Josephine Tey

by Jennifer Morag Henderson

  In real life, Henri Gaudier was a sculptor, and Sophie Brzeska his Polish muse, who gave up her own dreams of becoming a writer to live with and support Henri in England. They had a rather twisted and controlling relationship, which was also the subject of a 1972 film by the English film-maker Ken Russell. Ken Russell is best known for Women in Love and The Devils, and his film-making had a flamboyant and sexualized style. He is a particularly unlikely bedfellow, as it were, for Gordon Daviot. The Laughing Woman is an attempt to understand why a woman would give up her own creative dreams for a man, but with the sex and mental illness of Gaudier and Brzeska’s relationship taken out it is a sanitized, intellectual version of a melodramatic love affair. Daviot does make it clear in the introductory note to the play that she did not want to write an entirely truthful depiction of the relationship, but in leaving out what later interpreters of the Gaudier-Brzeska story would see as the crucial points, she is left with a story with a large plot hole. Daviot’s ‘Ingrid’ and ‘Rene’ are not suffering repressed sexual tension – instead Ingrid is stifled in her creativity because, as a woman, she is forced into housekeeping to keep Rene’s artistic dreams alive. The Times reviewer thought this was a fair point: ‘the play contains a more intelligent and persuasive study of an artist than is at all common on the stage’7 – but it certainly doesn’t make its artists likeable or attractive, and it makes the play an interesting character study – but not a dramatic night out for the audience.

  Having chosen the basis for her story, and decided not to stick to it too closely, Daviot then made a couple of other dubious choices for The Laughing Woman. The first was the structure of the play. While Richard of Bordeaux had its particularly effective opening and crowd scenes breaking up its structure and pacing the story, The Laughing Woman takes its smaller set of main characters through events in a linear fashion, with pacing that slowed to the pedestrian. Daviot’s habit of writing scenes that explored character development rather than showed action could detract from the drama – it was a characteristic that reviewers began to notice. To a certain extent, Richard of Bordeaux did this too, but, as part of its charm was its historical sweep and the way it covered a large period of time, it worked better in that play.

  However, the strangest and most challenging choice in writing The Laughing Woman was for Daviot to choose for her main protagonists two non-English speakers. One of Richard of Bordeaux’s main attractions had been the language; the way that a medieval king was rendered understandable and attractive by speaking in modern English. Daviot had clearly thought about the way she would represent ‘foreign’ English, taking the time to change the real-life Sophie, who was Polish, into the Swedish Ingrid. Beth MacKintosh had experience of speaking to Swedish women through her gymnastic training at Anstey. A keen observer of others, Beth was well aware of the differences in speech of a native speaker and a Swede speaking English, and perhaps felt she had a better grasp of this than of a Polish accent. Her time in France, particularly when her sister Jean was living there, would have accustomed her to French-accented and influenced English. But the fact remains that her main male character was French and her main female character was Swedish, and at no time could they speak to each other in their native tongue, while at all times they had to speak to the audience in a third language. There are a few lines in French in the play, but essentially Daviot was asking her two main actors to maintain foreign accents all the way through the play, and asking her audience to listen, not to carefully structured and attractive English, but to a representation of how foreign people speak English, an extraordinary demand for a play-going audience. Rene at times becomes a caricature – he speaks and behaves how an English person thinks a French person speaks and behaves. It is a masterclass in ‘writing Foreigners’: you string a bunch of fairly simple words together in a long sentence (because of course foreigners don’t construct sentences correctly), then you add in some funny noises (especially if they’re French) and make sure you never use contractions (are not instead of aren’t) and finally make sure to phrase your questions oddly:

  RENE What has that to do with it? I’m me. I could have murdered the men who sat next to you. If you had been kind to them I should have died. But you are very cold. You smile and are pleasant and they all hope and then poof! That is all. You are not interested in men?8

  In fact, Daviot’s leading man was to struggle with the accent so much that he eventually dropped it altogether.9

  The Laughing Woman has some affecting moments, as well as amusing scenes where artists and critics clash over the meaning of art as opposed to the business and selling of art. The play ends with the outbreak of the First World War, which shows Daviot’s continuing preoccupation with this theme, while her interest in class consciousness is also clearly shown from the standpoint of the foreigners looking in at English mealtimes. And as a meditation on creativity it shows how Gordon Daviot understood that, for women, caring for men and running the day-to-day household routine could be death to productivity. It’s hard not to relate this to Beth, caring in Inverness for Colin, but frustrated at not being able to take up all the opportunities that Richard of Bordeaux was offering her in London.

  Richard of Bordeaux continued its run throughout 1933, and had made a matinee idol out of John Gielgud. He was followed by fans, photographed for the covers of magazines, and praised by critics and theatregoers. It was essentially his biggest career moment, and he always acknowledged this: ‘if the fans had their way,’ he said, ‘I would have gone on being Richard for the rest of my life [...] it was to the brilliant inspiration and sympathy of Gordon Daviot that I owed the biggest personal success of my career’.10 John and Gordon kept up a friendly correspondence, though Richard of Bordeaux could run now without any more input from its author. The playwright has a strange disassociation from the cast of a play: responsible for their jobs, yet no longer needed. Making only occasional trips to London, it was only the very long run of Richard of Bordeaux that enabled Gordon to make friends among the cast.

  Gordon greatly admired the acting of her leading lady Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, and was drawn to her charming personality. In the Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies archive there are a number of letters between the two women, with the first surviving one from Christmas 1933, when Gwen had been playing in Richard of Bordeaux for almost a year. ‘Anne, my dear, how lovely of you!’ Beth writes, using her character’s name, to thank Gwen for a Christmas gift.11 She signed herself ‘Gordon’, and sent Gwen some hyacinths in return. One of Gordon’s prized possessions was a cushion made for her out of scraps of material from every costume featured in Richard of Bordeaux, a lovely idea and a present from Gwen and the other cast members that shows how highly Gordon was regarded.12 After the Christmas letter there are some fragmented letters, and then, after some face-to-face visits, the correspondence grows in length and detail, and starts to include Marda Vanne, Gwen’s partner.13

  Gwen herself, in an interview filmed near the end of her long life, remembered that Gordon had visited her backstage and spoken with her about her dream parts – the people Gwen would, as an actress, one day like to portray.14 Gwen had said that she had always dreamt of playing Mary, Queen of Scots. Gordon said she didn’t like Mary, and had always preferred Elizabeth of England. At this point in the story, Gwen rolled her eyes, and said that she’d then forgotten all about the conversation until Gordon showed up a few months later with the script of what was to become her third play, Queen of Scots.

  Richard of Bordeaux showed no sign of ever running down, but, after over a year in the same parts, some of the actors, including John Gielgud, wanted to move on. John was sensible of just how perfect a part Richard was for him. On a rare day off he had slipped into the theatre to watch from the back and became enamoured with the part again, watching how his understudy essentially had to play Gielgud in order to reproduce the role. Now he wanted a new challenge.15 Richard of Bordeaux finally finished its run at the New Theatre in April 1934. On the last day the police had to b
e called to keep back the crowd that surged to the stage door when John and Gwen tried to leave. The play then went on the road, touring regional theatres around Britain, with the male lead role taken by John’s London understudy Glen Byam Shaw. The Inverness Courier reported that the rights to the play had also been sold in Europe, with productions planned in Prague, Vienna, Bucharest, Budapest and Warsaw.16

  Almost simultaneous to Richard of Bordeaux’s regional tour was its production in America on Broadway, which opened on Valentine’s Day 1934 at the Empire Theatre.17 Richard was played by Dennis King who, like Gielgud, was also producer, while Gwen’s part of Anne of Bohemia went to Margaret Vines.18 Gordon Daviot was only involved in this production through her agent, who negotiated for her. It’s worth comparing this again with playwright Dodie Smith, who was far more personally involved in her American negotiations. This was another opportunity for travel and networking that Gordon Daviot did not take up, because of her commitments in Inverness and her aversion to publicity.

  The American run was not as successful as the London one, lasting only around a month on Broadway before touring regionally, but it still garnered exceptionally good reviews. The Inverness Courier of 1st June 1934 printed an extremely complimentary critique from the Chicago Journal of Commerce. Whether or not the Inverness Courier was parochial, and whether or not they resented Daviot not speaking to them directly, they were following her career assiduously and making sure all their readers knew of her success – Gordon Daviot was news. The Chicago tribute includes the lines: ‘Richard of Bordeaux is everything that Richard II isn’t. I re-read Shakespeare’s dull study of the man before I went [to see the play] [...] I liked the nerve of this Agnes MacKintosh [sic.] who dared to follow the Bard and improve on his lesser effort.’ There surely can’t be greater praise for a playwright than to be compared to Shakespeare and come out on top.

  Back in London, The Laughing Woman had directly followed Richard of Bordeaux at the New Theatre, starting on the 7th April 1934.19 The producers, wanting to develop their star playwright, and appreciating that this was a very different play to Richard of Bordeaux, had cast it carefully. Gielgud had originally angled for the lead role, but eventually admitted it was not the part for him, allowing Stephen Haggard (great-nephew of the writer H. Rider Haggard) to take the part of Rene.20 Most of the cast of Richard of Bordeaux were out on tour, and another new actor was engaged for the female lead, Veronica Turleigh.21 Haggard and Turleigh did not have the same connection with their audience as Gielgud and Ffrangcon-Davies; both were minor actors, who never went on to dominate the stage, but they were well suited to the parts and there seems to have been a deliberate attempt to show Gordon Daviot as an intellectual playwright, not just the populist of Richard of Bordeaux. Haggard struggled with the French accent demanded of his part, but Veronica, in particular, appreciated the role, and she and the rest of the cast and crew remained friendly with Gordon Daviot, who was becoming more accustomed to the stage world and easier in her interactions with it.22

  To a certain extent, the strategy of quiet difference worked, as the play was well received by the critics. Popular magazine Theatre World highly recommended it, although the Glasgow Herald noted that The Laughing Woman was ‘essentially the author’s rather than the actor’s work’.23 To audiences expecting some sort of sequel to Richard of Bordeaux, seeing a play by the same author and in the same theatre, The Laughing Woman appeared rather strange. Although, like Richard of Bordeaux, it was historical, it was set in the much more recent past, just before the Great War. And although, like Richard of Bordeaux, it had a relationship between a male and female character at its centre, the relationship between ‘Rene’ and ‘Ingrid’ is nothing like the romance between ‘Richard’ and ‘Anne’. Gordon Daviot didn’t write primarily to entertain, she wrote to understand the world. Her writing fits into a moral framework: how and why people deviate from it is her concern, throughout her plays and her Josephine Tey detective fiction. She focused on topics that interested her, and which fitted this personal quest for understanding. When considering The Laughing Woman in the context of all of Beth MacKintosh’s work, and in the context of her life, it makes sense – but to the audience and critics in London, the fans of Richard of Bordeaux, it was a strange follow-up. It wasn’t exactly a failure, but they weren’t entirely sure how to take it.

  Behind the scenes, Gordon Daviot was working closely with Gwen on developing the next play, Queen of Scots. Along with John Gielgud, Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies was being fêted by both audiences and the press for her role in Richard, profiled by magazines and followed by fans. Richard of Bordeaux had made her and John stars – and made them a lot of money. Both she and Gielgud earned enough to buy houses, country cottages outside London in the Essex countryside. There was a small area around the villages of Finchingfield and Stambourne which was becoming a sort of artists’ colony, familiar to anyone who has read the Josephine Tey novel To Love and Be Wise. Playwright Dodie Smith had bought a picturesque country retreat in the area with the proceeds from her plays; Gielgud used his Richard of Bordeaux money to buy a house and garden, and Gwen and her partner Marda bought Tagley Cottage, a small white house in Stambourne that was to become a place of sanctuary and home comforts for all Gwen’s friends, including Gordon Daviot.

  On the 7th April 1934, when The Laughing Woman was about to open, Gordon Daviot sat for the studios of Sasha, a leading photographer of the London theatre in the 1920s and 30s. Specializing in formal portraits, Sasha was in great demand, a fiery and competitive celebrity photographer who would spend a long time posing his subjects in exactly the right light (he was particularly interested in technical aspects of lighting and invented the Sashalite, an early flash bulb), all the while shouting at his assistants, whom he ordered to press the button on the camera when he felt the time was exactly right. Gordon was thirty-seven years old when Sasha took her photo, but she looks very youthful. Her short, waved dark hair and her shirt and tie are the epitome of 1930s chic, and she seems carefully but not overly made-up. Her pearl earrings, a gift from her father Colin, and her checked shirt show up particularly well in one black and white image. Beth was always interested in fashion, and used her trips to London to buy new clothes. Mixing with the leading actresses of her generation meant that she was able to see new fashions displayed to their best advantage, and her financial position after Richard of Bordeaux meant that she could indulge her love of quality tailoring. In one of the photos, she is wearing a tweed jacket, a purchase made with her first big pay packet. Compared with the photos taken by Inverness photographer Andrew Paterson when Kif was first published, Sasha manages to invest Gordon Daviot with a certain aura. Paterson’s photographs show Beth, the former schoolteacher – Sasha’s photographs very definitely project the image of a Writer. Gordon posed for several photographs, which were used on the covers of some of her books, and which are the stock images still used today when she is referred to in newspapers. Unlike Sasha’s glamorous images of actresses, though, Gordon is portraying a more serious face: she is a playwright, not an actress, and she looks thoughtfully and directly at the camera with only a hint of a smile. This is the mysterious Gordon Daviot, the ‘Enigma’ who was not understood either by her London friends or her Highland neighbours.

  In an unposed snapshot, taken around the same time, we see another side of Gordon Daviot.24 Taken on holiday, it shows Gordon with Gwen, Gwen’s partner Marda Vanne, and their friend the actress Margaret (Peggy) Webster. Gordon is relaxed, smiling and happy with friends. Her dark hair is in the familiar style from the well-known Sasha portrait, and she is wearing a blouse with a pussy bow at the neck in a similar 1930s fashion. She is also wearing her glasses, which she always removed for official photos, but which she needed. She is smiling and looking directly at Gwen, while Gwen shields her eyes from the sun. Gwen is immaculately dressed, and looks as elegant as ever: every inch the leading lady. John Gielgud wrote that Gordon was devoted to Gwen, and Gwen had welcomed Gordon into her c
ircle of friends.

  Gwen was a dedicated actress, and a committed Christian Scientist, who felt that she had a ‘calling’ to make the best of her talents.25 She worked to the fullest of her abilities to further the arts and thus help others, and her consideration for other people and caring nature are frequently mentioned by contemporaries. She was also enormous fun, and existing biographical programmes about her, recorded in the 1980s, show a woman who could tell hours of entertaining stories about backstage life at the theatre. She had a youthful voice well into old age, and retained a sort of theatrical slang in her speech; a quick, clear 1930s way of speaking that seems very close to the way that Gordon Daviot wrote in her personal letters. To listen to Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies speaking is to get a real insight into how she and her contemporaries would have spoken to each other when Gordon first met them all: the speech rhythms are different, and of course different slang was used than today, but it is the speech of people who were well-educated and who worked with words every day. In many of her later interviews Gwen would astonish and impress her audience and interviewer by quoting from memory large speeches from Romeo and Juliet, or from other famous plays she had worked in. For Gordon, as a writer and playwright, Gwen’s company was refreshing and stimulating, but simultaneously a place where she felt at home. Gwen’s dedication to stagecraft must also have struck a chord with Elizabeth MacKintosh the trained gymnast, as Gwen was interested in understanding how the whole body worked on stage, particularly through the Delsarte method.26 To watch Gwen walk across a stage or screen, even when she was in her 90s, was an education in balance and ease. Ffrangcon-Davies practised postural and movement exercises every day, took singing lessons, read widely and studied Shakespeare. She was dedicated to her craft, and it was not at drama school that she learnt how to be an actress but through her own personal wide-ranging studies and practice. This approach to personal improvement appealed to the self-taught Gordon Daviot: Daviot had not learnt to be a writer by going on a writing course, but had honed her craft by her own version of these daily exercises: reading (her work shows how literate she was) and writing (letters, poems and short stories, as well as her novels and plays). It was very enjoyable for Gordon to spend time with people like Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies – people who took their craft seriously and were willing to discuss it; who took Daviot’s talent seriously (and for granted, as she had already demonstrated it through her successes); who developed their work through daily practice; who had creative jobs that did not involve going to work every day but working to deadlines and for set periods of time; who were conversant with popular culture and interested in the theatre, in writing, in ideas. It was a great contrast to the way in which Beth MacKintosh lived in Inverness.