by Ngaio Marsh
I was rewarded from time to time with pieces of this sort. Whenever I accepted such an engagement I would suggest a Shakespeare play and as often as I did so was met by little plaintive cries of refusal. I even offered to do them for nothing but the reaction, though wistful, was the same. People still talked about Allan Wilkie and about a tour of Macbeth with Dame Sybil Thorndike and Sir Lewis Casson, but they said things were different now: nobody wanted Shakespeare. A generation had grown up since then and another was on its way and none of them had ever seen Shakespeare. I could well believe that most of them had learned quietly to hate him since there are not many teachers of English literature like our Miss Hughes.
One day, in the third year of the war, two young men came to see me. They were undergraduates of the University of Canterbury, as it now is. Then, it was a college of the University of New Zealand. Their Drama Society, they said, had fallen into the doldrums. They had no money, no membership and no actors and they asked me to produce Outward Bound for the hell of it. I said I would.
With members of the cast liable to disappear overnight into the armed forces, we had a stiff time of it rehearsing this piece. Dear James came in to stop a particularly large gap and somehow or another the play was mounted. It was the first time I had worked with students and I found them extraordinarily congenial. They were arrogant, opinionated, sometimes mannerless and not always dependable: they were, in fact, New Zealand undergraduates – a turbulent lot. Of course, they were entirely uninformed about theatre techniques: no material could have been more raw or less perturbed by its own condition. Having no settled faults or mannerisms to correct, they started from zero and being extremely intelligent were soon passionately concerned with dramatic principles. Their gluttonous appetite for work and responsiveness under a hard drive were a constant amazement and their loyalty, once a relationship had been established, heartening above words. Their little theatre quivered with vitality.
It struck me, about halfway through rehearsals, that for all the appalling gaucheries, there were dynamic elements here that were not being exploded by the effective but slightly dated piece of whimsy they had chosen as their play. This production was followed by others very well directed by the professor of classics which I watched with great interest. When, the following year, the students again asked me to work with them I said I would if the play was Hamlet. They at once agreed.
I find it hard to write without extremism of the sense of release and fulfilment that suffused the time that followed. The only comparable experience, it occurs to me, is that moment with which I began this book, a moment of pure and recognized happiness when I embraced a honeyed tree.
That is not to say that all went smoothly with Hamlet. Not at all. There were nights, during the early rehearsals, when I thought: we must never, never ask an audience to sit through this mutilation.
Nowadays I wonder at my own temerity. How did I dare? With a totally inexperienced cast, ignorant not only of Shakespearean acting but of acting, full stop. Uninstructed in the simplest of stage techniques; enormous creatures some of them were, who would stand in front of each other, crowd into straight lines, teeter, speak out of the corners of their mouths and leave great gaps between speech and speech while they shifted weight from one foot to another.
As rehearsals went on, by the way, I discovered that rugby analogies could be very helpful and I used one of them, I am told, with merciless frequency. In trying to give these large, ardent creatures a sense of orchestration, to persuade them that Shakespearean dialogue is not a series of disconnected speeches but a matter of concerted passages, I used to tell them to imagine that they must build such passages up to their point of climax like halfbacks executing a passing rush towards the goal. There must be no meaningless pauses between speech and speech. If they occur the ball is dropped, the movement loses its impetus and the play comes to grief. No. The dialogue must pass cleanly from player to player with mounting tension until, at the moment of climax, it is clapped down between the goalposts.
By such images did the cast begin to think constructively of teamwork, of the play as a whole, and, within this structure, to develop their individual roles with the aptitude I’ve already described.
Actually the footballers often got off to a better start than the ‘intellectuals’. Some of these were enjoying a difficult adolescence, suffered from acne and Freudian elaborations and were gloomily inclined to sit about staring at one and to raise foolish observations in order to show how different they were. But after a time, and with any luck, they too would begin to accept the enormous challenge of a Shakespeare play and their own real importance, if only as spear-carriers, in doing so.
Apart from the basic fault of the unpregnant pause the students had no notion of the importance of phrasing, of concerted playing, of realizing the text in terms of movement or of thinking about it as a whole with a certain shape which must be broken down into movements within movements, minor points of climax among major ones, passages of mounting anticipation, of suspension and of rest. It was the old business of rhythm and form. I heard the Wilkie company twenty years ago, rehearsing on an autumn morning:
‘Good morning, Mrs Hope.’
‘Good morning, Mrs Jack.’
And now:
‘Who’s there?’
‘Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.’
Is there anything to equal the moment when the thing happens: when suddenly there is ice in the air and the voices are lonely and apprehensive, when the superb pulse begins to thump and there we are on the battlements at Elsinore?
We played it in modern dress. I wanted, first of all, to get rid of Eng. Lit. and say to the players themselves and then to whatever audiences we might win: ‘This is an immediate affair, it happens now and all the time. The predicament is ours.’ There was a terrible shortage of all kinds of fabrics at that stage of the war and what material there was, was strictly rationed. We could not in any case have raised the wherewithal to dress this play in elderly Peter Pan or any other of the ‘costume’ conventions. As it was, I recollect, the King’s dress tunic was made from baby’s nappy cloth. His military aides-de-camp were dressed in such items of my father’s and other volunteer officers’ regimentals as had escaped the moth. The result was regrettably Ruritanian but the best that could be achieved.
Hamlet was played by an Englishman, nineteen years old when rehearsals began, who was completing his education in New Zealand. He was lame and of shortish stature with a resonant voice and a look in his face that theatre people recognize as that of an actor and call ‘star quality’. His performance, by any standard, was remarkable. If it had not been for his physical disability he would, I am sure, have become an actor of great distinction. The Laertes, now a judge, was then a law student. He, too, had a voice of beauty and a sensitive and searching approach to his part. I was fortunate in these two young players.
We rehearsed for eight weeks and very intensively. At first I tried to mix hospital-bus-driving with Hamlet but was finally given leave of absence on cultural grounds.
Nothing binds human beings together more quickly than theatrical endeavour provided all is well in the company and the feeling of emergence and growth persists. These rehearsals were blessed with that feeling. The company, or so I like to believe, was visited by a sense of discovery and involvement and perhaps with something of the same exhilaration that rewards the successful learner on skis. They said, and they could have said nothing else that would have pleased me half so well, that the play was coming alive in their mouths, that it was ‘real’. They willingly subjected themselves to an intensive cramming in basic techniques and to perpetual correction and an iron discipline. It seemed to me that, within the time allowed us, my best bet was to tell them as plainly as possible what I felt about the play, discuss this with them, listen, but not interminably, to any argument that seemed to be valid and then set the thing up in terms of concerted work, controlled and well-marked tempi and vivid movement. Upon that ba
sis, I hoped, an honest and ‘theatrely’ realization of character could be built and the truth about the play in some measure discovered and conveyed.
From the toughest rugby player to the most owlish of the intellectuals, from the ferociously brooding adolescent to the mildest of the white mice, there was a superb response from the cast. For my part, I loved them heartily for taking fire as they did and was most grateful, as I still am, to those odd, responsive creatures for all the adventures upon which we have embarked together.
The Little Theatre at Canterbury College had been built as an assembly hall in the early days of the Province. It was in a style of architecture that we slightingly refer to as ‘Dominion Gothic’. It had a little gallery, a raftered ceiling and the arms of the College above the proscenium. Sir James Shelley, an English professor of education who had been very active in university drama, had caused good lighting and an excellent cyclorama to be mounted. There was scarcely any room offstage and actors making a quick exit were prone to crack their skulls on a door lintel and then fall five feet sheer into a psychology cubicle. One could tumble backcloths but not fly them and the total depth, including the apron, must have been less than twenty-five feet. Crossing from prompt to OP was effected by squeezing through a filthy passage between the back of the cyclorama and the rear wall.
The seating accommodation was, lawfully, two hundred but we were known to cram in two hundred and fifty. As will be shown later this, potentially, was a dangerous practice.
With all its terrifying limitations, the Little Theatre had great character and an authentic atmosphere. As the rehearsal period went by I grew to curse and love it on equal impulses.
The Hamlet came to stay with us on the hills. He and James (who played the Ghost) and I would return exhausted after an intensive rehearsal, devour eggs and bacon in the kitchen at midnight and, talking in whispers so as not to disturb my father, would hammer out the problems of the moment. It was a glowing hazardous time.
Of all the plays in the Shakespearean canon, it seems to me, there is most conspicuously in Hamlet, an element that, not so much contradicts as it stands apart from, theory, research, comment and derogation. This is the singular flavour of Hamlet himself. It has been argued, and with much reason and any amount of textual support, that the Prince of Denmark is fat and flabby, amoral, a supreme egoist, cruel, rude, treacherous, subtle, and an idiotic bungler. He may be all of these things but it is difficult to imagine a performance by an actor who concentrated solely upon one or more of these aspects. If Charles Laughton who was fat, flabby, ugly and a superb actor, had elected to play Hamlet entirely in terms of the reverse side of the character, what would have happened? A fascinating speculation! Would his audiences not have come away exclaiming: ‘But awful as he was you couldn’t help liking him’? No actor as good as Laughton could have uttered certain lines without releasing the Hamlet magic. That the playwright himself saw Hamlet as an adorable prince is, to me at least, indisputable. Shakespeare knew, as so many of his commentators do not, that one is attracted to people, not by their virtues, but by that unfairest of all qualities – charm.
Our young Hamlet, in spite of the physical difficulty of his lameness, had the right ingredients: edge, rancour, intelligence, a quivering sensitivity and a certain wry sweetness. At first he was all over the place: unable to make his voice speak his thoughts, going full blast and arriving nowhere but presently the thing itself began to happen and here was an actor.
Two pieces of great good fortune befell us. The music for the production was written by Douglas Lilburn, then a young composer coming into full flower. Players were rehearsed. The violinist, Maurice Clare, at that time in New Zealand, heard Lilburn’s music and with wonderful generosity offered to lead the group. So we had sounds that sent our hearts into our mouths, sounds that before the clock struck twelve and the curtain rose on Elsinore, spoke of the cold small hour and an unquiet spirit.
Suddenly, the dress rehearsals were upon us. Strangely enough, I remember little in detail about them except that the first one threw us all into despair. The pace, attack and vitality which had seemed to be established, faltered and wavered. There were longueurs. There were deflations. I blasted away like a furnace and then said all the things about ‘bad dress, good opening’. We had two more and then, with the atmosphere almost giving off sparks like a cat’s fur, we opened to a full house.
It must be remembered that for twenty years there had been no professional Shakespeare in this place.
Let me describe one performance. Three youths unable to get seats have climbed up into the rafters and straddled a beam. Someone is sitting on the top of the electrician’s box in the auditorium. The theatre is inside the university and upstairs. The Christchurch fire board has not yet concerned itself with our activities but we have had a complaint from the police about queues outside the booking office. The play has begun and I watch from the prompt corner. Opposite me, caught in reflected light from the acting area, a young man stands with his arms resting on the edge of the stage. When the players come close to him he draws back his hands but otherwise is immovable. I suppose he has effected an entrance by some unlawful means and has no seat. His face is extraordinarily intent and alive. Watching him, I think that the spirit of Bankside has come to life in New Zealand. So rapt, might have stood some young gentleman from the Inns of Court or a journeyman apprentice with arms akimbo on the apron stage of the Globe. It gives me great delight to watch this young man in the still, packed little house.
Theatre people are generally disposed to refrain from understatement when recounting a success and this is very natural in so hazardous an occupation. Surprise and relief as much as vainglory release our tongues when we succeed and surprise was our first reaction to the reception of Hamlet. I was much taken aback when, on the day after we opened, a tailor ran out of his shop and wrung my hand. ‘The whole town’s talking about it,’ he said, and indeed, it soon appeared that he did not greatly exaggerate. Well then: ‘let me speak proudly’ of these student-players.
This was the beginning of an association that has lasted for twenty years. For me it has been a love affair.
Hamlet was twice revived and the following year we embarked on Othello. Somehow I contrived in the intervening months to write another book and take my turn at driving the hospital bus.
A strong nucleus from Hamlet was still at the university when we cast Othello and these players were now technically much better equipped. The ex-Laertes gave a sensitively realized performance as the Moor while Hamlet moved confidently into Iago. Under intensive and strictly disciplined rehearsal the company began to take up an attitude nearer to that of the professional than the amateur theatre. We had an extremely tough, capable, and rather arrogant stage-crew, most of them science or engineering students, who would try anything once and usually bring it off by a system of ferocious argument, terrifying rudeness and immense resource and expertise. I had the greatest confidence in them. We kept our respective tempers rather better than might have been expected and in the ripeness of time developed a mutual respect and affection.
Othello met with the same kind of reception as Hamlet. It became clear that, even if we extended our season for a longer period than the college authorities would stomach, we would still be unable to meet the box-office demands.
It was at this junction that a member of our executive who is now an administrator in the South Pacific, was seized with the notion of a tour in the long vacation. To this end he secured an interview in Auckland with Mr D. D. O’Connor, the régisseur who afterwards brought Stratford-upon-Avon and the Old Vic out to Australasia.
There followed a hectic period of suspense and then an offer from Mr O’Connor. He had been making enquiries and was prepared to tour Hamlet and Othello through the main cities during the long vacation. He would like, however, to see a rehearsal and would fly down if one could be arranged.
The Little Theatre was in use for examinations so we hired a room in town and set up
our rostra in it.
It was a hot summer night when Mr O’Connor arrived. My great monsters sat on benches round the room in their shirt sleeves, looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths. Elsinore rebuilt itself in a bare room under naked office lamps.
So it came about that after twenty years I was on the road again in New Zealand: this time with my own company.
New Zealand has a great many Edwardian and Victorian theatres, some in decent repair and others shedding dead paint like dandruff from old cloths that stealthily disintegrated in the flies. For this tour we played for the most part in the concert chambers of town halls. They could scarcely be less helpful to theatrical endeavour. In Auckland, in sub-tropic conditions, we had to keep the windows shut because of the noise of tramcars in the street. They were opened in the single interval and heavy, tepid air from outside dawdled into the steambath generated by a packed and sweating audience.
From the day the company began to work under full professional conditions, rehearsing in the mornings and with these rehearsals their sole concern, the temper and quality of the productions hardened and at the same time gained in flexibility, teamwork and control. In Auckland the actors had reached their full stature and were playing very freely and with great delight. One performance of Hamlet I remember vividly.
We did not take a formal curtain call. The actors, in single file, crossed the stage silhouetted against a blue cyclorama and that was all. On this night, as always, the house lights went up as soon as the curtain fell on this procession. The applause went on and on. The players, most of them, had gone to their dressing-rooms but the young Hamlet who had given that night the best performance of the tour, sat on the steps of the rostrum and cried like a schoolboy. This, no doubt, was a release, a kind of unwinding.