Black Beech and Honeydew

by Ngaio Marsh

  I advance this hypothetical picture for the consideration of any anti-Stratfordian theorists who may chance to read these reminiscences.

  I have already ventured to say that in a long association with student-players we contrived to establish as near a professional approach to our work as may be achieved by actors who have other commitments. This was made the more possible by long summer vacations and by the students’ readiness to give up recreational activities and devote themselves absolutely to the production in hand. They came more and more to be wholly committed. I hope I am not arrogant in thinking – in daring to think – that in this process they became less insular, more civilized, more intellectually adventurous and perhaps more responsible beings than they would have been if they had submitted themselves exclusively to the degree-factory process that unhappily pervades our universities.

  Directors’ approaches to the plays vary, of course, enormously. Tyrone Guthrie manipulated his actors, I suppose it might be said, like a puppet-master. He experimented. He improvised. He would think of a treatment for a scene, orchestrate his actors’ movements to bring out his reading, rehearse exhaustively and ruthlessly and scrap the whole thing if he decided it didn’t work. ‘No good. What a pity,’ he would say. ‘Never mind. Rise above.’ And away they’d all go on a new tack.

  Lewis Casson, on the contrary, prepared his elaborate production scripts beforehand. I have been told that he did this down to the last detail, marked the vocal inflections he was going to require of his actors as if in a music score and insisted on the strictest observance of them.

  There are directors who go into huddles with an actor and have inaudible, interminable discussions while the rest of the cast hang about on the sidelines. There are directors who sit immovably in the stalls and others who are on stage, in front-of-house, all over the theatre. Some like to illustrate and to give inflections and require the actor to echo them precisely. Others never do this. They talk about the character in question, however small his role, and invite the actor to decide how, in any given situation, such a person would feel and react. From what I have already written of my productions with student-players it will be seen that this was the manner in which we went to work.

  It was in crowd scenes of course, that the rank-and-file came into their own, most of all in Julius Caesar. For our modern dress production of this play in the Civic Theatre on a stage thrust out over the orchestra pit into the auditorium, we had a crowd of about sixty. They formed themselves into small groups of three, five and seven. Each group chose its own background – a working-class family of three generations, a cluster of students, members of a gang, down-and-outs, emotional women. I wrote sheets of cued dialogue for them, often using lines from other plays-Coriolanus, for instance, and the Histories. Some groups improvised their own dialogue. This was a hazardous undertaking and sometimes had to be checked. I remember a strongly New Zealand voice soaring above the crowd like a football fan’s tribute: ‘Look ut thet! Look ut thet! Hey! Watch it, mate.’ His zeal was admirable but, alas, it had to be modified.

  Julius Caesar might have been subtitled ‘The Mob’. In it Shakespeare demonstrates a sort of law of opposites – the bigger the crowd, the less responsible its individual members and their corporate reactions. When Mark Antony has finished with them the mob has the mass intelligence and amorality of a vicious six-year-old child. The director’s job is to orchestrate. The volume of sound the crowd produces must be perfectly controlled and synchronized with the orator’s speech. Overall there is one frightening crescendo that finally explodes into violence. Within this structure there are lesser climaxes for which Shakespeare gives occasional specific dialogue that must emerge above the groundswell. A woman gushes of Antony: ‘Poor soul, his eyes are red as fire with weeping.’ (Which they are not.) Her friends cluck with enjoyable concurrence. An aggressive male voice suddenly proclaims, ‘There’s not a nobler man in Rome than Antony,’ and this when two minutes ago they had all been cat-calling and booing him. The mob under Antony’s manipulation now becomes a single, idiot, menacing entity. To control, balance, order and shape this superb piece of dramatic writing is like conducting an orchestra and in the event I don’t know which was the more exhilarated, the company or I.

  And still, in all these productions, indeed throughout our association, I was obliged to take heroic short cuts. Techniques that a drama school covers in two years had to be injected in six weeks. The longer the casts the more arduous this process.

  As time went on, a core of experienced actors emerged and were a stimulating influence on the newcomers. I have spoken of the ones who went further afield and prospered. Among them, and most emphatically, is James Laurenson. He came to us as a first-year teachers’ college student and was cast for a small part in Antony and Cleopatra. (I telescoped a Messenger, Scarus and Dercetas for it.) It is difficult to find a place for an interval in this play. I took it after the Messenger’s shattering news for Antony. ‘The news is true, my lord…Caesar has taken Toryne.’ Its effect depended entirely upon the way this line was given and Antony’s reaction to it. As soon as I heard Jimmy’s voice I knew we were home and dry. Later, when he came to deliver to Caesar the sword with which Antony had killed himself and announced: ‘I am call’d Scarus-Dercetas,’ it was the same. The next role he played for us was Macbeth.

  In this same play, Antony and Cleopatra, there is a secondary part: Proculeius, a Roman soldier whom Antony told Cleopatra to trust. He was played by a newcomer from Westland who is still known as Proc to the old hands and is now the author of a number of impressive plays and a notable director of these and as many more: Proc, which is as much as to say Mervyn Thompson. In his autobiography, recently published, Proc indicates that I alarmed him beyond measure in this, our first encounter. I am glad I seem no longer to strike any chords of terror in his bosom.

  A university drama society is by its very nature ephemeral. At the end of each academic year it burns out and one can only hope it will rise from its ashes when the new year begins. For this reason our auditions were always open to experienced players who had graduated and were no longer students. With us the play really was ‘the thing’ and must be served above everything else by the best of available talent. For me, when my active association with these players came, as it must, to an end, it did so in the happiest imaginable way. Jonathan Elsom crops up quite often in these pages. He is now well enough established on the London stage to take the dreaded risk of ‘losing touch’ by too long an absence from it. A year or two after his great success as Chorus in Henry V he returned and brought with him a script he had put together for a one-man show called Sweet Mr Shakespeare. He asked me to direct him. The first half dealt with what material we have relating to Shakespeare, legendary, apocryphal or positive, from the wildly unauthentic John Aubrey to soberly exact Ben Jonson. Jonathan, by a series of slight but entirely adequate quick-changes, was in turn an Elizabethan man-in-the-street, Aubrey, a sea captain, a pedagogue, Francis Meres, Robert Greene with his acid ‘Shakescene’ and ‘upstart crow’, Sir John Wooton and sundry gossips and commentators. The second half consisted only of sonnets and the little dirge from Cymbeline.

  It was an elegant, accomplished and moving performance.

  And now Jonathan and James are in London. Proc is a dramatist and director and lectures in his subject at Auckland University. Elric directs The Court. Canterbury University has its own handsome theatre and the Drama Society, as ever, has its ups and downs. Unhappily I am unable to follow them at first hand because the only approach to the auditorium is by flights of stairs which are not within my compass nowadays. John Pocock, one of the student-players of our early days and now a celebrated and august historian, was co-author with Bruce Mason, our most distinguished playwright, of a book called Theatre in Danger. In it they wrote of the times with the Canterbury University Drama Society that I have tried to describe. They called them ‘the Golden Age’. For me, at any rate, they were all of that and that is how I shall alwa
ys think of them.

  II

  Since the days when I wrote the preceding chapters until now I have concocted eleven more Alleyn stories, sandwiching them between five Shakespeare productions and have made trips to England and to Italy, Copenhagen, Yugoslavia and Vigo and those groups of West Indian islands which I shall never cease to confuse – the three Bs: Bermudas, Bahamas and Barbados.

  The five weeks in Rome may be described as pampered. I was lucky enough to stay with the Alister McIntoshes at the Residence of the New Zealand Embassy where Alister was established as our first New Zealand Ambassador in Italy. The Residence has since been moved to a no doubt posher but certainly less enchanting site than that house in ‘old’ Rome.

  In a narrow side street off the exquisite Piazza Navona, it was reached by means of a lift and Primo, an eccentric porter who inspected all in-comers from some kind of invisible eyrie, where he could be heard indecipherably shouting. He admitted callers at once or, regardless of rank or distinction, caused them to wait, sometimes for an unconscionable time, in a rather dreary, dark little office. It was impossible to guess what line of reasoning prompted Primo to behave in this disconcerting manner. He roared a great deal and understood no English but he ‘went with’ the Residence and might not be discarded.

  He was the cause of extreme mortification to Marcello who was a sort of unofficial master-of-ceremonies-cum-controller of the household. But before invoking Marcello, who is unique, I must pause for a moment in this impressive interior. It was an apartment occupying a whole floor and a half of a very large building and was leased to our government by a rich American lady. The rooms were enormous and nobly proportioned. There were some huge, dark, dimly classical and vaguely belligerent pictures. The drawing room opened on to a roof garden from which one looked out upon an operatic backdrop of windows, walls and Roman streets that might have been ordered by Franco Zeffirelli. I arrived in spring and the air was alive with swallows. They darted across the vision so fast that a single bird looked like a flight of little arrows.

  When one left the Residence it was to walk into the noise of Rome, which is formidable: a conglomerate of excited voices, motor horns, church bells and millions of feet. Almost everywhere, it seemed, it was presided over by stone saints high up against a brilliant sky, making beneficent frozen gestures upon the teeming streets. I never tired of watching Romans in conversation. Two men, for instance, would greet each other soberly enough, sometimes gloomily: there would follow what might seem to be commiseration on the one hand and on the other tragic acceptance. Hands and eyes would be cast up. Shoulders would be clapped or stroked. Then, for no discernible reason, eyes would flash, teeth would be bared, voices would rise. Romantic profiles were advanced to within inches of each other. They were not yelling. A fight would seem to be imminent. ‘Well, come on, then,’ one would think, by this time oneself demoralized and, I’m afraid, longing for a scrap, ‘get on with it.’

  And then, without warning, these unpredictable gentlemen would burst into peals of laughter, shake hands extensively, clap each other on the back and part, refreshed, it was obvious, by their baffling encounter.

  Marcello, then. Marcello is a handsome, exquisitely mannered Roman, a chartered accountant, I believe, by profession and a motion picture creator who with a partner won the prize for a documentary at a film festival. Unhappily this success persuaded him to venture further with disastrous results. At the time when the New Zealand Embassy offices, which were some distance away from the Residence itself, were being set up, he had secured an extremely humble job in them. From this embarrassment, after confirmation of his story, he was rescued and promoted to chief driver for the Ambassador and thence to the indefinable but immensely important role in which he is now cast. Éminence grise one might be tempted to call Marcello except that there is no suggestion of high-flown, offstage manipulations or devious on-goings at any level, and not a hint of advancing himself above the role which he performs with such tact, adroitness and mastery.

  It is the role itself which is elusive and impossible to define. He is still head driver and he drives beautifully, although you may not quite fancy certain tendencies. For instance when, in the hurly-burly of the terrifying Roman street traffic, another driver tries to put one across him, Marcello removes both hands from the wheel, puts them together and raises them in ostentatious and sarcastic prayer as if to say ‘The Mother of God protect us from such as you.’ He is of course too grand to lean out of his window and scream abuse.

  When formal dinner parties were given Marcello was in the room throughout, presiding over the butler and footman who were engaged for these occasions and who did not seem to resent his presence. After a large reception when all the guests were gone, Marcello and Vera, his wife who assists offstage with the housework, would come in to say good night. Ceremonial, almost feudal, kisses were exchanged and compliments bestowed.

  When sightseeing trips were taken Marcello achieved wonders. At Paestum, a magical place of temples and ancient marvels in the south, beyond Amalfi, he required a closed museum to be opened for us and at Pompeii again caused those notorious rooms with extremely explicit frescoes to be unlocked for our slightly embarrassed inspection. At the exquisite Villa Giulia where visitors’ cameras are confiscated at the bureau, he excused himself for a moment and returned with the curator’s compliments and our cameras which, to the scarcely concealed and understandable anger of tourist groups, we were allowed to use. Nobody knew how Marcello achieved these miracles, but if it was by graceful bribery it was at his own expense. Probably it was by an appeal to snobbery.

  For, it must be confessed, Marcello is a great snob and was much gratified when visits were made to grand restaurants or smart shops. But he is also extremely thrifty and his gratification was tempered by considerations of expense. He admired the Ambassador and went completely but respectfully overboard for the Ambassador’s lady. On one occasion when he was driving her to her dentist, she remarked that she was not looking forward to her appointment.

  ‘If he hurt you I kill him,’ Marcello alarmingly remarked.

  Vitalia, the cook at the Embassy, was elderly, cunning and very, very devout. She did the marketing, but under the despotic supervision of Marcello to whom she had to account for every last centesimo that she spent. Every Friday evening if you passed the open door into the kitchen, there would be the wretched Vitalia seated with her account book at a table while Marcello with jabbing forefinger stood over her.

  While I was staying at the Embassy, Vitalia came into her own. It seemed that in her native village there had lived a holy person now defunct and undergoing the long-drawn-out process of being made a saint. Vitalia as one, possibly the only one, still alive, who could bear first-hand witness to the alleged miracles, was constantly required by the Devil’s advocate to do so. She gained enormous prestige by this circumstance and became unbearably smug: almost, one might have thought, as if she herself was in the running for beatitude. Marcello, maddened by her airs, teased her unmercifully, pretending he saw a halo coming and going over her head.

  He has a sense of fun. A political election was in progress and one of the high-ranking candidates was a pompous, excitable but tiny minister who paced about the bedroom all night in a state of tension. His wife, Marcello said, had remarked that she would be glad when the election was over as she was getting no sleep with him walking to and fro under their bed.

  Marcello speaks the sort of English that one had assumed to be made up by variety artistes impersonating Italians. When a pipe burst in the Embassy he really did say: ‘I getta da plum.’

  Perhaps I should have first tried to set down some of the wonders of Rome instead of remarking on the idiosyncracies of the staff at one of its smaller embassies. The truth is I have already tried to suggest them in a book that I wrote after leaving it. When in Rome is yet another detective novel but it is based on, and for the most part takes place at, a recognizable basilica – San Clemente in Via di S. Giovanni in Later
ano. I called it San Tommaso but that was the only difference.

  Doris McIntosh and I, driven and escorted as always by Marcello, first visited San Clemente one spring morning. To explore it is to walk downwards and again downwards through nineteen centuries into the age of Mithras. The present Basilica – one of the loveliest in Rome – is, as it were, the top layer of a superb historical cake. It was built over an early Christian church which was filled in with earth to support it but has now been excavated and restored by Irish Dominicans who have been in charge there since 1677 and began excavating in 1877. And still further down under this place of worship is a first-century insula or block of Roman flats. And there, in a grotto, at the far end of his sacrificial chamber and rising out of a bed of breast-like stones, stood the god who was born out of a stony matrix, a strange, smooth, plump figure, not child, not man, with a Phrygian cap on his long curls: Mithras. There he had stood, fixed and heavy, for nineteen hundred years and there we stood in his temple which was forbidden to all women.

  I knew at once that I wanted to write about him and when we got home began to read about his cult and what is known of the rites that were practised in his honour. It was easy to fill the triculum with the bellowing of a garlanded bull and the reek of blood on hot stone.

  We returned to San Clemente and on this second visit noticed how all the subterranean region where Mithras was fixed in his stones was filled with the sound of running water, because down there behind one of the walls runs an underground stream of pure water. It flows into the Cloaca Maxima about seven hundred yards away, close by the Colosseum.