Black Beech and Honeydew (16 page)

On the empty stage under a single working light, Mr Wilkie took me through the part of Anna.

He gave me the moves, checked my mistakes and was patient with them, being aware, I have no doubt, of my extreme nervousness. I gathered that he thought I would do. There would be a rehearsal next morning at 10.30 and I should report to the Stage Director. I had become a professional actress.

It was strange beyond words, at that first call, to meet the actors and actresses that we had applauded and criticized and discussed during the Shakespeare seasons. The splendid Polonius turned out to
be a scholarly and pleasant Englishman who had had a distinguished career in the theatre, ‘creating’ parts in several Galsworthy plays and also his present role in
Hindle Wakes.
Unhappily he was subject to heroic drinking bouts which Mr Wilkie fended off by making bets with him that he would refrain from alcohol for a given time and then renewing them, not always successfully, at its expiration. He was in the middle of such a period of abstinence when I joined the company.

It was unbelievable to find myself kneeling at the feet of the quondam Claudius and reminding him (tri-lingually, while he breathed garlic and scorn all over my protestations) how often he had lavished endearments upon me in our questionable past.

And there, in lace-up boots and a fur tippet, was Miss Vera St John whose laughter as Maria had so entranced us. The first gravedigger turned out to be a pale, sardonic and raffish personage with heavy eyebrows, a seedy blue suit and yellow boots and the second, a quiet conscientious young actor whose only characteristic seemed to be a complete lack of what I would learn to call star quality. The juvenile was Henri Doré. He was an excellent comedian: how is it that I cannot more clearly remember his performance in Shakespeare? He was leaving the company in Auckland to take up another engagement and would be replaced by Reginald Long who, with his wife Dorothy, joined us in Christchurch. Dorothy was the pianist with our orchestra. The ‘heavy’ woman, my employer in
The Luck of the Navy,
seemed to me extremely old and formidable. She was a completely instinctive actress who, in character parts, could score point after subtle point with rather less notion of their implication than a child of seven. Imported from Sydney for the tour was an actor who had fought with the Thirteenth Australian Light Horse throughout the war. His name was John Castle-Morris. Our other ex-officer was the stage director, Kingston Hewett.

The tone and character of the Wilkie Company were perhaps most clearly shown in the Scullys: Pat and Addie. Pat was our stage manager. He was a gentle and elderly Irishman who played decrepit old men – Adam in
As You Like It,
for instance – with a great deal of toothless quavering and head-wagging:
‘Cheerily, marshter, cheerily.’
He prompted, took routine rehearsals, called the actors and minded his own business which was multifarious. I hear his voice rumbling
down the dressing-room passages. ‘Overture and beginners, please. Overture and beginners.’

Addie, his wife, was an Australian. She played bit parts and was dresser to Mrs Wilkie whom she adored. Addie had progressed from child-actress, through the chorus, to her present authoritative position. In the programmes, she appeared as Miss Mona Duval. When I got to know her I ventured to ask why she had chosen this name.

‘Nothing to do with me, dear. When I was in me first shop in the chorus the management came in to get us girls’ names for the programme. “What’s yours?” he asked me. “Addie Jenkins,” I said. “Mona Duval for you, dear,” he said, quick as lightning, and Mona Duval it was. It’s a funny old world, though, isn’t it, dear?’

Addie was full of such Mowcher-like generalizations. She was jealously protective of Mrs Wilkie, who was really fond of her, and between them there had developed a sort of abigail-patroness relationship that was peculiar to the theatre. Pat accorded Mr Wilkie a complimentary devotion.

The Scullys had one child, Phyllis, at present in a convent school but formerly an actress. She had played Myl-tyl in
The Bluebird
and, with the Wilkies, Young Macduff, The Bloody Child, Mamillius and any number of pages. She was a strictly brought up child and very polite. On one occasion, as Young Macduff, she bounced her leather ball too zealously and it struck Lady Macduff smartly in the bosom. ‘I beg your pardon, Miss Forbes,’ Phyllis piped in her well-projected voice.

The final member of the company was also a child, engaged to play the newsboy and shout ‘Dunton Evening Echo’ in
The Luck.
He was placed under the care of the Scullys: B. Briggs, aged about twelve but born elderly. He wore an overcoat with a false astrakhan collar and had his own visiting cards: ‘Mr Bernard Briggs. Allan Wilkie Company.’ ‘That child will come to no good,’ Addie said darkly.

This was the Company that assembled in the Theatre Royal on my first morning. They were kindly people but they threw me into a fever when they began to rehearse
The Luck of the Navy.
It was a run-through for words. They skidded and rattled over their lines, cut the long speeches or muttered them at breakneck speed, raising their voices suddenly as they came down to the cue. They sketched
their gestures and walked through their moves like automata. When the first act was over I still had no idea of what the play was about.

‘Second Act beginners,’ called Pat Scully. This was it. ‘Beginner’ was indeed the
mot juste
for Anna, the Franco-Teutonic spy. For as long as I was on, they considerately played out but between my brief appearances, back they went to their gabbling. I waited by the door in a ferment until my entrance cue was suddenly thrown up and I was on again as if the devil was after me. At one point I had to scream offstage. It seemed an indecent act to do it all alone and unheralded.

Mr Hewett shepherded me about. At one juncture Mr Wilkie came up. ‘Rather confusing,’ he said. ‘You’ll know more about it when you’ve seen it from the front.’ I hoped so.

The play turned out to be a well-constructed thriller of the
Bulldog Drummond
genre and I am sorry that I cannot remember its author. It built to a meticulously engineered climax in the third act with Mr Wilkie (Lieut. Stanton) tied up in a chair by German spies. When the heavy lady (now a self-confessed Gauleiter-hausfrau) came on to taunt him, he convulsed the audience by remarking with the utmost sangfroid: ‘Ah! Here is mütter.’ It was somewhere about then that I screamed and an aeroplane (two motorcycles in the yard) took off. The
dénouement
was effected by Henri Doré (Midshipman Something) who entered through french windows asking jauntily: ‘Anyone aboard?’ and getting a round for it.

It may seem strange that a dedicated, scholarly and distinguished Shakespearean, which Mr Wilkie undoubtedly is, should have lent himself and his company to these somewhat off-Shakespearean capers. It was not at all strange as I shall now try to show.

Until his retirement, Allan Wilkie, like Sir Donald Wolfit, was one of the last in line of British actor-managers. Such men of the theatre stem directly from Burbage and his contemporaries: it is an unbroken sequence, merely going underground during the Protectorate. The actor-managers reached their highest point of affluence and display with Irving and his Edwardian successors. They were overwhelmed at last by show biz and the ‘prestige’ managements.

Theirs was always a precarious calling and to follow it a man needed a good lacing of fanaticism in his make-up. This element was not lacking in Allan Wilkie. He was, and in his sunny retirement, still is, a dedicated, an unquenchable Shakespearean.

Throughout the Far East, across Canada and for fifteen years in Australasia, on a multiplicity of stages and under every shade of theatrical environment, he mounted the battlements of Elsinore and Dunsinane, the Forests of Arden and Windsor, the wood near Athens, blasted heaths, palaces of Plantagenet and Old Nile, the road to Dover, the seaboards of Illyria and Prospero’s unnamed island. Sometimes the coffers were full and then Mr Wilkie bought new and exciting scenery and wardrobes and engaged highly salaried actors; sometimes they were all but empty and he would tour melodrama in the mining towns of Australia and our own West Coast. Sometimes, as now, when I joined the company, he would present a mixed bag of one box-office draw and three intelligent contemporary pieces while he gathered his forces for a new Shakespearean assault.

He was known throughout the world of theatre for his scrupulous integrity and his fixed determination to play under no banner but his own. He had a kindly and generous regard for his actors and was an extremely strict disciplinarian. He called none of his company by their Christian names and it is impossible – it is even terrifying – to imagine him using the word ‘darling’ when directing an actress. His manner was punctilious and his flow of blasphemy when something went amiss during a performance, startling and inventive. On
Macbeth
nights he was unapproachable; a looming and a lowering menace crowned with a headdress made of coffin-plates. This morbid but enormously impressive item was conceived and carried out by a designer of conspicuous merit who also played bit parts with frenetic enthusiasm and finally went mad. ‘I could,’ said Mr Wilkie, ‘have better spared a saner man.’

How, as they say nowadays in the theatre, was Mr Wilkie’s acting? I cannot write of it with detachment. It was in the grand, declamatory manner. My impression is that the Macbeth was terrific and the Bottom certainly the funniest I have ever seen. Between these extremes there were excellencies and, no doubt, lapses. ‘After all,’ as he himself once remarked with a Micawber-like roll in his
voice – he is not unlike a more personable Micawber – ‘After all, I have played in thirty-four of the works. You can’t expect me to be good in all of them. Indeed, I think I may say I am the
worst
Mercutio to have trod the boards in living memory.’ He will, I know, forgive me for quoting him in this context. Later on he changed to Friar Lawrence. Advisedly.

It is for himself that he is remembered in these antipodes and for his achievement in making the plays a series of living adventures for hordes of Australians and New Zealanders who, without his productions, would never have returned to Shakespeare after they left their schools and universities.

Here I must recount an incident that seemed to reflect, however ambiguously, on a reaction to his presentation of the plays. In a town in Western Australia, after a performance of
The Merchant of Venice,
Mr and Mrs Wilkie were walking back to their hotel. It was a very warm night and the time being close on twelve, the shops and houses were dark and the street lamps not very explicit. Their way had taken them into a particularly dark passage, when out of nowhere something dropped with a thud at their feet. Mr Wilkie stopped, groped and picked up a small object which his fingers, rather than his eyes, suggested was a figurine.

They arrived at their hotel and there discovered their find to be indeed the four-inch primitive head and shoulders of a bearded man wearing what might have been an Elizabethan ruff. The effigy had been pierced with a diagonal hole. All the edges and surfaces were greatly worn and eroded. But to the Wilkies there was no mistaking the personage; it was William Shakespeare. They asked themselves: was it a strangely presented tribute from some diffident admirer in an otherwise sleeping household or was it a cast-off from a disgusted patron who had stayed up in order to drop it on their heads?

The company in due course came to New Zealand and the Wilkies couldn’t wait to show us their strange treasure-trove. At that time Professor MacMillan Brown was our great, if controversial, pundit on the plays of Shakespeare and also on the islands of the South Pacific which he had explored and written about profusely. He was an old acquaintance of our family and his daughter, Viola, and I were and still are close friends. So we took the Wilkies and their figurine to the Professor for a pronouncement.

He held it on the palm of his hand and without a moment’s hesitation discoursed. The figurine, said the Sage, was of South American West Coast origin and had been hung from the prow of a canoe. The ruff was evidence of Spanish influence and the worn and eroded surface, of its antiquity.

All of which was fascinating news but did not explain why someone dropped it from a dark window at midnight
almost
on Mr Allan Wilkie’s head.

One feels that Mr Thor Heyerdahl, not yet so busy at that distant time, would have had something to say about the little man with the ruff and might have liked to pass a fibre cord through the diagonal hole and hung him from the prow of the
Kon-Tiki.

I have kept myself waiting in the wings for my initiation into the Wilkie Company. My only recollection is, in fact, of doing exactly this in an indescribable condition; of being wished well by Mrs Wilkie and the company and of finding Mr Wilkie standing beside me at the zero minute. ‘You’ll be all right,’ he said, and I can only hope that it was so.

During the next three weeks we rehearsed H. F. Maltby’s savage little post-war comedy:
A Temporary Gentleman.
In this piece, Mr Maltby takes a number of shrewd swipes at a particular form of snobbery afflicting demobilized lower-middle-class officers of the First War. On the way he also has a jaundiced look at the officer-private relationship. It is a play that is in tune with present-day attitudes and I should think might very well be revived.

I was given the part of an ex-WAAF, now a maid in the demobilized officer’s house, who tells him a number of stinging home truths and ends by engaging his affection. I didn’t appear until the last act and my principal scene was with Mr Wilkie. It was a very rewarding little part: I learned a lot from it and even more from watching rehearsals. I learned how actors work in consort, like musicians, how they shape the dialogue in its phrases, build to points of climax, mark the pauses and observe the tempi. There was a passage in the first act that looked insignificant to the point of banality. It went something like this.

‘Good morning, Mrs Hope.’