Black Beech and Honeydew

by Ngaio Marsh

  This is his moment of truth. Even though the role he plays is insignificant, the play worthless and the actor himself of no great account, this first crossing of a threshold from one reality to another will stand apart from anything else that he does.

  My introduction to the working half of a theatre was thus by way of an insipid little piece in a converted parish hall. Luckily I never thought of myself as, potentially, a dynamic actress. If I had cherished any such illusion my mother would very promptly have disabused me of it. It was the whole ambience of backstage that I found so immensely satisfying: the forming and growth of a play and its precipitation into its final shape. That wonderful phrase ‘the quick forge and working-house of thought’ was unknown to me then: I would have leapt at it as an exact expression of the living theatre.

  I don’t know when I first realized that I wanted to direct rather than to perform: at this early stage I was equally happy painting scenery, mustering props, prompting or going on for a speaking-part. I was at home.

  At school, also, there was dramatic endeavour. Antigone (in English), excerpts from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and, every year, a play in French composed and produced by M. Malequin. M. Malequin was an ardent monarchist and was rumoured to have been tutor to a scion of the Bourbons. His plays, mimeographed in purple from his own spidery hand, tended to reflect his opinions. One was about the Little Dauphin of the Terror, un-murdered and in durance. I was his gaoler – inevitably, since my voice and height always prompted M. Malequin to cast me for the ‘heavies’. I was very brutal and brought the Dauphin a meat pie. I think I had doctored it but that somehow or another a blameless pie had been substituted by a virtuous hand.

  ‘Eh bien!’ I rasped as the Dauphin attacked it. ‘Bon appetit!’

  Monsieur was, of course, anti-Bonapartist and in another piece I was a servile and sinister agent.

  ‘Excusez-moi, Madame la Duchesse, mais je suis ici envoyé de l’Empereur, mon maître.’

  There was nobody on the staff of St Margaret’s who had the slightest acquaintance with stage-production. My parents suffered these performances annually at the prize-giving and I cannot recall that either of them ever offered an opinion. In this they showed superhuman forbearance.

  There was a Lower School at St Margaret’s. After I became head prefect, I went there twice a week in the luncheon break to amuse the very small girls: I read to them and began to write and illustrate stories for their entertainment. Then I wrote a play and rehearsed it with them. This was a popular move and our effort, having been passed by Sister Winifred, was introduced into the prize-giving ceremonies at the end of the year. The play was called Bundles and the title is all I can remember about it. A New Zealand authoress of those days – Miss Colburn-Veale – saw it and wrote to my mother, offering to show it to her English publisher for an opinion. He wrote back very kindly and sent me a book: Tristie’s Quest by Dr Greville Macdonald, the son of George Macdonald whose stories my father, having delighted in them as a child, had tried in vain to get for me. Tristie’s Quest was a wonderful children’s novel and I wish very much that I had not lent it to the little girl who never returned it.

  Encouraged by these events, I now wrote a full-length piece based on one of George Macdonald’s fairy tales as related by my father. It was called The Moon Princess. There were long chunks of very torrid blank verse and a good deal of theeing and thouing. For songs, I wrote new verses to old music and got very worked up over the whole affair. When it was finished I showed it to my friends, the Burtons, and they bravely decided to produce it on quite an imposing scale at St Michael’s.

  ‘I hear, Ngaio,’ said Miss Hughes, shouting down the length of the luncheon table, ‘you have written a play.’ Her manner was friendly but I was seized with embarrassment and muttered churlishly at my plate: ‘Yes, Miss Hughes.’

  I would have done much better to show it to her and take what no doubt would have been a devastating opinion.

  In the event, it went quite well and drew good audiences. Perhaps, after all, it was not too bad since my mother agreed to play the witch. She made a splendidly frightening thing of the curse:

  ‘In the dark nights that follow the old moon – ‘

  Her big scene was with Helen Burton, the director and star of the production, and they both let fly with everything they had, lifting my dialogue into a distinction that it certainly did not possess. This feat, it occurs to me, illustrates in miniature one of the strange paradoxes of the Victorian, Edwardian and Georgian theatres. It can be seen at all levels from our remote New Zealand amateurism up to the great actor-managers. Irving’s most successful roles were in pieces that today reveal themselves as unbelievable fustian. These strange monsters of the theatre poured the charged stream of their personality and technique into dialogue which, by its very mediocrity, gave them the freedom which they needed. Irving was an intelligent man with a strong vein of irony but he seems to have been quite uncritical of his material except in so far as it provided him with a vehicle. Ellen Terry was different. ‘A twopenny-ha’penny play,’ she said of their enormously successful travesty on Faust. If there were adequate recordings or a film of Irving I wonder what we would think of them. Grotesque helpings of ham and corn? Or would some tingle of the electricity he generated in a theatre still make itself felt? Ellen Terry lived to a great age and people who remember her performance as the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet tell us that it was timeless in its perfection. But Irving?

  ‘I went to the Lyceum for Ellen Terry,’ my father said. ‘Irving’s mannerisms – ’ He thought for a moment. ‘All the same,’ he said, ‘there was something – ’ He gave a little chuckle. ‘Yes. There was something.’

  And he went on to relate how Irving as Mephistopheles, in a scene with Martha, the character-woman played as a tiresome old village body, had an aside to the audience.

  ‘I don’t know where she’ll go when she dies. I won’t have her,’ which always brought the house down. It is hardly enough to set us falling about in the aisles nowadays but my father insisted that Irving gave out the line in such a droll, unexpected manner that it always ‘went’ tremendously in the Lyceum.

  Irving’s mannerisms of course inspired every drawing-room entertainer of the day. In the Grossmiths’ Diary of a Nobody there is the egregious Burwin-Fosselton who, without being asked, insisted on giving his repertoire of Irving imitations after a meat-tea at the wretched Pooter’s house and to their dismay invited himself for the following evening to present the second half of his repertoire.

  As for Irving’s extraordinary vocal eccentricities: ‘gaw’ for go and ‘god’ for good, and all the rest of them, they were meat and drink for his mimics.

  It was while I was stemming the full tide of my devotional convictions that Irving’s son, H. B., visited New Zealand with an English company giving Hamlet, The Lyons Mail, Louis XIth and The Bells. This was an acid test, since the visit to Christchurch came in Lent and during those forty days and nights I had forsworn entertainment. The Burtons, very reasonably, decided that such an event, never to be repeated, might be granted an exemption. My parents were agog. Whether my decision was rooted in devotion, exhibitionism or sheer obstinacy I do not know but whatever the underlying motive, it was a difficult one to take and I can only hope I wasn’t insufferably smug about it. I listened avidly to their enraptured reports. My mother described in detail the ‘business’ of the play scene in Hamlet, the protracted death of Louis, the gasp of relief from the audience when he finally expired, the tap of Lesourque’s foot as the tumbrels rolled by. It seems probable that H. B. Irving suffered, in England, from inevitable comparison with his father. New Zealand audiences found him dynamic. I wish I had seen him.

  It was not very long after this visit, I think, that Ellen Terry, now in her old age, came on a recital tour. It was said that her memory, always an enemy, had grown so faulty that the performance was riddled with prompts that often had to be repeated. My father preferred to remember Beatrice running li
ke a lapwing close to the ground and my mother also felt that this might be a painful experience. So we missed Ellen Terry, and this was a mistake for she was so little troubled by her constant ‘dries’ that her audiences, also, were quite unembarrassed.

  ‘What?’ she would call out to her busy prompters: ‘What is it? Ah, yes!’ and would sail away again, sometimes on a ripple of laughter that my father used to say was never matched by any other actress.

  A friend of ours called Fred Reade Wauchop played Friar John and stage-managed in the Romeo and Juliet of her Indian summer. He used to call for Miss Terry at her dressing-room, carry her lanthorn for her and see her on for her entrance as the Nurse. The production was by her daughter, Edith Craig, and the star was an American actress very young and beautiful but not deeply acquainted with Shakespeare. Miss Craig thought it best to spare her mother the early rehearsals but when the play was beginning to take shape, asked her to come down to the theatre. Miss Terry had taken a great liking to Freddie Reade Wauchop and invited him to sit with them in the stalls.

  Juliet, alone, embarked upon the wonderful potion speech:

  Farewell. God knows when we shall meet again.

  I have a faint, cold fear thrills through my veins –

  It is a long speech. The star had enunciated but half a dozen lines when a scarcely audible moaning sound began in the stalls. Ellen Terry rocked to and fro and gripped her daughter’s hand.

  ‘O Edy! Edy! Tell her she mustn’t. Tell her she mustn’t.’

  In the event, it was the Nurse whom the audiences went to see in this production.

  Stories of these and the more remote days of the Victorian actor-managers turned my interest to the past rather than to the contemporary theatre and this inclination was encouraged by Gramp. After the final performance of The Moon Princess he gave me two parcels. One was a book called Actors of the Century. It began with Kean and ended with The Second Mrs Tanqueray and was nobly illustrated. Almost every page was enriched by marginal notes in Gramp’s handwriting. ‘My father recollected this performance.’ ‘I saw him as an old man.’ ‘Drank.’ ‘No good in comedy.’ ‘Mannered and puerile.’ ‘Drank himself to death.’ ‘Noble as Coriolanus.‘ The most exciting of these remarks appeared in the chapter on Edmund Kean. ‘Old Hoskins’ it read ‘gave me Kean’s coat.’

  The second parcel contained the coat. It was made of tawny-coloured plush-velvet and lined with brown silk that had worn to threadpaper and torn away from its handsewn stitching. Pieces of tarnished gold braid dangled from the collar and cuffs. It was tiny.

  ‘It’s very kind of Gramp,’ my mother said, ‘to give you Kean’s coat. You must take care of it.’

  I wish we had asked him to write down the story of its coming into his hands. As far as I have been able to piece it together from memory, conjecture and subsequent reading, it should run something like this. ‘Old Hoskins’, who as I remember them, appears frequently in Gramp’s marginal comments, was a family acquaintance. He was the son of a Devonshire squire and became an actor of merit, often playing with Samuel Phelps. When a stuttering West Country lad called John Brodribb first came to London, Mr Hoskins, having seen him in an amateur performance, very kindly gave him lessons in speechcraft and technique and a letter of introduction to an actor-manager. In 1853 when Hoskins sailed for Australasia, young Brodribb changed his name to Henry Irving and went on the stage.

  A few years later Mr Hoskins turned up in New Zealand and renewed his acquaintance with Gramp. It is in my mind that much of this was in the notes but they were so copious and diffuse and often so difficult to make out that I skipped a great many of them. Kean’s coat had been passed on to Mr Hoskins by somebody – Phelps? – and he gave it to my grandfather in gratitude for an obligation that he was unable to repay in any other way. It was an heirloom.

  About thirty years after Gramp gave me the coat, Sir Laurence Olivier played Richard III in Christchurch. There are few, a very few, actors of today in whom there is a particular quality that is not a sport of personality or even, however individual in character, exclusively their own. Rather, one feels, it is a sudden crystallization, a propitious flowering of an element that is constant in the history of the English theatre: it appeared in Alleyn, no doubt, and in Garrick, in Siddons and in Edmund Kean. When the door on the prompt side opened in a New Zealand theatre and Crookback came on with his face turned away from his audience, this witness to the thing itself, the truth about great acting, was at once evident. When the final curtain had been taken I said to myself: ‘He shall have Kean’s coat.’ And so he did. Gramp was a good judge of acting: he would certainly have approved.

  Vivien Leigh tried it on. She was small, slight and delicately shaped and it fitted her enchantingly.

  As for the book, I shall relate what happened to it at the appropriate time.

  One other of Gramp’s theatre stories sticks in my memory. When he was a very small boy he was taken with his father to call upon William Charles Macready in his dressing room. The production included a big crowd scene. Macready took the little boy by the hand and led him up to one of the bit-part actors who carried him onstage. All he could remember of this experience was being told by his father not to forget it. Stories about Macready abound, many of them authenticated by his own hectic diaries. Actors, perhaps obeying some kind of occupational chemistry, are frequently obstreperous but Macready takes, as we used to say, the buttered bun, for throwing ungovernable tantrums. I like best the stories that collected round his frightful rows in America. These culminated in a pitched battle with his audience during a performance of Macbeth. Articles of furniture were thrown about, armed troops were called in. People were shot. At the centre of this gigantic rumpus, Macready continued in his role but selected suitable lines (and there were many) to hurl in the teeth of one or another of his tormentors. One can see him advance to the footlights, squinting hideously at the audience and beside himself with rage, point a trembling finger at a jeering face and yell ‘The devil damn thee black thou cream-faced loon’. Speaking of buns, it is worth noting that his unfortunate manager in London was called Mr Bunn, a sort of Happy Family name that accorded ill with the insults Macready tended to throw at him.

  In his old age Gramp was both energetic and cantankerous. After Gram died he stayed with each of his daughters in rotation. He still took long walks over the hills and on his return would sit on the verandah apostrophizing the city on the plains with as much energy as if it had been Gomorrah itself. His hat was tilted over his astonishingly blue eyes, his pince-nez was perched halfway down his formidable nose, his head was thrown back and his very moustache sneered.

  ‘Generation of vipers!’ he would groan. ‘Sycophantic dolts! Perfidious beasts! Bah!’

  Nobody knew why he had taken up this attitude towards the city of his adoption. My mother said he merely enjoyed the sound of the phrases. Perhaps his elevated position reminded him of Mount Horeb and the mantle of the prophets fell across his shoulders or perhaps he was merely giving a final airing to his undoubtedly strong histrionic inclinations. At last he became very old and silent and it was not possible to guess at his thoughts or know if he listened to anything that was said to him. He died when he was over ninety years old and left behind him the trunk full of documents that I have already described and a great deal of material for the performance of conjuring tricks.

  IV

  ‘Lord Dismiss Us With Thy Blessing – ’ I had expected to be torn with emotion when, for the last time and well off-pitch, I joined in this valedictory hymn. It was annoying to find oneself relatively unmoved. Perhaps if it had been a rather more inspiring composition – ‘Jerusalem’, for instance, or ‘Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones’ – I might have risen to the occasion with a poignant throb or two but as it was, the final break-up passed off quite calmly and we faced the world with equanimity.

  It was a world on the brink of war and that seemed very odd to my schoolfellows and me. We had been taught by Miss Fleming, who took us in h
istory, to look upon war between civilized peoples as an anachronism. It could never happen again, Miss Fleming had crisply decided. The appalling potential of modern weapons of destruction was a safeguard: no nation, she assured us, not even Germany, would dare to invoke it. In that cosy belief we went forward with our plans for growing up. One of my best friends was to have a coming-out ball. There were endless consultations.

  In the meantime we went into the mountains for our fourth summer camp. I find I have caught up with the beginning of this book.

  CHAPTER 4

  Mountains

  Glentui is a bush-clad valley running up into the foothills of the Southern Alps between Burnt Hill and Mount Thomas. The little Glentui river churns down this valley, icy-cold and swift among its boulders. The summit of Mount Richardson from which it springs is called Blowhard and from here one looks across a wide hinterland, laced by the great Ashley river, to the main range. The Alps are the backbone of the South Island. When, in comparatively recent geological times, New Zealand was thrust up from the bed of the Pacific, this central spine must have monstrously emerged while the ocean divided and its waters streamed down the flanks of the heaving mountains and across the plains until they found their own level and the coastline was defined in a pother of foam. Ours is a young country. Everything you see in the South Island leads up to the mountains. They are the leitmotif of a landscape for full orchestra.

  Glentui is about thirty miles crow’s-flight from our hills. On winter mornings when the intervening plains are often blanketed in mist, it seems much closer and on a nor’ west evening in summer when a strange clarity, an intensity of colour, follows the sudden lapse of the wind, one can see in detail patches of bush and even isolated trees. So that we were, in a sense, familiar with Glentui long before we camped there in the first summer of my schooldays at St Margaret’s. We were a large party: two of the middle-aged Walker Boys – Colin and Cecil – Mivvy, the four Burtons, Aileen’s and Helen’s fiancés, who were called John and Kennedy, and Sylvia, another schoolfriend. To reach Glentui was an all-day business. We had to go roundabout: by train to Rangiora, a mid-plains town, and then by a meandering branch line to Oxford, where we lunched at a country pub. Here, in sweltering midsummer heat, we picked up two farm carts loaded with stores, tents, shooting equipment, and hay for our sleeping-sacks. Then came an eight-mile plod round the foothills and across the great bridge over the Ashley. The air, as clean as mountain water, smelt of sun-baked tussock and our load of hay. On hilly stretches we climbed down and walked to ease the horses. Tuis sang in the hills. Is the song of our native birds really as beautiful as we think? The tui, black-coated with a white jabot, has a deep voice and changes his tune with the seasons, often interrupting himself with a consequential clearing of his throat. Sometimes he sings the opening phrase of ‘Home to our Mountains’ and sometimes two liquid notes, a most melodious shake and a final question. I tried to suit words to his song: ‘Remote. Remote. Alone and fordone. Gone,’ but they didn’t really fit and I was left with that aftertaste of an acute pleasure that always resembles pain.