Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime (31 page)

The Festival of Britain was a huge national exhibition, due to open in London in May 1951, and many cultural events were planned to coincide with the celebration. Among them was a summer season of English comedy at the Embassy, which Molly May invited Ngaio to direct. There was also
another possibility. Stage director Sir Tyrone Guthrie and Dan O’Connor were considering running a Shakespeare season during the festival in a Woolwich theatre bombed during the war, and Ngaio was to be involved if it went ahead. It was planned, in proper Elizabethan style, to move audiences down the River Thames by barge to the theatre. Guthrie, his wife Judy, Bob Stead and Ngaio took a memorable boat trip down the river, picked up the theatre keys from an old pub, and entered the derelict building. Unfortunately the theatre was too badly damaged for their purposes and the project was abandoned. A Shakespearian season in London would have delayed Ngaio’s departure, but May’s offer was not tempting enough to hold her. She turned down the comedy season and prepared to leave England with a group of Commonwealth players she and Stead had spent months getting together.

When she was not writing, broadcasting, or directing, Ngaio was poring over
Spotlight
magazines with Stead, looking for ideal actors. There were countless professional photographs and flattering biographies. Ngaio was realistic. She knew the plight of post-war actors, and that every time a new play was cast in Britain or the United States there were 30 or more unemployed actors perfectly capable of playing each role. But they had very particular criteria. They needed people prepared to be away from England for at least six months. They wanted actors who would be ambassadors for their countries, and who were versatile, good-looking and congenial.

Ngaio fell back on the familiar. Biddy Lenihan was given the Stepdaughter’s part in
Six Characters,
Essie in Bernard Shaw’s
The Devil’s Disciple,
and Viola in
Twelfth Night,
all of which Ngaio planned to tour. There were other campaigners, including Bob Stead and his wife Mizzy, and Owen Howell’s son Peter, who had been Prompter in Ngaio’s production of
Six Characters
at the Embassy. She had worked with Peter Howell on
Hamlet
at her Knightsbridge flat, with a view to his taking a lead role. Other major players in the company were the openly homosexual John Schlesinger, later famed for his direction of the films
Midnight Cowboy
and
Sunday Bloody Sunday,
who was an ‘enchanting’ Feste; Frederick Bennet, who played Toby Belch with ‘elegance and breeding’; and Peter Varley, who made ‘a wonderful praying Mantis of Malvolio’. As individuals, Ngaio liked and admired each of them.

A fragile sun was dissolving early-morning mist on the Thames Estuary as Ngaio left London with her company of Commonwealth players, bound for Sydney. There were tensions among the actors. This was not a honed group
of homogeneous young players, but a diverse collection of professional prima donnas with egos that pulled against each other. The boat trip was not a quick passage across the Tasman, but a prison sentence, if you were travelling with people you did not like. Ngaio would use her experiences travelling with this company in a later book, but in the meantime it was a nightmare to be endured.

The cast rehearsed onboard and opened in Sydney with
The Devil’s Disciple
to mixed reviews.
It was ‘a play
,’ Ngaio wrote despairingly in
Black Beech,
‘that grew colder and colder in my hands the more I tried to blow some warmth into it’. She was criticized in the press for her dictatorial direction. The actors became ‘wooden puppets’ in her hands, according to
The Sydney Morning Herald.
The strains and stresses of the journey, and the disappointing reviews, brought out ‘
dissonances of all sorts
…in the company…houses faded and gnawing anxiety and depression settled upon us’.
Things were so clearly going wrong
that Dan O’Connor was forced to join the tour in Sydney. He had chosen to stay in England with his wife Shirley, who was expecting a baby. Deirdre was only nine days old when he left to try to help Ngaio turn things around.

After eight weeks in Australia, they made the desperate decision to move to New Zealand, where
Twelfth Night
opened in Auckland to a more positive reception. This might have been sustainable, and Ngaio thought a national theatre could have been based there, but the plan was to tour, and tour they did, with treacherous consequences. The dynamic of the group was further challenged by poor attendances in Christchurch, where Ngaio had always received so much support. She was not a good financial manager, and the Commonwealth project was too demanding for the resources and infrastructure of a tiny country. Her vaulting ambition, not so much for herself, but for New Zealand, had ‘o’er leaped itself’ and the consequences were tragic. By August 1951, in spite of the knocks, Ngaio was still clinging to her dream. ‘
Yours is not a letter
to be answered, according to my present habit,’ she wrote to John Schroder from the Theatre Royal in Christchurch,

in staccato little chunks scribbled between rehearsals & performances & lasting over days & through towns & yet after hoping for a decent interval it is after all under those conditions that I am trying to write to you I can’t wait any longer for a fair run.

Ngaio was tired, but still hopeful. ‘I’m glad you liked our play,’ she continued. ‘This is a frightfully, exciting & rewarding adventure. I sometimes wonder if it all really
is
happening.’

The greatest challenges were yet to come. It was in the provincial theatres that the company was routed. In Dunedin, the theatre was next to a winter fair where wild screams from the chamber of horrors and the grinding noise of the helter-skelter punctuated each performance until they resorted to using sandbags to try to deaden the sound. They found ‘once-pretty Victorian and Edwardian play-houses’ filthy and neglected. Some had no running water; in others, vandalized lighting equipment was beyond repair. In Nelson, in a packed house the fuses blew 25 times. The company’s last performance in Blenheim, after six long months, epitomized their struggle. ‘
Rats darted
in and out of the dressing-rooms, and the rain, which was extremely heavy, found its way through the roof.’ Ngaio watched John Schlesinger as Feste from the wings, in a lonely pool of light, singing ‘Heigh ho, the wind and the rain’, as the drips plopped in a growing puddle on stage.

It was an ignominious end to something that had promised and taken so much. Ngaio had worked and sacrificed, and Dan O’Connor had lost money. It would take time for them both to recover. After years of what seemed like an endless summer of successes, Ngaio experienced the winter of failure. There was nothing more to say than goodbye to the players, who mostly returned to England, get into her car and drive home.

Ngaio returned to the comfort of her old life. Stella Mannings and her husband, who had come down from Tauranga to look after Ngaio’s house while she was away, stayed on for several years with their sons, John and Bear. Both boys had completed their schooling at Christ’s College, and John had had a year at university before deciding he wanted to join the British Army; Bear chose the New Zealand Air Force. Ngaio used her contacts to help John get his wish and organized a farewell cocktail party for him and Bear at Marton Cottage. John, Bear and a friend called Snowy were responsible for serving drinks, but somehow the instructions went astray. John remembers the event well:

The first rounds
[of drinks] were neat, really solid…that relaxed them and then you watered them down a bit [with soda]…that was the thing [Ngaio] always did…something really solid at the beginning to get things going and then ease off…but it was the people who were there like the Bishop
of Christchurch…and the Dean…who got completely plastered…they left and it was a very dark night and they somehow got down the stairs and they lost each other, one went down the drive, and the other the path, and there was a hedge in between them so they couldn’t see each other…

‘Dean, where are you?’

‘Here.’

‘Yes, but where’s here?’…

It was pitch black and they didn’t know whether one was behind or in front of the other.

‘Dean, who’s taking Communion tomorrow.?’

‘You are, my Lord.’

‘Dean, I think it would be a good thing for you to take Communion tomorrow’

‘But Bishop, people are coming just to hear you.’

The Dean was found later in a heap under a bush in the garden.

One of the ladies woke up semi-naked on the floor in a room with a telephone still in her hand…Somebody, I can’t remember who, just slumped on to the floor and people stepped over her, as if that was natural and normal, to talk to somebody else…It was quite a party…We were supposed to add soda but…it all happened suddenly…as far as Ngaio knew it had been diluted.

Ngaio watched in horror as distinguished guests dropped like flies from the effects of alcohol. When she discovered the reason she was ‘furious’, but some years later ‘she thought it was terribly funny’. In spite of the pitfalls of having two young men around, Ngaio was sorry to see the boys leave for overseas. ‘
They were immensely
companionable and I think I may say that a bond, already established, was greatly strengthened during the three years that followed my home-coming.’

Early in 1953, Ngaio drove up to Auckland with Sylvia Fox especially to see the opening night of a Royal Stratford-upon-Avon season of
Othello, As You Like It
and
Henry IV, Part I
with Anthony Quayle (whom she knew), Leo McKern and Barbara Jefford. While she was there, she received the tragic news that, on Friday, 13 February, the Little Theatre had been gutted by fire. The wiring was blamed, but the blaze seemed to have started in the roof where the wardrobe was stored. Students smoked cigarettes in the area, which contained
felt tunics painted in oil paint, and in summer, under a hot slate roof, this was a highly combustible combination. There were numerous possible causes, but the result was simply devastating. The fabric of a decade of Ngaio’s work with student players was destroyed. Almost all of the costumes, scenery, props, lighting equipment, storage boxes, programmes, photographs and records were burnt. The evidence of so many wonderful experiences had gone forever.

What phrases
, what jetting sounds went roaring up that night: Othello’s opulent agony, the ghost’s booming expostulations, wings in the rooky wood, Clytemnestra’s death cries, Puck’s laughter…What a bonfire!

The cradle of Ngaio’s theatrical dreams had gone, but characteristically she was not defeated. In November 1952 she produced Christopher Fry’s
A Sleep of Prisoners,
and a few weeks later announced that the drama society would produce
Julius Caesar
in July.

The only accommodation the university could offer was the Great Hall: a cavernous wooden Victorian Gothic space that would drown the intimacy of theatre. Ngaio made her plans, which included the model for a structure within a structure, to be made by the New Zealand Army: a scaffolding auditorium was constructed around three sides of a temporary stage. This was the closest thing audiences had seen to an Elizabethan-style Globe Theatre in New Zealand. In the centre of her makeshift seating was a stage that was equally unique. She and sculptor Tom Taylor worked on the set design. The stage rose powerfully from the hall floor through three levels to a tower connected by a dramatic spiral staircase. The stage revolved, and the plan was to project the action upwards, to enhance the flow and speed of scene changes. It was a daring move, and one that captured the respect of critics and commentators.

Ngaio used the limitations of the space to enhance the play’s dramatic impact. She had actors coming onto the stage from between the seats, and crowd scenes that mixed riotously with the audience. Rather than togas, the costumes were Italian Fascist uniforms.
Julius Caesar
had the immediacy of her modern-dress
Hamlet,
for similar reasons. War shortages had affected the earlier production; now it was dearth caused by fire.

At the end of the production, like Caesar, perhaps Ngaio glimpsed her future from the top of the tower. She had not achieved the national theatre she had hoped might come out of the Commonwealth players, and now the hub of the
drama society had burnt down: ‘We were in the wilderness.’ What remained were her resources of experience and leadership, and these she would use. For the next 15 years Ngaio and her players were in a kind of exile. Rumblings about how the Great Hall was left after the scaffolding, stage and wiring were removed meant that they were never offered the space again. There was a regrouping. From now on, if the players produced avant-garde or contemporary theatre they found their own premises and sponsorship, and when Ngaio was in New Zealand she produced Shakespeare somewhere else.
Julius Caesar
was a turning point. It re-established her reputation as an innovator, it was a box-office success, and it rekindled her confidence and desire to see Shakespeare produced annually in Christchurch.

Ngaio moved quickly to complete her 17th novel before rehearsals began for
Julius Caesar. Spinsters in Jeopardy
was published in Boston in 1953, London in 1954, and as
The Bride of Death
in New York in 1955. After her theatre commitments were completed for the year, she began work on
Scales of Justice,
a novel commissioned by Collins to celebrate 25 years of its Crime Club label. Ngaio knew it needed to be good because of its significance. As she collected her thoughts, she contemplated the message of George Orwell’s now famous essay on the ‘Decline of the English Murder’, published in 1946. Orwell began his treatise with the image of a patriarch, full of Sunday roast, settled on his sofa, with a cup of ‘mahogany-brown’ tea, reading the
News of the World.
His wife dozes in an armchair near the fire, the children are out for a walk, and what does he choose to read about but murder. Orwell argued that the murders which made books sell, and were rehashed in Sunday newspapers, followed a domestic pattern and were inspired typically by middle-class motives—sex, money, jealousy—and, of course, gaining social position or protecting one’s position from scandal. These cases included the great poisoners like Dr Crippen, Dr William Palmer of Rugeley, Dr Thomas Neill Cream, and Mrs Florence Maybrick. These narratives were intriguing because the middle classes could relate to them and read about murder instead of committing it.