The English Crime Play in the Twentieth Century

Beatrix Hesse

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137463036
• eBook ISBN: 9781137463043
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This is the first comprehensive study of the English crime play, presenting a survey of 250 plays performed in the London West End between 1900 and 2000. The first part is historically orientated while the second one establishes a tentative poetics of the genre. The third part presents an analysis of some 20 plays adapted from detective fiction.

1

The Body in the Library and the Body on Stage

Many of the most popular English stage plays of the last century were concerned with crime, most frequently murder, and its detection. The present study will examine these plays, which in some ways are so like detective fiction and in other respects are very different. The title phrase of this chapter, “the body in the library and the body on stage” plays on the contrast between the popular image of a dead body found in the midst of “fossilized,” dead, written language and theatrical performance in which living bodies utter living, spoken language. Twentieth-century English detective fiction created a massive output of stories revolving around the discovery of a dead body and the reconstruction of how that body came to be a dead body. Since drama is concerned with the actions of living bodies one might assume that no comparable genre has evolved in the theatre. This is far from the case.

The term used for this kind of play in this study will be “crime play,” since this is a fairly neutral and comprehensive term which does not imply preconceived ideas about the structure or focus of these plays.¹ “Crime play” is defined as a play revolving around a crime and its detection. The crime must be the central topic of the play, which means that, for instance, plays on family conflicts that happen to escalate into violence will not be considered unless the focus is on the illegality of such violence. “Crime” is defined according to the textbooks on criminal law. The definition that states the essential aspects most clearly seems to be the one formulated by the House of Lords in 1957 (Board of Trade v. Owen): “an unlawful act or default which is an offence against the public and renders the person guilty of the act liable to legal punishment”.² The term “unlawful act” already contains several important aspects. “Unlawful” stresses the principle of legality: before an action can be a crime, there must be a law that prohibits it. “Act” refers to the legal principle of “actus reus,” meaning a willed, voluntary act committed in “mens rea,” a wrongful state of mind, for instance intent – the classic “malice aforethought,” – in the case of murder. Besides, the term “unlawful act” draws attention to the difference between legal and moral wrong. A traffic violation may be illegal, though not immoral, while lying or adultery may be immoral but not illegal unless defined as such by the laws of the country. The fact that a crime is considered “an offence against the public” and “liable to legal punishment” differentiates criminal law from civil law. In civil law, a specific person has been offended and the remedy for such an offence is not punishment but compensation.

As the above definition of “crime” suggests, this study will not be primarily concerned with moral wrong, with questions of guilt, responsibility – or Sin – but largely with the aspect of illegality and the threat of punishment resulting from it. The emphasis on this aspect implies that the crime play is understood to be a thoroughly secularized genre that deals with crime and its accompanying intense emotions of aggression and fear in a predominantly rational manner. Hence, treatments of the themes of fear and aggression which present these topics in the context of the operation of occult forces, e.g. Hamilton Deane’s Dracula, have been excluded from the present study. Plays concerned with terrorism in the context of civil warfare have also been ignored, since they are arguably better discussed together with other plays about war and political conflict.

So much on the aspect of “crime.” “Play” in the context of this study means “stage play,” excluding TV plays and radio drama, since the conditions of production are vastly different and the three formats are hence not necessarily comparable. Likewise, the present study focuses on full-length plays and largely ignores one-act plays because they present different problems of plot construction. A handful of plays that are less than full-length have nevertheless been considered because they introduced important innovations to the format, for example Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound and Howard Brenton’s Christie in Love. Since the focus of the present study will be on the development of specific traditions and conventions of the crime play, it turns out to be necessary to limit the selection of plays to those performed in a specific location – in this case, the London West End.³ Plays that only had a short run in a remote area of the British Isles obviously had little opportunity of establishing a new tradition. In this respect, the study of the crime play necessarily differs from the study of the detective novel: while a novel can be read anywhere, provided the reader is familiar with the language, you can only watch a play in a specific theatre. A historical study of a particular type of play has to be based largely on a study of the published play text. For the present study, only published plays have been considered, in order to render the resulting observations verifiable for the reader.

Finally, only plays of English origin have been considered for the present study, that is, plays usually written by English playwrights that saw their first performance in London or elsewhere in the British Isles. As the study of detective fiction has shown, different countries tend to produce different varieties of crime fiction. Therefore, it seems advisable to limit oneself to one national tradition at a time. For the same reason, plays adapted from foreign detective novels have also been excluded from the present study.

The term “crime play” is not yet established in critical discourse; however, there seems to be a latent awareness that some kind of generic label for the type of play described above is indeed desirable. The website “officiallondontheatre.com” and the regularly published free leaflet “Official London Theatre Guide” offer theatregoers the subgenre of the “thriller” next to established dramatic genres such as “tragedy” and “comedy.” John Russell Taylor dubs a play concerned with crime and detection a “whodunit”⁴ in imitation of the terminology employed in detective fiction criticism, and Stanley Richards calls his collections of crime plays “Mystery and Suspense Plays.”⁵ None of these terms, however, is particularly satisfactory, since “thriller” and “whodunit” all by themselves do not clearly announce that they refer to plays, and “mystery play” invites confusion with medieval religious drama. As a neutral and unambiguous term, “crime play” clearly is to be favoured.

As the absence of a uniformly used term suggests, critical discussion of the crime play has so far been virtually non-existent. There is an American dissertation on the subject, Charles LaBorde’s Form and Formula in Detective Drama (1976), and one monograph that attracted a somewhat wider audience, Marvin Carlson’s Deathtraps of 1993. Since the number of secondary texts is comparatively small and the texts themselves are not widely known, it may be appropriate to discuss them in some detail.

LaBorde’s thesis was subsequently published in The Armchair Detective under the somewhat more journalistic title of “Dicks on Stage,” but failed to trigger off a lively critical debate on the format. At the outset of his study, LaBorde deplores the lack of secondary criticism on the crime play, remarking: “It remains a major twentieth-century theatre form without detailed scholarly analyses of either its history, development, or structure.”⁶ While acknowledging the work done by Willson Disher and Frank Rahill in the field of melodrama, LaBorde believes that disproportionately little space is allotted to thrillers and mysteries in their respective works. Besides, he notes that studies of detective novelists like Christie and Wallace also devote but minimal space to the authors’ dramatic work. LaBorde limits himself to the discussion of published English and American plays that had substantial runs in London or New York, “substantial” meaning over 70 performances before 1940 and 200 or more after 1940.⁷ Besides, he only examines one type of crime play in any detail: the kind he christens the “confined mystery,” “a drama in which a group of characters is detained primarily in a single locale until a crime is solved.”⁸ Although this definition also applies to courtroom drama, this type is explicitly excluded from LaBorde’s study.⁹

In his analysis of the structure of crime plays, LaBorde largely relies on Aristotelian dramatic theory and terminology. Like Dorothy Sayers in “Aristotle on Detective Fiction,”¹⁰ he notes that the crime play admirably obeys the rule of unity of action. Using his favourite type of the “murder-house mystery” as an example, LaBorde describes a typical crime play plot structure as follows:

Ordinarily the playwright devotes the entirety of the first act of a murder-house mystery to exposition. Despite the rapid insertion of the murder theme, the act moves rather slowly before it culminates in an initial on-stage murder. […] Thus the end of the act prepares the way for the investigation that occupies most of the remainder of the play.¹¹

The investigation characteristically consists of the discovery and interpretation of clues. This part of the play is subject to the “fair-play rule” established by authors of detective fiction, demanding that no important information be withheld from the audience. In the course of his discussion of the fair-play rule, LaBorde introduces a useful distinction between the “functional” and “occupational” detective. While an occupational detective investigates crimes professionally, but may not solve the crime in question (he may even himself be the culprit), the functional detective is whoever takes it on himself to solve the present case. LaBorde strongly disapproves of the practice employed in The Mousetrap and Ten Little Niggers of presenting the solution in the form of a confession speech delivered by the criminal, since he considers it unsatisfactory for the audience:

The audience is led to believe that it can solve the problem just as the detective will. Suddenly the murderer, not the detective, reveals the solution. The audience then realizes that it has preoccupied itself with attempting to solve what is, in fact, an unsolvable mystery. Another problem with such solutions is that they necessitate a theatrically ineffective final scene.¹²

It is certainly debatable if a confession scene is necessarily “theatrically ineffective” particularly considering the major successes of Henry Irving in his melodramatic parts. The penultimate sentence of the above quotation is more interesting, since it suggests that the crime play, even in its most conventional form, is more sceptical towards positivistic optimism than the traditional detective novel.¹³

The next major part of LaBorde’s study is concerned with audience response. Still employing Aristotelian terminology, La Borde deplores the lack of “magnitude” in detective drama occasioned by an insufficient difficulty of the mystery and the lack of seriousness in its treatment. The crime play is said to deal with crime in a “game-like” manner, using sketchily developed characters who “die quickly and their apparent pain or anguish is minimal.”¹⁴ Moving from the discussion of plot to the discussion of character, LaBorde observes that a typical crime play cast consists of a detective, a pair of young lovers, a comic servant, a playboy, an older man, and a villain. Character development is rare, with one exception: “One character in each of the plays undergoes a major transformation: that character is the villain.”¹⁵ This sudden revelation endangers the Aristotelian virtues in character delineation, which are appropriateness and consistency. The characters’ mental processes are almost exclusively centred on deduction, which is mostly done by a single personage, the functional detective. Progressing from characterization to the plays’ overall moral message, LaBorde states: “While murder-house mysteries do not make their characters face moral crossroads, the formula posits a basic morality. Stated most tritely, but clearly, that moral viewpoint is ‘Crime doesn’t pay.’”¹⁶ Not only is the villain punished by arrest or sudden death, but the victims also deserve their fates. Moreover, the “corollary of the ‘crime-doesn’t-pay’ stance states that ‘Virtue is rewarded’.”¹⁷ Most frequently, the reward of the virtuous takes the shape of the young couple living happily ever after.

After having devoted a very extensive chapter to “murder-house mysteries,” LaBorde has considerably less to say about the other formulas he unearths, which include for instance the “police procedural,” the “psychological thriller” and the “inverted mystery.” The appendix of LaBorde’s dissertation contains useful act-by-act synopses of the 34 plays examined. These are the only crime plays listed in the bibliography, with the result that LaBorde’s study contributes little to relieving the unsatisfactory lack of a reliable bibliography in the field.

As the subtitle suggests, Marvin Carlson’s Deathtraps: The Postmodern Comedy Thriller is not concerned with the development of the crime play as a genre but merely with a particular subgenre which evolved between 1970 and 1990. The term “postmodern drama” is usually associated with experimental avant-garde theatre, but Carlson deliberately applies it to commercial mainstream theatre. He defines the type of play with which his study is concerned as follows: “The subject of the play is murder, planned or already committed, and the action is the su...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Body in the Library and the Body on Stage
• Part I A History of the Crime Play
• Part II A Poetics of the Crime Play
• Part III The Crime Play and Detective Fiction
• Notes
• Bibliography: The Plays
• Bibliography: Works Cited
• Index