Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime

by Joanne Drayton

  With a group of fellow art-students, I sat in the front row of the gallery…since three o’clock, [we] had waited on an iron staircase in a cold wind for the early doors to open. The play was Hamlet, the house was full and the Dane was Allan Wilkie…What one would think now if one could re-visit that glimpse of the moon?

  She described Wilkie as ‘a bit larger than life’: ‘a bullet head, a large frame, a drooping cigarette and a voice of peculiar resonance…letting forth streams of a particularly inventive blasphemy’. She endorsed his story because it was ‘about the living theatre’ and the strength of a man’s vision to tour players across the world. Sadly, T.S. Eliot, who received the manuscript, turned it down and it was subsequently lost.

  Meeting Wilkie again must have been a poignant experience for Ngaio, who was working on preparations for the launch of her Commonwealth theatre company with Dan O’Connor. This was partly why she attended so many theatre productions. She was enjoying herself, assessing the state of post-war theatre in London, and looking for talented actors initially to tour Australia and New Zealand, with the possibility of more Commonwealth countries in the future. Allen Curnow explained the venture in a letter to John Schroder, who was the literary editor for The Press, a leading broadcaster and, according to Ngaio, ‘an accomplished letter writer’.

  She is talent-scouting & otherwise prospecting for her own & D. D. O’Connor’s big British Commonwealth theatre project—U. K. & Dominions, season & season about—which is to come into being some time next year. She is also busy on a new book, hoping to get it done before the curtain goes up. She talked me into delivering my play [The Axe] (reconstructed from the Christchurch prototype) up to Alex Clues in the West End if not exactly of it…the more I think of it the less I can imagine it on any other stage than the one it was written for.

  Ngaio greatly respected Curnow’s work, especially his Axe, the experimental play with a quasi-indigenous theme which he had staged in Christchurch, with John Pocock as producer, in 1948. That year, Ngaio was immersed in writing her book but still found time to help with the production. Pocock rode his bike from one side of Christchurch to the other to consult her over details of design and production. She thought Curnow’s clever concept could have been the beginning of more local playwriting and production, and was eager to encourage it. Her support of talented New Zealanders like Curnow meant that her London flat became a hub of expatriate activity. Her old art-school friend Evelyn Page, and her husband Frederick, who had composed Ngaio’s early theatre scores, were visitors, along with school friend Sylvia Fox, Biddy Lenihan and her fiancé John Knight, John Pocock and others.

  Ngaio delighted in their company: ‘Allen Curnow comes in quite often & is in terrific form,’ she told the Schroders. But not all theatrical projects received the same endorsement.

  D’Arcy Cresswell turned up with the final draft of his play in verse. It’s extremely good, but is an apologia for homosexuality [and] it’s destination will probably be a not too delicious private theatre. Pity in many ways. These things always cause one to end with the most churlish abruptness as I do now.

  Curnow wrote to Schroder about the same episode:

  It struck me as strange that this was a surprise to Ngaio; she had not read ‘ Present Without Leave’ where D’Arcy makes no secret of [his homosexuality]: in any case it is always a slight jolt when the internal & external evidences merge suddenly into proof. D’Arcy (I have this from Ngaio) is living in some hostel for Sailors, passing himself off as an able seaman & anxious to preserve this disguise. No comment on this, except that the country of the Queers, that of the non-Queers, & the no-man’s-land between, are very perceptible territories here, more than I would have supposed. It’s a temptation to speculate on the indefinable empire of the Queers.

  Ngaio knew that overt homosexual references were marginalizing. Her letter suggests she had more to say on the subject, but chose not to. She was liberal and accepting of homosexuality yet vigilant in her efforts to remain distanced from its taint. Her ambition was to move mainstream audiences with her writing and theatrical productions, and in 1950 this did not happen from the margins.

  Her own theatrical endeavours in London centred on manager Molly May’s Embassy Theatre in Swiss Cottage, which had staged the première of Agatha Christie’s first play. Black Coffee, 20 years earlier. The project that linked Ngaio to the Embassy was a dramatization of her Surfeit of Lampreys by semi-retired solicitor Owen Howell. Ngaio and Pamela Mann met Howell at his home to discuss the venture, and Ngaio gave it her backing. The play was to be directed by Daphane Rye and the setting designed by John Pemberton. Ngaio was not directly involved in script development, staging or production, which was probably detrimental to the overall result. The show opened on 24 October 1950 and closed on 5 November. It was not a success. The translation of a Ngaio Marsh novel into theatre required more skill and experience than Howell or the show’s director possessed, and this point was made in a Times review. The novel’s humour and visual and imaginative richness existed in language, and a literal translation of this into action on stage could be very static if it was not cleverly done. Ngaio felt that:

  Mr Howell’s play might well have succeeded but it did not do so, largely I think because the Lamprey flavour, present in his dialogue, was sadly missing in the production, which was much too heavy-going. The set was extremely lugubrious.

  It was not that a stage production of Surfeit of Lampreys or any of Ngaio’s other novels was impossible, but it required a great deal of interpretative talent, and probably the best person to do it was Ngaio herself, yet she resisted the temptation. She was too involved in the Commonwealth theatre project and her next novel to take up a challenge that may have offered her new opportunities.

  By 1950, two of the Queens of Crime were already heavily involved in writing for the theatre. Agatha Christie wrote Black Coffee in 1929 as a response to the disappointing portrayal of Hercule Poirot in Michael Morton’s 1928 Alibi, based on The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. The first season of Black Coffee, which opened at the Embassy in 1930, was less than two weeks long, but it reopened in April 1931 and moved between theatres, before closing in June. Christie described it as a ‘conventional spy thriller, and although full of cliché, was not, I think, at all bad’. The play was a modest success and she was encouraged to keep writing for the stage. In 1945, she produced Appointment with Death, based on her 1938 book of the same name; in 1946, Murder on the Nile, based on her 1937 Death on the Nile; and, in 1951, The Hollow, based on her 1946 book of the same name. A Daughter’s a Daughter, written in the 1930s and based on a book Christie had written under her historical romance writing pseudonym, Mary Westmacott, was not staged until 1952. Her most famous play was given life as a short radio drama in 1947 called Three Blind Mice. It was rewritten for stage and renamed The Mouse Trap, and its world première was at the Theatre Royal in Nottingham on 6 October 1952. In November, the play shifted to the West End and it has been there ever since. It is the longest first run of any play in the world.

  Christie’s theatrical achievements were as outstanding as those of her novels. In Dorothy Sayers’ case, the balance was less equal, but she was enamoured with the theatre. She began writing for the stage in 1935, when Busman’s Honeymoon was adapted for stage and opened in December 1936 at the Comedy Theatre in London. Much of her other theatrical writing was associated with the church. In 1937, she wrote The Zeal of Thy House for the Canterbury Festival based on William of Sens’s rebuilding of the cathedral’s choir in 1174. This was followed by the 1938 radio play. He That Should Come, about the birth of Christ; another Canterbury Festival play, The Devil to Pay, presented in 1939; and the comedy Love All, staged without commercial success in 1940 at the Torch Theatre in Knightsbridge. Her greatest and most controversial achievement was The Man Born To Be King, a radio drama about the life of Christ commissioned by the BBC and broadcast as a cycle of 12 plays four weeks apart: the first episode began in December 1941 and the last in October
1942. The project created a storm of protest. Atheists, agnostics and ardent Christians all had an opinion and the debates were heated. Sayers was unmoved in her determination to make the life of Christ real and immediate for a contemporary audience. After it had aired, the play cycle was deemed a great success by all but those at the extreme ends of the spectrum.

  In 1950 Val Gielgud, Sir John’s brother and the producer of The Man Born To Be King, but now director of the BBC, approached Ngaio to write a play script for a new autumn radio series. He believed she easily had the talent and experience to write an excellent piece. In his generous letter, he said he was a great admirer of her work. But Ngaio was already committed in many perhaps too diverse directions and the invitation fell on fallow ground. She was too busy with her Commonwealth theatre commitments to follow up an opportunity that could have given her a new creative direction.

  The work required with Molly May at the Embassy was familiar, and therefore less taxing—or so she thought. May had heard of Ngaio’s successful 1949 tour of Australia with Pirandello’s Six Characters and invited her to direct a season, beginning in late November and ending in December 1950. The Embassy was a club theatre that ran three-week seasons. There were to be just two intensive weeks of rehearsal before opening night. Ngaio wanted Biddy Lenihan to take the part of the Stepdaughter, and Lenihan was desperate to have it because, ironically, the picture Ngaio had painted of destitution in Opening Night was not far from her reality.

  New Zealand playwright Bruce Mason met Lenihan in London, and with other student player friends he:

  shared her huge disappointment over Ngaio’s production of Six Characters… We were all in it somewhere; Robert Stead as Stage Manager winkled New Zealanders into it wherever he could. But Molly May insisted on a ‘name’ for the Stepdaughter, and Yvonne Mitchell finally played the part. As a consolation, Bid was given second lead in a piece of flimsy-whimsy called Isle of Umbrellas, a long series of poor jokes about the English weather.

  Pamela Mann, who had finished course work at The Old Vic, was May’s personal assistant, but there was nothing for Lenihan. Five years later, Rodney Kennedy met her in London. ‘I shared the coldest winter of her life without work, her marriage to John Knight broken up. She was lost. The cold bitch theatre had no room for youth and beauty. I tried to persuade her to come back: the New Zealand Players needed her.’

  Ngaio was facing her own crisis, cut down by a devastating dose of ‘Asian influenza’ that left her with a ‘temperature of 102’. It was difficult at the best of times for an outsider to come in and lead a group of professional English players, but with ill health the task was daunting. Each day Ngaio woke up and wondered how she would get to the end of it. A friendly doctor kept her on her feet by prescribing ‘M and B’s at night and benzedrine by day’. Against the odds, she imposed her signature style of production on a recalcitrant English cast. She insisted on ‘pace, attack and understanding’, with good result. Reviews of the show were very pleasing. ‘Ngaio Marsh, author of 16 detective stories, last night produced her first play in England,’ wrote the critic for the Daily Mail on 22 November 1950. ‘Under her guidance Pirandello’s six characters came to life…Outstanding performances by Karl Stepanek and Yvonne Mitchell helped to realise an extremely difficult and fascinating entertainment.’ According to The Observer, ‘the piece turns strongly’, and the Evening Standard beseeched audiences to ‘to hie thee to the…Embassy’. The Times published rambling reservations, but about Pirandello’s play, not the production. This was the success Surfeit of Lampreys had failed to be. Ngaio, however, hardly lingered long enough to appreciate its impact before she left for Brighton, and a ‘wan recovery with Miss May’, who had contracted the same bug.

  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 financi
al 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.