Kevin Elyot on Christie : Adapting Agatha Christie for TV

Over the past 5 years, Kevin Elyot has been asked to adapt 6 Christie novels for television and a new adaptation of And Then There Were None for the stage. On the 13th September 2005, he gave a talk at the British Library about his work, and love of Christie.

My relationship with Agatha Christie began very recently. I had a brief flirtation in my teens, but it wasn’t until Death on the Nile, that things became serious. I’d seen the Peter Ustinov movie adaptation in the 1970s but had never read the novel, so I came to it with hardly any preconceptions. I found it to be an immensely stylish work, and, having now read several more of her novels, regard it as quintessential Christie: a group of irresistible characters leading us through a devious plot, motored by a heartfelt, emotional core, in this instance, the doomed, obsessive love affair between Simon Doyle and Jacqueline de Bellefort. It begins with an act of betrayal and ends with a bodycount as high as Hamlet but what Christie manages so adeptly is to pull this off in high comic style, creating a perfect tragicomedy.

Her writing is a gift to a dramatist. It tends towards the minimalist, and in a few deft strokes offers character and situation in such a way that you feel enabled to breathe your own life into them, whilst at heart, I hope, remaining true to her intention. What has also drawn me to the books I’ve worked on is that each one, whether light or dark in tone, tells of genuine, painful experience, such as adultery, betrayal and rumour; wrought, I’m sure, from her own life.

After Death On The Nile I wrote a screenplay of Five Little Pigs, a dark,nervous tale, again with obsessive love at its centre. I was particularly attracted to the structure of this novel, in which the same story is retold from five different points of view. It shows how memory plays tricks, how time can warp the truth and how old sins cast long shadows; all themes that I’ve touched on in my own plays.

Both these novels of course feature Hercule Poirot. The next novel I worked on, The Body In The Library, featured Miss Marple. With their formidable powers of deduction, wisdom and a dash of intuition, each of these characters, in their own inimitable fashion, see that justice is done, but whereas Poirot is an outsider, a foreigner in an insular, xenophobic, even racist society, Miss Marple is a stalwart member of her village community.

Writing both characters was somewhat intimidating, trespassing as I was on such hallowed ground. Each posed its own challenge, in the case of Poirot, doing justice to David Suchet’s already-established, immaculate portrayal, in the case of Marple, reincarnating a muchloved character for a new actor. We saw no reason why Miss Marple shouldn’t have some sort of emotional hinterland, so we wove into her history an unfulfilled relationship with a married army captain who’d died in the Great War. This experience gives resonance and poignancy to her understanding of some of the characters she encounters, and as a consequence has perhaps broadened her mind a little, gently shifting her towards a more modern sensibility. No one wrong-foots Miss Marple, played with twinkling aplomb and a delicious sense of mischief by Geraldine McEwan.

In Agatha Christie’s world, it seems, all loose ends are neatly tied up and order is always restored. I’m not sure how convincing this is in our more cynical times. Life’s not as neat as perhaps she’d have us believe; there are consequences, ramifications, scars, and so I prefer to leave a few questions hanging.

There are certain other changes I’ve made in my adaptations - one might even say, taken liberties - but as a rule I see my job more as a case of mining ideas that are already there, rather than imposing new ones, and perhaps developing them further than she felt able to.

This is what I’ve attempted to do with my new stage version of And Then There Were None. I’ve stayed true to the uncompromising nature of the original novel, which Christie herself, in her own dramatization, shied away from. When she told her agent, Edmund Cork, that she was going to change the ending, he said, “Sacrilege, but it’ll make easier theatre.” We’re sticking with the more difficult option. I’ve worked solely from the novel, and I’ve yet to read or see her play, or indeed any of the film versions. And Then There Were None is a fierce morality tale about justice and retribution. As ever in her novels, crime is always punished, but here it’s taken to frightening lengths. We’re a million miles away from the comforting environs of St. Mary Mead. This is a zero-tolerant world a world of logic without reason, where justice prevails but no one survives. The enemy lurks within, unidentifiable but deadly, striking an alarming chord in our own unsettled times.

There’s something about Christie, her instinctive grasp of character and situation, perhaps, that transcends a seeming insularity to give her work universal appeal, and touches parts that other writers can only dream about.

Kevin Elyot.