Graham Greene’s China Play That Never Happened

Without doubt Graham Greene is a God and his imagined world of Greeneland always a place to happily visit – he made ‘seedy’ popular and the turned the thriller into an art form – think Brighton Rock, The Ministry of Fear, The Comedians, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, The Third Man. And then there’s the great searing novels – The Power and the Glory, The End of the Affair, The Heart of the Matter. He was a traveller (and just with his aunt!); The Lawless Roads, Journey Without Maps. He also dabbled in plays, a lesser known fact I think – The Living Room probably remains the best known.

But, Greene aficionado as I am, I was unaware of his almost China play. Recently I read (and I’m not sure why it’s taken me nearly 45 years to get round to reading it in Greene’s memoir Ways of Escape. So here’s what the man himself says it would have been, had he finished it…

“…a comedy based on one of the frequent kidnapping incidents which took place in Japanese-occupied Manchuria before the last war, never reached the second act. I was pleased enough with the first: the scene of a draughty railway station on the Manchurian border: the characters a Japanese officer always busy at his typewriter, a correspondent of the Daily Mail, a paper which had embarrassed the authorities by offering a large reward for the return of the kidnapped (there were no currency problems in those happy old-world days), the British Consul, a Chinese go-between, the anxious husband, and last the kidnapped couple – the wife and a young employee who had been taken by the bandits while riding at a local race-club. the husband’s anxiety was less for his wife’s safety than for his own marital security, since the victims, according to the Press, had been bound together by the wrists for the last fortnight, night and day. I liked my first act. There seemed to me a freshness and authenticity in the setting, the action marched, but alas! when I came to time it, the first act only lasted for eighteen minutes and a half. It was to be a play in two acts, and the second act was to be shorter than the first…I abandoned my play with reluctance.

And so we never got Greene on China…shame