Honeysuckle Weeks in 'A Daughter's Daughter'

The love between a mother and daughter turns to jealousy and bitterness in Christie's fifth novel published in 1952 under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. Ann Prentice falls in love with Richard Cauldfield and hopes for new happiness. Her only child, Sarah, cannot contemplate the idea of her mother marrying again and wrecks any chance of her remarriage. Resentment and jealousy corrode their relationship as each seeks relief in different directions. Are mother and daughter destined to be enemies for life or will their underlying love for each other finally win through?

'The Mousetrap' might be the longest running play in history, while this delicate drawing room drama, a radical departure from the murder scene for Agatha Christie, saw only a week's run when it opened in 1956. But it reveals Christie as a writer of far greater nuance and emotional insight than she's normally credited with.

'A Daughter's Daughter' traces the slightest tear in the fabric of two women's post-war lives, and the complete unravelling that follows. Roy Marsden's elegant revival, the first since the play's premiere, makes for harrowing viewing, thanks largely to Jenny Seagrove's haunting portrait of an ageing widow, Ann, forced to choose between her daughter and her new partner Richard, stoutly delivered by Simon Dutton.

 'He's the kind of man,' Honeysuckle Weeks' magnetic Sarah declares, the moment she sets foot back in Blighty and her mother's house, 'who'd make her fetch his slippers.' So he is, but the notion that her mother might be happier so doing than drinking gin and dabbling in cocaine like her arrogantly liberated daughter, is not one Sarah can countenance.

The second half begins three years later, when Ann's decision begins to bear disturbing fruits. Tracey Childs's eagle-eyed, redoubtable Dame Laura presides over this awful harvest as Ann's oldest friend, noting too the subtle shifts in post-war concepts of class, loyalty and femininity. It remains a stiff, antique affair, improbable conversations and unlikely doorbell interruptions abound. But it's also surprisingly potent, shot through with devastating crimes involving nothing so crude as a corpse nor so clean and neat as guilt and innocence.

You can't help but wish Christie had been less astonishingly successful as a crime writer if it meant she'd written more plays.

The play ran from 2009 to 2010. Source.