Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime (21 page)

It is the dark side of surrogate parenting that Ngaio explores in
Died in the Wool.
Flossie enrolled her farm manager’s son, Cliff, at the equivalent of the best English public school in New Zealand. Cliff’s father, Tommy Johns, raised objections and there were ructions at home, but eventually it was settled. Cliff’s precocious appetite for the piano and writing would be nurtured in the best learning environment money could buy. Cliff, ‘a full-sized enfant prodigé
[sic]’,
was taken out of his own environment to satisfy Flossie’s need for a child. She wooed him with books, a gramophone with specially selected records, and her Bechstein piano, but away from Mount Moon he faced the realities of life outside the familiar woolshed world of rouseabouts. Flossie planned a big future. Cliff was to go to university and, at the end of the war, to the Royal College of Music in London. But Cliff was miserable at school, and he and Flossie quarrelled. At the age of 16 he wanted to enlist and fight in the war. At 47, she wanted him to remain her protégé and to succeed. She was the parent-figure he rebelled against to become a man. Like a financial investment, Flossie tallied up her losses and railed against him. Her love was not unconditional. He owed her a huge debt. Flossie was bludgeoned and suffocated to the sound of Cliff
playing Bach on an old piano in the shearers’ quarters. Or was he?

The links to Ngaio’s life are fascinating. It is almost as if she is teasing out potential scenarios fictionally, before the possibilities are unleashed in reality. The relationship between real life and her fictional creations is never in any way precise, yet she has a clever way of identifying and exploring the essential issues. Flossie is a dictator (Ngaio was not), so many more than just Cliff have a motive to kill her. As Fabian Losse observes about Flossie’s spouse, Arthur Rubrick, ‘it takes a strong man to be a weak husband. Matrimonially speaking, a condition of perpetual apology is difficult to sustain.’ Flossie’s life is littered with people unable to transcend her suffocating ego. Her husband, her ward, her nephews, and her surrogate son all have a stake in her death. She is likened to one of the weird sisters in
Macbeth,
because there is something uncannily clever about her ability to manipulate people. Flossie is ruthless to succeed. The ‘ambitious type’ is how Markins, manservant and special agent, describes her. ‘You see them everywhere. Very often they’re childless.’ Her political endeavours are insincere. When asked to contribute an article for a weekly journal, she explains: ‘I want to stress the sanctity of women’s work in the high country’. But her best platitudes ‘faltered before the picture of any cocky-farmer’s wife, whose working-day is fourteen hours long and comparable only to that of a man under sentence of hard labour’.

As writer and detective fiction commentator Carole Acheson points out, Mount Moon symbolizes ‘
the multiple role
the sheep station has played in New Zealand’s history: bringing settlers to the secluded hill country; making sheep the backbone of the nation’s economy; and creating a new landed gentry out of the wealthy station owners’.

Cliff’s generation will tackle the creation of a New Zealand National Identity in the arts, and his symphonies will capture the quintessence of the landscape and its history. In the meantime, though, this is a mystery and the murderer revealed at the end of
Died in the Wool
is a young man indoctrinated by a Nazi ‘youth training scheme’ with supremacist ideas. In a letter to Fox, Alleyn explains: ‘He was one of a clutch of young foreign Herrinvolk
[sic]
…who did their worst to raise Cain when they returned, bloated with Fascism, to their own country.’ Ngaio drew on her own experiences to create her killer, weaving into her plot threads of experiences in Germany in 1937. She was remembering the New Zealander who extolled the virtues of the Nazi Party, and the boys that shouted ‘Heil Hitler’ as they bathed with their master in the Mosel River. What
kind of men would they become, and what would they be capable of?

Alleyn is thinking increasingly of home. As he builds up the fire in the study, he is caught ‘on a wave of nostalgia’. He has been away from his wife and London life for three years. He longs to be back in his own country and with his own people. His salve at Mount Moon has been the overpowering presence of the landscape, a presence that even at midnight comes through the windows and sends a shiver of excitement down his spine. But for Alleyn it is time to go.

From this point on, Ngaio would discuss the New Zealand accent, manners and cultural identity in newspaper and
Listener
articles, in letters to the editor and on the radio, but never again in such depth fictionally. It was hard to justify her detective’s presence in New Zealand. ‘
Well I can’t keep on lugging
old Alleyn out to New Zealand for this reason or that,’ she explained to a radio interviewer in 1978. The war had given her an excuse, but Japan surrendered in August 1945, and the fighting was over.

Died in the Wool
was criticized for its slow plod through repetitious reminiscences. On the whole, though, critics commended it for its psychological insights and marvellous evocation of the High Country landscape. The most cutting criticism came from the reviewer for the
Time and Tide.
It was overly harsh, but there was an element of truth:

Died in the Wool,
though competent
, is heavy and, let’s face it, dull. The first half of the book is aptly described as ‘a verbal striptease before an investigating officer’, and before it is over one has long ceased to care which, if any, of these tedious characters is a Nazi agent. Nor are the technical details of New Zealand sheep-shearing very exciting to a layman. The whole thing lacks grip. Come back to England, Miss Marsh; you’ve been wool-gathering long enough.

The two-year gap between the publication of
Colour Scheme
and
Died in the Wool
was her longest so far. Between these books she entered a new phase in her life that would make detective fiction pale by comparison. In 1941, when the young drama students from the Canterbury University College Drama Society (CUCDS) had cycled up to her home and asked her to produce
Outward Bound,
she had agreed, on one condition: that the next year’s production was
Hamlet
and she would be the director.

A
midnight bell tolled as the curtain rose. The stage was simply lit and spartan. High contrasts of light and dark created long silhouettes that played across the plain backdrop. This was the freezing cold battlement of Elsinore Castle in Denmark.

‘Who’s there?’ cried Bernardo, stepping onto the narrow rampart.

‘Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself,’ challenged Francisco.

‘Long live the King!’ exclaimed Bernardo.

It was August 1943, and the opening night of a student production of
Hamlet.
Because it was wartime, ‘Long live the King!’ had a patriotic echo that reverberated around the room.
The Little Theatre
in Christchurch was packed to capacity. More tickets had been sold than there were seats, and as people’s eyes grew accustomed to the darkness the unseated overflow emerged, draped over beams and electrical boxes, and standing leaning against the stage. They crept into place as the lights went down to watch a spectacle, a cultural awakening that would keep Christchurch transfixed for six nights. This was the first time since Allan Wilkie had toured
Hamlet
over 20 years before that
Hamlet
had played to Christchurch audiences. The student players had been reluctant to do it and the audience reaction was impossible to predict. Staging
Hamlet
was a risk.

Francisco, the sentinel, was dressed in an army-issue greatcoat and tin hat. Under his arm he carried a service rifle with a fixed bayonet. The play programme warned audiences that the actors would be wearing modern dress, but the austerity of the stage, its eerie blue lighting, plus the costumes’ contemporary poignancy, gave the production a chill impact that few could have anticipated. Bernardo was also dressed in army uniform, and the two men loomed larger than life on the tiny stage. What began in those opening moments would keep the audience spellbound for nearly two hours. They watched Dundas Walker as King Hamlet’s ghost standing in bloodcurdling conversation with his son; they watched the young Hamlet, racked by fear and grief, crawling across the stage steps towards the spectre.

‘Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder,’ the ghost commanded his son.

‘Murder!’ cried young Hamlet.

‘Murder most foul, as in the best it is, but this most foul, strange and unnatural.’

‘Haste me to know’t,’ replied Hamlet, ‘that I, with wings as swift as meditation or the thoughts of love, may sweep to my revenge.’

Jack Henderson was perfect as Hamlet. Dark-haired, sallow-skinned, seething and slightly petulant, he had stage presence before he opened his mouth. Henderson, who was 19 when rehearsals began, was the son of Justice Henderson, a High Court judge in Calcutta. He had been attending Westminster School in London when war broke out, and his parents arranged for him to finish his schooling at Christ’s College and continue on to Canterbury University. He had previous acting experience and planned to leave shortly for England to study at The Old Vic. Even then, Ngaio and Dundas Walker spent hours with him going over lines so that he got the timing, intonations and breathing correct. They spent a whole afternoon on the first 10 lines of his opening soliloquy. For a time he even stayed with Ngaio at Marton Cottage. Exhausted after rehearsals, they would creep in late at night and cook bacon and eggs, whispering so that they did not disturb Ngaio’s father. She thrived on the camaraderie and loved the intellectual exercise of translating the play script into dramatic action. Henderson, however, struggled to find his form. He had to learn how to speak in blank verse and hold some of his energy in reserve so that he could build to a climax. He found it hard to texture the delivery of his lines. At times, he unleashed emotion with an intensity that was as exhausting
for those who listened as it was for him. But there was a power in his passion that would ultimately rivet the audience, and leave it marvelling that a young, relatively inexperienced actor could bring so much fire to one of Shakespeare’s most turbulent roles.

Some of the play’s impact came from the changes Ngaio made to the script.
Hamlet
was presented in prose rather than verse. This made it seem more immediate and accessible, and stopped students from falling into the pattern of reading it like a poem that paused ‘at the end of each line of verse, regardless of sense or punctuation’. The Christchurch audience was provincial; a purist version of the play could not be staged. It was imperative to capture and hold people’s interest, and the rhythms of the staid city must be considered. Ngaio cut the play with the precision of a surgeon, reducing it to 17 scenes with a shortened interval so that the theatre emptied before the last tram left Cathedral Square at 10.30pm. This distilled the action so everything that remained contributed to the dramatic climax. She kept the structure tight and the timing precise. In rehearsal she ran through the scenes, timing them so that they had speed and economy of delivery.

The script she worked from was heavily annotated and had illustrations of characters and action in the margins and on facing pages. She mapped the stage out in models to visualize how the production would work. The Little Theatre stage was tiny, and the challenge was to make it seem expansive enough to cope with the epic aspects of the play. The space easily evoked the intimacy of the soliloquy, but a grander canvas was harder to suggest.

Ngaio brought a degree of professionalism to student drama, and it was infectious. She took the productions seriously and she communicated her seriousness so that students felt compelled to rise to her expectations. Young people excited her. She loved their untried, easy confidence, and their willingness to learn. Ngaio, although flattered at being put on a pedestal, made sincere efforts to climb down from it. The play gave her a reason to be in the company of a generation who could have been her children, but always the work stood between them and close personal intimacy. It protected this shy, reserved woman from the glare of uncomfortable sentiment and youthful exuberance, but occasionally it was an unfortunate barrier to something more meaningful and revealing. Acting brings raw humanity before the gods. Its instrument is the human body and voice, and few things test people more than live performance. Inevitably, emotions are heightened and intense, and added to this were bristling juvenile
egos, hormones and alcohol. Most single women of 48 would have blanched at the prospect, but Ngaio thrived. She had found her
métier
—another passion, another great love, a second life.

She stepped into the hurly-burly with her firm way of handling the cast. She was never gratuitously cutting or cruel, but she had an awesome presence that riveted young actors to the spot, sending a ripple of discomfort down their spines when they were not on the mark. Her voice ‘boomed like a bittern’, she gestured extravagantly, and she could leap onto the stage with an agility that left no one out of her reach. Physically, she was still young, able to flick her leg up behind her with flamboyant flexibility. To the students, she seemed as extraordinary in life as she was in print. Even the engineering students who shambled into rehearsals to do the lighting stiffened to her cue. She made them believe in something bigger than themselves: the play, the playwright and the production. All of these were more important than the individual, and the cast’s collective responsibility was to make it the best production possible.

Ngaio had the perfect psychology: she set high standards and encouraged people to reach them. The stick was not a rod but a carrot, and the energy to reach it was the actor’s own self-motivation. Ngaio led from behind. Interestingly, she hung back from putting her name to her first Shakespearian production. In the programme the producers were given as Jack Henderson and Marie Donaldson, but
Canta,
the student magazine, recognized her shadowy presence:

‘Hamlet’—in modern dress
—is the most ambitious production the Drama Society has attempted for many years. In fact, were it not for Ngaio Marsh continually in the background (for she refuses to be called ‘producer’, only ‘godmother’, on the grounds that she has insufficient time to devote to the play), the society would indeed be rash to attempt it.

Ngaio was determined to make
Hamlet
a success. She may have been too humble, or too cautious, to put her name to the play, but in every other way it carried her stamp. She coached the cast in voice projection. Ngaio was less concerned with the Kiwi accent than with clear speech that reached the back of the room. In the Little Theatre, empty, this was easy, but when the theatre was crowded it was more of a challenge.

It was also her idea to use modern dress, which could be justified on the grounds of war rationing and expediency, but in reality was a covert experiment.
Christchurch had a literati and a university at its heart, and Ngaio wanted to challenge and impress them.
Hamlet
brought something of the urbane West End avant-garde to an Antipodean garden city. In 1938, Tyrone Guthrie had produced
Hamlet
in modern dress at The Old Vic, and memories of this were still vivid in Ngaio’s mind. So parents’ cupboards were raided for the sake of art. Except for the sentinels, the men wore everyday suits and overcoats, the women evening gowns and housecoats. Hamlet and Claudius were a yin and yang pair. Ngaio’s father commissioned his tailor to make a dashing black suit for Hamlet, and Claudius was dressed in a white suit made out of nappy fabric stiffened by shoe whiting. Regular applications of the latter were required to maintain its pristine appearance.

Modern costuming was matched by the minimalism of a modern stage. The clutter of scenery and props was kept to a minimum by the use of the cyclorama, lit for outdoor scenes and curtained for inside. It was a brilliantly simple concept that became a Ngaio trademark.

Music was another addition. Frederick Page recommended the talented Douglas Lilburn to write the incidental music. He had returned to Christchurch in 1941, from the Royal College of Music in London where he had worked under Vaughan Williams, and was keen to build on his repertoire and experience. The play was due to ‘
open on a Monday night
[and] Lilburn only began work after attending a rehearsal the preceding Wednesday’. By the dress rehearsal on the Sunday he had written and rehearsed with his three violins and a tubular bell-ringer. It was a scramble to produce and practise the music, so Lilburn must have been relieved when the results were rapturously received. ‘
The good Ngaio
,’ he recalled many years later, ‘always made me feel that whatever I realised for her was just what she had been wanting.’ Lilburn’s music was perfectly placed. His violins evoked ‘
the very breath
of the cold night air at Elsinore,’ wrote Ngaio, and his finale, a funeral march, where the dead Hamlet was carried out on the shoulders of four soldiers, left a lingering sense of solemnity that underscored the prince’s tragic end.

When the final curtain came down, the crowd clapped wildly. The actors took their bows. The star of the show was undoubtedly Jack Henderson, but there was also Paul Molineaux, a young law student, who played an excellent Laertes, and accomplished performances from Yvonne Westmacott as Ophelia and Marie Donaldson as Gertrude. In fact, the cast of
Hamlet
had held the audience captive and they were reluctant to break the spell and go home.

News of the show’s success spread like wildfire around a city tinder-dry for serious theatre. Ngaio was elated. Everywhere she went it was the topic of conversation. Newspaper reviews of the show were very positive. Its simple stage, and skilful editing, pace and execution were commended. ‘I would praise the good diction, rapid ease and smooth timing of the spoken lines, which, throughout the play, retain the exciting nature of spontaneous dialogue and involuntary out pouring of thought,’ wrote the
Press
critic. The queues that formed to buy tickets for the next performance were so long that the company received complaints from the police about the obstruction of the pavement. The play continued to open to packed houses. There was demand for an extended season, but it was impossible to extend it much longer because of the end-of-year examinations. A compromise was reached and it was decided that
Hamlet
would run again after examinations in late November-December.

This was the human involvement and public recognition that Ngaio Marsh had always longed for. Writing detective novels was an introverted experience. She wrote in isolation to focus her mind, and her real fame overseas was now vicariously experienced through reviews and letters from her publisher and English and American agents. New Zealanders read her books, but few people fully appreciated the enormity of her achievement abroad.

All the detective books she had written had never brought this kind of local acclaim. It must have seemed ironic that a student play should generate so much fuss, but she relished it, because in that relationship she glimpsed her dream of a Shakespearian renaissance in Christchurch. ‘
This was the beginning
of an association that has lasted for twenty years,’ Ngaio wrote in
Black Beech.
‘For me it has been a love affair.’ Between
Hamlet
and the following year’s production of
Othello,
Ngaio wrote
Colour Scheme.
She was still writing when rehearsals for
Othello
began, and some nights she would return home exhausted, but somehow found the energy to attend to her book. Increasingly, she tried to write during the day. Sometimes she even dictated sections to her secretary to relieve the strain of handwriting.

The rehearsal period for
Othello
was six weeks. Paul Molineaux was cast as the Moor and Jack Henderson as Iago, but a new leading lady was required to play Desdemona. Auditions were a serious matter, and students now lined up for the honour of playing a part in a Shakespearian drama directed by Ngaio Marsh. From this point on, the pretence of student producers was dropped and Ngaio’s
name featured boldly on the programme. Barbara Reay (now Webb) auditioned on the stage of the Little Theatre for the part of Desdemona.