GERALDINE MCEWAN, 1932-2015

Photo by Michael Ward, 1962

Of course Radio 4 emphasized that she was ‘best known’ for her Miss Marple on televsion, but seasoned theatregoers will remember Geraldine McEwan for her earlier bravura comic theatre performances. I missed a later one of these, her award-winning Lady Wishfort in Congreve’s The Way of the World in the Lyttelton Theatre, but I remember a clip of her big scene, shown at an awards ceremony, which seemed to extend her to new heights of physical clowning.

I also remember, years before that, a conversation in which we were bemoaning a punishing peak in the NT workload, beginning with a week on tour of eight performances at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen in which Geraldine had been playing Millamant in The Way of the World and ended the week with four performances as the lead (Raymonde Chandebise) in Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear, whilst rehearsing some cast changes. The Sunday was spent in an endless slow train down to London, and we were in costume by 10.30 on the Monday morning on the Old Vic stage, dress-rehearsing the precision machine work that French farce is. Geraldine was always cool and professional with the most gentle voice and manner, but she permitted herself to say quietly: ‘This relentless last week I’ve found myself resenting the sound of the audience’s laughter.’ But she was a master at eliciting it.

A Flea in Her Ear. L to R. Geraldine McEwan, John Stride,
Maggie Riley, EP, Graham Crowden (far right)
Photo by Zoe Dominic

Here are some passage recalling her days at the NT from my book ...

The National staged an experimental season at the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre, in which the NT’s resident expert in French farce and Restoration Comedy acting, as well as Jacobean tragedy, Geraldine McEwan, played a cockney lavatory attendant in Rites, a one-act play by Maureen Duffy loosely based on Euripides’ Bacchae, set in a ladies’ public convenience and commissioned and directed by Lady Olivier! I remember the comic effect as a solemn procession of stagehands carried on lavatory seats to set the scene.

* * * * * *

The three stars [of Armstrong’s Last Goodnight] – Stephens, Finney and Geraldine McEwan – were properly at the centre, and they all gave epic theatre grit and the ‘real drive’ of the kind that I have just read Jack Lambert admiring Brecht for, immediately after his death in 1956, ‘his ability to drive actors to real attack.’ There seemed to be an idea that in losing the ‘ham’ of the nineteenth century and embracing, if that is the word, the so-called ‘throwaway’ naturalism of the West End box-set play, English actors, with a few great exceptions, were in danger of being incapable of the kind of epic realism of the Berliner. But they didn’t need to be driven – the vast reaches of the Chichester stage and the even vaster reaches of that splayed auditorium, demand real drive, and the curious archaisms of Arden’s script begged to be spouted, not in poetic arches of theatrical rhetoric, but in direct hammer blows and with incisive scythe swipes and spitted out staccato, rapid-fire, accompanied often by physical swagger, or from Geraldine, diamond-sharp poise.

* * * * * *

Geraldine at a rehearsal one day of A Flea in Her Ear: a noisy bit in the last act where she was remonstrating with the hotel porter double, believing him to be her returned and inebriated husband (why were we rehearsing? We often were). Geraldine asked Maggie Riley and me, who were standing on either side of her and had a ‘no certainly not’ in concert together, to make it ‘a little bit untidy’. Her next thing was to do a steadying gesture to us, as in ‘I’ll deal with this’ walk down stage to her husband and say to the befuddled Hotel Porter very quietly: ‘Now we’ve had quite enough of this’. That night, the laugh on that simple line (always big) was more or less doubled. She always said that she had been at sea in the first rehearsals until Jacques Charon gave her some agitated off-stage dialogue to precede her first entrance. This cracked her problem setting the right pace and mood and was the key to her performance.

Rehearsing A Flea in Her Ear:
EP and Geraldine McEwan with director Jacques Charon
Photo by Chris Arthur

* * * * * *

Our brilliant Mrs Malaprop [in The Rivals] was Geraldine McEwan, her cut-glass Kensington with that curious bass undertow when she needed it (I can still hear her using it with angst for ‘This is hell’ in The Dance of Death), its occasional use abetted her in achieving the perfect comic delivery for the famous Malapropisms.

WINTER LIGHT

Light is therefore colour, and shadow the privation of it by the Removal of these rays of colour or subduction of power and throughout nature these rays aer to be found in the ... in the ruling principles of diurnal variations, the gray dawn, the yellow morning, golden sun rise and red departing ray in ever changing combination; these are the pure combinations of Aerial colour.

J. M. W. Turner, Academy lecture 1818 

A short film conceived the evening Tom Stoppard’s new play, The Hard Problem, premiered at the National Theatre:

Winter Nocturne, NW3
Photo by EP

CHURCHILL'S FINAL JOURNEY

Painting is a companion with whom one may walk a great part of life’s journey. 

Winston Churchill, Painting as a Pastime 

Photo by Chris Arthur

Less than three weeks after T. S. Eliot’s death, another defining figure of the twentieth century, Sir Winston Churchill, died on 24 January 1965. (The two men, incidentally, shared a love of the Marx Brothers). Churchill’s state funeral six days later, the largest in world history up to that point, ended with the coffin being carried up the Thames by launch from Tower Pier to the Festival Hall Pier. From nearby Waterloo Station a train took the body to its final resting place in Bladon, Oxfordshire. At the time I was rehearsing the role of Conrade in Franco Zeffirelli’s NT production of Much Ado About Nothing at the Old Vic. I reprise here a passage from Slim Chances, with additions:

At lunchtime one bitter cold day, Neil Fitzpatrick and I left the warmth of Franco’s Messina for the South Bank, just in front of the Festival Hall where we found a silent crowd, already several deep, lining the riverside and waiting. The whole of Waterloo Bridge was lined with people, and the embankment on the north side; there were no sounds of traffic. After some time, the crowd around us stirred slightly and then, for a moment, we glimpsed the Union Jack draped over Churchill’s coffin as the barge, which had carried him down the Thames to St Paul’s, approached.

Coward photographed by Yousuf Karsh, 1943

We didn’t know that Noël Coward and his party, shedding ‘proud tears’, had moved from the television set they had been watching since 9.30 a.m. to the window of his Savoy Hotel sitting room directly opposite us, to see this moment of the barge arriving on its progress to Waterloo Station. Coward had dined with Churchill during the war on more than one occasion, including 3rd May 1945, when the complete surrender of Germany was imminent. He recalled in Future Indefinite: ‘There were only four of us: Juliet [Duff], Venetia Montagu, Winston Churchill and myself. The Prime Minister was at his most benign, and suddenly, towards the end of dinner, looking across the table at the man who had carried England through her dark years, I felt an upsurge of gratitude that melted into hero worship … Emotion submerged us and without exchanging a word, as simultaneously as though we had carefully rehearsed it, the three of us rose to our feet and drank Mr Churchill’s health.’ One wonders why he wasn’t among the mourners in St Paul’s rather than watching the ceremony on telly at the Savoy. 

We were told later by the stage manager, who had accompanied Franco to the station to watch from there, that Franco had somehow managed to burst onto the platform and follow the train down the platform as it left. Rehearsal was late in re-starting. Years later Ian Mckellen told me that he had had the morning off and watched the procession on its way to St Paul’s and that, comparatively speaking, a holiday atmosphere prevailed.

The coffin is borne along Festival Pier against
the towering, grey backdrop of the Houses of
Parliament. Illustrated London News

Churchill’s funeral barge, of course, passed close by the site of the National Theatre’s future home (still twelve years away). At a banquet given in honour of Ellen Terry on 17 June 1906 at the Hotel Cecil (which stood on the Thames Embankment and was even larger than the Savoy), Churchill, then Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, said in his address:

Let us think how much money can always be easily obtained for any purposes involving the destruction of life and property; let us think with what excitement and interest we witness the construction or launching of a Dreadnought. What a pity it is that some measure of this interest cannot be turned in the direction of the launching, say, of a National Theatre.

But there would be two world wars before a National Theatre Act, establishing the principle of government financial support for the idea, was passed under Clement Attlee’s Labour government. And a Cold War was in full swing by the time the idea was finally realized in October 1963 (almost the same week that Harold Macmillan resigned in the wake of the Profumo Affair).

Churchill was posthumously implicated in one of the NT’s biggest controversies, the cancellation of the premiere in 1967 of Rolf Hochhuth’s Soldiers, which alleged that Churchill was responsible for the death of the Polish Prime Minister, General Władysław Sikorski.

Portrait of Churchill by former West
Hampsteadite Walter Sickert, 1927

Much less controversially, in an Eton bookshop a few summers ago, I chanced upon a copy of Churchill’s rather magnificent little volume Painting as a Pastime, which Roy Jenkins described as ‘draughts of clear water’. Painting is more of a full-time job for me at the moment as I race against time and the winter light to finish my submission for this year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

T. S. ELIOT IN NW6

For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.

T. S.  Eliot, ‘The Dry Salvages’, Four Quartets 

Last Sunday, 4^th January, marked the 50^th anniversary of T. S. Eliot’s death. Kathleen and I have produced a little film about Eliot’s time as a resident of Compayne Gardens, West Hampstead during the First World War. It touches tangentially on the life of Mina Loy, the woman known as the ‘forgotten Modernist’, who grew up in Compayne Gardens.

The film also features a portrait of Eliot and some Eliotesque London street scenes by yet another former resident of West Hampstead, photographer Bill Brandt, an important social documentarian of twentieth-century British life.

Portrait of T. S. Eliot by Cecil Beaton, 1956.
Beaton’s ‘Aunt Jesse’, who was married to the Bolvian Consul-General,
lived at 74 Compayne Gardens throughout his Edwardian childhood.

TWELFTH NIGHT

On these magic shores children at play are for ever beaching their coracles. We too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the surf ...

J. M. Barrie

In Slim Chances, describing the finely honed simplicity, the silent eloquence necessary to play Beckett’s Krapp, I wrote:

The discipline of doing no more than is set down for one to do, as Hamlet advised the clowns. I once saw the great Russian clown Slava and was amazed by the magnetic power he had over a big audience in the slow, quiet passages of his show; it was full of spectacular effects, but, oh, the moments where he paused and seemed only to exist on the minutely eventful journey from one ‘blank’ space to another!

Photo by EP

Last night I had the privilege of seeing Slava’s Snowshow on the Southbank, a truly magical Twelfth Night. The show was fresh as new and once again miniature minimalism on a grand scale.

Photo by EP

Photo by EP

Wishing you a magical New Year!

Stay tuned for a new short film in commemoration of the 50^th anniversary of T. S. Eliot’s death.

DAVID RYALL, 1935-2014

Today I turned up the notes I had written after my visit to Bille Whitelaw at Denville Hall and found David Ryall’s name too. David had played a small part in Trelawny of the ‘Wells’, I recall.

Proudly, Billie showed me her room. They’ve built a fine new extension since I was last there in the 80s and the rooms are spacious with en suite shower rooms and Billie particularly enjoys her view of the garden. Amongst her pictures I noticed a series of photographic studies of her thirty-eight-year-old son when he was about nine, a photograph of ‘Sam’ of course, who is always photogenic, and old posters of Trelawny of the ‘Wells’ –‘You must have contributed to them; the company gave them to me when I left’. Yes, faintly I remember. When I left, after six years – it was a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern night I remember – there was no ceremony of any kind, except that some bunches of violets were thrown at my feet from the gallery (I pressed and framed them with their note and kept them for quite a few years – who threw them, I still wonder). David Ryall, who’d understudied me for the three years plus I’d played the part, came into the dressing room at the last minute and presented me with half a bottle of whisky, the result of a quick whip-round.

So on that day at Denville Hall, as well as talking with the woman who had danced for Diaghilev and Fred Astaire [Wendy Toye], I talked with the woman who had walked down the Boulevard with Samuel Beckett; as we had stood amongst the throng round the table of cakes and savouries, she had suddenly spoken to me the opening chunk of Not I in a hushed breathless monotone whisper with ‘no acting’ as Sam had wanted it, but it had its own special music.

I have a longish letter David wrote to me ten years ago. It was written on stage at Wyndham’s Theatre during a performance of Michael Frayn’s Democracy when David had a long period as one of several politicians, sitting upstage and working at a desk as I remember. He was very convincing in the part, and no doubt on the night he wrote to me he seemed to be addressing a constituent – which, in a way, he was.

He had joined Olivier’s National Theatre company just a year after me. He took over from Frank Wylie the role of Pedro de Candia in The Royal Hunt of the Sun and we appeared together in Strindberg’s Miss Julie as part of the Chichester season of 65. On the NT tour of Canada for Expo 67, where we performed Feydeau’s A Flea in her Ear, he begged me to accompany him by train – as he loathed flying – from Winnipeg, through the Rockies at dead of night (so we never saw them), to the West Coast. He remained grateful that we had shared that long, tedious journey.

Laurence Olivier with David Ryall in a 1966 rehearsal for A Flea in Her Ear.
Photo by Chris Arthur 

We last appeared on stage together in 1998, on another North American tour, in Matthew Warchus’s production of Hamlet for the RSC when he played Polonius and I doubled the roles of the Ghost and Player King. I remember a particularly moving matinee in Brooklyn to a tough audience of local kids. David’s Polonius was shot, not stabbed, through the arras in our production. One would have thought the shootings every day in the streets of Brooklyn and every hour on US television might have desensitized our teenage audience. No. A single boy’s voice called out: ‘F**k – he shot him!’ and you could still have heard a pin drop.

Alex Jennings (fourth from left left) as Hamlet; EP (centre);
David Ryall (third from right). Photo by Donald Cooper

I heard too late, some months ago, that David had done a run of King Lear in a fringe production at the Cockpit Theatre, bravely reading much of the part as he had recently undergone chemotherapy and his memory was defective. Touchingly his younger daughter Charlie played Cordelia.

As Lear at the Cockpit in March 2014

A THRILL OF HOPE

Then suddenly lights began to appear along the German parapet, which were evidently makeshift Christmas trees, adorned with lighted candles, which burnt steadily in the still, frosty air. 

Rifleman Graham Williams, of the 5th London Rifle Brigade

A Merry Christmas to You All!

Photo by EP