Official Agatha Christie Birthday Event

The Festival Players present a rehearsed reading of Agatha Christie’s ‘lost play’ TOWARDS ZERO.



Directed and introduced by Dr Julius Green, this costumed reading is the latest in the series from the team who brought us The Lie, A Daughter’s a Daughter and The Stranger. This is our main event to mark the birthday of Agatha Christie.

When a house party gathers at Gull’s Point, the seaside home of Lady Tressilian, Neville Strange finds himself caught between his former wife and his new flame. This nail-biting thriller probes the psychology of jealousy in the shadow of a savage and brutal murder.
 
Another rare Christie stage script, Towards Zero (her own adaptation of her 1944 novel) was commissioned for presentation on Broadway and premiered for a week of “try-out” performances at Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse in 1945. For various reasons, the planned Broadway production never happened, and the script entirely disappeared from history – even Christie scholars were unaware that she had written it, and the Christie Archive contains no material relating to it. In 1956 playwright Gerald Verner, with nominal input from Christie herself, adapted the same novel, and this became the accepted stage version. However, it makes use of different settings and characters to Christie’s own vastly more accomplished stage version.

Discovered by Dr Julius Green in New York in 2014, Festival audiences now have a unique opportunity to hear Agatha Christie’s own brilliant 1945 script read by the Festival Players, whose members include both professional actors (including former members of the Agatha Christie Theatre Company) and performers from Torquay’s own amateur companies. This event has been made possible thanks to the generous support of the Colwinston Charitable Trust.