a pretext for multi-racial casting. Gregory Doran has done far better things for the RSC. Did you see his production of Hamlet on television on Boxing Day with David Tennant's wonderfully lucid and frenetic performance?

Richard Wilson at 73 is making his Shakespearean debut as Malvolio and he should be ideal for a self-important, grumpy steward; but he's no good at all. He looks as if he is in a different play to the rest of the cast.

He finds no humour in the scene when he is reading what he supposes is a love letter to him and doesn't seem to know what to do when he is dressed in yellow cross-gartered stockings to make it funny. He is at his best with the humiliation in his last scene; but why on earth is his great exit line - "I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you!" - said off-stage where it has no impact whatsoever?

Jo Stone-Fewings' Orsino, sadly, isn't Byronic, Nancy Carroll's Viola is a bit dull and Alexandra Gilbreath overdoes it, spoiling a potentially good Olivia. James Fleet doesn't make the impact Sir Andrew Aguecheek can. Richard McCabe, playing Sir Toby Belch, thinks breaking wind will raise a laugh. It doesn't. Militos Yerolemou's Feste is a whirling dervish and nothing more. The person you feel most for is Simeon Moore's Antonio, a very gay pirate in love, and, like everybody else, with the wrong person.

Aladdin
Hackney Empire

The story of Aladdin dates back to the Arabian Nights, an entertainment which, as everybody knows, ran for a thousand and one nights. But had Scheherazade told the story in the tacky way it is told in most British pantomimes at Christmas, she would undoubtedly have suffered the same fate as the other wives of the King of Persia. Aladdin was first staged in London in 1788.

The pantomime we know today was created by H J Byron in 1861 and it was he who introduced Widow Twankey (a reference to Chinese green tea, then very popular) and Abanazar, the villain who steals the lamp. The year was also the first time the principal boy was played by an actress and has been an opportunity for actresses to show their shapely legs on stage ever since.

The Hackney Empire's Aladdin is said to be London's number one pantomime, which may make you wonder just how wishy-washy the other pantomimes must be. Its centrepiece is Clive Rowe's popular Dame. David Ashley is a first-rate camp villain. The production's high spot is a flying dragon.

Dr Marigold & Mr Chops
Riverside Studios

Charles Dickens's reading tours up and down the country were phenomenally successful. They weren't readings, as such. Dickens knew the texts by heart and put so much into the performances that they were responsible for his early death at 58.

Simon Callow performs two stories which have not been acted for 150 years. Chops is a dwarf who comes into a fortune and finds he is treated no better by society than when he was earning his living in a circus. Marigold is a travelling salesman who teaches a deaf and dumb girl sign language. Callow is a good storyteller and Dickens's unashamed sentimentality still touches the heart.