Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime (24 page)

In 1946, Ngaio staged
Macbeth.
This was the play, along with
Hamlet,
that she mentioned so often in her novels, and the Scottish Highland setting excited feelings of family history
Macbeth,
was also supposed to be unlucky, and she loved the idea that the play was jinxed. ‘The Scottish play’ also satisfied the continuing call for strong female leads. Lady Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most dynamic and complex women. The lynchpin in her husband’s downfall, she is torn apart by warring motives and emotions. It is this psychological and spiritual journey from normality to madness, and from grace to damnation, that must be portrayed convincingly on stage. The challenge for Ngaio was to find a young female actor of sufficient calibre to carry the role. When the tall, contralto-voiced Maryrose Miller marched into the auditions, Ngaio could not believe her good luck. Miller’s deep voice gave her acting a range of intensity that suggested someone much older. The show opened in July. People flooded in to watch Norman Ettlinger, a returned serviceman, and his wife, a second-year student, destroy themselves on stage. Ngaio had advertised for ex-soldiers to audition. This was a new source of acting potential, as were the refugees and immigrants who came to Christchurch to escape the catastrophic consequences of the war.

Macbeth
played for seven nights. Douglas Lilburn’s haunting Highland pipes set the scene, and Ngaio’s now-established formula perfectly captured the bleakness of the heath. Things were distilled and dramatic. In
Canta
magazine reviews, there were gripes about ranting and an overall sense that the actors had not quite fulfilled their roles. For the play to be successful, sympathy for the thane and his wife has to survive a convincing portrayal of their slide into madness and moral degradation. This is a fine balance even experienced actors struggle to achieve. The production was also criticized for its cheap costuming and stingy props. The most unconvincing were the toy swords and Macbeth’s
papier-mâhé
head on a broomstick, which, according to one critic, ‘deserved the hearty laugh it received’.

Student reviewers were always among Ngaio’s harshest critics. They reserved the right to offer an independent view, which was often jaundiced and bubbling with bravado. They were the radical voice and Ngaio represented
the establishment, but sometimes they got it right. Lukewarm criticism was not matched by the popular response. The show played to capacity crowds and was a huge financial success. Dan O’Connor was back in the country, so the decision was made to tour
Macbeth
over the summer break. Ngaio made changes to the cast, costumes, shields, swords, backcloth—and
papier-mâhé
head—in preparation for their seasons in Auckland and Wellington.

The
Auckland Star
raved: ‘
Settings almost stark in their simplicity
, splendid use of lighting, imaginative costuming and drapings all reveal her outstanding talent in this field.’ The changes she had made seemed to have hit the mark. A
Herald
review had one main reservation: ‘When Macbeth’s soliloquies are spoken as though they had nothing like absolute values of their own, they lose their power to sweep the listener.’ A letter to the editor from poet and academic A.R.D. Fairburn took the reviewer to task.

The custom of lifting soliloquies out of the action of the play and treating them as ‘purple passages’ is one that has marred generations of Shakespearian acting. [Macbeth] and his colleagues are, I think, to be commended for the way in which they maintain a strict unity of the dramatic and literary elements in the play, letting the poetry ‘come through’. I felt that they brought us very close to Shakespeare, and a long way from the 19th century ‘drawing room reciter’.

Ngaio saw Shakespeare’s soliloquies in the same way. In fact, it was in 1946 that Ngaio published her
A Play Toward: A Note on Play Production,
a handbook that collected her thoughts on theatre production. ‘
These notes, too slight for dedication
, carry my thanks to those members of the Canterbury College Drama Society with whom I shared the experience of Shakespearean production,’ she wrote on the dedication page. There was nothing slight about her thoughts at all, and the book became a classic.

Ngaio covered play production from a variety of angles. There was the director’s perspective, then those of the actor and the audience. Her ideas had been honed by recent Shakespearian productions. She did not mention Shakespeare’s soliloquies specifically, but made it clear that she saw the plays as integrated entities. The actors were like dancers, whose voices pulsed with the words of the author. Their contribution was integral to a greater choreographed pattern of players, which must be ‘rhythmic’ and work together as a ‘team’.
Dramatic dialogue was not a series of speeches delivered by individual actors but a ‘
series of spoken movements
, each with its own form and climax, carried out by a group of players’.

Ngaio analysed the relationship between actors and their audience. Each performance was a completely new experience and was ‘
infinitely variable
, hazardous and incalculable’. A good actor played his audience like a musical instrument, shaping and controlling their ‘emotional response to his work’. The actor achieved a ‘fusion of himself with his role’. ‘This process is brilliantly set out by Stanislavsky,’ wrote Ngaio. The actor ‘should seek not so much to “lose himself in his part” as to find his part in himself.’

Ngaio provided a working methodology for directors and small amateur groups in what she called New Zealand’s ‘renaissance of flesh-and-blood theatre’. She outlined a process that began with the director spending several weeks becoming familiar with the script. ‘
The producer’s script
should leave plenty of room for notes. A typed script on one side of foolscap pages, bound horizontally, with wide margins is none too big.’ Her own prompt book was a blueprint of minute detail. To get a sense of scale and movement, she suggested making an accurate cardboard model. She advocated acting on different levels to help composition and flow, and the addition of stairs for dramatic variation. Her regime of rehearsals included individual and group work with actors, so that they fused with their parts and acted seamlessly together. ‘
Don’t snap
,’ was her comment on discipline. ‘There are only three legitimate excuses for blackguarding your cast; unpunctuality, talking off stage and failure to memorise.’

What she offered readers was her recipe for success, plus some basic philosophy. It was the actor’s responsibility to be heard, and the director’s to be understood. ‘
If you can’t make
an intelligent play intelligible then you had better not attempt it,’ she pronounced. Part of making a complex play comprehensible was communicating its basic message. ‘Many an attempt at a serious play has been lost by a kind of ingrained genteelism…If the production of…a play is healthy it will probably err on the side of coarseness.’ Underpinning all this was Ngaio’s fundamental assumption that New Zealand must have its own national theatre.

Ngaio offered directors a tightly structured approach. She had a clear idea herself about what she hoped to achieve from a production, and was unambiguous about how she realized it. There was not much room in her approach for spontaneity or intuition. Her methods have been described as
autocratic and tyrannical, but they were underpinned by a wit and humanity that won most people over. She was glamorous and talented, and this made her something of a cult figure to a younger generation hungry for international insights.

Her ideas were a conglomerate of things she had seen and read overseas. From William Poel, she discovered the open stage. It was similar to ‘
the kind…on which
Shakespeare’s plays were first performed. The playing area was a permanent space…There was no attempt at illusion of place because there was no scenery, and the plays were allowed to charge forward, one scene overlapping another.’ It was Edward Gordon Craig who introduced her to the concept that the stage was an atmosphere and not a physical space, and the German director Leopold Jessner whose productions prompted her to use stairs. Her greatest model was Stanislavsky, who encouraged actors to find qualities in themselves that connected with their roles.

She believed in the authenticity of a specific approach. Plays were ‘
real objects possessing
an absolute set of meanings, prone to damage by careless direction or acting. To her, the director was like a curator, charged with revealing the play’s absolute value to the audience in the clearest possible light.’

Her handbook was published by the Caxton Press, whom Ngaio used, whenever she could, to print her programmes. Like her stage sets, Caxton’s typography was spare and in keeping with the play. As she distilled the play’s message, so they expressed it graphically. Often she provided the illustrations, either her own, or those of a friend. First-night programmes became collectors’ items, because they were all individually signed by Ngaio. (This tradition continued until her last production.)

Her handbook marked the end of a fervent few years of theatrical production. She had been away from her novels, which were her bread and butter, and her publishers were anxious for another book. She told the drama society she was unavailable for 1947, which must be kept free for another murder mystery. Her work in the theatre and the recent tour with
Macbeth
had given her a wealth of ideas, but picking up the threads was a challenge.

Ngaio lived her life in compartments. She had her life as a writer, as a director, her life in New Zealand and abroad, and her private life, often lived with different people in separate spheres that occasionally overlapped. The complexity of her life allowed her to move with seamless ease from one project to the next. She directed her life as she directed a play, filling each fresh scene with a new set
of actors; only she was privy to the prompt book. She had become a very public figure but few people had access to the compartment that was her private life.

It was often in her dedications that Ngaio’s public and private lives coalesced.
Final Curtain,
published in 1947, was dedicated to Cecil Walker and his sister, Joan. There was substantial private money in the Walker family, and Dundas, Cecil and their sister lived in an overgrown rambling old villa with high ceilings and dark corridors. Eccentricity abounded. Joan was a Miss Havisham-style recluse, and her brothers both bohemian and homosexual. All three were part of Ngaio’s inner circle of friends.

In
Final Curtain,
the threads of Agatha Troy and Roderick Alleyn’s lives are woven together again after their long separation. At the beginning of the book, Alleyn is still chasing spies in New Zealand and Troy is in England, making maps and ‘pictorial surveys for the army’. The war has taken its toll. She is fragile and tense. It is a grey day, and bitterly cold, as Troy walks up the path from her studio to her Buckinghamshire house. She is thinking of her husband thousands of miles away.

‘Suppose,’ Troy pretended, ‘I was to walk in and find it was Rory. Suppose he’d kept [his return] a secret and there he was waiting in the library. He’d have lit the fire so that it should be there for us to meet by’…She had a lively imagination and…so clear was her picture that it brought a physical reaction; her heart knocked, her hand, even, trembled a little as she opened the library door.

There is no Alleyn waiting in the library, but into that waiting space of anticipation slips an opportunity: a commission from Millamant Ancred inviting Troy to paint her father-in-law, Sir Henry Ancred, in the character of Macbeth. One of the grand actors of pre-war West End productions, he has moved audiences for years, particularly by his rendition of Macbeth. The picture is to hang in the entrance hall at the splendid Gothic-styled Ancreton Manor. Troy is even given the specifications: it is to occupy a niche 6 feet by 4 feet. She turns the commission down immediately—she is no made-to-measure Society portrait painter—but the Ancreds, a flamboyantly dramatic family with an acting pedigree that goes back to the Norman Conquest, interpret her refusal as provocation to persist. A family envoy, Thomas Ancred, is sent, and
Troy, already tempted to paint the elderly tragedian’s handsome, well-formed head, caves in. She is to stay at Ancreton Manor for a week and paint. She and Sir Henry will have their sittings in what the family calls the ‘little theatre’. Sir Henry sits for her in his Macbeth costume. The background is a painted backcloth of the wasteland before Forres Castle.

Troy is riveted at their first meeting. She has seen Sir Henry on stage and knows what a powerful actor he is. At their fourth sitting in the ‘little theatre’, suddenly Sir Henry breaks the silence with Macbeth’s words:

Light thickens, and the crow

Makes wing to the rooky wood…

And so he continues. Troy’s hand jerks and she stands transfixed until he has finished. His performance has shaken her and ‘she had the feeling the old man knew very well how much it had moved her’. Over the next few days Troy will meet the whole ‘larger-than-life’ Ancred family, whom she regards as ‘two-dimensional figures gesticulating on a ridiculously magnificent stage’, especially the ‘loathsome blond’, Miss Orrincourt, a gold-digger with pretensions to becoming the next Lady Ancred.

The scene is perfectly set for murder, not of a Scottish king, but of a Shakespearian actor. The unveiling of Troy’s painting is to coincide with Sir Henry’s 70th birthday. The premier event of Sir Henry’s birthday parties is a reading of his current will. ‘He has always made public each new draft. He can’t resist the dramatic mise-en-scèe,’ his grandson Cedric explains to Troy. The family members jockey like Derby horses to finish in the money. Each new reading is a fresh race, and now Miss Orrincourt, a rank outsider, is in the lead. Sir Henry announces their engagement before the family assembles in the little theatre for the portrait unveiling. They file into their seats in anticipation. When the cloth is drawn dramatically back, there is the sombre head of a legend—and ‘flying against a clear patch of night sky, somebody had painted an emerald green cow with vermilion wings’ dropping black bombs. Someone has graffitied the nation’s painting. In shock, Sir Henry retires to bed. The next morning he is discovered dead in his room. The death certificate says heart failure brought on by a severe gastric attack, but his room has been scrupulously cleaned so there is no evidence to the contrary, and no autopsy.