The Hollow (play)

The Hollow
Written by	Agatha Christie
Date premiered	10 February 1951
Place premiered	Cambridge Arts Theatre
Original language	English

The Hollow is a 1951 play by crime writer Agatha Christie. It is based on the 1946 book of the same name.

In her Autobiography, Christie claimed that the success of And Then There Were None set her on the path of being a playwright as well as a writer of books and that only she would adapt her works for the stage from then on and that The Hollow would be her next play. In writing this, Christie forgot her intervening plays of Appointment with Death (1945) and Murder on the Nile (1946) in addition to Moie Charles and Barbara Toy's 1949 adaptation of Murder at the Vicarage.

Christie had always felt that The Hollow would make a good play but she came up against the opposition of her daughter, Rosalind Hicks, who Christie affectionately described as having "had the valuable role in life of eternally trying to discourage me without success". Christie was determined to turn the book, which both she and Rosalind liked, into a play but was equally adamant that in doing so it would lose the character of Hercule Poirot whose appearance in the book she thought had "ruined it". The parts of the policemen were changed from the book as well from Inspector Grange and Sergeant Clark to Inspector Colquhoun and Detective Sergeant Penny.

Bertie Meyer, a backer of plays whose association with Christie's stage works dated back to Alibi in 1928, signed a contract to produce The Hollow in 1950 and plans were made with Christie's agent, Edmund Cork, to open the play in London to coincide with the start of the Festival of Britain. These plans came to nothing and Christie was annoyed at the treatment she was starting to receive from Meyer on this and his slow response to staging another play she had written, Towards Zero. Meyer turned it down as he believed that it would be too difficult to cast, although it has been speculated that the anti-Semitism in the novel was the primary reason, him being Jewish. During the year, Peter Saunders, a young and new theatrical producer had sustained a significant loss when he staged an adaptation by Dan Sutherland of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 1913 book, The Poison Belt. Desperate to make up these losses, he cast around for a play that he could take on tour which would not involve too much expense and which would be sure to attract a paying audience. Charles and Toy's adaptation of Christie's Murder at the Vicarage was just about to finish a four-month run at the Playhouse Theatre and, desperate to minimise his costs, he hit upon the idea that the name of the actors who starred in the production wouldn't really matter as Christie herself was enough of a public name to attract the audience. He therefore deliberately advertised the play as Agatha Christie's "Murder at the Vicarage" rather than "Murder at the Vicarage" by Agatha Christie. This small piece of showmanship worked. He recouped his losses and, more importantly, brought himself to the attention of Christie who, annoyed with the slow progress of Bertie Meyer, gave The Hollow to Saunders instead.

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