Black Beech and Honeydew (34 page)

After a steady rumour that we would all be landed at Copenhagen, the
Temeraire
discharged her passengers at a small port in Wales. Bob (my old comrade of Commonwealth Theatre Company days) had found out about our arrival and telegraphed that he would drive nobly across England and into Wales to meet us.

All the other passengers had gone. Essie and I said goodbye to the Captain and the officers, sat on the hatch and told each other what a pleasant voyage it had been and how we would always remember the
Temeraire
with affection. It was quite late in the afternoon when the car arrived. We turned back to look at our little ship: elegantly graceful and unpretentious. As one does on such occasions, I promised myself another voyage in her some day.

There have been other voyages but not in the
Temeraire:
voyages to the Far East, to the USA and to Greece. Happy voyages in ships with a limited number of passengers and smart voyages in grand liners. There have been luxurious trains like the one from Kyoto to Tokyo and shabby comfortable trains like the old grande dame sweeping across the USA from San Francisco to Chicago, and innumerable joggings by branch lines in England. Flanders and Swan were here the other day and with their little dirge for fallen trains did awful things to addicts. Has Dr Beeching or his successor slaughtered that most amiable of branch lines: the one that potters to and fro between Leamington and Stratford-upon-Avon by way of Warwick? What are they going to buy with all the money they make from the killing-off of little trains?

The year 1955 was spent mostly in London where I took a minute and beguiling house in Hans Road. The two young New Zealand cousins were now commissioned in the Gunners and in the RAF respectively and, as we had so often planned, they spent their leaves with me. They were wonderfully gay company; everything entertained and delighted them. I used to see people in theatres and restaurants smile when they looked at them or overheard what they
said: I suppose because they were so very un-blasé and so obviously enjoying themselves.

With The Gunner, I took what is perhaps the most spellbinding train of all, the Night Ferry to Paris: the train that is already French when you step into it at Victoria, that magnificently pours itself at speed through the night to the coast, stops and goes quiet. If you are still awake in your bunk you hear brief metallic sounds and then feel a lift and a suspended swaying. When you look out of your window the end of a jetty slides past and then – how strangely – a word with an arrow: ‘To Dunkirk’. The Gunner was greatly excited. He stayed up until we were seaborne and called me repeatedly through the communicating door looking for all his six-foot-two, very much as he did when he first came down to school in Christchurch.

This was the year of Laurence Olivier’s
Macbeth
at Stratford-upon-Avon. Bob and another friend and I drove back the hundred miles to London after the show and were so rapt, so involved by this extraordinary performance that the hours slipped by like a dream. The eldest of the Lamprey children, now a mama, and I stayed in Stratford for a week and I returned yet again by myself. I had become an habituée.

I don’t really mind the ‘Bard Industry’ aspect of Stratford and what’s more I don’t think the Bard would have minded it either. It’s better that there should be an olde radio shoppe, one or two souvenir absurdities and a display of handweavery that might well have been created for Miss Margaret Rutherford in character, than that the place should be put into a sort of sacred aspic and (like a perennial galantine in a passenger ship) taken in and out of the deep freeze and never marred by cutting. It is, I feel, not inappropriate that lorries and charabancs rumble over Clopton Bridge and along the London Road. One regrets, of course, that the theatre should have been built at exactly the wrong moment in the development of modern architecture. There may be something pretty silly about a modern hotel calling its guest rooms after Shakespeare’s characters. (It would be fun to write for reservations stipulating: ‘Either Doll Tearsheet or Pompey Bum, if you please.’) But what may we not set beside these maggots? Captain Jaggard’s bookshop. A walk at dawn or dusk across the fields to Charlecote. Groups of Warwickshire oaks that are also, and so clearly, ‘a wood near Athens’, a hilltop where
poor Wat might have sat on his hinder legs listening, dew-bedabbled wretch, for the cry of the hounds. The Falcon Inn, which carries its age with grace and no gimmicks. A quiet church with a monstrous effigy to which you need pay no attention. And nightly, from early spring to late autumn, the sounding out before unfashionable cosmopolitan audiences of a music in words. This music so easily, so good-humouredly transcends all other spoken English in our history, that it raises a kind of laugh in the throat and heart whenever one hears it.

Of all the oddly divergent people, ideas and things that have attracted my devotion, I find most reason in my attachment to these plays. After writing this down it has just occurred to me for the first time, that if I had not directed ten of Shakespeare’s plays I would have written ten more detective stories and been, I daresay, ten times better off.

How right I was!

When I first applied myself to writing this book, it seemed to me that I would be obliged to make a sort of practical equivalent of that familiar experience which I have tried to describe in the first chapter. I thought that I must look on at myself: slide apart from my own image as if I were mis-focusing a camera upon it. And just as when the strange sensation of duality visits me, I always, by an involuntary act of defensiveness, return to my everyday self: so, I find, have I withdrawn from writing about experiences which have most closely concerned and disturbed me. What I have written turns out to be a straying recollection of places and people: I have been deflected by my own reticence.

It is with people that I would like to end this chapter: with some of the people who have formed its design. If, indeed, it may be said to have a design.

I look out of my windows, across the plains and there are the Alps. It is easy to find the shadowed valley where we camped and, further south, the entry into the Waimakariri Gorge leading to the high country, Arthur’s Pass, the Main Range and Westland. The
house is warm with recollections of Unk, Papa Jellett, Mivvie, Colin, Cecil and dear James: all of them very cheerful. But it is not just a house of recollections. There are at present, family visitors of three generations and many others going back as far as St Margaret’s and even Tib’s and there is a steady flow of past and present student-players. I am fortunate in my house and the people who come to it.

Three years ago, after two months of complicated and exciting voyages to Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and the USA, ending with an unpleasant Atlantic crossing in a German liner, I landed at Southampton. With what seemed to me to be quite bewildering friendliness, I was given a telegram and shepherded into a train by two of the port officials. Green downs and spinneys fled past the windows and in a clearing in a wood there were English countrymen, doing something leisurely with a cart and horse. I visited an unsmart bar in the train called, absurdly, a tavern. The pallid barman and tepid drink might have been Ganymede and Ambrosia. When the ugly backsides of Outer London’s railroad houses began to close in, peculiar things happened in my throat, and when the Battersea Power Station, that unlovely inverted udder, loomed murkily forward, I actually cried with happiness and the sensation of Home. Is this sentimental? Very well, then, it is sentimental.

So, once more I was in London. In a little house in Montpelier Walk. Here it is, on the sunny side of the street, looking towards the dome of the Oratory and with the Prince of Wales, a decorous pub, in the foreground. I am visited once a week by a hoarse flower-seller
(’Anytime. All fresh.’),
by a whistling piano-accordionist who is rumoured to trade in filthy postcards on the side and by cheerful French onion-sellers. Jonathan Elsom, one of my student-players, on bursary at a drama school, is staying with me. My London secretary, who is also a friend of earlier days in New Zealand, is typing out a dramatization of
False Scent
which Jemima, the eldest Lamprey daughter, and I, have sweated out between us. (This play will, in the near future, be sold to a London management. Three years will go by. Jemima and I, by a kind of mental osmosis, will gradually absorb the truth about selling plays. We will discover that whatever may be said to suggest more precipitant action, the play may well be put into cold storage, occasionally taken out and blown upon and then put back again. At the moment, however, we are all wide-eyed enthusiasm.)

I await a visitor. Presently he arrives. Over six feet tall. Very erect. Very alert. The familiar Micawber-like voice and the stately periods roll round our little drawing room. He has been in retirement for many years but, as if the ‘stroller’s’ drops of blood in his veins infect all the rest, he still travels a great deal. He visits his son and his old theatre associates in Australia, taking a devious course on the way.

‘I had meningitis in Madrid,’ he proclaims. ‘A great bore, it was, but it has left no serious defects that I am aware of.’

‘Four score and three,’ he says. ‘But not, I hope, greatly inconvenienced by the weight of years.’

Not greatly. Scarcely at all. Indeed, the years themselves disintegrate like mist and there he is asking me how I would like to be an actress or booming awfully with a coffin-plate crown upon his head, giving what-for to the witches.

The telephone rings. A falsetto voice tells me that the private secretary to Mr Chou En-Lai wishes to speak to me. I wait in a state of unsuspended disbelief until a second voice, speaking pidgin-English, says that Mr Chou will meet me in a certain little opium den under the American Embassy at thirteen hours GMT. I am to have a camellia clenched between my teeth and a copy of
The War Cry
in my left boot.

‘And, darling,’ says the voice,
‘such
a crisis blowing up! You can’t
think.’

Jonathan is coming to dinner. We will speak for a little while of old times, but will soon turn to the present and Jon’s future and what we are all going to do next.

Perhaps I should have started with a heading
Twenty Years After,
which sounds like the title of a Victorian novel. Indeed I believe there was such a one and that it dealt with convicts in Australia.

It
is
in fact getting on for twenty years since I wrote the final paragraphs of the preceding chapter and almost as long ago since I last read them. The middle-aged woman is now very old. Her lines of perspective stretch out behind her and the beech tree is almost out of sight.

When we are young, old age is something that happens to other people. This attitude persisted in my father until he was well into his seventies. He once said to me that he always thought of himself as a young man and added in his surprised voice that he supposed that was absurd. I don’t think he really believed it to be so or, if he did, gave a damn one way or the other. He preferred the company of my contemporaries. When his own – Unk or dear James, for instance – had reminisced at some length about the friends and events of their past my father would afterwards say fretfully that he found it all rather boring.

I resented the approach of middle age whenever I reflected that it had already overtaken me, but was almost too busy for this consideration to occur. Old age has caught me completely by surprise. It was the sudden onset of uncertain health that did the trick and the realization that the activity one most valued and passionately enjoyed was no longer possible. It must be packed up and put away with theatrical photographs and old programmes: a tidying-up
process before a journey on which one will be obliged to travel very light indeed.

In this room there is a lovely old Hungarian chest, large, with five carved, smooth-running drawers and each drawer full to extremity with the detritus of theatrical endeavour accumulated through half a century. There are photographs in albums, the gifts of, I hope, affectionate casts, quantities of loose photographs in no sort of order and piles of old programmes. Every time I drag open an over-stuffed drawer I think I will reduce its contents to some kind of order and every time I then think of something more urgent or nicer to do and shamefacedly force back the drawer with all its contents jamming and slithering about inside. Unlike Kipling’s Elephant’s Child I am not ‘a tidy pachyderm’. A popular song of the First World War was called ‘The Trail of the Lonesome Pine’. My mother used to sing it substituting ‘Untidy Daughter’ for the last two words.

I have just finished a prolonged fossick in the Hungarian chest and have come up with programmes of the last three Shakespearean plays I directed. Two of them,
Twelfth Night
and
Henry V,
were special in that each was the opening production for a new playhouse:
Twelfth Night
for the Ngaio Marsh Theatre at the University of Canterbury and
Henry V
for the James Hay Theatre at the magnificent Town Hall complex in Christchurch.

The touching kindness of the Canterbury University Drama Society in calling their long-wished-for theatre after me made its opening a very moving occasion. I have written earlier in this book of a production of
Twelfth Night
for the British Commonwealth Theatre Company when John Schlesinger played Feste, and of my own feelings about the play. They do not change but I was now to learn how the expression of them would do so with a different cast. Student-players, like wine, blossom in maturity, yet retain a certain freshness of approach and a kind of knowledgeable delight in what they are doing. The cast of the new
Twelfth Night
were almost all of this sort: experienced but still young, disciplined but still exuberant. In the event this brought about a broader emphasis on the buffo element, particularly in the comic duel. I don’t think I have ever before or since heard such laughter as this scene provoked.

While the overall orchestration retained its original shape, in detail there were many changes arising out of the actors’ personalities.
But Illyria was still Illyria, a country halfway between a laugh and a sigh, and at the end Feste still laid his lute on the stage, broke his rose over the strings and tiptoed off into the shadows.

The
Henry V
production replaced one that was to have been directed by Sir Tyrone Guthrie who was then in Australia and came over to New Zealand for discussions. He was considering, I afterwards learned, somebody’s re-arrangement of the mediaeval mystery
Everyman.
I have written elsewhere of Tony Guthrie and so have many of the theatre people who had worked with him. To me, he had been very kind indeed. It was delightful to meet him again but only too evident that he was no longer the provocative, brilliant, explosive Tony we had all known and so greatly admired. He was ill and soon to die.

And so, sadly, it came about that I was asked to direct whatever play I cared to choose for the opening of the James Hay Theatre. It was a formidable undertaking and at first I hesitated. But an irresistible bait was trailed before me. It was promised that we would have full use of the stage throughout the five weeks of rehearsal. After years of condemned premises, dirty, cold and balefully uninspiring, this was primrose news indeed. I fell for it.

In the event, such are the devils who beset theatrical endeavour that it turned out to have no more substance than a dream. Owing to strikes, over-optimism, unrealistic appraisements and the non-arrival of electrical equipment, we did not set foot in the theatre until twenty-four hours before curtain-up on the opening night. This meant working continuously through day and night, in a litter of electrical equipment, scenery, hammering and an atmosphere of near-despair. The first dress rehearsal, endlessly interrupted, was also a mechanical and lighting rehearsal. The second, uninterrupted, finished three hours before the curtain rose on the first performance. I had been given a committed and devoted assistant, Helen Holmes, and without her I don’t think we would have made our deadline. On the night before we opened, she laboured right through. The workmen arrived in the morning to find her there and remarked that she was making an early start.

Apart from being obliged to endure this nightmare, I had been given a completely free hand.

Henry V
was an appropriate choice for the occasion. Almost certainly it was Shakespeare’s play for the opening of the newly-built
Globe Theatre. It had always seemed to me to be, in the first instance, a play about plays and playhouses. Like many another dramatist who was to follow him, Shakespeare was irked and frustrated by the theatre’s limitations and excited by its potential. So he created ‘Chorus’ to explode upon the opening scene with his ‘O, for a Muse of fire’, to lament and apologize and exult and light a flame in the hearts of his unruly audiences. Again and again he came before them at that opening performance, four centuries ago in The Globe, to woo, to beckon, to reach out over the physical and emotional gulf that every actor must bridge. It is in the thoughts of the audience, he insists, that the reality of a play is born and he uses the word over and over again. The theatre, he says is a ‘quick forge and working house’ of thought. The audience must perform their part, they must ‘work, work’ their thoughts.
‘Think,’
he urges, ‘when we
talk
of horses that
you see
them…’ ‘You must’, he says, ‘piece out our imperfections with your thoughts.’

And of course it was Shakespeare who beckoned and roused up and implored. Behind the mask of ‘Chorus’ is the author himself making his age-old appeal: ‘Like us, meet us halfway. Please. Please.’

To fulfil this role we brought out from London the young actor who, five years ago, had played Laertes for us in a production of
Hamlet.
Jonathan Elsom had won a bursary to a drama school in London and was now an experienced and successful actor.

He was to arrive a fortnight before we opened. We wrote, of course, repeatedly and at great length about the role which in the meantime he was to prepare. At last, and how vividly I recall this, it fell out that one day I was writing, not for the first time, that Jonathan must always be aware that it was Shakespeare himself who was speaking. I suddenly thought: ‘But of course! Very well then! Let’s go the whole hog and make it so.’ I cabled him to get a Shakespeare wig made and finished the letter in the highest state of excitement.

We managed to preserve our secret from the rest of the cast. It was not until that first nightmarish dress rehearsal when they were all collected on stage that they found their author had joined the company.

The malign fates had one more kick in the pants reserved for us. On the opening night for fifteen agonizing minutes the curtain
refused to budge. An electrical engineer arrived and at 8.15 it rose. And so, in that state of febrile, sick anticipation that crackles over backstages on first nights, we opened
Henry V.

It worked.

The house lights dimmed. Bight trumpeters came out and sounded a fanfare. There was music. The curtain rose on an empty stage, clouds of mist, a luminous blue cyclorama and a solitary unmistakeable person who stood before it. As he came down to the forestage through the mist, the audience’s recognition of him ripened into the sound that is the accolade of all players, and when at the end of the first chorus he asked them ‘gently to hear, kindly to judge our play’ it broke out again and in the shadows offstage we said to each other: ‘We have a play.’

It ran for a season that could not be extended, to full houses.

‘Thus far,’ says Chorus at the end of the play, ‘our bending author hath pursued the story.’ And thus far I may, I hope, be forgiven for adding, did this bending director pursue her attempts to stage ten of his plays. When the curtain fell on the last night of
Henry V
it did so on my final Shakespeare production.

Theatrical endeavour is the most ephemeral of all the arts. When a season comes to an end it does so abruptly and completely and if, in whatever form and however explicitly or abstractly the cloudcapped towers and gorgeous palaces may have been suggested, they do indeed melt into air, into thin air. Canvas flats, stacked against a wall, a bare stage, a folded cyclorama and dust are all that is left of Illyria or the road to Dover, of Agincourt or Elsinore or the Blasted Heath. There will be some press notices. A few performances will survive for a time in actors’ shop-talk, fewer still in books about theatre. Such a book, at least in part, is this.

What has been of lasting value in our student-players’ Shakespearean ventures over the past forty years? Perhaps, first of all, that they
were
still student-players and attracted young audiences who otherwise would not have experienced the plays in performance and were fascinated by what they saw. One remembers the boy who stood with his hands on the edge of the apron stage for nearly three hours to watch
Hamlet,
the illicit sitters on rafters, and on the top of the lighting box because there was nowhere else to sit, the ones who came round after the show to ask questions,
argue, propound. Above all, I think, there were those players, some in every production, who, after a few rehearsals would come to me and say they had not known that the plays were like this. Having, of course, had the pants bored off them by some pedagogue at school. Anthony Quayle once said to me that he was firmly of the opinion that teaching Shakespeare should be forbidden in schools. Remembering our exceptional Miss Hughes, perhaps the dictum should be given an additional gloss, ‘except by a person of unusual ability’.

Of all the countless books that have been written about these plays over the last century I sometimes think that Granville Barker’s
Prefaces
are the best. He was a playwright, a man of the professional theatre and also an academic. Knowing all about actors and the problems, limitations and liberties of playhouses, he wrote for the people who work in them. Because he was a scholar, and a man of sensitivity and perception, he wrote wisely of the texts. I returned again and again to his
Prefaces.

When one is rehearsing Shakespeare there sometimes occurs a little miracle of a peculiar sort. One comes to a celebrated difficult passage upon which academic pundits have lavished pages of notes, a certain amount of guesswork, and pot-shots ending perhaps with the very persuasive conclusion that the text is indecipherably corrupt. An example is the speech about the ‘dram of eale’ in the second battlement scene of
Hamlet.
With many – not all – of such passages the baffled actor who is to speak one of them after, as it were, retiring to the study and mugging over all the commentaries, comes out no wiser than when he went in. He despairs. At this point he will, if he is an old hand, remember that his author, when he put words together, was a supreme master of sound and that the pulse of his blank verse is tremendous, the pauses imperative and that, with him, music and meaning are incorporate.

So the actor will experiment. He will repeat this devilish passage and for the time being pay no attention to sense but the sharpest and most devoted attention to sound. He will try and try again until shape, cadence, pauses and emphases
sound
right and while he sweats away at this exercise the door to interpretation has opened without him noticing and suddenly he knows without a doubt what he is talking about.

It is well to remember the conditions under which these plays were written: to think of some spring morning at the Globe Theatre when the Lord Chamberlain’s Players were assembled under an open sky to re-rehearse a scene that went wrong at the last performance. Their manager, master and star-actor, Burbage, tells them the current show won’t run longer than two weeks. Perhaps he says to his bit-part actor-playwright, ‘See what you can do with this, Will,’ and throws him a dilapidated old script. Or perhaps he asks him if he’s got anything ready and if not, why not. And the bit-part actor goes away and writes
King Lear
in a fortnight.

It is no wonder, indeed, that many of the texts are corrupt: the wonder is that there are not more mistakes, more muddles, that the author himself did not slap in more careless or stock audience-informative minor scenes, or that insoluble confusions of time sequences, such as that which occurs in
Othello,
did not spill over into other plays. In that ‘quick forge and working house’ of theatre Shakespeare was not, could not be, a meticulous writer. He wrote at speed for a demanding boss and avid audiences. And, being a genius, more often than not he wrote like one.