Black Beech and Honeydew (29 page)

Representatives of the press attended our rehearsals. They were amiable young men who said they would like to have some action pictures. Would I, they suggested, lie flat on my stomach on the stage with my elbows on the production script while members of the company, all with the great big smile, hung tenderly over me? Did I smoke? Yes, in those days I did, but was not, as it happened, smoking at that moment. Very well, would I light a cigarette? Just stick it in the mouth and let it dangle. I did murmur that it was not my practice to take rehearsals smoking from a prone position on a dirty stage but no attention was paid. Publicity is publicity, I reminded myself, and disregarding the covert grins and snide comments of my company, I lay down and lit a cigarette. The lights flashed. Next day the picture appeared with a bold caption. ‘Ngaio (Nio) Marsh, eccentric
Maoriland novelist-producer. Lies on stage for rehearsals. Chain smoker.’

Mr O’Connor told us that for the first three performances the audiences would be thinnish and after that he expected a rapid build to full houses. He was right in this but one thing that neither of us anticipated was that part of the
Othello
wardrobe, together with the new dinner suit of Bob, our business manager, and travellers’ cheques belonging to one of the actors should all be stolen from the theatre on the eve of our opening performance. It was never discovered who served us this scurvy trick although strange and fantastically improbable stories of professional resentment were brought to us.

We would have found ourselves in a pretty pass if Miss Doris Fitton’s Independent Theatre had not come nobly to our rescue with handsome replacements.

The press notices made us blink. The players were compared, and favourably, with the Old Vic. Ecstatic praise was lavished upon teamwork, voices, attack and, particularly upon Biddy Lenihan. One couldn’t believe one’s eyes. It really was, we agreed, trying to keep the sickly grins from creeping over our faces, a bit too thick. ‘You are not,’ I said to the cast, ‘anything like as good as all that,’ and they replied: ‘No, Mum’ which was a form of address they had adopted and which had already been nauseatingly exploited by a gossip columnist.

Characters
met with the same reception, or, indeed, rather more so. This had proved to be a good choice for student-players. Their intelligence, instinctive iconoclasm and command of pace were enormous assets. Sustained by buoyancy and lack of experience they actually welcomed rather than doubted the technical demands made by the play. It opens with a Commedia dell’arte gambit. Pirandello merely tells us that a company of actors is assembling for rehearsal and leaves the rest to the director. I wrote some five pages of dialogue as a framework upon which the players could improvise and between us we built a scene of preparation lasting about eight minutes up to the entry of the ‘Manager’ and the beginning of Act I as it is printed. It is a play that generates excitement. The theatre thrums and pulses with it – if this didn’t happen at the outset the production would be a failure. It did happen, now. Every night I
went out in front to get the feel of the house when those six black-clothed baleful persons were suddenly exposed and every night there was the same little miracle.

We played Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. Before the end of the tour, Dan O’Connor made a new suggestion. He asked me if I would like to produce a company assembled in London from Commonwealth players and bring them out to Australia.

I accepted this offer.

I returned to England in the summer of 1950. The Second War was over. Nearly thirteen years had gone by since I had seen the Lampreys. That is a long time. The children were all grown up and three of them had married. I did not at first recognize the tall blond young man who, with his elder brother, met us at Southampton. He was my godson.

Pam, my student-player-secretary, was with me. We had travelled in comparative grandeur and with her assistance I had written a largish chunk of a book. She was to go through the Production Course at the Old Vic Drama School. Another great New Zealand friend, Bob, who had been business manager on the student-players Australian tour, was also at that admirable, and ever to be regretted, school. He and Elizabeth, his wife, and I had settled to share a flat in London while preliminary investigations were made for the projected tour of which he was to be the business manager and stage director. After an interlude in apartments owned by an intimidating prima donna and furnished in a style that fluctuated balefully between that of a superior fortune-teller’s parlour and an interior by Mauriac, we found an unfurnished flat in, of all streets, Beauchamp Place, and actually next door to the second premises rented by Charlot and me in our shopkeeping days. We furnished it mostly from junk picked up in or near the Fulham Road.

This flat was over an enchanting clock shop. During the night I could hear minuscule chimes, single tinkling bells, a gong, musical-box confections and the punctual wheelhorse observations of a
dependable grandfather. There was even a French clock that tootled a little silver trumpet. ‘There they go,’ I would think, ‘busy as bees all by themselves through the night.’ It was like the setting for a Victorian fairy tale-by Mrs Molesworth of course.

I spent as much time as I could with Charlot. Our old quartette was now only a pair. Much of the past was to be unrolled, looked at and put gently away again. She was keeping house for the head of her family. I found the children were for me as they had always been, dearer than any others.

The head of the family had taken a house at Eze on the heights above Monte Carlo: a converted Saracen stronghold, we were told, carved into the cliff-face. Charlot and I joined his house party there for a fortnight and then, since the alpine atmosphere did not agree with her, came down to our old hotel, and, for a few days, revived old goings-on.

On the way back we stopped in Paris where I met my French agent, Marguerite Scieltiel. We breakfasted at her flat and then I signed a contract and was photographed in the act, and again in a raging gale, emerging incomprehensibly from police headquarters under the ironical scrutiny of the gendarme on guard.

It is always a surprise when I leave my own country to find myself ‘known’ elsewhere: I feel like a Willy Loman whose vapourings have turned out to be factual. If I have any indigenous publicity value it is, I think, for work in the theatre rather than for detective fiction. Of course, whenever I return to New Zealand I am always asked to write articles saying what I think about it
now
and even, on exceptional occasions, what I think about William Shakespeare, but seldom what I think about crime stories. This is just as well as there is a limit to what can be written under that heading. Intellectual New Zealand friends tactfully avoid all mention of my published work and if they like me, do so, I cannot but feel, in spite of it.

So it was astonishing, this time in England, to find myself broadcasting and being televised and interviewed and it was pleasant to find detective fiction being discussed as a tolerable form of reading by people whose opinion one valued. I suppose the one thing that can always be said in favour of the genre is that inside the convention the author may write with as good a style as he or she can command. As witness, for an instance, Michael Innes’s wonderful
Lament
for a Maker.
The mechanics in a detective novel may be shamelessly contrived but the writing need not be so nor, with one exception, need the characterization. About the guilty person, of course, endless duplicity is practised.

In the seventeenth century the ‘metaphysical’ poets fitted their verse into diamonds, hearts and triangles. The convention was a silly one but within their self-imposed limits they occasionally contrived some pretty conceits. To do as much in his own medium is the aim of many a crime writer of the orthodox sort.

In London, my time was divided between prospecting for the new theatre company and finishing the current book:
Opening Night.
This was typed by another ex-student secretary who is assisting also in the preparation of this one.

The idea behind the British Commonwealth Theatre Company was, as its title suggests, a synthesis of players from Great Britain and the several arms of the Commonwealth, as it was then constituted. We were to try ourselves out in Australia and New Zealand and, upon the results of this tour, decide whether to continue and extend the venture.

In the meantime Bob and I poured over
Spotlight,
that vast
vade mecum
of the stage with its countless so-professional photographs: full-page and grandly taciturn for the stars, progressively smaller and more anxiously informative with the diminishing status of the entrants. We visited repertory theatres in many places, we interviewed actors and actresses from South Africa, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India. We became accustomed though never, I think, reconciled to the heartbreaking sales talk that must not seem to be what it is: an airy cover for a chronic occupational anxiety. We tried to come to terms with the strange unbalance between talent and demand in what is perhaps the most over-populated profession in the world. I suppose that, every time a new play is cast in Great Britain or America, there are at least thirty adequate, unemployed players available for each part. Any one of these will give a sound enough performance and yet how difficult it is to cast a play to one’s satisfaction. Harder still, as we gradually discovered, to form a company under the too exacting conditions we had set ourselves: a company in which each member should be a better than adequate representative of his country of origin, versatile, of satisfactory
appearance, a good trouper, a reasonable being and prepared to leave Great Britain for at least six months.

While Bob and I were still engaged in this daunting pursuit the Embassy Theatre at Hampstead, under Molly May’s management, decided to produce a comedy-thriller by Owen Howell based upon
Surfeit of Lampreys.
The Embassy was a club theatre running seasons of three weeks only. Mr Howell’s play might well have succeeded but it did not do so, largely I think because the Lamprey flavour, present in his dialogue, was sadly missing in the production, which was much too heavy-going. The set was extremely lugubrious.

Not long after this disappointment Molly May, having heard something of our Australian tour with
Six Characters,
asked me to produce the play for her own management. I was given an excellent cast with Yvonne Mitchell and Karel Stepenac in the leads. We had only a fortnight’s intensive rehearsal, at the beginning of which period I was struck down with a virulent attack of Asian influenza and a temperature of 102. A doctor, whose spouse was in the show, kept me on my feet with M and B’s at night and benzedrine by day. I used to wonder, each morning, how on earth I was going to see the next eight hours’ work through. I had changed much of the original production and I asked a great deal of my cast in the way of pace, attack and understanding. They responded nobly to what I cannot but think must have been strangely trance-like direction.

The Hampstead audiences were largely Jewish and continental: warm and big. The whole experience was heartening. Not that I saw much of it. I watched the opening night in a curiously unreal, floating condition, having eaten nothing but one raw egg a day for some considerable time. I then crawled to bed and later to Brighton and a wan recovery with Miss May for company. She, too, had been smitten by this beastly bug.

This illness left me with a chronic legacy which has been a great bore and which added in no small degree to the difficulties of the year that followed.

The Festival of Britain was in preparation. Miss May asked me to direct a season of English comedy at the Embassy throughout the summer. We were, however, to leave for Australia before the Festival opened so I had to say no.

At about this time another and, to me, most beguiling project was considered by Dan O’Connor. At Woolwich there was a theatre that had received bomb damage and not been repaired. The idea was that, if it could be made usable, a Shakespeare season should be held there during the Festival of Britain. Audiences would be able to ‘take water to the play’ going downstream by barge from Westminster Pier. One sparkling spring morning Tyrone Guthrie (he was not yet knighted), his wife, Bob and I, all went down the river to inspect this theatre. It was the gayest of jaunts. Tony Guthrie was in the middle of producing
The Barber of Seville
in a lovely liquorice-all-sort kind of setting and he and Judy sang bits of it all the way. We picked up the keys of the theatre at a pub and let ourselves in. The damage was extensive. ‘No good, dear,’ said Tony Guthrie after one glance at it. ‘What a pity! Never mind.’ So it was us for the antipodes, after all.

On an early March morning Bob, Mizzy, his wife, and I stood together on the deck of the steamer that carried us, with our company, to Australia. A light mist was already dissolving and the sun shone delicately over the Thames estuary. ‘It’s going to be a lovely spring day in London,’ we said.

The six months that followed seem in retrospect to have had something of the character of one of those dreams that rocket to and fro between horror and reassurance. We opened in Sydney with
The Devil’s Disciple,
a play that grew colder and colder in my hands the more I tried to blow some warmth into it. Dissonances of all sorts broke out in the company, the houses faded, gnawing anxiety and depression settled upon us. After eight weeks a decision was taken to tour New Zealand with
Twelfth Night,
a revival of
Six Characters
and
The Devil’s Disciple.
As soon as we began to work on the new plays, the temper of the company changed and lightened. My health by this time was becoming increasingly groggy but I managed to keep this circumstance to myself and rehearsals prospered.
Twelfth Night
seemed to work its own miracle. We gave it a Watteau-like setting with delicate pavilions, striped silk awnings and a flowery swing in which the young Olivia dreamed her silly-billy fantasies. Biddy Lenihan in gallant blue made a darling of Viola. Feste, all frill and Watteau-esque stripes, was enchantingly realized by John Schlesinger. This admirable actor was already beginning to turn his attention towards film-making. Frederick Bennet, an excellent
Shakespearean, was a toby-jug Toby with a touch of elegance and breeding, and Peter Howell, later of
Emergency Ward 10
fame and later still in the cast of
The Affair
was a nicely batty Aguecheek. Peter Varley made a wonderful praying mantis of Malvolio.

Three years later the editor of
Shakespeare Survey No. 8,
the annual that is published in Stratford-upon-Avon, asked me to write an account of this production. I venture to re-introduce it here because it defines, as adequately as I could contrive, my feelings about the presentation of Shakespeare’s comedies.

A N
OTE ON A
P
RODUCTION

O
F
T
WELFTH
N
IGHT

Each decade creates its own fashions in Shakespeare and only actors of distinction can survive them. The Shakespearean costumes of Macready’s stage now ‘date’ almost as markedly as the crinoline itself. Is it not probable, moreover, that if we could look through the wrong end of our opera glasses at the Lyceum of the 1880s, the mannerisms of the lesser players would make us titter while Ellen Terry or even Irving would still command our applause? In the portrait of Garrick as Lear the authentic look of madness in his eyes effaces the oddness of his wig and costume. One is able to believe that his performance, if we could see and hear it, would transcend the mannerisms of his period.

Fashions in acting and presentation are as extreme as those that control the garments worn by the actors. The points of view held by producers, critics, actors and designers are forever changing: there is a feverish anxiety in our theatres to keep up with, or better still, anticipate the mode. It is in the presentation of Shakespeare’s comedies that this kind of stylistic snobbism is seen at its extremity and it is about an attempt to escape from fashion that I propose to write, with specific reference to the comedy of
Twelfth Night.

The modern producer of Shakespeare’s comedies believes himself to be up against a number of difficulties. Much of the word-bandying is, he says, disastrously unfunny while many of the allusions are obscure and some so coarse that it is just as well that they are also incomprehensible. He must cut great swathes out of his script and for the rest depend on eccentric treatment, comic ‘business’ funny enough in its own right to amuse the audience while the words may
look after themselves. If he is honest he dreads the obligatory laughter of the Bardolators as much as he fears the silence of unamused Philistia. These are reasonable fears, and, in my opinion, he does well to entertain them.

There are, however, contemporary producers who in their search for a new treatment of an old comedy forget to examine the play as a whole and fall into the stylistic error of seizing upon a single fashionable aspect of a subtle and delicate work and forcing it up to a point of emphasis that quite destroys the balance of production.

In 1951 it fell to my lot to produce
Twelfth Night
with a company of British actors on tour in the antipodes. As soon as I was made aware of my fate I began to look back at the many productions I had seen of this comedy. Some had been by distinguished producers with famous companies, others by repertory theatres and touring companies like my own. Of them all, the best, it seemed to me in retrospect, had been the simplest; the least pleasing, the most pretentious; and the most pretentious, those in which producers, actors and designers had apparently exchanged glances of dismay and asked each other what they could do to put a bit of ‘go’ into the old show. They had done much. There had been star Malvolios and star Violas. There had been remorseless emphasis on a single character or sometimes on a single scene. The words had been trapped in the net of a fantasticated style, lost in a welter of comic goings-on, coarsened by cleverness or stifled by being forced out of their native air. I had seen Andrew wither into a palsied eld, Malvolio as a red-nosed comic and Feste, God save the mark, as bitter as coloquintida or the Fool in
Lear.
I had seen productions with choreographic trimmings and with constructivist backgrounds. I had, however, missed the production on skates.