Black Beech and Honeydew

by Ngaio Marsh

  The applause continued.

  ‘What’s the matter with them?’ said the stage director. ‘Haven’t they got homes?’ At last it petered out. Hamlet sheepishly got up, grinned and said he couldn’t think why he was such a bloody fool. Somebody gave him a grease towel and he began to remove his make-up.

  ‘All right. Clear,’ said the stage director. He looked through the curtain to make sure the house had emptied and drew back quickly. At the same time the applause started again, rose like a hailstorm and persisted. They were still sitting out there, almost the whole lot of them. In the end we had to reset the lights and parade as many of the company as were presentable. I have not known this happen on any other occasion in the theatre.

  This tour was followed by a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in midwinter when for part of the rehearsal period the fairies tripped winsomely in unheated premises with one of our extremely rare falls of down-country snow lying thick outside. Then Henry V. Then Macbeth, first in Christchurch in a larger theatre and later again on tour, under Mr O’Connor’s banner. Precarious though its structure was and will always be, the student society had now established itself as a dramatic force in New Zealand.

  In the last year of his life when my father grew more dependent upon me, I did not direct a play for the society but held a short production course of one-night-a-week exercises. From these and out of the accumulated experience of three years, a group of student directors emerged. They did some excellent work. One of them, John Pocock, now a distinguished historian, directed a most beautiful and moving production of The Axe, a play by the New Zealand poet, Allen Curnow. A student director who had not been concerned in my production, tackled Venice Preserved and made an excellent job of it. Later, he worked for the BBC. Dr Faustus was produced and The Way of the World. A group of three tackled an act apiece of Sartre’s The Flies. There was a short season of one-acters. The standard throughout was lively and intelligent. The Little Theatre in those days was a quick forge and working house of thought.

  These developments delighted me. I saw our group of young directors going forward under its own steam, with the Little Theatre becoming at once a training centre and a house for experimental plays. New approaches would be made by actors of integrity. Perhaps, I thought, it will be from here, who knows, that a professional theatre will at last emerge in New Zealand or, if not that, amateur actors who, being fully aware of the problems, stresses and technical demands of the stage, are prepared to play dangerously.

  It was not long after my father’s death that Mr O’Connor brought the Old Vic to New Zealand with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. I have recorded already the impact of Richard III and the honourable destination of Kean’s coat. The student-players were, of course, much excited by this visit. They carried spears, they ushered, and as I and my fellow art students had done (long ago, now) they waited in queues, some of them all night, to get tickets. About three weeks before the company arrived we received a staggering request. Would we entertain them in the Little Theatre to a supper after the play and would we show them something of our work?

  Putting, as far as one could, all thoughts of Bully Bottom and his tedious brief chronicle right out of mind, and refusing to cast Sir Laurence for the role of Theseus, I set feverishly to work. There was a certain new and most promising glitter in our minuscule firmament, a female one this time, Brigid Lenihan, who as an exercise in my production course, had worked with Bernard Kearns, one of our best men-players, on the first act of my obsession: Six Characters in Search of an Author. We plumped for this, built up as strong a cast as we could raise at short notice and rehearsed as if the devil was after us.

  In the event, the performance was rough but not too bad and encouraging noises were made by our distinguished guests. This golden night in the Little Theatre was followed by a golden offer from Mr O’Connor. How would we like a tour of three Australian cities in January? Two plays would be called for. What about reviving Othello and completing Characters?

  It is tedious to elaborate success stories. I shall take no more than a glance or two at our Australian venture. Here we all are on the trans-Tasman steamer, much excited, greatly possessed of that sense of partnership inseparable from all well-augured enterprise in the theatre. We have runs-through for lines on the boat deck, we relearn about each other as travelling companions, we tingle with anticipation but maintain a cool and hardy demeanour.

  With rehearsals called at 10.30 every morning over the past six weeks, the company has become fully integrated, has developed, I think I may say, a responsible, dedicated and mature attitude to the work in hand. We are all very conscious of this and try not to look astonished when movie cameras move in on us as we land at Sydney and there are press conferences.

  The Australian press is, with several most honourable exceptions, opportunist, pseudo-American, curiously naïve and fairly impertinent. ‘Now, the great big smile’ they chant, aiming their cameras. Their picture pages champ with so many great big smiles, willingly or reluctantly induced, that one recalls with an involuntary shudder, the interior of some dental mechanic’s cabinet.

  Representatives of the press attended our rehearsals. They were amiable young men who said they would like to have some action pictures. Would I, they suggested, lie flat on my stomach on the stage with my elbows on the production script while members of the company, all with the great big smile, hung tenderly over me? Did I smoke? Yes, in those days I did, but was not, as it happened, smoking at that moment. Very well, would I light a cigarette? Just stick it in the mouth and let it dangle. I did murmur that it was not my practice to take rehearsals smoking from a prone position on a dirty stage but no attention was paid. Publicity is publicity, I reminded myself, and disregarding the covert grins and snide comments of my company, I lay down and lit a cigarette. The lights flashed. Next day the picture appeared with a bold caption. ‘Ngaio (Nio) Marsh, eccentric Maoriland novelist-producer. Lies on stage for rehearsals. Chain smoker.’

  Mr O’Connor told us that for the first three performances the audiences would be thinnish and after that he expected a rapid build to full houses. He was right in this but one thing that neither of us anticipated was that part of the Othello wardrobe, together with the new dinner suit of Bob, our business manager, and travellers’ cheques belonging to one of the actors should all be stolen from the theatre on the eve of our opening performance. It was never discovered who served us this scurvy trick although strange and fantastically improbable stories of professional resentment were brought to us.

  We would have found ourselves in a pretty pass if Miss Doris Fitton’s Independent Theatre had not come nobly to our rescue with handsome replacements.

  The press notices made us blink. The players were compared, and favourably, with the Old Vic. Ecstatic praise was lavished upon teamwork, voices, attack and, particularly upon Biddy Lenihan. One couldn’t believe one’s eyes. It really was, we agreed, trying to keep the sickly grins from creeping over our faces, a bit too thick. ‘You are not,’ I said to the cast, ‘anything like as good as all that,’ and they replied: ‘No, Mum’ which was a form of address they had adopted and which had already been nauseatingly exploited by a gossip columnist.

  Characters met with the same reception, or, indeed, rather more so. This had proved to be a good choice for student-players. Their intelligence, instinctive iconoclasm and command of pace were enormous assets. Sustained by buoyancy and lack of experience they actually welcomed rather than doubted the technical demands made by the play. It opens with a Commedia dell’arte gambit. Pirandello merely tells us that a company of actors is assembling for rehearsal and leaves the rest to the director. I wrote some five pages of dialogue as a framework upon which the players could improvise and between us we built a scene of preparation lasting about eight minutes up to the entry of the ‘Manager’ and the beginning of Act I as it is printed. It is a play that generates excitement. The theatre thrums and pulses with it – if this didn’t happen at the ou
tset the production would be a failure. It did happen, now. Every night I went out in front to get the feel of the house when those six black-clothed baleful persons were suddenly exposed and every night there was the same little miracle.

  We played Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. Before the end of the tour, Dan O’Connor made a new suggestion. He asked me if I would like to produce a company assembled in London from Commonwealth players and bring them out to Australia.

  I accepted this offer.

  CHAPTER 11

  Exercise Heartbreak and Recovery

  I returned to England in the summer of 1950. The Second War was over. Nearly thirteen years had gone by since I had seen the Lampreys. That is a long time. The children were all grown up and three of them had married. I did not at first recognize the tall blond young man who, with his elder brother, met us at Southampton. He was my godson.

  Pam, my student-player-secretary, was with me. We had travelled in comparative grandeur and with her assistance I had written a largish chunk of a book. She was to go through the Production Course at the Old Vic Drama School. Another great New Zealand friend, Bob, who had been business manager on the student-players Australian tour, was also at that admirable, and ever to be regretted, school. He and Elizabeth, his wife, and I had settled to share a flat in London while preliminary investigations were made for the projected tour of which he was to be the business manager and stage director. After an interlude in apartments owned by an intimidating prima donna and furnished in a style that fluctuated balefully between that of a superior fortune-teller’s parlour and an interior by Mauriac, we found an unfurnished flat in, of all streets, Beauchamp Place, and actually next door to the second premises rented by Charlot and me in our shopkeeping days. We furnished it mostly from junk picked up in or near the Fulham Road.

  This flat was over an enchanting clock shop. During the night I could hear minuscule chimes, single tinkling bells, a gong, musical-box confections and the punctual wheelhorse observations of a dependable grandfather. There was even a French clock that tootled a little silver trumpet. ‘There they go,’ I would think, ‘busy as bees all by themselves through the night.’ It was like the setting for a Victorian fairy tale-by Mrs Molesworth of course.

  I spent as much time as I could with Charlot. Our old quartette was now only a pair. Much of the past was to be unrolled, looked at and put gently away again. She was keeping house for the head of her family. I found the children were for me as they had always been, dearer than any others.

  The head of the family had taken a house at Eze on the heights above Monte Carlo: a converted Saracen stronghold, we were told, carved into the cliff-face. Charlot and I joined his house party there for a fortnight and then, since the alpine atmosphere did not agree with her, came down to our old hotel, and, for a few days, revived old goings-on.

  On the way back we stopped in Paris where I met my French agent, Marguerite Scieltiel. We breakfasted at her flat and then I signed a contract and was photographed in the act, and again in a raging gale, emerging incomprehensibly from police headquarters under the ironical scrutiny of the gendarme on guard.

  It is always a surprise when I leave my own country to find myself ‘known’ elsewhere: I feel like a Willy Loman whose vapourings have turned out to be factual. If I have any indigenous publicity value it is, I think, for work in the theatre rather than for detective fiction. Of course, whenever I return to New Zealand I am always asked to write articles saying what I think about it now and even, on exceptional occasions, what I think about William Shakespeare, but seldom what I think about crime stories. This is just as well as there is a limit to what can be written under that heading. Intellectual New Zealand friends tactfully avoid all mention of my published work and if they like me, do so, I cannot but feel, in spite of it.

  So it was astonishing, this time in England, to find myself broadcasting and being televised and interviewed and it was pleasant to find detective fiction being discussed as a tolerable form of reading by people whose opinion one valued. I suppose the one thing that can always be said in favour of the genre is that inside the convention the author may write with as good a style as he or she can command. As witness, for an instance, Michael Innes’s wonderful Lament for a Maker. The mechanics in a detective novel may be shamelessly contrived but the writing need not be so nor, with one exception, need the characterization. About the guilty person, of course, endless duplicity is practised.

  In the seventeenth century the ‘metaphysical’ poets fitted their verse into diamonds, hearts and triangles. The convention was a silly one but within their self-imposed limits they occasionally contrived some pretty conceits. To do as much in his own medium is the aim of many a crime writer of the orthodox sort.

  In London, my time was divided between prospecting for the new theatre company and finishing the current book: Opening Night. This was typed by another ex-student secretary who is assisting also in the preparation of this one.

  The idea behind the British Commonwealth Theatre Company was, as its title suggests, a synthesis of players from Great Britain and the several arms of the Commonwealth, as it was then constituted. We were to try ourselves out in Australia and New Zealand and, upon the results of this tour, decide whether to continue and extend the venture.

  In the meantime Bob and I poured over Spotlight, that vast vade mecum of the stage with its countless so-professional photographs: full-page and grandly taciturn for the stars, progressively smaller and more anxiously informative with the diminishing status of the entrants. We visited repertory theatres in many places, we interviewed actors and actresses from South Africa, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India. We became accustomed though never, I think, reconciled to the heartbreaking sales talk that must not seem to be what it is: an airy cover for a chronic occupational anxiety. We tried to come to terms with the strange unbalance between talent and demand in what is perhaps the most over-populated profession in the world. I suppose that, every time a new play is cast in Great Britain or America, there are at least thirty adequate, unemployed players available for each part. Any one of these will give a sound enough performance and yet how difficult it is to cast a play to one’s satisfaction. Harder still, as we gradually discovered, to form a company under the too exacting conditions we had set ourselves: a company in which each member should be a better than adequate representative of his country of origin, versatile, of satisfactory appearance, a good trouper, a reasonable being and prepared to leave Great Britain for at least six months.

  While Bob and I were still engaged in this daunting pursuit the Embassy Theatre at Hampstead, under Molly May’s management, decided to produce a comedy-thriller by Owen Howell based upon Surfeit of Lampreys. The Embassy was a club theatre running seasons of three weeks only. 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.

  Not long after this disappointment Molly May, having heard something of our Australian tour with Six Characters, asked me to produce the play for her own management. I was given an excellent cast with Yvonne Mitchell and Karel Stepenac in the leads. We had only a fortnight’s intensive rehearsal, at the beginning of which period I was struck down with a virulent attack of Asian influenza and a temperature of 102. A doctor, whose spouse was in the show, kept me on my feet with M and B’s at night and benzedrine by day. I used to wonder, each morning, how on earth I was going to see the next eight hours’ work through. I had changed much of the original production and I asked a great deal of my cast in the way of pace, attack and understanding. They responded nobly to what I cannot but think must have been strangely trance-like direction.

  The Hampstead audiences were largely Jewish and continental: warm and big. The whole experience was heartening. Not that I saw much of it. I watched the opening night in a curiously unreal, floating condition, having eaten nothing but one raw
egg a day for some considerable time. I then crawled to bed and later to Brighton and a wan recovery with Miss May for company. She, too, had been smitten by this beastly bug.

  This illness left me with a chronic legacy which has been a great bore and which added in no small degree to the difficulties of the year that followed.

  The Festival of Britain was in preparation. Miss May asked me to direct a season of English comedy at the Embassy throughout the summer. We were, however, to leave for Australia before the Festival opened so I had to say no.

  At about this time another and, to me, most beguiling project was considered by Dan O’Connor. At Woolwich there was a theatre that had received bomb damage and not been repaired. The idea was that, if it could be made usable, a Shakespeare season should be held there during the Festival of Britain. Audiences would be able to ‘take water to the play’ going downstream by barge from Westminster Pier. One sparkling spring morning Tyrone Guthrie (he was not yet knighted), his wife, Bob and I, all went down the river to inspect this theatre. It was the gayest of jaunts. Tony Guthrie was in the middle of producing The Barber of Seville in a lovely liquorice-all-sort kind of setting and he and Judy sang bits of it all the way. We picked up the keys of the theatre at a pub and let ourselves in. The damage was extensive. ‘No good, dear,’ said Tony Guthrie after one glance at it. ‘What a pity! Never mind.’ So it was us for the antipodes, after all.

  On an early March morning Bob, Mizzy, his wife, and I stood together on the deck of the steamer that carried us, with our company, to Australia. A light mist was already dissolving and the sun shone delicately over the Thames estuary. ‘It’s going to be a lovely spring day in London,’ we said.