page_title: Agatha Christie
section_title: Plays
hierarchical_section_title: Agatha Christie / Works, reception, and legacy / Works of fiction / Plays
caption_attribution_description: Denkmal für Agatha Christie Great Newport Street Ecke Cranbourn Street, London West End of London
context_page_description: Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, DBE was an English writer known for her sixty-six detective novels and fourteen short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. She also wrote the world's longest-running play, The Mousetrap, which was performed in the West End from 1952 to 2020, as well as six novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. In 1971, she was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her contributions to literature. Guinness World Records lists Christie as the best-selling fiction writer of all time, her novels having sold more than two billion copies.
  Christie was born into a wealthy upper-middle-class family in Torquay, Devon, and was largely home-schooled. She was initially an unsuccessful writer with six consecutive rejections, but this changed in 1920 when The Mysterious Affair at Styles, featuring detective Hercule Poirot, was published. Her first husband was Archibald Christie; they married in 1914 and had one child before divorcing in 1928.
context_section_description: In 1928, Michael Morton adapted The Murder of Roger Ackroyd for the stage under the title Alibi. The play enjoyed a respectable run, but Christie disliked the changes made to her work and, in future, preferred to write for the theatre herself. The first of her own stage works was Black Coffee, which received good reviews when it opened in the West End in late 1930. She followed this up with adaptations of her detective novels: And Then There Were None in 1943, Appointment with Death in 1945, and The Hollow in 1951.
  In the 1950s, "the theatre ... engaged much of Agatha's attention." She next adapted her short radio play into The Mousetrap, which premiered in the West End in 1952, produced by Peter Saunders. Her expectations for the play were not high; she believed it would run no more than eight months. It has long since made theatrical history, staging its 27,500th performance in September 2018. The play closed down in March 2020, when all UK theatres shut due to the coronavirus pandemic. In 1953, she followed this with Witness for the Prosecution, whose Broadway production won the New York Drama Critics' Circle award for best foreign play of 1954 and earned Christie an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Spider's Web, an original work written for actress Margaret Lockwood at her request, premiered in 1954 and was also a hit.
  she is also the first female playwright to have three plays running simultaneously in London’s West End. Along with The Mousetrap the plays included were Witness for the Prosecution and Spider’s WebChristie said, "Plays are much easier to write than books, because you can see them in your mind's eye, you are not hampered by all that description which clogs you so terribly in a book and stops you from getting on with what's happening." In a letter to her daughter, Christie said being a playwright was "a lot of fun!".
caption: Memorial to Christie in central London
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