Curtain Up: Agatha Christie – A Life In The Theatre

A revealing and witty new examination of how Agatha Christie became the world’s most successful and popular female playwright, including details of never-before-published scripts and stories.

Published in celebration of Agatha Christie's 125th birthday, Curtain Up! is an essential purchase for Agatha Christie fans worldwide. Everyone knows that The Mousetrap is the world’s longest-running play, but this first ever book dedicated to Agatha Christie as a playwright tells how Christie prevailed against the male-dominated establishment to be the only woman to have three plays in the West End at the same time and became the most popular and successful female playwright in the world.

Author and theatre producer Julius Green has been given unprecedented access to archives in the UK and USA and has uncovered unpublished and unperformed plays, as well as previously unknown facts and correspondence. Agatha Christie was a skilful and accomplished stage writer, and this long-awaited book is a fascinating, funny and revealing tale that theatregoers and Agatha Christie fans won't want to miss.

Julius Green has numerous West End plays and musicals to his credit as a theatre producer and is the founder of The Agatha Christie Theatre Company, which celebrates its tenth anniversary in 2015. In 2001 he produced the twelve-week Agatha Christie Theatre Festival, presenting a repertoire of the complete stage works of Agatha Christie, as then known. In 2012 he was invited by HarperCollins to write the introduction to a special edition of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap and Other Plays, celebrating the 60th anniversary of The Mousetrap, and in the same year Oberon published his book How to Produce a West End Show, with an updated edition in 2014. Julius is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London, and is a regular columnist for The Stage newspaper.