A survey of homosexuality in the theatre

Encore magazine cover 001Six years before homosexual acts between consenting adults were legalised Encore, the ‘little magazine’ devoted to contemporary theatre, published in Jan-Feb 1961, a perceptive item by ‘Roger Gellert’ entitled ‘A Survey of the Treatment of the Homosexual in some plays’. Gellert was the pseudonym of the one-time Third Programme announcer John Holmstrom, who left the BBC to become a playwright and theatre critic, only to return as an announcer on Radio Three and a contributor to Test Match Special.

Encorewas just the sort of publication that you might expect to find such a radical item. It advertised itself as ‘ the voice of vital theatre ‘ and was edited by Clive Goodwin (1932 – 78 ), who in the previous year  had also published essays on Arden, Pinter, Arthur Miller, Ionesco, Wesker, Negro Theatre and ‘ Billy Liar’. Goodwin, incidentally, was an actor and writer who was married for a short while to the tragic pioneer of Pop art, Pauline Boty.

Gellert’s approach to a subject that was still a ‘ problem ‘ for theatregoers in Western culture was to emphasise that to the ‘ bisexual ‘ Shakespeare, to Marlowe and the Restoration dramatists, homosexuality was regarded as something to be accepted and laughed at, rather than condemned as immoral. Then, after two hundred or more years of ‘ silence’ on the subject, the whole issue, according to Gellert, was resurrected with the staging of Mordaunt Shairp’s play of 1933, The Green Bay Tree, in which the audience is invited to laugh once more, this time at the extraordinary camp utterances of the gay protagonist, Mr Dulcimer, a sort of aesthete of the Oscar Wilde type, who grooms an innocent  boy for his own amusement , but is shot dead as punishment for his decadence.

As Gellert argues, The Green Bay Treeis a shallow ‘entertainment ‘rather than a serious comment on the plight of homosexuals in society. That more sympathetic attitude emerged in the post war years with such plays as William Douglas Home’s Now, Barabbas, in which a rather pathetic ex-schoolmaster serving time for sex crimes pesters a young prisoner. Gellert also credits Arthur Miller’s View from the Bridge,Philip King’s Serious Charge, Lilian Hellman’s The Children’s Hourand Robert Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy, for airing serious issues around homo sexuality, though he accuses the latter of doing so at a ‘ very shallow level’. Continue reading →

Laurence Olivier’s Stage Fright

Laurence_Olivier_with_Joan_Plowright_1960

Laurence Olivier_with Joan_Plowright in ‘The Entertainer’

Sorting papers recently I found an EPCA Newsletter (European Personal Constructs Association - PC Psychology deals with personality and attitude change) from 1998.  It had a book review quoting Laurence Olivier on his stage fright.

"With each succeeding minute,  it became less possible to resist the terror.  My cue came, and I went in to that stage where I knew with grim certainty I would not be capable of remaining more than a few minutes ...".

The book itself  The Person Behind the Mask: a Guide to Performing Arts Psychology  (London, Ablex 1997)  was written by Linda H. Hamilton.  She had been a ballet dancer from age 8 to 26, then became a Clinical Psychologist.  Her book cites research conducted over one year at the University of California's Health Program for Performing Artists, when 25% of patients had psychological problems including "severe anxiety and/or depression, personality disorders somataform disorders, psychoses and suicidal behaviour (p84)".  The reviewer goes on to say that the book "deals in some detail with the characteristic problems of public self-display e.g. unrealistic weight requirements, debilitating injuries which hamper performance or prevent it altogether, and stage fright and points out that it is time the professions themselves woke up to the need to pay attention to their own occupational realities".

A month in the life of a RADA student in 1934: The journal of Nancy Seabrooke

 

Diary of Miss Seabrooke 1934 001Nancy Clara Seabrooke (1914 – 1998) does not figure hugely in the history of the British theatre and TV. Her biggest claim to fame was  being the most patient understudy in the annals of British theatre– shadowing the role of ‘Mrs Boyle’  in Agatha Christie’s record-breaking Mousetrapfor 15 years (6,240 performances), and actually appearing as her for a fraction of these performances, before retiring in 1994. On TV she was a bit part player, appearing in single episodes of Danger Man, The Grove Family, Maigret and  No Hiding Place. Double Exit(1950) was her first TV movie. She was Deputy Stage Manager of the play ‘The Irrregular Verb to Love’ (1961), which starred fellow RADA student Joan Greenwood. There is no record of any appearance by Seabrooke on the silver screen.

 

Her journal, which covers the period April 18thto May 19th1934 while she was a twenty-year-old final year student at RADA, occupies the whole of a slim exercise book, and is written in a large, round, artistic hand in fountain pen and pencil. At the outset Seabrooke confesses that she had decided to begin it after acquiring a Victorian example in a second–hand shop. She says nothing about whether she plans to continue her journal well beyond the month. For all we know, it may have been part of a series, though no evidence of this has come to light.

 

At the time in which she began her journal Seabrooke was commuting to London from her home not far from the small village of Newdigate, south of Dorking, Surrey, and the events she describes are concerned as much with her home life in the country as they are with her other, more glamorous,  existence as a RADA student. Several things emerge from the journal. She seems to have been fascinated by Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, particularly Ben Jonson and John Webster (she even named her cats Beaumont and Fletcher), was an avid playgoer in London, notably at The Old Vic, and was in awe of many leading actors, especially John Geilgud, to whom she writes a fan letter. She also seems to have been the editor ( or assistant editor ) of the news-sheet The Rada News  and was writing a ‘ satire ‘ and some ’sonnets’. Having at the outset vowed that she would steer away from introspection, she devotes a good deal of her journal to tormenting herself over a certain Joseph, on whom she clearly had a crush, although the affection seems to have been one-way. Continue reading →

Applying for the Garrick Club 1954

IMG_5579Found among the papers of Ifan Kyrle Fletcher writer, expert on the history of theatre and bookseller, a bunch of correspondence from 1954 relating to his application for membership of the London club, the Garrick. One member writes that he has just posted his proposal and reminds him to get the ‘seconder’s letter from Carter as soon as convenient.’ Another writes that he is delighted to write to the Commissioner of the Garrick and also to arrange for his name to be placed in IFK’s page in the candidate’s book. Another letter says that Carter (John) is in America and  ‘his name will be entered as your seconder by proxy as long as he writes the necessary letter.’   One correspondent – St.Vincent Troubridge writes: ‘I rather fear the tendency by publisher members to knife a bookseller. Now this voodoo seems to have been lifted by the recent election of Peter Murray Hill, so I have no doubt you will now balloon in. In my view you have been wise to wait a little and let someone else break what ice there may have been about.’ Are ‘balloon’ and ‘knife’  still current clubland jargon?  Another member notes:

I hope you’re not expecting to find a very large number of theatrical members, because, if so, you may be disappointed…about a third of the total are publishers, another third are connected with the law, while the remaining third covers all the arts, other professions and riff-raff like myself. Incidentally lawyers and barristers are, I find, much more interesting people than actors. In the main the latter have only one topic of conversation, namely themselves. Today you have nine names to your credit which is a good start. Would you like to lunch with me one day to meet more members for greater support?

Things change slowly in London’s clubland, so many of these procedures may still be in place. Not sure if IFK ever became a member. He certainly would have known more about the actor David Garrick (after whom the club was named) than almost any member. In 1938 he issued a catalogue devoted to ‘Garrickana’  commemorating the 160th anniversary of Garrick’s death…

John Osborne observed in 1959

Reading Which of Us Two? The Story of a Love Affair (Viking, London 1990).It is the record of a 'youthful, illicit and intense' relationship between John Tasker (1933 – 1988) the theatre director and Colin Spencer (born 1933) artist and writer. Spencer uses a  collection of letters the lovers wrote to each other (his were returned after John Tasker's death) and considers the relationship and why he 'murdered its future'. Spencer makes acute and amusing comments on literary figures including John Osborne (whose library we bought last year). This entry was starred by Osborne in his copy:

17.iii. 59. Yesterday I began drawing the great Mr Osborne, tall, thin, spectral: in black skin-tight trousers that showed a cute bottom and a huge lunch. And camp, my dear – not 'arf.  And the musical, my dear, cor that's a queer dish too, everybody changes their sex halfway through and deliciously lovely Adrienne Corri grows hair on her chest. Most peculiar: he was moving about so much, it's only the second week of rehearsals...though I did some lightning things with a brush, it just won't do so I'm going back after Easter and try some more. He has a curiously camp voice and he appears to stare at one with his teeth...

Colin Spencer says of this letter:

The John Osborne musical was of course The World of Paul Slickey, soon to become the only commercial failure of his early years. [We]admired Look Back in Anger, our generation felt that Osborne encapsulated the rage we all felt over the limitations of the British theatre.Yet like so much of the later Osborne the play now seems an hysterical diatribe, the characters thin and invalid,the plot negligible..it was brilliant journalism.. masquerading as theatre.