Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime

by Joanne Drayton

  ‘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.

  I wasn’t very good at reading…I remember her saying ‘I didn’t want to give you the part.’ It was so frank and so sweet (I don’t know who else auditioned but they probably weren’t very good)…It wasn’t said with any animosity and we both laughed.

  Ngaio called the students by their nicknames, and Reay’s was Bubs. Well coached by Ngaio, she improved. ‘She would take every part…I’m five feet and she’s six feet [tall] and she played my part beautifully.’ A great respect developed between director and cast. ‘[Ngaio] was controlling…in a very charming sort of way…She got us doing things we never dreamed we could do.’ All the time she was directing her actors, Ngaio was thinking of how the audience would respond. She wanted them to experience Shakespeare as she had, so she made momentum and dramatic action paramount. ‘Othello strangling poor little Desdemona…well, it was murder,’ Barbara Webb remembers.

  As she was a [detective fiction] writer she had a great sense of drama and excitement…I think she produced these two tragedies like thrillers. Which were very watchable and very presentable. She really presented Shakespeare back to Christchurch…when I was throttled everyone used to scream.

  Ngaio had considered the possibility of staging both Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar, but she had such strong male leads in Paul Molineaux and Jack Henderson that it seemed a waste of their talent not to cast them in roles of equal complexity in Othello, with its central struggle between good and evil.

  Ngaio enjoyed working with young men. In Shakespeare’s plays, they had the most dramatic and complex roles, and it was this that attracted her as much as the people who played them. She spent hours in private sessions going over their lines. This ‘coterie of young men…became real friends of Ngaio’s. They used to go up and have suppers on Sunday nights.’ There was nothing overtly sexual in these relationships, but they contained a degree of flirtation. Ngaio was much older, and her infatuation was with the work and the challenge, but the titillation of being surrounded by good-looking men was undoubtedly a boost to her ego. It seems perhaps odd, then, that Ngaio dressed as she did. ‘She always wore trousers and usually a scarf and a three-quarter coat. She always looked mannish.
’ Although these were comfortable clothes that allowed her to move easily and stay warm on a draughty stage in the middle of winter, they were still a curious choice for a woman in the 1940s. As was her hallmark habit of chain-smoking cigarettes without flicking off the ash, so that students took bets on how long it would defy gravity and curl before it fell, usually down the front of her dark-coloured top.

  Douglas Lilburn was again invited to write the music, and Ngaio’s cousin Samuel Marsh Williams designed the set and costumes. Modern dress could not be repeated, so, at the height of rationing, wardrobe mistress Margaret Westmacott was charged with the responsibility of finding velvets, satins, lace and the fabric to make Tudor ruffs and cuffs. Ngaio and the drama society’s confidence had been bolstered after the previous year’s success. There was no need to make the play seem so contemporary. Othello would be the Elizabethan spectacle that Hamlet was not. They felt sure that the audience would make the leap and see its modern relevance, in spite of the antique dress.

  Before the curtain rose on a Venetian street, the audience could hear the cries of a gondolier over the strains of Lilburn’s opening music. The flavour of a foreign scene was set. ‘Just imagine you are a couple of old Venetians,’ Lilburn had told his musicians, who were to become ‘part of the drama’. A courtly pièce then heralded the arrival of the duke and senators. The scenes changed easily to ones of courtly splendour. ‘We had three acting levels,’ Ngaio explained, ‘with the stage arranged so that acting was continuous—one scene going on in one quarter of the stage while a new scene is set up—as quietly as possible—behind curtains on another part of the stage.’ In its own way, Othello was as experimental as the modern-dress Hamlet had been.

  Ngaio’s staging technique made the Little Theatre seem more spacious, and her costuming gave it a rich visual texture. Desdemona was a splash of sumptuous colour against a sepia-toned wartime audience. Her piece de résistance was a gown made of rose pink satin with a cloak of deep green velvet and a black headdress embroidered with pearls. She was breathtaking, and so was the performance. When the curtain came down on the first night, the audience clapped madly as they had a year before. According to a New Zealand Listener article, ‘seats for the whole season were sold out before it opened’. It seemed destined for success, but could it reach Hamlet’s benchmark of critical acclaim? Allen Curnow’s review in The Press was an enthusiastic endorsement. He thought Jack Henderson made a worthy Iago to Othello, but:

  the Moor himself, deserves the highest praise. Mr Molineaux was emotionally ‘possessed’ by the part…His clear capacity for actual suffering in the tragic role both startled his audience and really touched those nerves of experience which tragedy must touch if it is to be more than the name…Barbara Reay’s Desdemona was appealing, though her love for Othello might have been less romantic.

  Curnow also praised Lilburn’s music, which he thought distinctive, yet at the same time ‘submissive to the meaning of the play, and perfectly in place’.

  Othello was a coup, and once again ‘the whole town was a stir’, as Ngaio noted in an interview a few months later.

  I was walking through town one day and I went past a tailor’s shop. The tailor came dashing out with a piece of tweed over his arm when he saw me, and said he had taken his son five times, and could I possibly get him seats again…exactly the same thing happened with an electrician.

  What thrilled Ngaio most was that her play had been a democratic success, appealing to the ‘man in the street’ as well as to the literati. This, she believed, was Shakespeare’s intention—to communicate on all levels to all people—and she had achieved it. The models for her approach began with Allan Wilkie. His theatre was constantly on the move, so props and settings were kept to a minimum. His costumes, more easily transported, were lavish and considered. According to theatre commentator Paul McGuire, ‘he stepped up the tempo of speech and action and reduced the scene changes, to reach something like the pace of Elizabethan playing’. There was also the avant-garde Pirandello with his bleak stages, and Constantin Stanislavsky, whom Ngaio described as ‘the G.O.M. [Grand Old Man], as it were, of the Russian theatre’. From Stanislavsky, she took his method of ‘complete muscular relaxation and natural-looking movements’ and seamless scene changes. Nothing Ngaio did was entirely unique, but the combination was her own.

  Ngaio’s greatest achievement was her ability to pull together talent. She had that rare ability to see and realize potential in others. This was the skill of a ‘looker on’ who watched and assessed people just as she weighed up the strengths and weaknesses of her characters. She wanted to draw the best from her actors. As a result, when the Othello cast party died away and inebriated students climbed on their bicycles to weave their way home, there was a huge void.

  Ngaio saw the disbanding of this group as a loss. She had aspirations to create a national theatre company in New Zealand and she believed her student players might form a nucleus or at least the pattern for a professional theatre. Ngaio was already a member of a select group, which included cousin Sam Marsh Williams, George Swan and Arnold Goodwin, that was planning to tour professional actors in plays around the country. However, it was not this group but a pair of young students who kept the cast together and put Ngaio’s players on the road.

  In July 1944, Lyall Holmes and Colin Allan suggested that the university drama society tour Hamlet and Othello around New Zealand. The idea was enthusiastically embraced, but the cast failed in its first attempt to find a backer. Unannounced, a delegation of promoters led by John Farrell arrived at the Little Theatre, expecting to watch an impromptu taste of Hamlet and Othello to assess whether they would invest. Without make-up and costumes, the cast lurched nervously through their lines. Harold Bowden, general manager of theatrical company J.C. Williamson, was not convinced. It seemed the dream would founder. But Farrell, moved by the students’ disappointment, suggested they try Dan O’Connor, a theatrical manager and impresario in Auckland. In the end, Allan travelled all the way to Auckland to convince O’Connor to come down to Christchurch to see a matinée performance of Othello. O’Connor, a great lover of Shakespeare himself, agreed and was convinced.

  In early September, Ngaio confirmed publicly that a student tour was planned. ‘Some friends are coming to light with the necessary backing and ideas, and suggestions on the business side,’ she explained to an interviewer. ‘Of course there are all sorts of things that will have to be dovetailed in, and there will be transport and manpower difficulties, too, but you might see us tour, all the same, in the summer.’

  No one was naïve about problems of touring a wartime company of students, least of all Ngaio, but perhaps no one realized quite how difficult ‘difficult’ could be. Rehearsals began after end-of-year examinations, and one of the first obstacles was to free six of the young men from compulsory military training over the summer. Ngaio’s name, in association with that of Dan O’Connor—who had toured Yehudi Menuhin, the Vienna Boys’ Choir and pianist Wilhelm Backhaus—was enough to convince the military authorities, but the pair had less luck with the railways. There were restrictions on non-essential travel, and bookings were at a peak over the Christmas period. The railways were reluctant to move a cast of 32 (plus hangers-on), let alone the massive amount of gear that accompanied them. They were denied discount fares, but negotiations continued until it seemed transport to Dunedin, before Christmas, and Auckland and Wellington in the New Year, had been secured. The transition from the Little Theatre to the much larger His Majesty’s Theatre in Dunedin had to be carefully considered. Suddenly, action and scenery on a tiny stage had to convey the same intensity in a much bigger space, and such props as Desdemona’s bed had to be made to move.

  Their itinerary was in such flux that the programmes were printed in Dunedin, rather than, as usual, by the Caxton Press in Christchurch. When the company arrived in Dunedin there was the worrying issue of accommodation. The women were quickly billeted, but 15 of the men were homeless until a dilapidated
house in George Street called The Chookery was found and they crammed into it. It was a party powder-keg, and Ngaio knew it. She could only hope that the fuse would not be lit until after the final curtain. Wild rumours abounded about what went on in The Chookery, which became the company’s hub. Hamlet opened on 16 December 1944, and once the Star critic got over the fact that modern dress meant overcoats, felt hats, beer bottles, guns and uniforms, the reviews were good. The Otago Daily Times looked beyond individual performance to Ngaio’s creative direction: ‘Miss Marsh’s imagery is striking, and the play’s manners and action retained unspoiled…Those who do not feel the beauty and force of it can hardly be alive to artistry and imaginative direction.’

  Othello was equally well received. ‘Miss Barbara Reay as Desdemona achieved a perfect contrast to the turbulent Othello,’ wrote one commentator. While another, on a more negative note, identified:

  a propensity on the part of some of the actors to unduly raise their voices in the more passionate passages, and in two cases at least this ranting was rather a distressing note. But the performance as a whole was a vivid, colourful one and met with the enthusiastic approval of a fairly large audience.

  This accusation of ‘ranting’ was not new. Although newspaper response in Christchurch was almost unanimously positive, a student review in Canta magazine had been critical, especially of Jack Henderson, who was described as mannered and conceited. There was an air of tongue-in-cheek tease in these reviews and articles, but also an element of truth. At moments of climactic action, the acting could lose the contours of Shakespeare’s language and emotion and became an unrelenting tirade. Ngaio impressed on her actors that they needed to be larger than life on stage to communicate with an audience separated by their place in the mob and the shroud of darkness. Sometimes, however, this strategy was applied too literally and they overcompensated.