Black Beech and Honeydew

by Ngaio Marsh

  In this room there is a lovely old Hungarian chest, large, with five carved, smooth-running drawers and each drawer full to extremity with the detritus of theatrical endeavour accumulated through half a century. There are photographs in albums, the gifts of, I hope, affectionate casts, quantities of loose photographs in no sort of order and piles of old programmes. Every time I drag open an over-stuffed drawer I think I will reduce its contents to some kind of order and every time I then think of something more urgent or nicer to do and shamefacedly force back the drawer with all its contents jamming and slithering about inside. Unlike Kipling’s Elephant’s Child I am not ‘a tidy pachyderm’. A popular song of the First World War was called ‘The Trail of the Lonesome Pine’. My mother used to sing it substituting ‘Untidy Daughter’ for the last two words.

  I have just finished a prolonged fossick in the Hungarian chest and have come up with programmes of the last three Shakespearean plays I directed. Two of them, Twelfth Night and Henry V, were special in that each was the opening production for a new playhouse: Twelfth Night for the Ngaio Marsh Theatre at the University of Canterbury and Henry V for the James Hay Theatre at the magnificent Town Hall complex in Christchurch.

  The touching kindness of the Canterbury University Drama Society in calling their long-wished-for theatre after me made its opening a very moving occasion. I have written earlier in this book of a production of Twelfth Night for the British Commonwealth Theatre Company when John Schlesinger played Feste, and of my own feelings about the play. They do not change but I was now to learn how the expression of them would do so with a different cast. Student-players, like wine, blossom in maturity, yet retain a certain freshness of approach and a kind of knowledgeable delight in what they are doing. The cast of the new Twelfth Night were almost all of this sort: experienced but still young, disciplined but still exuberant. In the event this brought about a broader emphasis on the buffo element, particularly in the comic duel. I don’t think I have ever before or since heard such laughter as this scene provoked.

  While the overall orchestration retained its original shape, in detail there were many changes arising out of the actors’ personalities. But Illyria was still Illyria, a country halfway between a laugh and a sigh, and at the end Feste still laid his lute on the stage, broke his rose over the strings and tiptoed off into the shadows.

  The Henry V production replaced one that was to have been directed by Sir Tyrone Guthrie who was then in Australia and came over to New Zealand for discussions. He was considering, I afterwards learned, somebody’s re-arrangement of the mediaeval mystery Everyman. I have written elsewhere of Tony Guthrie and so have many of the theatre people who had worked with him. To me, he had been very kind indeed. It was delightful to meet him again but only too evident that he was no longer the provocative, brilliant, explosive Tony we had all known and so greatly admired. He was ill and soon to die.

  And so, sadly, it came about that I was asked to direct whatever play I cared to choose for the opening of the James Hay Theatre. It was a formidable undertaking and at first I hesitated. But an irresistible bait was trailed before me. It was promised that we would have full use of the stage throughout the five weeks of rehearsal. After years of condemned premises, dirty, cold and balefully uninspiring, this was primrose news indeed. I fell for it.

  In the event, such are the devils who beset theatrical endeavour that it turned out to have no more substance than a dream. Owing to strikes, over-optimism, unrealistic appraisements and the non-arrival of electrical equipment, we did not set foot in the theatre until twenty-four hours before curtain-up on the opening night. This meant working continuously through day and night, in a litter of electrical equipment, scenery, hammering and an atmosphere of near-despair. The first dress rehearsal, endlessly interrupted, was also a mechanical and lighting rehearsal. The second, uninterrupted, finished three hours before the curtain rose on the first performance. I had been given a committed and devoted assistant, Helen Holmes, and without her I don’t think we would have made our deadline. On the night before we opened, she laboured right through. The workmen arrived in the morning to find her there and remarked that she was making an early start.

  Apart from being obliged to endure this nightmare, I had been given a completely free hand.

  Henry V was an appropriate choice for the occasion. Almost certainly it was Shakespeare’s play for the opening of the newly-built Globe Theatre. It had always seemed to me to be, in the first instance, a play about plays and playhouses. Like many another dramatist who was to follow him, Shakespeare was irked and frustrated by the theatre’s limitations and excited by its potential. So he created ‘Chorus’ to explode upon the opening scene with his ‘O, for a Muse of fire’, to lament and apologize and exult and light a flame in the hearts of his unruly audiences. Again and again he came before them at that opening performance, four centuries ago in The Globe, to woo, to beckon, to reach out over the physical and emotional gulf that every actor must bridge. It is in the thoughts of the audience, he insists, that the reality of a play is born and he uses the word over and over again. The theatre, he says is a ‘quick forge and working house’ of thought. The audience must perform their part, they must ‘work, work’ their thoughts. ‘Think,’ he urges, ‘when we talk of horses that you see them…’ ‘You must’, he says, ‘piece out our imperfections with your thoughts.’

  And of course it was Shakespeare who beckoned and roused up and implored. Behind the mask of ‘Chorus’ is the author himself making his age-old appeal: ‘Like us, meet us halfway. Please. Please.’

  To fulfil this role we brought out from London the young actor who, five years ago, had played Laertes for us in a production of Hamlet. Jonathan Elsom had won a bursary to a drama school in London and was now an experienced and successful actor.

  He was to arrive a fortnight before we opened. We wrote, of course, repeatedly and at great length about the role which in the meantime he was to prepare. At last, and how vividly I recall this, it fell out that one day I was writing, not for the first time, that Jonathan must always be aware that it was Shakespeare himself who was speaking. I suddenly thought: ‘But of course! Very well then! Let’s go the whole hog and make it so.’ I cabled him to get a Shakespeare wig made and finished the letter in the highest state of excitement.

  We managed to preserve our secret from the rest of the cast. It was not until that first nightmarish dress rehearsal when they were all collected on stage that they found their author had joined the company.

  The malign fates had one more kick in the pants reserved for us. On the opening night for fifteen agonizing minutes the curtain refused to budge. An electrical engineer arrived and at 8.15 it rose. And so, in that state of febrile, sick anticipation that crackles over backstages on first nights, we opened Henry V.

  It worked.

  The house lights dimmed. Bight trumpeters came out and sounded a fanfare. There was music. The curtain rose on an empty stage, clouds of mist, a luminous blue cyclorama and a solitary unmistakeable person who stood before it. As he came down to the forestage through the mist, the audience’s recognition of him ripened into the sound that is the accolade of all players, and when at the end of the first chorus he asked them ‘gently to hear, kindly to judge our play’ it broke out again and in the shadows offstage we said to each other: ‘We have a play.’

  It ran for a season that could not be extended, to full houses.

  ‘Thus far,’ says Chorus at the end of the play, ‘our bending author hath pursued the story.’ And thus far I may, I hope, be forgiven for adding, did this bending director pursue her attempts to stage ten of his plays. When the curtain fell on the last night of Henry V it did so on my final Shakespeare production.

  Theatrical endeavour is the most ephemeral of all the arts. When a season comes to an end it does so abruptly and completely and if, in whatever form and however explicitly or abstractly the cloudcapped towers and gorgeous palaces may have been suggested, they do indeed melt in
to air, into thin air. Canvas flats, stacked against a wall, a bare stage, a folded cyclorama and dust are all that is left of Illyria or the road to Dover, of Agincourt or Elsinore or the Blasted Heath. There will be some press notices. A few performances will survive for a time in actors’ shop-talk, fewer still in books about theatre. Such a book, at least in part, is this.

  What has been of lasting value in our student-players’ Shakespearean ventures over the past forty years? Perhaps, first of all, that they were still student-players and attracted young audiences who otherwise would not have experienced the plays in performance and were fascinated by what they saw. One remembers the boy who stood with his hands on the edge of the apron stage for nearly three hours to watch Hamlet, the illicit sitters on rafters, and on the top of the lighting box because there was nowhere else to sit, the ones who came round after the show to ask questions, argue, propound. Above all, I think, there were those players, some in every production, who, after a few rehearsals would come to me and say they had not known that the plays were like this. Having, of course, had the pants bored off them by some pedagogue at school. Anthony Quayle once said to me that he was firmly of the opinion that teaching Shakespeare should be forbidden in schools. Remembering our exceptional Miss Hughes, perhaps the dictum should be given an additional gloss, ‘except by a person of unusual ability’.

  Of all the countless books that have been written about these plays over the last century I sometimes think that Granville Barker’s Prefaces are the best. He was a playwright, a man of the professional theatre and also an academic. Knowing all about actors and the problems, limitations and liberties of playhouses, he wrote for the people who work in them. Because he was a scholar, and a man of sensitivity and perception, he wrote wisely of the texts. I returned again and again to his Prefaces.

  When one is rehearsing Shakespeare there sometimes occurs a little miracle of a peculiar sort. One comes to a celebrated difficult passage upon which academic pundits have lavished pages of notes, a certain amount of guesswork, and pot-shots ending perhaps with the very persuasive conclusion that the text is indecipherably corrupt. An example is the speech about the ‘dram of eale’ in the second battlement scene of Hamlet. With many – not all – of such passages the baffled actor who is to speak one of them after, as it were, retiring to the study and mugging over all the commentaries, comes out no wiser than when he went in. He despairs. At this point he will, if he is an old hand, remember that his author, when he put words together, was a supreme master of sound and that the pulse of his blank verse is tremendous, the pauses imperative and that, with him, music and meaning are incorporate.

  So the actor will experiment. He will repeat this devilish passage and for the time being pay no attention to sense but the sharpest and most devoted attention to sound. He will try and try again until shape, cadence, pauses and emphases sound right and while he sweats away at this exercise the door to interpretation has opened without him noticing and suddenly he knows without a doubt what he is talking about.

  It is well to remember the conditions under which these plays were written: to think of some spring morning at the Globe Theatre when the Lord Chamberlain’s Players were assembled under an open sky to re-rehearse a scene that went wrong at the last performance. Their manager, master and star-actor, Burbage, tells them the current show won’t run longer than two weeks. Perhaps he says to his bit-part actor-playwright, ‘See what you can do with this, Will,’ and throws him a dilapidated old script. Or perhaps he asks him if he’s got anything ready and if not, why not. And the bit-part actor goes away and writes King Lear in a fortnight.

  It is no wonder, indeed, that many of the texts are corrupt: the wonder is that there are not more mistakes, more muddles, that the author himself did not slap in more careless or stock audience-informative minor scenes, or that insoluble confusions of time sequences, such as that which occurs in Othello, did not spill over into other plays. In that ‘quick forge and working house’ of theatre Shakespeare was not, could not be, a meticulous writer. He wrote at speed for a demanding boss and avid audiences. And, being a genius, more often than not he wrote like one.

  In Romeo and Juliet he talks about ‘the two hours’ traffic of our stage’. Even allowing for poetic licence this is puzzling. Hamlet, played in its entirety, and without intervals, lasts about four and a half hours. Did the Elizabethan actor get up a terrific head of steam and execute his soliloquies at breathtaking speed? Did the dialogue rattle about the stage like bursts of rifle-fire? And were Shakespeare’s audiences much, much quicker on the uptake than our telly-saturated viewers? I believe they must have been.

  For a company embarking upon that journey with their playwright that all rehearsals call upon them to make, questions like these constantly arise. I believe that when their fellow traveller is William Shakespeare the actors themselves change a little on the journey. The more sensitive among them arrive enriched at their destination. If it is a happy company, a fine and lasting camaraderie is established. It delights me to record that this has been so with our student-players. We have explored together, striven together and, when fortune was on our side, succeeded together. I began by remarking upon the ephemeral nature of theatrical endeavour: this is the place to say that the bond that was established during our golden days endures.

  Nowadays there are four major professional theatre companies in New Zealand and from time to time they all present one of Shakespeare’s plays. Here in Christchurch, in the once-academic buildings that housed our original Little Theatre, is the Court Theatre with one of our earlier student-players, Elric Hooper, now a most experienced, widely travelled and gifted director, at the helm. From time to time English actors are imported for a season and are impressed by what they find. Our hope is that more of those student-players who made the hazardous decision, won a bursary to a London drama school and went professional, will return briefly, as Jonathan Elsom does, to give us a taste of their quality.

  At the end of nearly every season when the cast still breathed the heady air of success and commitment, one or two players would come to me, hell-bent on becoming full-time actors. In almost every case they met with little encouragement.

  The theatre is the most overcrowded profession in the world. In London when a new play is cast there are enough out-of-work, highly experienced and talented actors to fill each part over and over again. This may be one of the reasons why the standard of performance in the English theatre is so high; it is also a very good reason why any young enthusiast should ask him- (or her-) self how he would shape up in such a competitive field. And even if, after a long hard look at himself, he still believes he has a genuine potential, he must face this cruel reality: success often depends as much upon chance as upon ability. He must find himself an agent. He must be ready to endure exile in a wilderness where he waits, day after day in a bed-sitting room for the telephone to ring. And when, by some fluke, he is cast, it may well be in a small walk-on part that offers no artistic or financial potential but which, by this time, he is glad enough to accept.

  Remembering these bleak prospects, one would be less than honest if one did not put them before any starry-eyed hopeful who does not want to consider them. Over the last thirty years and throughout fifteen productions there have been one girl and four young men who I thought would never be happy unless at least they tried, and who seemed to me to be possessed of that unfair and wayward gift known to actors as ‘star quality’. Of the young men, one was unhappily lame. The other three have become well-known and well-established British professional actors and have prospered. The last, indeed, is now a star. And the girl? She was, I think, perhaps the most gifted of them all; largely an instinctive actress with a Godgiven sense of timing, a lovely voice and witchcraft in her ways. If all had gone well and she had lived, she must have shone very brightly indeed in that most precarious firmament.

  Someone once said, and justly was it said, that madmen flock to Shakespeare as flies to a honey pot. The indisput
able facts that are known about his life could be covered by three hundred words. Surmise and conjecture ranging from plausible speculation to stark, staring lunacy would, one is tempted to venture, fill as many tidy-sized volumes. Some years ago I used, at intervals, to receive from a gentleman in the Middle West of the United States of America, packets of diagrams purporting (I think) to illumine God-knew-what theory on the authorship of the plays and sonnets. They arrived together with pamphlets typed, cyclostyled, and in some instances printed on different-sized bits of paper. They were totally incomprehensible. In the margins exclamation marks, queries and arrows proliferated. Passages were scored under in scarlet ink and handwritten comments abounded: ‘How true!!!’ ‘Bosh!’ ‘See Titus Andronicus or Pericles??’ And in one instance a possibly triumphant ‘Ah-Ha!!’ The sender neglected to give an exact address so I was mercifully spared writing acknowledgements which may have been why these baffling documents stopped coming.

  Arguments as to the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays and the identity of Mr W. H., the subject of the publisher’s dedication to the sonnets, range from the respectable to the thoroughly dotty.

  There is one rebuttal to the anti-Stratford arguments that I have never seen advanced but which any actor would find irrefutable. Let us return for a moment to The Globe. The company is assembled. The new piece they are rehearsing is Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. In no time Shakespeare is being asked for explanations.

  ‘Dear boy, what do you mean by “the dram of eale doth all the noble substance of a doubt to his own scandal"? Could you just give me a line on it, dear boy?’

  Now. If somebody else wrote the play and if Shakespeare is in fact a Stratfordian semi-rustic clodhopper who has been told (by whom and why?) to pretend he wrote the play, how does he make out? He will be constantly badgered with such questions to which he hasn’t a notion of an answer and to which his only response can be an oafish guffaw. He would not last a morning’s rehearsal without being rumbled. And if anyone supposes that, Heaven knows why, the Lord Chamberlain’s players were required to keep under their hats a piece of gossip of such an intriguing kind as this, they have no knowledge of what actors are like when they take a drink or two together.