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theatre

All Star Cast, by Naomi Royde-Smith (1936)

A program from the London Palladium, 1936.
A program from the London Palladium, 1936.

This is my contribution to Kaggsy and Simon Thomas’s (Stuck in a Book) #1936club celebration.

#1936Club

If you’re a theater lover like me, All Star Cast is the next best thing to the thrill of seeing a live performance. That’s because it’s about a live theater performance as experienced by both actors and audience.

Its premise is simple: a young theater critic, David Winters, arrives at the Empress Theatre in a taxi with a fellow critic, O’Hara. They’re there to attend the premier of a new play, The Ace of Wands, by the veteran playwright William Renishaw. And over the course of the next 270-some pages, Naomi Royde-Smith takes us through that experience.

We watch the audience dribble in, take their seats, converse with each other, anticipating the curtain’s rise. We follow the action on stage through three acts, hear the dialogue, watch the actors come and go, observe the sets and the use of props, feel the tension grow as it comes to seem as if the wrong person is going to be sent up for murder, sense the tragic relief as the right person arrives at the decision to admit guilt. And then, after the cast takes their bows, we join the slow stream climbing the stairs to the lobby, sharing reflections on the performance.

Fin.

When All Star Cast was first published, more than a few reviewers expressed surprise that no one had ever come up with the idea before. It’s not the same thing as reading a script. Royde-Smith includes all, or virtually all, the dialogue, but instead of stage instructions to the director and cast, she describes the action as seen by the audience — in particularly, by David Winters, who, though new to the job of critic, is an experienced and keen-eyed theater-goer.

An action, for example, as simple as a character picking up a small table lamp and placing it near another character is more than it seems:

“Queer bit of business with the lamp,” whispered the little man, as Rawlinson left the stage, “I wonder what it has been done for.”

“I wonder,” murmured David, not attempting to express his own recognition of the change in lighting effected by this simple and obvious gesture. The pillar of white light between the still unclosed doors in the centre of the background now showed faint and grey like the plinth of some vague funereal monument. The light from the shaded lamp on the ground made a round pool on the rug by the chesterfield, and threw a diffused circular glow upwards, changing the shadows of the room.

Is this something in the script or something the director has added? Something incidental or intentional?

Well of course, in a good performance, as this one seems to be, nothing is incidental, and a few pages later, we see that the lamp allows the murderer — and the audience — to see a crucial prop: a tarot card, the Ace of Wands. The Ace of Wands shows a hand holding a staff emerging from a cloud. Right-side up, it signals promise, a new opportunity; reversed, it warns of misfortune to come. Which way the card is read, and when and to whom the card appears, becomes instrumental to the plot twists that follow the murder in Act One.

We, like the audience, are surprised that the victim is the difficult Russian wife, played by Vera Paley, “famous for wearing to-day what every fashionable woman would be trying to wear next week.” It is she who enjoys the play’s star entrance:

Critics had been known to complain that, whether she played Rosalind or the Second Mrs. Tanqueray, she was never anyone but Vera Paley; but the salvo of applause with which she was greeted from the stalls as well as from the more discriminating parts of the house showed that she held a wide public under some kind of spell. She paused, holding the door open with her left hand, outstretched at full arm’s length behind her, so that the player with whom she was talking as she entered was hidden from the audience. Without bowing or losing her pose, she smiled as the applause increased in volume. She let the play cease while she, as Vera Paley, took her reception.

Within the next twenty minutes, she will be lying dead on stage, an antique Indian dagger through her heart.

“But darling,” David overhears a woman saying as the audience files toward the bar at the interval,

“Vera Paley can’t be killed in the first scene of Act I. She’s the leading lady.”

“Oh! So you think she’ll recover — or come back as a ghost and haunt them all?”

“Recover — ofcourse. Vera’d never do any highbrow spookery stuff. She’ll be ill in the most marvellous négligé — and then there’ll be a perfectly terrific love scene…”

Instead, as David learns from another critic at the next interval, Vera Paley is paying a favor to the producer and will be gone by the end of the first week to start rehearsals for a showpiece of her own.

This is just what makes All Star Cast so fun. You get to experience not just the play but all the trappings and all the threads that come together to weave a unique evening at the theater.

Ernest Milton and Naomi Royde-Smith.
Ernest Milton and Naomi Royde-Smith.

Naomi Royde-Smith knew her subject from all angles. She’d been a theater critic herself through much of the 1920s and had written several plays that were produced in London’s West End. Her husband, Ernest Milton, was an actor, a stalwart of the Old Vic’s company for over twenty years. And, as she conveys so effectively in her account of The Ace of Wands’s opening night, she understood just how complex were the sensations and interactions of a night at the theater:

It was difficult enough to form an opinion on a play, seen for the first time, that would not cry to be revised or restated when once you saw your own words in print. You could go back, re-read, check, verify when reviewing a book: but a play acted itself without repeating any passage, noteworthy or obscure, and while it told its tale, demanded attention on three counts. Its appeal was too complicated. You were bound to miss some point, while under the impression made by another, in a scene which you had to see, to watch and to hear in one and the same unrelenting minute. You had to pass judgment on playwright, players, scenic artist and producer at one sitting, while their combined work was set in movement before your eyes and made its continuous appeal to your ears as well.

“How flat and stale these journalistic phrases were in comparison with the state of mind in which the play had actually left him!” David Winters despairs. And it’s a tribute to Naomi Royde-Smith’s skill that All Star Cast succeeds so well in putting us into that state of mind — and longing for the chance to return to a theater ourselves.

All Star Cast is fairly rare, but luckily it’s available online from the Internet Archive: Link.

All Star Cast, by Naomi Royde-Smith
London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1936

Actors and Directors: Two Anecdotes from Letters from an Actor, by William Redfield (1967)

Ralph Richardson and Bail Dean
Ralph Richardson and Bail Dean

Ralph Richardson and Basil Dean

Some thirty years ago, Richardson was rehearsing a play directed by Basil Dean. The latter was the last of the old-time directors on the British side of the Atlantic. By “old-time,” I mean abusive, cruel, sarcastic, and contemptuous of actors. His American equivalent, albeit far younger, would be Jed Harris. Mr. Harris, however, has changed. So far as I know, Mr. Dean never did. Richardson was an important actor at the time but not yet a film star nor one of the classic theatre’s leading lights. In this particular production, it had been decided to open “cold,” which means no tour of the provinces and no previews before the opening performance. Throughout the rehearsal period. Dean was nasty and autocratic with most of his actors, but left Richardson strictly alone. In fact, practically no conversation, pleasant or otherwise, passed between them. “Good morning, Mr. Richardson”; “Good morning, Mr. Dean”; “Good night, Mr. Richardson”; “Good night, Mr. Dean” was about the long and short of it. The night before the play opened, the cast performed a dress rehearsal with only Basil Dean out front. He stopped the performance quite often, either to change entrances and exits, lighting and cues for the stage manager, or merely to abuse the skills and talent of one actor or another. Late in the evening — midnight or thereabouts — Richardson made an exit which Dean considered important. He stopped the performance and asked the stage manager to bring Mr. Richardson back on stage. A moment later, Richardson stood soberly before the footlights.

Dean rose from his seat and ambled down the center aisle. When he reached the first row, he spoke softly. “Mr. Richardson,” he said, “do you think it possible that at some moment between now and tomorrow evening you could learn to leave the stage like a gentleman?”

Richardson gazed blandly back at his director and then all but murmured, “Yes. I believe I could.” He thereupon turned away, left the stage, continued on past the wings, the dressing rooms, the stage doorman, the alleyway, took a taxi for the railroad station, a train to his country home, told his wife what had taken place, instructed her not to call him to the phone for any purpose, and never opened in the play. For several days, his telephone rang hourly, but only Mrs. Richardson heard the pleadings, cajolements, blandishments, and inducements offered by producers, playwright, and fellow actors. It would seem perhaps cruel to deprive one’s innocent colleagues of employment, but
if the play had been really good they would have gotten someone else. In any case, they didn’t. The play closed before it opened, and Dean’s directorial charisma sustained a smarting blow. Richardson—single-handed—caused what amounted to a silent revolution in the treatment of English actors by directors.

George Stevens and Method Acting

Only at the Actors Studio (granted its drawbacks and parochialism) can the actor ask question on question with impunity. Only there can he seriously explore the mysteries of his craft without being looked on as a neurotic pariah…. [T]he Studio remains a house of questions and stands, therefore, as an oasis in the lip-cracking desert of pay your dues and take your orders and grab the money and run for the cat-house…. I cannot say that I have stopped asking questions, but I have certainly stopped believing that honesty is the best policy. Because it isn’t. Not when directors are kings.

Good directors understand all this, of course, though they don’t often say so out loud. Good film directors understand exactly the reverse, and they are quite correct. During the filming of The Greatest Story Ever Told, George Stevens (a really excellent film director) was queried by an actor as to “motivation.” “Young man,” he said, “while you were resting yesterday, I went up in those hills over there and I shot a lot of sequences with a herd of cattle. Not one of those cattle asked me a question about motivation and, believe you me, they did just fine.”

Letters from an Actor, by William Redfield (1967)

In 1964, Sir John Gielgud convinced Richard Burton to star in a Broadway production of Hamlet. Still smoking hot from his big-screen romance with Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra, Burton was looking to solidify his street cred as a serious actor after a few Hollywood duds. Gielgud’s motivation is a little less clear, as gradually becomes clear to the rest of the cast and crew.

In any case, they shook hands and with Alex Cohen as producer, Gielgud began assembling a stellar cast: Hume Cronyn as Polonius, Alfred Drake as Claudius, a young John Cullum as Laertes, and an impressive list of veteran character actors such as Barnard Hughes, George Voskovec, Eileen Herlie, Kit Culkin (father of Macaulay et al.), and Linda Marsh. As Guildenstern, he picked William Redfield. Though just 37 at the time, Redfield already had thirty years’ experience in radio, TV, film, and theatre.

Gielgud took the cast up to Toronto in late January 1964 to begin rehearsals. Redfield began providing a running account of the process through a series of letters to his friend, Bob Mills, back in New York, and these are the letters collected in Letters from an Actor. It was nearly a month into rehearsals before Redfield hit his stride, moving from notes scratched on cocktail napkins to what eventually became at-times epic narratives of the daily/nightly goings-on on and off stage.

From the very beginning, there was a certain tension — mostly artistic — that pervaded the production. Gielgud was the epitome of the subtle and refined school of acting, perhaps the great master of underplay. And by this point, he had decades of Hamlet under this belt. As Redfield notes, “He remembers, bone-wisely, all the forty-plus years of playing Shakespearean roles; of directing his fellow actors in those roles; of observing Ralph Richardson rehearsing and playing this part, Laurence Olivier that one … and on through every degree of accomplishment and competence.”

Burton, on the other hand, was part of the postwar, naturalistic school of British actors and possessed of a sometimes volcanic temperament. Burton was direct. “As a tank is direct. Throw what mortar you will, a tank keeps coming until it is annihilated. I can imagine him fighting with a severe head wound,” writes Redfield. “I can picture him with an arm chopped off fighting fiercely with what remains.”

The two men almost never exchanged angry words over the production. Gielgud was far too ephemeral for that. On top of his feather touch as a director, he also chose to take set and costume to an understated extreme. The set was nothing but a barest collection of furniture and towering abstract planes painted black. Instead of period costume, the actors appeared in street clothes. “Since he is dealing with a great play and an electric star,” Redfield surmises, “he gambles that the rest of us can be efficient enough to meet our challenges without the help of fur and flugelhorns; that we can be kings without crowns, soldiers without epaulets.” In Redfield’s case, Guildenstern looks as if he could have strolled in from an insurance office down the street.

If there was anything Gielgud stressed, it was verbal delivery. He knew the play backwards and forwards and would hone in on the smallest things in an actor’s lines. “Not ‘the’ — ‘the‘” he stresses to Redfield at one point. This drives Redfield nuts, for all his admiration for Gielgud, because at the same time he continues to ignore the actor’s plea that Burton is completely mangling the speech following the the line. After one performance during the play’s preview run in Boston, he tells Phil Coolidge, who plays the Captain, “Coolidge, it’s a charming
performance, but get yourself a hat. I couldn’t tell you why, but you’re nothing without a hat.” When the play finally opened on Broadway, Peggy Cass (raise your hand if you know her name from To Tell the Truth) offered Redfield a summary of the situation: “No direction for this show. Everyone was left to strike out on his own. Hume Cronyn got a triple.”

William Redfield was perhaps the ideal reporter for this beat. He had a big enough part to be in the midst of much of the action on stage and a small enough one to have plenty of time to observe. Indeed he’d realized early in his career that he’d never be a star. When he was 17, a friend told him, “You do not have a star’s temperament. You are not a killer. A star must be a killer. You will be one of the best actors in the country but you will never be a star no matter how many times you are billed above the title.”

He also had a healthy respect for just how tough the business of acting is:

The theatre is more ruthless than a factory, more expensive than a newspaper, and more closely watched than a shoe-shine boy. The theatre’s product is fearfully expensive; the theatre’s guarantee of employment is nil; the theatre’s competition is savage; the theatre’s employer’s are gamblers with the odds a good eight to one against them. Do you think the actors don’t know this? In fact, you will not meet a more tough-gutted and realistic group of people professionally speaking during your lifetime than actors. Why? Because when a play fails, Armaggedon is upon us. It even costs money to cart the scenery away.

Show me a working actor and I will show you a man with a cement stomach.

One reason the production has gone down in history is that it was perhaps the earliest example of the kind of stage-to-screen bridges one now sees in things like streamed performances from the Met. A group of television producers approached Alex Cohen and convinced him to allow a live performance to be filmed in a new process called “Electronovision.” The resulting “Theatrofilm” was shown in thousands of movie theaters around the U.S. and grossed a healthy $4,000,000. You can see it yourself on YouTube. But none of the profits benefited the actors. Redfield writes bitterly, “The financial details of this venture involved a mass screwing of the acting company so excruciatingly delicious that only a separate letter could do the tale justice.”

Sadly, Letters from an Actor was William Redfield’s only venture into print, aside from a collaboration with his friend, Wally Cox, on Mr. Peepers: A Sort of Novel (1955), a spin-off from Cox’s television series of the same name. He carried on with a busy career as a character actor until dying of leukemia at the age of 49 in 1976. You can get a small but superb example of his work in this clip from Elaine May’s 1971 film, A New Leaf, in which he tries to tell Walter Matthau’s character he’s broke:

You can find electronic formats of Letters from an Actor on the Open Library: Link.

Letters from an Actor, by William Redfield
New York City: Viking, 1967