ARTISTIC POINTS OF VIEW

'I take it you won't need a microphone?' said Christopher Dean, Chairman of the Dorothy L. Sayers Society. Flattering of course, but I said we ought to have the option. For the luncheon party to celebrate the launch of The Attenbury Emeralds we were to be practically on the terrace of the House of Lords and I imagined, from the map Dean had drawn me, a long room with people spread to my left and right and the River Thames behind them. It turned out to be just so and to be a beautiful day. We spilled out onto the narrow terrace, narrow because the 'room' we were in was really a semi-permanent marquee occupying most of the width of the terrace. 

A view of the terrace in Edwardian times.

This famous spot affords views of the South Bank with the unremarkable 1980s addition to St Thomas’s Hospital opposite and the more attractive brick original obscured by trees. There are steel and glass buildings to the west, including the one with the most lovely view of the Houses of Parliament – from its choice lofty penthouse you feel as though you are hovering over the middle of the river: I know this because it is owned by Lord Archer and I have hovered there myself by virtue of being in his play, The Accused. On one of his walls there is another splendid view of the Thames, painted by Monet from the room he hired at the Savoy Hotel. What I am saying is that the Houses of Parliament themselves are surrounded by inferior views whilst providing a spectacular Victorian Gothic fantasy to the hospital patients, office workers, millionaire penthouse dwellers and the tourist hoi polloi.

View of the Houses of Parliament from the terrace of St Thomas's Hospital, 1960.

The fabric of the 'tent' absorbed the sound of the human voice very efficiently, even though there was a mike. The difficulty was compounded by a noisy ventilation system. During the speech of welcome I stood next to Norma Major; noting the problem, she told me she was off on a quest to get the ventilators turned off. She succeeded in time for Jill Paton Walsh's little speech. Jill confessed to being in love with Lord Peter Wimsey as Dorothy Sayers had been before her. The passage I read featured, amongst other things, a long speech by the Dowager Duchess and played like a marvellous light-comedy script. The 'luncheon' consisted of the most diminutive canapés I have ever seen. 

On the way out I was impressed by a striking portrait of Baroness Amos of Brondesbury, former Leader of the House of Lords and current UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Co-ordinator. 

The Baroness Amos of Brondesbury by Paul Benney. 
Oil on canvas, 48" x 44". 2004.

Brondesbury is in Brent – one thinks of the National Theatre of Brent. Modest areas of our land have become ennobled in these democratic times. Actually the National Theatre of Brent provides me with the perfect link – not to portraiture but 'modern art'. Did you happen to catch their hilarious history of contemporary art broadcast on Radio 4 in August – ‘Tracey Emin and How She Done the Bed’? So much more to the point than the trendy journalism about art and art curators and dealers, which pervades every paper I pick up at the moment. And so I come to my own small self-portrait – not to be mentioned in the same breath as all the talk in these modish articles with their impossibly modish personalities in their impossibly smart minimalist interiors.

This, I hope, shows an advance from last week's preview:

Vintage Seer and Yellow. Acrylic on canvas, 10" x 14".

I finish with a modest footnote on art from a 1953 weekly rep programme. My first professional job, at the tender age of seventeen and whilst still at drama school, was in Halifax, Yorkshire, playing Frith, the white-haired butler of Manderlay, in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. There was not much to read in those old theatre programmes, unless one was interested to learn, yet again, that wardrobe care was by Lux, nylon stockings by Kayser Bondor, cigarettes by Senior Service or Abdulla, and that Act 2 was the same scene four days later. 

But in coming across the programme of Rebecca, what I love and wouldn't have missed is the half-page letter to the members of the Theatre Club of the Halifax Theatre Royal, touching on a plan to adorn the walls of the theatre's corridors with exhibitions of paintings.

The current exhibition is by members of the Halifax Art Society whose members get their living in various ways. They help to keep their sanity by observing nature and trying to interpret her secrets in line and colour – in short by making pictures.

I rest my case.


Postscript
If you would care to glimpse a portrait of the artist as a young man, I have recently uploaded to YouTube a few clips of my Lorenzo in the 1972 BBC production of The Merchant of Venice, directed by Cedric Messina.

WORK IN PROGRESS

You may recall an earlier incarnation of this self-portrait, which featured in my very first webcam blog back in March. Today I was inspired to revise the painting and so I offer here a detail of my work in progress.

Tomorrow a lunch reception is being given by Lord Cope of Berkeley for the Dorothy L. Sayers Society in the Cholmondeley Room and Terrace at the House of Lords. My wife Emily and I are invited and Jill Paton Walsh will be there. She will speak and I am to read from The Attenbury Emeralds. I am hoping to get an early night but want to get this painting's improvements … improved first!

OUTTAKE

It is meat and drink to me to see a clown.

Touchstone, As You Like It, Act V, sc.i

There is rather a lot to contend with on my revamped website.* But in case anyone would like some light reading, this week's blog features an outtake from the manuscript of my book Slim Chances. I have seen an amazing span of theatre in the last fortnight, much of it proving that the realistic well-made play of then and indeed now is very much alive.

Some years ago, after a visit to a circus at Camden's Roundhouse, I wrote: 

I know that I saw something essential last night. It dispelled all tired, heartless, conventionalized routine, neither was there the faintest whiff of the pretentious, technically inadequate aspirations of so much theatrical experimentation, which hopes to tap the roots of Essential Theatre.

Watching the hair-raising results of what must be a prodigious dedication, I kept on being reminded of a movement teacher at the National Theatre in the 1960s, Yat Malmgren, who once said during a class, 'If you were performers in a circus, you'd kill yourselves every night.'

Last night, had we realized it, the avenging angels and wrathful gods of the United Nations, with deadly computerized precision, were aiming cruise missiles at the Serb positions around Sarajevo. High up beneath the Roundhouse roof, with wonderful precision, time after impossible time, the trapeze artists would swing and hurtle and revolve in uncountable somersaults. Then the dreadful drop and four hands would find one another in the air, two saving and two, belonging to a falling angel, saved. Landing back on their perches, they would look down on us and shout their triumph, smiling and happy.

Lower down, two frizzy-haired women defied gravity by grasping each other in unheard-of interlocking embrace, like a living chain-link puzzle. And the bicycle was ridden, like a leaping, prancing gazelle, and bounced off a trampoline by crazed genius, who clearly lives with it and has never been seen on any other form of transport.

The clown tried to net a butterfly, make spots disappear from a handkerchief, and displayed his shy cunning whilst wondering at us and the world. Finally, reading from a picture book to his inattentive baby, he manifest the truth of James Agate's proposition that 'puppetry is the point at which all schools [of acting] converge.'  

The circus comes to town in many guises. Allow me to quote again Harold Hobson's comment in 1950:

The span of time between The Second Mrs Tanqueray and The Winslow Boy is theatrically speaking enormous. Our characteristic contemporary drama is in its extreme old age. In its prime its vitality depended on the excitement caused by the new method of realism, which for the first time in many decades made stage characters talk, walk, speak, dress, behave and think like ordinary human beings.

Well its vitality survives, not least because ordinary human beings are so extraordinary. Sure, we dance and sing and mime them more than we did, but we have learnt to listen to nuclear physicists on a West End stage, after reading a crash course in quantum theory in the programme, learnt too that box sets can accommodate low-life vagrants who hold the mirror up to our nature. We have wept at puppet horses whilst their pragmatic puppeteers were plainly, ordinarily in view, and tussled with politicians and bankers. As I write, Coward and Rattigan beguile astonished young critics with their freshness. Old age? Well it is, after all, the oldest profession, 'Let's Pretend'.

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

The first impressive clown I remember seeing was Popov of the Moscow State Circus, who in 1956, in the vast Belle Vue arena in Manchester, seemed single-handedly to thaw the Cold War – he was the first Soviet clown to perform in the Western world. Our Northern Theatre School class was taken on a special trip. 

The slack wire must be infinitely more difficult to work on than the tightrope, especially if your act depends on looking as if you are in constant danger of falling off or getting clothes entangled. But the great moment was when he suddenly spoke just three words, an English North Country exclamation, in a voice we all heard: 'Ee by gum!' No doubt in London it was 'Cor, blimey!'

My favourite story, my Muscovite readers will be interested to know, concerns one of the workers' clubs in Kutuzovskaya Street. At the age of eighteen, Oleg Popov was called into the director's office of the Moscow Circus School and told he should go and see a clown at the Metro Builders' Club in Kutuzovskaya Street, the director having seen 'a young clown who was very like you only better.'

'I can't go and see him', said Popov.

'And why not?'

'Because it's me', he replied.

* Two brand new additions to the website: a Newman Noggs video compilation and another rare excerpt from Bill Naughton's 1963 radio play, November Day. And over on YouTube you can watch two scenes from R. C. Sherriff's Journey's End, filmed for television in 1988.

QUANTUM LEAPS AND BOUNDS

First a little test: can you match the lines with the titles of the plays in which they are spoken?

1. The boy is plainly innocent. I accept the brief.

2. And it was then that I saw her. Just … just looking at me.

3. Look at this in a new way and a hidden pattern emerges which connects the two sides of the equation in the most extraordinarily beautiful way.

4. I swear … if you existed I'd divorce you.

5. You'll see me then, at last, with other people's eyes; you'll see me just as your daughter does now, as all wholesome folks see women like me.

6. Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann …

7. Cancel and pass on.

a) Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

b) The Dance of Death

c) The Second Mrs Tanqueray

d) Waiting for Godot

e) The Winslow Boy

f) A Disappearing Number

g) The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? 

Answers printed here for easy reference. It's up to you whether you read the blog before deciding on your answers and checking them against this list.

1 = e
2 = g
3 = f
4 = a
5 = c
6 = d
7 = b

 __________________________________________

Albert Einstein, we're told, observed ruefully that he was alone amongst his friends in not entering a competition set in 1920 by the journal Scientific American, which offered a cash prize of $5,000 for the most cogent summary of his Special Theory of Relativity in no more than three thousand words – 'so that a person with no special mathematical training may read it profitably.'* 'Do you know,' said Einstein, 'I don't believe I could do it.'

The great mathematician and physicist used to play in a string quartet at Princeton University. Another member of the group when asked, 'What's Einstein like as a musician?', replied, 'OK. The only thing is – he can't count.'

Lithograph by Emil Orlik, 1928

I have set myself the task of writing an introduction to my book in as near 1,500 words as possible. It attempts an overview, a cogent summary of the theatre as I have known it – 'Theatre in My Lifetime' sounds a bit pompous I know. (Is it even arguable that the developments in theatre have been as important as Einstein's theory?) Crazy perhaps all the same to attempt to summarize even the chunk of theatre I know about first hand in a short chapter. However, one peg to hang things on is what the critic Harold Hobson wrote in 1950, lamenting the dearth of new playwrights:

The span of time between The Second Mrs Tanqueray and The Winslow Boy is theatrically speaking enormous. Our characteristic contemporary drama is in its extreme old age. In its prime its vitality depended on the excitement caused by the new method of realism, which for the first time in many decades made stage characters talk, walk, speak, dress, behave and think like ordinary human beings. 

Punch cartoon showing Mrs Patrick Campbell (the second Mrs Tanqueray) leaping the Hurdle of Convention. Arthur Wing Pinero stands mopping his brow. 

Published 10 June 1893.

When Beckett's tramps waited for Godot in the London of 1955, Harold Hobson welcomed them and wrote about them for seven successive weeks; was it because the revolution in playwriting had been accomplished in the old 'method of realism' by characters who talked, walked, spoke, dressed, behaved and thought like ordinary human beings? I would argue yes – except we had not seen this particular class of ordinary human being behaving anything like this on the stage before.

Waiting for Godot at the Arts Theatre, London, 1955.

(V&A Picture Library)

I remember that first line 'What a dump!' in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? One knew of course, surely everyone knew, either from observation or personal experience, that marriage could be corrosive (Strindberg had written of a corrosive marriage in his play The Dance of Death in 1900). But somehow we had not been permitted to know it, witness it so idiomatically as this, in the very vernacular of our own lives, and in a dramatic entertainment in public. We were learning, publicly, just how extraordinary our ordinary lives could be. 

Uta Hagen in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 

(Billy Rose Theatre Collection)

To parody Hobson, the span of time between Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1962 and Albee's 2002 play The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? is enormous, but it is not a span that suggests our school of drama is in its extreme old age – unless with age has come wisdom. The play reads, even on a bus, like music and one can 'see' the action. It deals with a taboo subject with a light comic touch of breathtaking realism and segues effortlessly from domestic comedy to tragedy of Greek dimensions.

You may wonder how one gets back to Einstein from here. Well on Saturday night I saw a play about mathematics, Complicite’s A Disappearing Number. It's about an Indian genius of maths called Srinivasa Ramanujan and his close collaboration with Cambridge don G. H. Hardy around the time of the First World War. On one, if not most levels, I am no wiser. I still have to face the fact that the little we know about our physical universe is a closed book to me since it can only be understood in terms of mathematics. And yet the play fascinates, partly because of cunning, fluid and imaginative staging, and partly because mathematical geniuses sometimes think, and occasionally talk, but certainly walk, dress and behave like ordinary human beings – like you and me.

Shane Shambhu as Ramanujan and David Annan as Hardy in A Disappearing Number.

Photo by Tristram Kenton.

Taking the play to Hyderabad for the 2010 International Congress of Mathematics was perhaps not quite the coup that luring our military top brass to Kilburn to see twelve plays about Afghanistan in one day was, but the span of time and space covered by these two events, let alone by the total of seven plays I have mentioned, is – as Hobson might put it – 'theatrically speaking enormous', and might go on, who knows, like a run of numbers to infinity. But that is already over 750 words and I have said little about the experience thus far of a theatrical lifetime; have only touched the tip of the theatrical iceberg; no, that's the wrong metaphor – I need an elegant solution, some sort of equation.

______________________________________

Speaking of the quest for brevity and cogency, Harry Graham’s poem of 1909, 'Poetical Economy', includes this verse:

If playwrights would but thus dimin.

The length of time each drama takes,

(The Second Mrs. Tanq. by Pin.

or even Ham., by Shakes.)

We could maintain a watchful att.

When at a Mat. on Wed. or Sat.

* The winner of the Eugene Higgins $5,000 Prize was an Englishman by the name of Lyndon Bolton, a senior examiner at the British Patent Office, London. You can read his essay here and judge for yourselves the lucidity of his summary.

NEW ADDITIONS TO PETH'S STAGING POST

A further word from the editor

As some of you may already be aware, Peth's Staging Post, Edward's official website, has undergone some recent renovation and a veritable Petherbridgean feast awaits the cyber-visitor.

In particular, there is an all-new WIMSEYCALITIES section, an eclectic anthology of prose and verse. Highlights include a master class in the art of the short essay, fashioned as a 'thought-provoking' riposte to Will Self's Free-Thinking lecture; a brilliant pastiche of both Edith Sitwell and Dylan Thomas (with accompanying recordings); and an evocative reflection on the decline and rebirth of the music hall.

There is a fresh selection of audio clips to enjoy, including an exclusive unpublished excerpt from Edward's play Pillar Talk.

Further examples of Edward's art work have been added to the IMAGE GALLERY.

Coupler in The Relapse, National Theatre, 2001. Self-potrait.

And you can preview three new excerpts from Edward's forthcoming book SLIM CHANCES.

For the latest news, be sure to check the homepage news alert, which is regularly updated, or bookmark Edward's News Blog.

Stay tuned for this week's blog, which will be posted shortly.

K.R.

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: