The Festival Players present Agatha Christie’s Verdict

As part of this year’s Agatha Christie Festival, audiences are invited to experience a rare performance of Agatha Christie’s Verdict (1958) – an extraordinary original stage drama that has never been adapted for film, television, or radio.

Presented as a costumed, seated reading, the production is directed and introduced by theatre producer Dr Julius Green, author of Agatha Christie: A Life in Theatre.

Following the success of the Festival’s 2023 reading of Christie’s long-lost adaptation of Towards Zero, the cast once again brings together professional actors and local amateur performers, reflecting the Festival’s ongoing commitment to community engagement and celebrating theatre-making at every level.

About Verdict

Staged at the height of her West End popularity, it was an unexpected flop – largely because its producer, Peter Saunders, had insisted on a title that made it sound like a courtroom drama follow-up to the hugely successful Witness for the Prosecution. And partly because, disastrously, the curtain came down a beat too early on opening night, radically changing the ending.

Christie herself observed that it was “a play which, though not a success with the public, satisfied me completely. It was put on under the title of Verdict – a bad title. I had called it No Fields of Amaranth, taken from the words of Walter Landor’s “there are no fields of Amaranth on this side of the grave”. I think it is the best play I have written, with the exception of Witness for the Prosecution. It failed, I think, because it was not a detective story or a thriller. It was a play that concerned murder, but its real background and point was that an idealist is always dangerous, a possible destroyer of those who love him – and it poses the question of how far you can sacrifice not yourself, but those you love, to what you believe in, even though they do not.”

The play has fascinating resonances with Christie’s own life and interests, not least its referencing of opera, recorded extracts of which will be heard throughout.

Despite the inclusion of a murder, which is committed in plain sight and with no doubt as to the identity of the murderer, and a brief appearance by a police Detective Inspector who arrests the wrong person, Verdict is an intriguing insight into the playwright that Christie might have been had she not succumbed to the constant pressure to deliver work for the stage befitting the “Queen of Crime”. It is the third in a trio of domestic dramas for the stage, following The Lie (c.1926) and A Daughter’s a Daughter (1956), which have been the subject of previous readings at the Festival. “A good and unusual Agatha Christie – not a thriller” remarked the censor on his report.

The presentation will be a costumed, seated reading directed and introduced by theatre producer Dr Julius Green, author of Agatha Christie – A Life in Theatre. As with 2023’s hugely successful reading of Christie’s lost adaptation of Towards Zero, the cast will be a mix of professionals and local amateurs, underlining the Festival’s continued commitment to community engagement.

For more information, visit www.agathachristiefestival.com

Thursday 17 September | 7.30pm