Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime

by Joanne Drayton

  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 wai
ting 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.

  The matter would have rested in the family crypt along with Sir Henry, if anonymous letters suggesting that he had been murdered had not begun circulating. The final straw comes when the stiff body of white-saddled Carabbas the cat is found in the garden. The murderer has inadvertently killed twice. When Barker, the butler, had taken in Sir Henry’s morning tray, Carabbas had fled from the room. Barker thought Sir Henry had forgotten to let him out, and was surprised that the cat had not woken him. But it was too late to wake either Sir Henry or Carabbas, because both had been poisoned. Into this double homicide walks the unsuspecting Chief Detective Inspector Alleyn, for a touching reunion with his wife and an instant immersion in English murder. The novel makes constant references to the play Ngaio had just finished directing. There are mentions of a ‘little theatre’ and lines quoted from Macbeth. The play would continue to simmer in her novelist’s imagination.

  Final Curtain was well received in Britain and the United States. ‘Another of Ngaio’s delightful who-dun-its,’ announced the critic for The Sunday Times in April 1947. ‘[Sir Henry] and his curious family are such good company that you would be quite content to read about them without any murder-mystery at all.’ The New York Times identified exactly what Ngaio’s writing offered ‘whodunit maniacs’:

  Ahead of them lie certain assured items of perfection. There will be excellent craftsmanship applied to the everyday matter of crime detection. There will be civilized human beings making good conversation which relies on wit rather than gore. There will be full-bodied characterization and murder proceeding quite naturally out of some small frustration uncomfortably like one’s own pet neurosis.

  Only one newspaper hinted at a debate that had raged through the newspapers and had recently reached the misty shores of New Zealand: Golden Age detective fiction’s relevance in the post-war era. ‘What will happen to the detective story,’ asked the Daily Sketch, ‘now that so many country houses are being nationalised, and week-end parties, the detective’s happy hunting ground, may soon be a thing of the past? We shall be denied such a story as Final Curtain in which Miss Ngaio Marsh is at her best.’ Was there a place for stylized murder in a world that had experienced Auschwitz and the atom bomb?

  In September 1945, the New Zealand Listener printed sections of an article by critic Edmund Wilson, published in January in The New Yorker. His title, referring to Agatha Christie’s 1926 best-seller, was ‘Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?’ Wilson was vitriolic in his attack on Golden Age crime writers. His criticism of Sayers’ The Nine Tailors was bitter; Ngaio’s Overture to Death fared even worse:

  It would be impossible, I should think, for anyone with the faintest feeling for words to describe the unappetizing sawdust which Miss Marsh has poured into her pages as ‘excellent prose’ or as prose at all except in the sense that distinguishes prose from verse. And here again the book is mostly padding. There is the notion that you could commit a murder by rigging up a gun in a piano, so that the victim will shoot himself when he presses down the pedal, but this is embedded in the dialogue and doings of a lot of faked-up English country people who are even more tedious than those of The Nine Tailors.

  He found Margery Allingham’s Flowers for the Judge wooden and unreadable. The characters were flat and stock, and the circumstances of the murders unconvincing. ‘How can you probe the possibilities of guilt among characters who all seem alike because they are all simply names on the page?’ he asked. Wilson’s aggravation continued unabated until he reached the conclusion that the readers were addicts and the ‘reading of detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks between crossword puzzles and smoking’.

  Ngaio found it disturbing to be pilloried. There were heated rebuttals overseas as well as at home. The New Zealand Listener published a defence of detective fiction. The author accepted some of Wilson’s more moderate claims, but disagreed adamantly with his comments about Sayers’ The Nine Tailors, and was enthusiastic about Ngaio’s New Zealand novels. ‘The local colour in these books is excellent. I am much less interested in the mystery of Died in the Wool than in the character-drawing and the fine pictures of McKenzie Country landscape.’ Ngaio wrote book reviews for the Listener and letters to the editor on pronunciation and the Kiwi accent, but was not drawn into the whodunit debate until October 1947, when she was invited to comment on the question: ‘Is the Detective Story Dying?’ ‘I think that the character of the detective novel is changing,’ she responded,

  and changing very markedly. Many readers who, ten years ago, devoured the purely two-dimensional piece, depending entirely upon its interest as a puzzle, now demand from their detective novels a very much more solid affair. They want three-dimensional characters, and psychol
ogical as well as intellectual problems…the entirely mechanical detective novel is yielding to the longer, more elaborate and less conventional plot.

  For her own sake, Ngaio hoped the decline would be gradual and ‘that the thing itself may merge almost imperceptibly into a changed form’.

  The revenue from the sales of Ngaio’s books was essential to keep her life going. Often over the past few years she had dug deep into her own pockets to assist the drama society, contributing to wardrobe costs and financing anything from post-production parties to the construction of purpose-built wooden property boxes. Much of her discretionary income went into the theatre. Her professional career as a writer subsidized her vocation as a director, but there were also everyday costs that were demanding. Her father’s health was rapidly failing. The Crawfords were there to help him when Ngaio was away, but his care was getting too much even for them. Henry had been active all his life and a sedentary deteriorating existence was more than he could abide. Ngaio could see his death coming and, with it, the end of an irreplaceable connection to her past. He was the surviving parent of an intense adult-and-only-child union, a last connection to her childhood and to her mother.

  In March 1948, Ngaio sat Henry down in the garden at Marton Cottage, with the vista before him of the city that he had watched grow. She propped a folio of foolscap paper on his knee and urged him to record his life, for her and for posterity. It was a struggle for him to hold the pen. His mind wandered along the corridors of distant memories. He remembered stories of his father and the clipper ships that brought tea from the New World to the Old. This was a time of wealth for his family, then decline, and the untimely death of his father at 51 years of age. Henry was at school at Dulwich College with his brother Edward when the news came. Dulwich had been chosen specially, because it was a public school with a good reputation but without the huge fees of Eton or Harrow. P.G. Wodehouse described his years at Dulwich as ‘six years of unbroken bliss’; Raymond Chandler had also been a pupil. It was a good school, but the Marsh boys had to leave, because there was no money to keep them there. Knocked off-course, Henry tried banking, but became ill with pleurisy.