Black Beech and Honeydew

by Ngaio Marsh

  From then onwards our fortunes madly fluctuated. There were full houses in unlikely towns and half-empty ones where the auguries had seemed promising. People still tell me how excited they were by these plays. I know very well that Brigid Lenihan’s performances were of a startling brilliance and the concerted work and general standard of acting at a pretty high level. What really defeated us were the conditions under which we had to tour. These were, as I now see, comically disastrous.

  When, for instance, we arrived at a large theatre in a Southern city it was to find that the adjacent building was occupied by a Winter Fair and the theatre dock itself given over to a scenic railway, operated by machinery that might have been geared to the treadmills of Bedlam. It was patronized by revellers who screamed industriously throughout the evening. In two of the West Coast theatres the antediluvian red, white and blue proscenium lights had been broken, apparently by stoning, and there was not power enough to supply our own equipment. In Nelson we had a full house and twenty-five fuses during the performance. The switchboard became so hot that the electrician could not touch it without whimpering cries of anguish.

  We discovered, in secondary towns, once-pretty Victorian and Edwardian playhouses that had fallen into neglect and were filthy. In one of them there was no water for the enraged actors to wash in and a major row at once blew up, as well it might. I learned more about actors than had entered my wildest dreams when I was a player myself. One member of the company, who took umbrage rather easily, toured an enormous album of photographs and press notices eulogizing his past successes. I used to dread the appearence of this tome which would be produced by sleight-of-hand, as it seemed, when an insult had been suspected. The pages would be turned rapidly under my reluctant gaze and the more adulatory passages read aloud while a dramatic forefinger stabbed home the points. We also had our Job’s comforter who liked to count the empty seats through a hole in the curtain. ‘Plenty of the Wood family in front tonight,’ this player would exclaim in a sort of gloomy triumph, like a near relation of Cassandra.

  We stayed our six months’ course. The last performance was in Blenheim, where rats darted in and out of the dressing-rooms, and the rain, which was extremely heavy, found its way through the roof and dribbled dirtily down to the stage.

  I stood in the wings and watched and listened to Feste. There he was, alone in his pool of light, singing: ‘Heigh ho, the wind and the rain.’ He laid down his lute on the stage and broke over it the rose that Olivia had given him. The petals made a little ghost sound on the strings.

  But that’s all one, our play is done

  And we’ll strive to please you every day.

  The next morning I said goodbye to Bob and Mizzy and to the company. They were nearly all returning to England. I drove myself down the east coast of the South Island, through the ranges, and home.

  II

  During my long absence the English cousin and her husband with their two sons of whom I have already written, had taken care of my house so that I returned to my family. The boys had now left Christ’s College and were making up their minds what they were going to do. They were immensely companionable and I think I may say that a bond, already established, was greatly strengthened during the three years that followed my homecoming. Finally they decided, the elder for the British Army and the younger for the RAF. We saw each of them off at the old railway station and I began to think what fun it would be if we could all be reunited in London.

  I suppose the physical collapse that I had kicked offstage whenever it threatened to appear was bound to declare itself once my guard was down. It did so now and for some weeks I was more or less out of action. However, energy seeped back at last, and I began to write again.

  My friendships, I find, on looking back down those parallel lifelines, have for the most part been long-standing affairs, many of them beginning in childhood. Now, I was blessed with one of the richest and most rewarding of them all: a new friendship-of-three, so naturally and quickly formed and so firmly held that it is hard to believe it is only twelve years old. Fortified by this and by cheerful reunions with student-players I took heart-of-grace and we began to plan a new production which would go into rehearsal when my book was finished. There stood the Little Theatre, warm and ready for us.

  In the meantime, in 1953, the Royal Stratford-upon-Avon Company came to New Zealand starring Anthony Quayle, Leo McKern and Barbara Jefford. With the Sylvia of Glentui days for company, I took the car up to Wellington by ferry and drove some five hundred miles to Auckland for the opening night. I did this because I couldn’t wait for them to come to Christchurch and because Tony and Dot Quayle are friends whom it was delightful to meet again and because Bob was assistant business manager and Mizzy, his wife, was with him. It was a great reunion. And then-the plays! Othello, As You Like It and Henry IV, Part I. A wonderful season.

  While we were in the thick of it, I had a telegram saying that the Little Theatre had been completely destroyed by fire.

  It had happened in the early hours of the morning. Some of the old hands were rung up and told of it. When they arrived the stage, curtain, auditorium and loft were all ablaze, and firemen concerned only with saving the rest of the building.

  One of our players, dressed in pyjamas and mackintosh, ran up the stairs, plunged into the smoke and emerged with a smouldering bundle of papers – programmes and press notices for the most part. He would have gone back for more if he hadn’t been held back.

  It was a clean sweep; wardrobe, scenery, equipment, records, rafters that had been used during Hamlet as perches for an overflow of audience, odd little gallery, the apron, proscenium and loft – all gone. If it were true, as some people hold, that sound does not altogether die but leaves an echo of itself on walls and in the fabric of such places as our Little Theatre, what phrases, what jetting sounds went roaring up that night: Othello’s opulent agony, the ghost’s booming expostulations, wings in the rooky wood, Clytemnestra’s death cries, Puck’s laughter, the symmetrical bleating of Lady Wishfort and Faustus’s cry of ‘See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament.’ What a bonfire!

  New Zealand universities are under great pressure for space. More lecture rooms, more laboratories is the cry in our degree-factories, and it was quite clear that another little theatre was the last thing the authorities would think of building. We were in the wilderness.

  It is in situations of this sort that the student is altogether admirable. No theatre? Very well, then, no theatre. Where shall we play? By some mingling of bluff with sob stuff and of effrontery with special pleading, we talked our way into the Great Hall – a Dominion Gothic interior in which a minstrel’s gallery is not lacking. It is presided over by an enormous stained-glass window busy with New Zealand historical anecdotes and by portraits of distinguished alumni including Lord Rutherford of Nelson. Acoustically it is eccentric and unpredictable.

  In this setting we persuaded the army to erect a three-sided arena and down in the circus thus formed we built a system of rostra and steps with a revolving unit in the middle, presenting as its several aspects, a stairway leading up to a pulpit, an interior and a tower. In this setting I directed Julius Caesar in modern dress. Three of the old hands came back for the production.

  From that day until this, we have been a homeless society without a non-acting club membership and entirely dependent upon what we can earn. The students themselves produce plays, usually of the avant garde, in halls, common rooms and a theatre belonging to the local Repertory Society. Each year that I have been in New Zealand I have directed them in a Shakespeare play at the Christchurch Civic Theatre. This great barn is rather like a theatrical joke in bad taste. It was erected many years ago by a City Council profoundly convinced of its own expert’s understanding of theatrical architecture. The Civic is the fine flowering of their confidence. The walls external to the proscenium are treated with a plaster trellis behind which organ pipes lurk and upon the surface of which medallioned nymphs and faun
s musically caper. This motive is repeated as a frieze all round the auditorium. The circle is large and utterly remote from the stage. The general atmosphere is subfusc and far from intimate. There are, however, two portable aprons, the bigger of which extends over the front three rows of stalls and was designed to accommodate massed (and massive) choirs and augmented symphony orchestras. Christchurch is a musical city. This playhouse (how else to name it?) seats about 1100.

  By using one or both aprons we have been able to throw the action out towards the audience and bridge the gap, psychological and physical, that yawns between stage and auditorium. In this theatre during the winter term, we have presented King Lear, Henry IV, Part I, Henry V, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Macbeth and Julius Caesar. Over a season of eight to ten performances we can expect audiences of between six and ten thousand. We have rehearsed in a condemned boat-shed with holes in the exterior walls, an earthen floor, occasionally pocked with puddles, and no form of heating. Also in a dog-show at a fairground: premises that were gloomy beyond all thought, icily cold and made filthy by the introduction of a furnace that periodically belched out massive clouds of soot. We have used a sort of giant attic where the players on the higher rostra crashed their heads against rafters, a parish schoolroom and a disused brewery – now a storage loft for old rags. Our rehearsals always take place in midwinter and under circumstances of extreme discomfort. You may say this is a kind of lunacy.

  As for me, the time has come when, in the theatre as elsewhere it is appropriate, if one is so disposed, to look back, to ask oneself what one has chiefly desired to bring about, how far one has succeeded, and what conclusions, if any, may be drawn from the result.

  I think the elements of stage direction with which I have most concerned myself are those of structure and orchestration. One’s whole approach to a play can be governed by its architecture. The tone, style and impact of Othello reflect its form down to the last analysis of movement within movement, ascents to climaxes and their realization, pauses, passages of rest, phrase within phrase. It is of the first significance, I believe, that Iago’s Satanic self-dedication: ‘I am your own: for ever’ falls exactly at the centre of this play. The structure curves up to this keystone and descends inevitably and in absolute balance to the reverse end of the arch. The character of the writing from the classic sweep of such speeches as the ‘Pontic Sea’ to an accurately observed need for compensation and relief in Iago’s anti-heroic prose, the ease with which these transitions are achieved, and the whole anatomy of the play: these elements never obscure the pulse that beats so strongly throughout, but leave one, as director, to feel that a great wave is here and if you and your company can ride the crest you must come safely home.

  It has become clear to me that far from restricting the individual actor, a keen observance of structure, of tempi and of concerted phrasing, releases his potential ability and leaves him free to move boldly within the design both as soloist, as interpreter and as a member of a team. As for the audience: without knowing precisely why, it feels itself to be involved and carried forward with the players.

  The techniques of concerted acting are well understood by the professional actor: he is unhappy if he is not fed his cues in a way that gives him a good entry, if he is not responded to and sustained by his fellow players. He is sensitive to concerted phrasing, particularly in so far as it effects his performance. He will, however, sometimes resist these techniques and even destroy them if by doing so he can score a personal point. If he is a great actor with ‘star quality’ and the kind of dynamism that such players generate, we not only forgive him but, unless we are Brechtians, adore him for exciting us as he does. Let him break tempi and make nonsense of teamwork. He creates his own rules. The real struggle with the professional actor comes when he is not all that dynamic but technically pretty cunning and hell-bent on showing himself off.

  By the student-players I have been given, not only a quick and lively understanding of the values of teamwork but a positive greed for the acquisition of stage techniques. Of necessity much of their work proceeds by short cuts, is rough, is over stressed but they are intelligent and responsive and they are never dull. This is particularly evident in their crowd work. Here each group in a mob, after diligent dragooning, is usually prepared to make an approach that even methodists might applaud. I have lately done a second production of Julius Caesar for the Canterbury University players. The continuity-rehearsals on midwinter Sunday afternoons in our comfortless buildings, generated their own heat.

  Now, after ten years, the University is about to build another theatre. I have directed my last Shakespeare play in the Civic and perhaps my last for the Society. What I should like most of all would be to see a group of student and graduate producers carrying on the established tradition for vigorous, concerted acting, boldness, hard work, hard thinking and complete dedication.

  I shall not lose touch with those of the players whom I know most intimately. They come often to see me and there is the very best kind of bond between us – the attachment born of working together at a hazardous task for which we share a great devotion. Together we have made those discoveries of Shakespeare that come, I believe, only to people of the theatre: only by way of acting the plays out before an audience, only by going a journey with each one on the terms under which it was written. Such journeys we have taken together. The iron discipline of rehearsal, fortified by the attitude of the students themselves, is as close to that of the professional theatre as I have been able to keep it. In directing I have myself received direction. Most students are above the average in intelligence: they are extremely quick to take a point and their approach to character can be as penetrating as any method actor’s. Once they have learned the means of expression, how to make proper use of the player’s tools: his body, his voice and his inward dynamo, they can be very good Shakespearean actors.

  Some of the young men, having got their academic degrees, have elected to try their fortunes on the professional stage in England. Several of them have won bursaries to London schools of drama, others have gone naked into the jungle. I am thankful to say they have all prospered. They write often and when I am in London we meet and take great pleasure in doing so. I think myself most fortunate in the friendship of these students.

  III

  During this last decade I have made two more visits to England. The first was taken in a Norwegian freighter, the Temeraire, with a New Zealand friend, Essie, who had found out about the line and suggested that as I was thinking of going anyway I should keep her company. The Temeraire, sailing from Outer Harbour near Adelaide in South Australia, took twelve passengers. She would carry wool, possibly to Odessa, making several points of call on the way though her Captain’s orders, which were opened at sea, were quite likely to be changed. Ships of this line had been known to make an eight weeks’ voyage without calling anywhere and deposit their desperate passengers finally at Oslo. Under circumstances such as these, arrangements would be made to tranship us to an English port.

  It is a journey of nearly a week from New Zealand to Adelaide if you travel by surface. We arrived in sweltering heat twenty-four hours after the Queen had left and found the city still in a ferment with hotel accommodation at a premium. Here we awaited our embarkation notices and after about a week, received them.

  On a very hot night we stood in an otherwise deserted customs shed at Outer Harbour while an official hunted through his files for our papers. It was some time before he found them and we were able to board a graceful ship that looked remarkably small in the moonlight.

  As soon as we were shown our cabins I knew I would like the Temeraire. She was old-fashioned, odd and good. Her one bathroom was tanklike and primitive. The only passengers’ common room was a small smoking parlour with a bit of deck outside. There was a little games deck above this and a narrow promenade amidships. Otherwise one sat or lay on the hatches. The dining saloon was just big enough to take three long, narrow tables. The stewardesses were two
Norwegian college girls who were seeing the world and the steward was also a ladylike little thing. The wireless assistant doubled the parts of cabin boy and orchestra. Nothing could have been less like the organized fun of the luxury liners in which I had taken my last three voyages and no change could have been more refreshing.

  Our cabins were unsmart, spotlessly clean, rather large and very comfortable. We stowed away our belongings, setting ourselves in order for a long voyage. The steward looked in and invited us to coffee and little newly baked breads. They were delicious.

  On a very warm, still midnight we slipped away from Outer Harbour and when dawn came, stood well out in the Great Australian Bight.

  I had not intended to embark such readers as have been kind enough to bear me company, on yet another sea voyage but I find my recollections of the Temeraire so pleasant that I cannot resist taking a longer look at them.

  We were an oddly assorted company of passengers with little enough in common, one might have thought, but we got on extremely well together. Chief among us was a retired don, a Cambridge man, a classic: Professor S., late of Melbourne University. He was a delightful travelling companion and when we reached the Aegean Sea, spoke of each island as if its legend was an affair of yesterday. Mrs S., three other married couples, including Mr Thompson, the Dane, an excitable fellow, and his Australian wife, two unattached ladies, Essie and I, made up the full complement of passengers.

  The Captain was a man of sentiment. He was fair and rubicund and inclined, out of social embarrassment, to giggle. His English was tolerably fluent and he was very polite. He was also a good commander and, one could see, respected by his officers.