Black Beech and Honeydew

by Ngaio Marsh

  The final member of the company was also a child, engaged to play the newsboy and shout ‘Dunton Evening Echo’ in The Luck. He was placed under the care of the Scullys: B. Briggs, aged about twelve but born elderly. He wore an overcoat with a false astrakhan collar and had his own visiting cards: ‘Mr Bernard Briggs. Allan Wilkie Company.’ ‘That child will come to no good,’ Addie said darkly.

  This was the Company that assembled in the Theatre Royal on my first morning. They were kindly people but they threw me into a fever when they began to rehearse The Luck of the Navy. It was a run-through for words. They skidded and rattled over their lines, cut the long speeches or muttered them at breakneck speed, raising their voices suddenly as they came down to the cue. They sketched their gestures and walked through their moves like automata. When the first act was over I still had no idea of what the play was about.

  ‘Second Act beginners,’ called Pat Scully. This was it. ‘Beginner’ was indeed the mot juste for Anna, the Franco-Teutonic spy. For as long as I was on, they considerately played out but between my brief appearances, back they went to their gabbling. I waited by the door in a ferment until my entrance cue was suddenly thrown up and I was on again as if the devil was after me. At one point I had to scream offstage. It seemed an indecent act to do it all alone and unheralded.

  Mr Hewett shepherded me about. At one juncture Mr Wilkie came up. ‘Rather confusing,’ he said. ‘You’ll know more about it when you’ve seen it from the front.’ I hoped so.

  The play turned out to be a well-constructed thriller of the Bulldog Drummond genre and I am sorry that I cannot remember its author. It built to a meticulously engineered climax in the third act with Mr Wilkie (Lieut. Stanton) tied up in a chair by German spies. When the heavy lady (now a self-confessed Gauleiter-hausfrau) came on to taunt him, he convulsed the audience by remarking with the utmost sangfroid: ‘Ah! Here is mütter.’ It was somewhere about then that I screamed and an aeroplane (two motorcycles in the yard) took off. The dénouement was effected by Henri Doré (Midshipman Something) who entered through french windows asking jauntily: ‘Anyone aboard?’ and getting a round for it.

  It may seem strange that a dedicated, scholarly and distinguished Shakespearean, which Mr Wilkie undoubtedly is, should have lent himself and his company to these somewhat off-Shakespearean capers. It was not at all strange as I shall now try to show.

  Until his retirement, Allan Wilkie, like Sir Donald Wolfit, was one of the last in line of British actor-managers. Such men of the theatre stem directly from Burbage and his contemporaries: it is an unbroken sequence, merely going underground during the Protectorate. The actor-managers reached their highest point of affluence and display with Irving and his Edwardian successors. They were overwhelmed at last by show biz and the ‘prestige’ managements.

  Theirs was always a precarious calling and to follow it a man needed a good lacing of fanaticism in his make-up. This element was not lacking in Allan Wilkie. He was, and in his sunny retirement, still is, a dedicated, an unquenchable Shakespearean.

  Throughout the Far East, across Canada and for fifteen years in Australasia, on a multiplicity of stages and under every shade of theatrical environment, he mounted the battlements of Elsinore and Dunsinane, the Forests of Arden and Windsor, the wood near Athens, blasted heaths, palaces of Plantagenet and Old Nile, the road to Dover, the seaboards of Illyria and Prospero’s unnamed island. Sometimes the coffers were full and then Mr Wilkie bought new and exciting scenery and wardrobes and engaged highly salaried actors; sometimes they were all but empty and he would tour melodrama in the mining towns of Australia and our own West Coast. Sometimes, as now, when I joined the company, he would present a mixed bag of one box-office draw and three intelligent contemporary pieces while he gathered his forces for a new Shakespearean assault.

  He was known throughout the world of theatre for his scrupulous integrity and his fixed determination to play under no banner but his own. He had a kindly and generous regard for his actors and was an extremely strict disciplinarian. He called none of his company by their Christian names and it is impossible – it is even terrifying – to imagine him using the word ‘darling’ when directing an actress. His manner was punctilious and his flow of blasphemy when something went amiss during a performance, startling and inventive. On Macbeth nights he was unapproachable; a looming and a lowering menace crowned with a headdress made of coffin-plates. This morbid but enormously impressive item was conceived and carried out by a designer of conspicuous merit who also played bit parts with frenetic enthusiasm and finally went mad. ‘I could,’ said Mr Wilkie, ‘have better spared a saner man.’

  How, as they say nowadays in the theatre, was Mr Wilkie’s acting? I cannot write of it with detachment. It was in the grand, declamatory manner. My impression is that the Macbeth was terrific and the Bottom certainly the funniest I have ever seen. Between these extremes there were excellencies and, no doubt, lapses. ‘After all,’ as he himself once remarked with a Micawber-like roll in his voice – he is not unlike a more personable Micawber – ‘After all, I have played in thirty-four of the works. You can’t expect me to be good in all of them. Indeed, I think I may say I am the worst Mercutio to have trod the boards in living memory.’ He will, I know, forgive me for quoting him in this context. Later on he changed to Friar Lawrence. Advisedly.

  It is for himself that he is remembered in these antipodes and for his achievement in making the plays a series of living adventures for hordes of Australians and New Zealanders who, without his productions, would never have returned to Shakespeare after they left their schools and universities.

  Here I must recount an incident that seemed to reflect, however ambiguously, on a reaction to his presentation of the plays. In a town in Western Australia, after a performance of The Merchant of Venice, Mr and Mrs Wilkie were walking back to their hotel. It was a very warm night and the time being close on twelve, the shops and houses were dark and the street lamps not very explicit. Their way had taken them into a particularly dark passage, when out of nowhere something dropped with a thud at their feet. Mr Wilkie stopped, groped and picked up a small object which his fingers, rather than his eyes, suggested was a figurine.

  They arrived at their hotel and there discovered their find to be indeed the four-inch primitive head and shoulders of a bearded man wearing what might have been an Elizabethan ruff. The effigy had been pierced with a diagonal hole. All the edges and surfaces were greatly worn and eroded. But to the Wilkies there was no mistaking the personage; it was William Shakespeare. They asked themselves: was it a strangely presented tribute from some diffident admirer in an otherwise sleeping household or was it a cast-off from a disgusted patron who had stayed up in order to drop it on their heads?

  The company in due course came to New Zealand and the Wilkies couldn’t wait to show us their strange treasure-trove. At that time Professor MacMillan Brown was our great, if controversial, pundit on the plays of Shakespeare and also on the islands of the South Pacific which he had explored and written about profusely. He was an old acquaintance of our family and his daughter, Viola, and I were and still are close friends. So we took the Wilkies and their figurine to the Professor for a pronouncement.

  He held it on the palm of his hand and without a moment’s hesitation discoursed. The figurine, said the Sage, was of South American West Coast origin and had been hung from the prow of a canoe. The ruff was evidence of Spanish influence and the worn and eroded surface, of its antiquity.

  All of which was fascinating news but did not explain why someone dropped it from a dark window at midnight almost on Mr Allan Wilkie’s head.

  One feels that Mr Thor Heyerdahl, not yet so busy at that distant time, would have had something to say about the little man with the ruff and might have liked to pass a fibre cord through the diagonal hole and hung him from the prow of the Kon-Tiki.

  I have kept myself waiting in the wings for my initiation into the Wilkie Company. My only recollection is, in fact, o
f doing exactly this in an indescribable condition; of being wished well by Mrs Wilkie and the company and of finding Mr Wilkie standing beside me at the zero minute. ‘You’ll be all right,’ he said, and I can only hope that it was so.

  III

  During the next three weeks we rehearsed H. F. Maltby’s savage little post-war comedy: A Temporary Gentleman. In this piece, Mr Maltby takes a number of shrewd swipes at a particular form of snobbery afflicting demobilized lower-middle-class officers of the First War. On the way he also has a jaundiced look at the officer-private relationship. It is a play that is in tune with present-day attitudes and I should think might very well be revived.

  I was given the part of an ex-WAAF, now a maid in the demobilized officer’s house, who tells him a number of stinging home truths and ends by engaging his affection. I didn’t appear until the last act and my principal scene was with Mr Wilkie. It was a very rewarding little part: I learned a lot from it and even more from watching rehearsals. I learned how actors work in consort, like musicians, how they shape the dialogue in its phrases, build to points of climax, mark the pauses and observe the tempi. There was a passage in the first act that looked insignificant to the point of banality. It went something like this.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Hope.’

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Jack.’

  ‘Good morning, Mr Jack.’

  ‘Good morning, Miss Hope.’

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Good morning.’

  Mr Wilkie took it again and again, insisting on a specific cadence. It was wonderful to see how it took shape and suddenly became as satisfying as a Mozartian interchange of voices. I had seen my mother working like this at rehearsals but not with the knowledgeable support of everybody else on the stage. Thus, I discovered how actors must listen to the dramatic shape of sound. When, in after years, I became a producer and when, at last, the plays I directed were Shakespeare’s, I remembered, most clearly of all the lessons I had been given, this commonplace exchange of ‘Good mornings’ and how the final word had fallen so sweetly and justly into its appointed resolution.

  If I gave a tolerably good account of myself in this play, I made an astonishing hash of my role in The Rotters, a Maltby farce that was as acidulous as it was funny. Again it was a third act appearance but this time as a weather-beaten harridan of sixty. I lined my face like a gridiron, I padded, I shrieked, but all to no avail. The performance was a vain mockery and I knew it. Luckily it was confined to a single scene but the entrance was important and climactic and I hated making such a botch of it. But still I learned. I learned that the techniques for farce were unlike and in many ways more exacting than for those of comedy, that the timing of a laugh-line was a most delicate matter of finesse, that an actor could score better by alighting on a point than by clambering up to it. I saw that the open-handed action carrying The Luck of the Navy through its Boys’ Own Paper situations, needed an entirely different treatment from that of either of the Maltby plays. And when we came to rehearse Hindle Wakes for the newcomers in the company: here was a fourth and marked difference – that of the genre play with its dialect, for which Mr Wilkie was a stickler, and its harsh regional attitudes. I had a tiny bit – another maid – in this admirable and, at that time, daringly outspoken piece. In the course of playing it I made yet another discovery. A minimal, a half-minute scene with Mr Wilkie, the overbearing mill-owner, ended when he turned his back and dismissed me with a short ‘Good night’. After one or two performances it occurred to me to smile when I replied ‘Good night, sir’, and there was a murmur, like a reflection, from the house. One may learn much from bit parts in the theatre.

  ‘What did you do on your exit line?’

  ‘I – I think I smiled.’

  Mr Wilkie made the sound that is written ‘Humph’. After a hazardous pause he said: ‘Building your mighty role up, I suppose,’ and walked away.

  ‘Only I,’ he remarked on another occasion, ‘am at liberty to take six-foot strides on this stage.’

  I hobbled my legs above the knees with a stocking.

  I didn’t get off so lightly on the dreadful night when, the offstage area being cold, I wore an overcoat and left it across a chair while I was on. Mr Wilkie had a quick change into a dressing gown which was carefully laid out for him. During the blackout I heard a stream of shattering profanity. He had put on my overcoat.

  I apologized at the end of the show. By that time the edge of his fury had a little blunted. I think he said something about being trussed up like a sacrificial rooster.

  The Christchurch season came to its end. Our family friendship with the Wilkies had ripened. Mr Wilkie had been shown Kean’s coat and had made a cautious attempt to fit his arms in the sleeves which did not reach his elbows. He had also been shown Gramp’s book and asked to see it on each successive visit. On Sundays we had taken long walks on the hills, returning to our house for an improvised supper. Jack Castle-Morris had come to tea. The dates for the tour were posted up and I began rapturously to smother my luggage with the white and red labels of the Allan Wilkie Company.

  I had never been out of the South Island. At seven o’clock on a blustery evening I attended my first train call as an actress. We had our own carriage. To reach Lyttelton one passed through our Port Hills by the longest and smokiest tunnel in New Zealand.

  Our head mechanist arrived at the last minute, extremely drunk. He sat opposite me and turned out to be in the oncoming stage of his cups. Nothing could illustrate more precisely the difference between young persons of that generation and this than the circumstance of his being the first inebriate with whom I experienced a personal encounter and nothing could point more exactly the social attitudes of the actors in this old-fashioned company than the immediate intervention of two who happened to be at hand. A ‘young girl’ was placed between inverted commas in the theatre of those days. She was ‘sweet’ by definition and without irony, the word being used in its Elizabethan sense. I really don’t think she was any the smugger for this rather nauseating addition. The adjective was understood if not specifically attached and when, as now, the occasion arose, her status was protected. If she chose to relinquish her sweetness she moved, I imagine, into another category.

  I was much too excited to be more than momentarily perturbed by this incident. The train emerged from its tunnel into the port and there were ships riding at anchor with lights along their decks and mastheads moving against the stars. Cranes made wide, grandiloquent gestures, sailors leaned over taffrails and winches rattled. The train ran past a murky little station and then back down the wharves until we were alongside the night ferry to the North Island.

  To me she looked enormous. Her tiers of portholes glowed, there were cars on her afterdeck and white-coated stewards at the gangways. An offshore wind blew strongly in our faces as we went aboard and then was lost in the hot rubber-and-soup smell of the ship’s inside.

  I was to share a cabin with Vera St John and I had the top bunk. I left my suitcase and went up on deck. The port withdrew into itself and became a lonely arrangement of lights with an illuminated sign, ‘Lane’s Emulsion’, standing on the cliff-face above them. A lamp at the end of a mole slid past. The ship moved under my feet and the night wind was cold.

  Mr and Mrs Wilkie were taking a walk round the deck. They paused for a moment.

  ‘Singularly distasteful trip, this, I always think, don’t you?’ Mr Wilkie remarked with that roll in his voice that I associated with Mr Micawber.

  I looked at the black shapes of the Port Hills, the pinpoint lights of Lyttelton, the rough, cold sea and the harbour heads with Godley Lighthouse beaming across them.

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t mean to say this is your first trip?’

  ‘Yes. I can hardly believe it’s true.’

  I heard Mrs Wilkie’s warm laugh. They moved away. ‘Youth!’ the Micawber voice rolled out in a generalized comment. ‘My God! Youth!’

  I went belo
w and presently, in company with Miss Vera St John, was seasick.

  IV

  We came into Wellington at seven the next morning and late the same afternoon caught the Express to Auckland where we were to open in three days’ time.

  In this year the Prince of Wales visited New Zealand and our tour was arranged to follow hard in his wake before the enormous crowds had dispersed. The train journey to Auckland would take about fourteen hours and with or without a sleeper was, and still is, one of considerable discomfort and few amenities. I, however, persisted in my rapture. It was the first of many such occasions and I was to grow familiar with the look of my fellow players in transit: the ones who read, the ones who stared out of the window, the ones who slept, the cheerful, the morose and the resigned. Mr Wilkie and Pat Scully, their shoulders hunched and their heads nodding with the motion of the train, played endless games of two-handed whist. Mrs Wilkie read. Jack Castle-Morris told me stories of his experiences as an actor in Africa and as a soldier in the mud and carnage of Flanders. I had a sketchbook with me and made drawings of many of the company. The world outside darkened and night had fallen when we reached Palmerston North where the train waited for half an hour while we hurtled into an eating room and had plates of food slammed down in front of us. Dining cars had long since been abandoned by New Zealand Railways. Mr Wilkie was nowhere to be seen.

  Here, at Palmerston, our child-actor, B. Briggs, having alighted to refresh himself with pork pies entered the wrong train and was borne rapidly back to Wellington. This mischance did not call up any particular consternation in the company. Mrs Wilkie murmured that there were no doubt other infant phenomena in Auckland. Henri Doré stuck his head round the door of our compartment and shouted ‘Dunton Evening Echo’ in a falsetto voice. Addie Scully said: ‘Never stops eating: that’s the root of his trouble. He’ll turn up, don’t worry, if he has to charter a special.’ Remembering my own childish terrors I was alarmed for B. Briggs: unnecessarily as it turned out. He presented himself and his professional card at the Station Master’s Office in Wellington and was, by what precise means I have forgotten, speeded north again.