Read Black Beech and Honeydew Online
Authors: Ngaio Marsh
New Zealanders did not for a moment think there was any immediate threat to their own country. Again, the entire fit manhood of a small population was emptied out of these islands and it was not until after Singapore had fallen that it gradually became certain, as it seemed, that the Japanese would mount a full-scale invasion against us. We began to practise evacuating the hospitals and people built themselves retreats in the foothills. My father dug a funk-hole in the garden. Carried away by the creative urge, he roofed it with enormous pine logs which would have fallen on our heads at the smallest disturbance. We could hear and feel blasting under our hills where, it was rumoured, munitions were being secreted. Tank-stops went up along the Summit Road. A total blackout was imposed and by this time we were quite sure they would come.
A Lamprey cabled to me. ‘Don’t forget Japanese mothers nurse their children for seven years.’
My father put down four bottles of champagne against the peace but when it came and we opened them, their life had gone. They had been kept too long.
Now that the time has come when I must part with him, I wonder if I have managed to convey anything of my father. He was naïve and he seemed to many people, I daresay, to be a very straightforward, rather comical man, not madly successful in life. He was excitable and in minor crises was inclined to get himself into what my mother called fluffs but he was extraordinarily understanding and there was nothing I could not say to him. Even after his appendix he was able to do quite a lot of things he enjoyed. He played two small character parts in plays I directed. I used to walk round the set every night just before his entrance and there he would be, listening, with his ear at the door, for his cue. He would look at me and his eyes would snap and we would nod happily at each other and on he would go.
It was his heart that played up at last. He detested the disabilities of old age and was bewildered that they should be inflicted upon him. Not long before he died, being at my wits’ end for something he could ‘do’ – old age is like childhood in this respect – I suggested
that he might write down some of his considered opinions. He rather took to the idea. I fixed him up with one of my unused manuscript books and a pen and he sat out in the garden. I would look down and see his hand moving across the paper. For a time he wrote collectedly and with excellent precision. Granny Marsh. The Georgian House. Uncle William. South Africa. New Zealand. Marriage. Me. ‘Our only child – our daughter: Edith Ngaio.’ There was a wonderful broadside at the baleful consequences of organized religion.
And then the excellent clerkly hand began to waver. Sentences are a little confused. One day he looked up at me and said: ‘I don’t know, darling. This book seems so heavy.’ I took it from him. ‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘Never mind.’
It was a great sorrow when he died but there was no bitterness. I missed him dreadfully but wouldn’t have had him to go on any longer than he desired. He died in the spring of 1949.
It was strange to be the only one of our little family. To begin with I was desolate. For some years everything (and it was fortunate that writing is a housebound job) had been ordered to meet the condition of having someone increasingly dependent upon me. This was no hardship. With our improving resources I had found understudies, young friends as well as Mrs Crawford, who could take over for a day or two, or on rehearsal nights if I was engaged in the theatre. I had a secretary, Pam, who lived with us and was a great help and solace during my father’s illness. She was a graduate of Canterbury University College and her arrival in our household was tied up with a series of ventures that have, I believe, brought greater satisfaction to me than anything else that has come my way. In order to write about them I must go back a little in time.
Immediately before and during the first years of the war, while my father was still extremely active, I had, between books, begun to do a good deal of direction for various
soi-disant
repertory societies in New Zealand. There were no resident professional companies in this country but the leading amateur bodies employed, as they still do, professional directors, staff, secretary, premises and theatres. The
name repertory is an accepted misnomer since none of these highly developed societies ever presents a repertoire. They offer perhaps as many as seven separate major productions at intervals during the year and depend largely upon their membership to keep them solvent. Many of them play safe with box-office successes from England or America but most are prepared to risk one or two rather more venturesome pieces to appease the intelligentsia in their audiences and satisfy immortal longings in the odd administrative breast.
I was rewarded from time to time with pieces of this sort. Whenever I accepted such an engagement I would suggest a Shakespeare play and as often as I did so was met by little plaintive cries of refusal. I even offered to do them for nothing but the reaction, though wistful, was the same. People still talked about Allan Wilkie and about a tour of
Macbeth
with Dame Sybil Thorndike and Sir Lewis Casson, but they said things were different now: nobody wanted Shakespeare. A generation had grown up since then and another was on its way and none of them had ever seen Shakespeare. I could well believe that most of them had learned quietly to hate him since there are not many teachers of English literature like our Miss Hughes.
One day, in the third year of the war, two young men came to see me. They were undergraduates of the University of Canterbury, as it now is. Then, it was a college of the University of New Zealand. Their Drama Society, they said, had fallen into the doldrums. They had no money, no membership and no actors and they asked me to produce
Outward Bound
for the hell of it. I said I would.
With members of the cast liable to disappear overnight into the armed forces, we had a stiff time of it rehearsing this piece. Dear James came in to stop a particularly large gap and somehow or another the play was mounted. It was the first time I had worked with students and I found them extraordinarily congenial. They were arrogant, opinionated, sometimes mannerless and not always dependable: they were, in fact, New Zealand undergraduates – a turbulent lot. Of course, they were entirely uninformed about theatre techniques: no material could have been more raw or less perturbed by its own condition. Having no settled faults or mannerisms to correct, they started from zero and being extremely intelligent were soon passionately concerned with dramatic principles. Their gluttonous
appetite for work and responsiveness under a hard drive were a constant amazement and their loyalty, once a relationship had been established, heartening above words. Their little theatre quivered with vitality.
It struck me, about halfway through rehearsals, that for all the appalling gaucheries, there were dynamic elements here that were not being exploded by the effective but slightly dated piece of whimsy they had chosen as their play. This production was followed by others very well directed by the professor of classics which I watched with great interest. When, the following year, the students again asked me to work with them I said I would if the play was
Hamlet.
They at once agreed.
I find it hard to write without extremism of the sense of release and fulfilment that suffused the time that followed. The only comparable experience, it occurs to me, is that moment with which I began this book, a moment of pure and recognized happiness when I embraced a honeyed tree.
That is not to say that all went smoothly with
Hamlet.
Not at all. There were nights, during the early rehearsals, when I thought: we must never,
never
ask an audience to sit through this mutilation.
Nowadays I wonder at my own temerity. How did I dare? With a totally inexperienced cast, ignorant not only of Shakespearean acting but of acting, full stop. Uninstructed in the simplest of stage techniques; enormous creatures some of them were, who would stand in front of each other, crowd into straight lines, teeter, speak out of the corners of their mouths and leave great gaps between speech and speech while they shifted weight from one foot to another.
As rehearsals went on, by the way, I discovered that rugby analogies could be very helpful and I used one of them, I am told, with merciless frequency. In trying to give these large, ardent creatures a sense of orchestration, to persuade them that Shakespearean dialogue is not a series of disconnected speeches but a matter of concerted passages, I used to tell them to imagine that they must build such passages up to their point of climax like halfbacks executing a passing rush towards the goal. There must be no meaningless pauses between speech and speech. If they occur the ball is dropped, the movement loses its impetus and the play comes to grief. No. The dialogue must pass cleanly from player to player with mounting tension
until, at the moment of climax, it is clapped down between the goalposts.
By such images did the cast begin to think constructively of teamwork, of the play as a whole, and, within this structure, to develop their individual roles with the aptitude I’ve already described.
Actually the footballers often got off to a better start than the ‘intellectuals’. Some of these were enjoying a difficult adolescence, suffered from acne and Freudian elaborations and were gloomily inclined to sit about staring at one and to raise foolish observations in order to show how different they were. But after a time, and with any luck, they too would begin to accept the enormous challenge of a Shakespeare play and their own real importance, if only as spear-carriers, in doing so.
Apart from the basic fault of the unpregnant pause the students had no notion of the importance of phrasing, of concerted playing, of realizing the text in terms of movement or of thinking about it as a whole with a certain shape which must be broken down into movements within movements, minor points of climax among major ones, passages of mounting anticipation, of suspension and of rest. It was the old business of rhythm and form. I heard the Wilkie company twenty years ago, rehearsing on an autumn morning:
‘Good morning, Mrs Hope.’
‘Good morning, Mrs Jack.’
And now:
‘Who’s there?’
‘Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.’
Is there anything to equal the moment when the thing happens: when suddenly there is ice in the air and the voices are lonely and apprehensive, when the superb pulse begins to thump and there we are on the battlements at Elsinore?
We played it in modern dress. I wanted, first of all, to get rid of Eng. Lit. and say to the players themselves and then to whatever audiences we might win: ‘This is an immediate affair, it happens now and all the time. The predicament is ours.’ There was a terrible shortage of all kinds of fabrics at that stage of the war and what material there was, was strictly rationed. We could not in any case have raised the wherewithal to dress this play in elderly Peter Pan or
any other of the ‘costume’ conventions. As it was, I recollect, the King’s dress tunic was made from baby’s nappy cloth. His military aides-de-camp were dressed in such items of my father’s and other volunteer officers’ regimentals as had escaped the moth. The result was regrettably Ruritanian but the best that could be achieved.
Hamlet was played by an Englishman, nineteen years old when rehearsals began, who was completing his education in New Zealand. He was lame and of shortish stature with a resonant voice and a look in his face that theatre people recognize as that of an actor and call ‘star quality’. His performance, by any standard, was remarkable. If it had not been for his physical disability he would, I am sure, have become an actor of great distinction. The Laertes, now a judge, was then a law student. He, too, had a voice of beauty and a sensitive and searching approach to his part. I was fortunate in these two young players.
We rehearsed for eight weeks and very intensively. At first I tried to mix hospital-bus-driving with
Hamlet
but was finally given leave of absence on cultural grounds.
Nothing binds human beings together more quickly than theatrical endeavour provided all is well in the company and the feeling of emergence and growth persists. These rehearsals were blessed with that feeling. The company, or so I like to believe, was visited by a sense of discovery and involvement and perhaps with something of the same exhilaration that rewards the successful learner on skis. They said, and they could have said nothing else that would have pleased me half so well, that the play was coming alive in their mouths, that it was ‘real’. They willingly subjected themselves to an intensive cramming in basic techniques and to perpetual correction and an iron discipline. It seemed to me that, within the time allowed us, my best bet was to tell them as plainly as possible what I felt about the play, discuss this with them, listen, but not interminably, to any argument that seemed to be valid and then set the thing up in terms of concerted work, controlled and well-marked tempi and vivid movement. Upon that basis, I hoped, an honest and ‘theatrely’ realization of character could be built and the truth about the play in some measure discovered and conveyed.
From the toughest rugby player to the most owlish of the intellectuals, from the ferociously brooding adolescent to the mildest of
the white mice, there was a superb response from the cast. For my part, I loved them heartily for taking fire as they did and was most grateful, as I still am, to those odd, responsive creatures for all the adventures upon which we have embarked together.
The Little Theatre at Canterbury College had been built as an assembly hall in the early days of the Province. It was in a style of architecture that we slightingly refer to as ‘Dominion Gothic’. It had a little gallery, a raftered ceiling and the arms of the College above the proscenium. Sir James Shelley, an English professor of education who had been very active in university drama, had caused good lighting and an excellent cyclorama to be mounted. There was scarcely any room offstage and actors making a quick exit were prone to crack their skulls on a door lintel and then fall five feet sheer into a psychology cubicle. One could tumble backcloths but not fly them and the total depth, including the apron, must have been less than twenty-five feet. Crossing from prompt to OP was effected by squeezing through a filthy passage between the back of the cyclorama and the rear wall.