50-year mystery over Agatha Christie play finally solved

There is no debonair detective or murdered house guest. Just a mystery that can now, finally, be cleared up.

A play by Agatha Christie is to be given a West End run more than 50 years after it was written.

For decades A Daughter's a Daughter has languished unperformed because of a family dispute: Christie had based the main character on her own daughter, and the play hinted at Christie's troubled feelings towards her only child.

Mathew Prichard, Christie's grandson, said this week that his mother - Rosalind Hicks, who owned the copyright to the play after the author's death in 1976 - "wasn't wildly enthusiastic" about the play.

He added that "coincidence is too strong a word" to describe the similarities between his mother and the play's central character: "I think the way my grandmother constructed characters was that she would take pieces of characteristics or habits of those around her. It's hard for me to avoid the fact that the character of the daughter reminds me a lot of my mother. It is eerie."

More strangely, events in Christie's life went on to mirror the plot of the play, which centres on the difficulties of a mother-daughter relationship, which intensifies when the mother meets a new man.

A Daughter's a Daughter was written in 1956 under Christie's pseudonym Mary Westmacott. Ms Hicks's death in 2004 meant there was no longer an obstacle to it being properly revived. "I will be a little bit nervous on the first night, but also proud," Mr Prichard said.

- INDEPENDENT