by Agatha Christie (Contributor), Agatha Christie (Contributor), Julius Green (Author), Agatha Christie (Contributor)
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of her life are illustrated with extracts from hitherto unknown plays, deleted scenes from her theatrical classics, and unpublished private letters, including her extensive correspondence with the legendary `Mousetrap Man', theatrical impresario Sir Peter Saunders.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.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 688
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 05 Apr 2018
ISBN 10: 0007546963
ISBN 13: 9780007546961
`If you ever wanted to know anything - and by `anything' I mean everything - about Agatha Christie's work in the theatre, then Agatha Christie: A Life in the Theatre by Julius Green is as good as a ticket in the front stalls. Now a superbly illustrated paperback from HarperCollins, which shows just how far paperback production values have come, Green's surely definitive work will answer any question.'-Mike Ripley, Shots Magazine
`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 Extensive quotations from unpublished and/or unperformed plays reveal a wit and nuanced understanding of human nature far beyond the novels.'-Daily Express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
JULIUS GREEN has numerous West End plays and musicals to his credit as a theatre producer and is a Fellow of the Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre, University of London. He studied history at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and in 2014 was Fellow Commoner of the College. In 2011 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 has served on the Board of Management of the Society of London Theatre and the Board of Directors of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, and is a director of the Academy of Circus Arts. Green is a regular columnist for The Stage newspaper and the author of How to Produce a West End Show. He lives in Cambridge.