Spider's Web (play) - Background

Background

Spider's Web was written at the request of its star, Margaret Lockwood, whose main body of work was in films and who had never appeared in a West End production aside from Peter Pan. In 1953, Lockwood asked her agent, Herbert de Leon, to speak with Peter Saunders, who was the main producer of Christie's work on the stage after the successes of The Hollow and The Mousetrap, and see if Christie would be interested in writing a play for her.

Saunders arranged a meeting between Christie and Lockwood at the Mirabelle restaurant. During the conversation, Lockwood requested that she didn't play a sinister or wicked part again (for which she was well known) but a role in a "comedy thriller". She also requested a part for Wilfrid Hyde-White who she wanted to act with and who was also on the books of de Leon. In the event, although the part was written, Hyde-White declined the role and Felix Aylmer was cast instead.

Christie wrote the play during the period of the final rehearsals for Witness for the Prosecution which opened to rave reviews in London on 28 October 1953. Lockwood's character was given the name of Clarissa, the name of Christie's beloved mother who had died back in 1926. Unasked, Christie also wrote a role which would be suitable for Lockwood's fourteen year old daughter, Julia, although Margaret Barton played the part in the finished production.

Although the play is an original piece, within it Christie utilised four plot devices from earlier works she had written:

• In the play, Clarissa is offered the rental of the house she is in for only four guineas a month, whereas other inquirers are told the sum was eighteen guineas. This is to make sure that someone with the surname of Brown becomes resident in order to lure thieves to the house to steal something they think the real Mrs Brown possesses. This repeats the plot of the 1923 short story The Adventure of the Cheap Flat (published in book form in Poirot Investigates in 1924) where a couple called Robinson are cheaply let a flat in order that they act as decoys for two spies who are in fear of their lives and who were living under the alias of Mr and Mrs Robinson.

• The item the thieves are after is revealed to be a rare stamp which is on an envelope containing other pieces of paper which are thought, throughout the play, to be the real attraction of attempts at theft. This plot device was first used in the 1941 story The Case of the Buried Treasure, printed in book form in the US as Strange Jest in the 1950 collection Three Blind Mice and Other Stories and in the UK in the 1979 collection Miss Marple's Final Cases and Two Other Stories. In the short story, a deceased man has left his great-niece and nephew a supposedly hidden fortune which Miss Marple deduces is in the form of a rare stamp on one of his otherwise innocuous-looking letters.

• In the 1941 novel Evil Under the Sun, an adolescent girl experiments with witchcraft, shortly before the victim is murdered, and then believes herself to be responsible for the murder

• The group's alibi of playing bridge all evening is ruined when the Inspector notices a playing card on the floor across the room from the bridge table. A full deck of cards is needed to properly play bridge. Therefore the Inspector knows the group could not have been playing several consecutive hands of bridge that evening. This is similar to an attempted alibi in the short story "King of Clubs," which appears in 'Poirot's Early Cases'. A family claims that they have been playing bridge all night and therefore cannot be involved in a murder that has occurred in their neighbour's house. Poirot sees through this lie after he discovers a card (the King of Clubs) is missing from the pack on the table. This discovery proves the family's alibi of playing bridge was false and they have lied about their whereabouts that evening.

The play opened at the Theatre Royal, Nottingham on 27 September 1954, followed by a short national tour and then had its West End opening on 13 December 1954 at the Savoy Theatre, where it ran for 774 performances. With The Mousetrap and Witness for the Prosecution still running, Christie was at the peak of her West End career.

On 7 March 1955, Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Philip and Princess Margaret were among the audience for a performance of the play