MUSEUM PIECES

Space and Light is the title of a new Edward Gordon Craig exhibition in the V&A's Theatre Galleries, but both elements were in short supply at the official opening on Friday evening. We were crammed round a large model rhinoceros, the theatrical significance of which eluded me – unless there was an implicit reference to Ionesco. As we listened to the Director’s speech listing the people to be thanked ('If you don't like it, tell her; if you do like it, tell me' was a witticism he judged worthy of repetition), the staff excitedly whooped their favourite curators and we guests had the impression that we were mere onlookers at an in-house jamboree.

The usual Craig woodcuts were in evidence round a corner, nicely framed, and although I happen to know most of them, indeed posses some signed examples, and am very familiar with others from reproductions, I always find it refreshingly pleasing to see them.

The main feature of the exhibition, however, was an installation: a sombre sort of fairground booth in which I suppose six people at once could view some projections. I didn't spend long inside, but the projections seemed to be of Craig's cut-out figures seen against arrangements of his famous screens, disappointingly lacking in atmosphere. That marvellous radio voice of Anton Lesser (never did I imagine I could prefer somebody else's reading of 'Ode to a Nightingale' to my own until I heard Anton's), speaking Craig's words, sounded curiously light. I presume they played the famous recordings of Craig's voice, curiously deep; if they did, the contrast must have been surreal.

Sir Michael Holroyd was pointedly allowed no more than five minutes to speak, and used them expertly to tell us what a controversial, influential and inspiring figure Craig was. You'd not guess it on the evidence of the exhibit.

A curious case, Edward Gordon Craig, a subject in media studies and theatre history, a revolutionary figure, harbinger of modern stage design, the discrediting of Victorian illusion and the scene painter's romance, literal domestic realism. But if anybody wants a tour round the old Lyceum, long before it was refurbished for at least the second time in readiness for The Lion King, and would like to scent the air of the place in the late nineteenth century, when Sir Henry Irving was actor-manager and Gordon Craig a young actor in his company in which his mother Ellen Terry was leading lady, they could not do better than to read Craig's affectionate and evocative memories:

On the prompt side there were two Greenrooms where the actors looked at themselves in pier-glasses. … On this side of the theatre was also the property room and one of the largest of several scene docks; and upstairs, Hawes Craven's large scene-painting studio, and the Beef Steak Room [where Irving would give suppers to friends and distinguished guests after the play].

 The Beef Steak Room

But now, in our tour of 'the strange darkened realms of the place', we come to the pivotal moment when Craig describes the stage filling up with costumed actors and mentions 'Arnott, the property-man – whose apple tree in that scene was a masterpiece of realism.' The operative words being 'Tree' and 'Realism'.

Next we must go to Ellen Terry's house in The Kings Road (these days there is commemorative brown plaque). The erstwhile Lyceum actor, John Martin-Harvey, a slightly older contemporary of Craig's, describes in his autobiography the day when the young Craig was showing him his ideas for scenic effects, manipulating 'rectangular blocks of various forms and size – rather like a child's box of bricks.' Harvey was amazed to see the great variety of localities Craig could thus suggest, but at the same time imagined what a Herculean task it would be to lift and use these shapes on a real stage. He wondered about suggesting verdure: 'Yes, but Teddy,' he said, 'what will you do for a tree?' Craig continually ignored this question until Ellen Terry took from the mantlepiece a little Bavarian toy tree, clapped it down on the blocks and said, 'There, Jack, will that do for your blessed old tree?'

When I was playing in Nicholas Nickleby in New York in 1981, I spent a couple of Mondays off at the Harvard Theatre Collection. I had persuaded them that Craig's fretted tree screens needed to be seen in light and space. I jumped off a plane and hired some lights and a photographer's roll from a camera shop. They were carved wooden screens about ten inches high, never realized by him on the stage.

The two images below, demonstrating the importance of light, are my own kitchen-table mock-ups. I have wired up my copy of EGC's cardboard lamp carrier with a torch bulb to illuminate the Player King and Queen, and used a perforated something to create the mackerel sky effect.

************

When the old Theatre Museum in Covent Garden closed its doors for the last time (before its contents were subsumed by the V&A), I composed an epilogue and lament for its final days:

In default the show begins

Bygones, heretofores, has-beens

Still! The relics hold their poses

As it opened, so it closes.

Rich preserve of obsolescence

What’s conserved when all but presence

Evanescence …

And the passing show has passed?

Not a word, not e'en the last

Within these booths is uttered, puffed,

Limelights, candles – sputtered, snuffed.

Here's the face, the fiery master

Kean: asleep in death-mask plaster.

Through the plate glass though we stare

He's absent, off: the stage is bare.

Moving portraits jump through hoops

Repeatedly in filmic loops.

In footage, still they foot it featly

In the scenes they've left completely.

Alone I watch, whilst happily

Larry dances, just for me

Consummate, such graceful cheek

I call out, 'Are you here all week?'

In case he's not, for Archie Rice

I watch the loop round twice or thrice.

In default the show begins

Bygones, heretofores, has-beens

Still! The relics hold their poses

As it opened, so it closes.

Postscript

On my way out of the V&A on Friday, I passed through the jewellery section – untold wealth, beautifully lit. I bethought myself to look for emeralds (remembering the Attenbury ones I have had so much to with lately). There is a reverend gentleman's collection, which has three large emeralds: impressive but where was the mystique? I must say that Jill Paton Walsh's prose descriptions stirred me more.

* Photograph of Edward Gordon Craig by E. O. Hoppé, 1911. National Portrait Gallery, London.

SEPTEMBER SONG

Here is a companion piece to last week's Five Photo Calls:

FIVE PHOTO CALLS

As promised:

GOING TO PRESS!

A brief word from the editor

I'm delighted to announce that Edward is putting the final finishing touches to his eagerly awaited volume of essays, and that the completed manuscript will be with the publishers this week.

Slim Chances and Unscheduled Appearances will be officially launched in early spring. A National Theatre Platform is being planned to mark the book's release. News of this, and other book-signing events and readings, will be posted on Edward's website nearer the time.

In the interests of preserving the author's modesty, I will let the book, when it appears, speak for itself. Suffice it to say, my work as editor has been an immense privilege and joy. Slim Chances is not only an eloquent and engaging memoir, but also a uniquely valuable contribution to theatre history. 

Below is a sneak preview of the draft cover design.

(Click image to enlarge)

I can also announce that, as something of a foretaste of the book, a new short film from Petherbridge Studios is imminent.

K.R.

TO MOSCOW! TO MOSCOW! TO MOSCOW!

For years after I had played Vershinin in Three Sisters, one of his speeches would come back to me like a snatch of an old tune and I would speak it aloud wherever I happened to be:

I often think: what if we could, consciously, begin our lives anew. If only a life that had been lived could be the rough draft and the new one the fair copy. I think then each of us would try, most of all, to have a different setting for his life. He'd have a room like this with flowers and blazing sunshine. 

With Suzanne Bertish as Masha in Trevor Nunn's production for the RSC's first small-scale tour in 1978. Designed by John Napier.

I’m currently sorting and doing searches in the attic, in which some of you saw me rhapsodize despairingly in my webcam film, Aloft (aka Bringing Home the Bacon).

The question, 'What would you change about your life?' rings out of the jumble of my memory (an even more cluttered attic). It is in the voice of one Vernon Dobtcheff, film actor, who told me he'd used it successfully as an ice-breaker in the conversations we were both having one day with a party of Soviet artists and academics we were helping to escort round Hampton Court years ago. (I would change by developing an enthusiasm for filing!)

Apparently the director of the Moscow Art Theatre had said, 'What would I change about my life? Everything, or nothing.' You have to imagine the statement in a Russian accent, spoken by the interpreter. But the diminutive, melancholic Moscow professor gave the most candid reply. In his slow, lugubrious, accented English he said, 'My wife, my job, my apartment.'

I have found a few scraps of paper dated Sunday 23rd July 1984, written when I was alone in the National Hotel, Moscow, Room 126, which I had to move out of because the water wouldn't work. By impulse I was taking advantage of a week off from playing Faulkland in Sheridan's The Rivals at the National Theatre. I had realized that I could change my life, at least for a week, and fly with ease the three-and-a-half hours to the capital of the Soviet Union, but more to the point to the very epicentre of what I was then working on in my spare time. Simon Callow and I were trying to write a play about the production of Hamlet (or Gamlet) that Stanislavski and Edward Gordon Craig had planned from 1908 and finally produced at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1911.

A contemporary impression of the first Ghost scene

Our separately composed scenes of the abandoned work lie in my attic, but here is the account of my arrival in Moscow in the summer of 1984:

The careful checks at the airport took about one hour, forty-five minutes, including the age it takes for one’s case to appear on those luggage roundabouts, identical in Japan, Malaysia, the USA – everywhere …

Caroline [Blakiston] had told me to expect birch trees. 'Dear, modest birches, I love them above all other trees', I had said as Chekhov's Vershinin in Three Sisters – but the approach by air it seemed was all fir trees, a grandiose landscape of broad waterways and lakes with sprawling patches of dark forest and clearings where a neat control had been at work, communities of blocks of flats and adjacent, cut off by belts of trees, compounds of low dachas with garden plots in comfortable formation. There were isolated buildings in their own clearings; one I noticed had the unmistakeable green-blue square of a swimming pool. Later as we descended, groups of old wooden houses with steep roofs, little plantations and fields of crops, but mostly firs and water, then at last birch trees and the landing.

A small clapped-out Mercedes was my taxi – the radio removed, leaving a little hole. The thirtyish driver stopped for 'Benzene' at a very shoddy petrol station along the broad tree-lined road to the centre of Moscow – more fir trees and gradually more blocks of flats, the kind one imagines Moscow to have, but then suddenly at the corner of a big field near one side of the road, two men with a huge scythe and, on the other side, two men driving tractors – country and city mixed. Then older apartments with pediments and columns like old New York, and suddenly an exotically graceful Art-Nouveau block, obscured by trees, sped by – bus stops with huge shelters with a few waiting people, dressed as they might be in Camberwell. Now the road became enormously wide, the buildings set back and screened by trees, then yes! Glimpsed for a second an onion dome or two and some towers – Red Square? And a giant Russian version of a Victorian town hall – prosaic pragmatical building of a capital.

My diary scraps from the National Hotel continue:

I think I just heard the word ‘Britain’ on the hotel-room radio, followed by a slightly scratchy recording of Elizabethan music – all sackbuts and recorders, followed immediately by a French pop number.

My stroll up to Red Square started with a daunted look at the 50th Anniversary of the October Revolution Square. What did they pull down to celebrate the anniversary with this agoraphobic space across which little dots of cars speed alarmingly? What looked like a subway entrance turned out to be one, leading right under the square. This is the prelude to Red Square, not a hint of litter, graffiti or urine, not a poster of any description: part of the length mud, part white tiles and fluorescent lighting. I find I am walking behind four youths conversing in deaf and dumb language; they are wearing running shoes and jeans, but one has a very nice T-shirt, moccasins and the latest cut of lightweight trousers. Their movements in conversation are eloquent, dramatic, completely unselfconscious with the expressiveness that can only come of freedom and conviction. A marvellous chest-exploding gesture, like a heart burst, lots of combative gestures. I get halfway to the top of the stairs at Red Square behind them and they notice me, but continue their conversation. Suddenly, the most stylishly dressed boy looks straight at me and simply gestures, ‘Jeans? T-shirt?’ by subtly plucking his own garments between finger and thumb and looking questioningly at me. Having no spares, I shake my head, wondering what they might offer by way of barter. They go on smiling and conversing together.

A closer look at the odd group of onion-domed towers that is St Basil’s Cathedral, the twirly painted flowers on the walls. It has the mystery that all good buildings have – no logic perhaps, but somehow you can’t argue that it isn’t the perfect set of masses. I long to go in, but it is firmly locked. Another time perhaps.

Remembering back now, I made a friend in Henrietta Dobryakova, then a curator of the MAT Museum, who helped me trace so much intriguing information. We would take breaks together on the stone landing of a staircase where she would offer me Soviet cigarettes whilst telling me stories of the high security surrounding Stalin’s twenty visits to see Stanislavski’s production of Bulgakov's The White Guard, which I could have seen certainly once more in the recent production at the National, so much did it seem like a visit to early nineteenth-century Russia. The theatre's stage was going to be gutted and modernized. The builders were at work already. One day, Henrietta and I stood on the darkened stage and peered out into the auditorium, seeing nothing, but at least we were standing upon the boards, soon to be torn up, which had been graced by the legendary first productions of Chekhov, and had carried the experiment of the Craig-Stanislavski Hamlet of 1911.

Here, under the scaffolding, you can see the façade of the Moscow Art Theatre, with its famous seagull emblem.

And here is an image of B. M. Alfonin as Lucianus, the posioner, in the Craig-Stanislavski Hamlet. It is a role I played at Northampton Rep in 1958, just two months before I saw the Moscow Art Theatre perform The Cherry Orchard at Sadler's Wells.

Something I had forgotten is in the scraps of paper:

The customs lady was a young Russian beauty – short blonde hair, dark eyes with dark make-up; a self-contained beauty, sure of her rhythm, steady as she used economic gestures to bring the already cringing tourists to heel. The elderly Midwestern American doctor, ahead of me, arrived for a health conference, had already perspired and gasped as he misunderstood every gesture of the uniformed customs man who signalled his orders, his misconstructions leading him to perform ludicrously maladroit and servile actions, after which he had to mop the inside of his big beige hat. The blonde beauty coolly brought him to order with a tap of her Biro and then perused his medical brochures for subversive material and scanned every page of his newspaper.

I had a copy of Hamlet in Moscow and she looked at the title page. Was the publishing house on the black list, the author a known reactionary? She even sampled two or three bits of text – for anti-Soviet sentiments? At last, with a sideways movement of her hand measuring six inches, she waved me on and I felt clean and fit for Moscow. 

On the flight back to London I sat once again with the distinguished Nigel Nicolson of Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Our small talk was halting; no doubt I seemed to him as green about literature and publishing as he did to me when he attempted to stray from his speciality, though his achievements were obviously wide and his social sphere stratospheric. 'Does the director', he asked, 'demonstrate how he wants the lines to be said?'

It wasn't until some time later that I saw a film of the Soviet director Yuri Lubimov rehearsing the English cast of Crime And Punishment at the Lyric Hammersmith, doing just that and demonstrating the business too. The romance of Russian theatre took a knock, as it still does when I read of Stanislavski, working on the script of The Seagull in isolation, ahead of rehearsals, and prescribing the number of seconds per pause – I would have perspired inside my hat!


* The photographs above are among several I took on that trip in 1984 - I may find more!

YOUNG ILLUSIONISTS

If this is not enchantment then where is it to be found?

                                                               J. B. Priestley

Dreamboats and Petticoats, Playhouse, London, 2010

The Roses and the Bear, Northern Children's Theatre, 1956

Fifty-four years separate the two theatrical events depicted here. The more sober, dramatic scene took place at a dress rehearsal of a children's play I did when I was nineteen. I got the idea to turn a fuzzy black-and-white photograph somebody took of us rehearsing the last scene into a colour painting, showing not only the stage, but also the kind of theatre we often played in, and the rows of children to whom we played. The scale is a little exaggerated, the actors look large and the children small, but that may be how it seemed at the time. Our faces on the canvas are no bigger than half the size of my little fingernail, and I don't have the technique to do features accurately at that size. Perhaps the figure on the right is the one most successfully depicted in the approximately on purpose style of the Camden Town School. But I remember them all in high detail as people, having gone through two years training with them at the Northern Theatre School in Chapel Street, Bradford, and toured the big Moss Empires variety theatres in the North and Midlands for the best part of a year with the Northern Children's Theatre production of The Roses and The Bear, a play by William Baines. In Bradford alone more than 5,000 children saw the play.

In the painting, I am centre stage with hand outstretched and my first wife is in kingfisher green, playing a pageboy. She had a beautiful little tune composed for her to whistle whilst she guarded Rose White and Rose Red in the forest at night; it was never heard because the Bear appeared and the children's screams astonished us all at the first performance. 


I have promised myself to portray in pastel a scene from the second show we toured, The Dancing Master's Kit, to form a third piece in my Sickert-inspired collection.

The Northern Children's Theatre was the pride and joy of our principal Esmé Church; she founded it in 1946, using her final-year students. Esmé had the status of a minor goddess in Chapel Street, and no wonder: she had been a West End and classical actress for years – not a star, but she had directed the famous Edith Evans-Michael Redgrave As You Like It the year I was born; acted with and directed Laurence Olivier; and run the Old Vic School of Acting. She'd toured the North during the war when the Old Vic Company was avoiding the bombs and taking the classics to remote industrial and mining towns. Peace came, she arrived at a certain age and, with her designer Molly McArthur, bought a part-Elizabethan, part-Georgian farmhouse in the dales outside Bradford on an old Roman road. Amazingly Esmé assumed the professional directorship of the amateur Civic Playhouse, and from this connection developed the Theatre School.

Esmé Church

A day of art! I finished the painting this afternoon (it needs a tidge more work) and then went to see The Illusionist, the brilliant animated film directed by Sylvain Chomet and based on an unproduced script that Jacques Tati had written in 1956 (the year I was touring in The Roses and the Bear). It is the tale of a magician, one of the dying breed of music-hall turns.

A scene from The Illusionist

I worked on the same bill with Tati once, on a TV programme, and he was a wonderful live comic turn. Oddly, I first saw him on film in Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, when I was still a drama student – it was at the Civic which was also an art-house cinema.


This is a picture I took of Chapel Street, my Mecca in those days and the street to which we returned our touring scenery. It had at least one of its gas lamps at an angle that even Charlie Chaplin might have thought exaggerated until handled by one his villainous roughs. It is perhaps not a thoroughfare you would associate with art, or even with roses and bears and gilded theatres and enchantment, but that is where I found them.

Postscript

I should add a few words about where I saw The Illusionist on Sunday night; it was in the Hampstead Everyman Cinema, a building that started life in the late nineteenth century as a drill hall for the Hampstead Rifles. By the 1920s it had become what we would now call a fringe theatre, and Noël Coward, just short of his twenty-fifth birthday, had his first hit there in 1924 – The Vortex. He described the basement dressing-room area with its frowsy comfortable sofa, and the auditorium with its iron-girdered timber roof: 'The whole place was carpeted throughout with coconut matting and a pervasive air of artistic endeavour.'

 Circa 1920 and today

I missed the chance to see the recent revival of The Vortex with, I gather, Felicity Kendal and Dan Stevens being seeringly consummate as mother and son. 'Any production of Coward that has you thinking in all seriousness of Sophocles and Strindberg [which sounds artistic enough] has clearly achieved something pretty remarkable', raved Christopher Hart in The Sunday Times. 'We do not need this filth in the West End', fulminated Gerald Du Maurier in 1924, probably helping to ensure a long run for the transfer. It was Du Maurier, a Hampstead resident, who opened the Everyman Cinema in 1933.

Lilian Braithwaite and Coward in The Vortex

There are two screens at the Everyman, one in the basement and another under the iron and timber roof. Now the whole place is carpeted throughout in Wilton one notices, before sinking into immaculate scarlet sofas and having drinks and snacks brought to one’s little table.

I counted, amongst the lengthy credits for The Illusionist, thirty-two names under the heading ‘Ink and Paint’ alone! Go to this film just to see how Edinburgh is depicted, for the amazing flight over the city, the poignancy of Tati’s gentle story: for Artistic Endeavour triumphant in fact.   

MAGIC CARPETS

The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests ...

Bean (our dog) gave the seal of approval to our new Afghan carpet – yes Afghan, and from the province of Kunduz. Not a mile away from Kilburn's Tricycle Theatre, where I saw the twelve plays about Afghanistan I've spoken of so recently, there is a carpet shop which is having a closing-down sale. The sales talk revealed yet another facet of life in that troubled country: 'You won't get these carpets in five years' time – they are made in people's homes, and people are out working in offices, working for NGOs, sitting on plastic chairs, looking out of the office window, issuing forms: you can’t park here, you can’t go there.' The young man who carried the carpet to my car told me he had lived here since he was five years old and gone to school here, but I noticed he still spoke English with an Afghan accent.


As soon as the reassuring classic pattern was laid, woven I had been assured in wool of the first shearing, Bean began to loll and luxuriate on it. The old, coarse-weave carpet it replaced was going to grace our little conservatory, which had been paved with, by now rather challenged, cork tiles on a concrete base. A man came to lay some underfelt; as soon as that was down, Bean celebrated by running round on it excitedly in small circles.

It is a truly international effort, the modest refurbishing of our house; what with the new carpet and, not before time, the outside window frames being repainted and the conservatory roof, never leak-proof in its twenty-two years, repaired (already it has stood up perfectly to the wet weather), all thanks to a team of men from Romania, the painter and, from Poland via Chicago, one of the roof repairers. Clearing the way for them, I found a bird's nest on a high ledge, obscured by the grapevine that forced its way inside three years ago. I was harvesting the ripe crop, and there was the small songbird’s abandoned mud and straw home, brought inside by us as an ornament, still with some fragments of shell from its young. Astonishing that the tool used to construct it was the bird's beak – I don't know what kind of bird or whether the male and female both do the work, but I surmise they were international too, annually migrating impossible distances.

Impossible to muse on these things without remembering the unprecedented havoc and suffering caused to homes and livelihoods by the monsoonal rains in Pakistan, and what a difference we who have, so far, safe homes can all help to make.