15 Jul Fugue (in development)

Librettist: Anna Chatterton

Commissioner: Tarragon Theatre (Artistic Director Emeritus Richard Rose)

Funders: Commissioned with the assistance of The Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

Workshops: July 2018, August 2020, March 2022; Tarragon Theatre, Toronto, ON

Performers: 6 voices (3 female, 3 male) and 3 players (accordion, violin, violoncello)

Duration: ca. 100 minutes (2 acts)

Program note

Fugue is a play in which music–songs, ensembles, and instrumental–drives the drama. Fugue is in development, having had three workshops at Tarragon between 2019 and 2022.

Synopsis

Fugue traces the mysterious eleven-day disappearance in 1926 of famed mystery novelist Agatha Christie. Her husband Archie reveals that he has been having an affair with his secretary Nancy Neele, and wants a divorce. Agatha flees into the night, crashing and abandoning her car near her home southwest of London. She appears incognito a day later in the north of England, at the spa town of Harrogate, where she registers as Theresa Neele from South Africa. She quickly warms up and casts aside her British reserve, dancing and singing, becoming the life of the party.

A newspaper frenzy blows up, followed by a nationwide police search, led by Kenward, a dogged but deluded detective. He zeroes in on Archie as the prime murder suspect. Hotel employees eventually recognize Agatha from press photographs; the police bring Archie to the hotel to identify her. Agatha doesn’t recognize Archie at first, but he eventually breaks through to her, and they run the gauntlet of a media scrum. Agatha – a very private, retiring woman – is exposed in all of her confusion and private anguish. Together they put on a brave face, but once out of the spotlight, they go their separate ways.

The reason for Agatha’s disappearance is still disputed. Some thought she staged her own disappearance as revenge on her husband. Archie found doctors who diagnosed her with short-term amnesia, or a psychological ‘fugue state’. This phenomenon had only recently been described; its symptoms—sudden, unexpected escape from home or work, amnesia about one’s past, confusion about one’s identity, or the creation of a new identity—mirror Agatha Christie’s behaviour during her disappearance.