Beatrix Leahmann plays, radio plays and voice over 1950s

All dates taken from the Time digital archive


Wednesday, Oct 18, 1950;
Fortune theatre, later Camberwell Palace, The Lady with the lamp, play for school children for the LCC Education committee

Monday, Mar 05, 1951;
Embassy Theatre – Thunder Rock (week of new plays)

Wednesday, Jun 13, 1951
Embassy Theatre – Ghosts by Ibsen
He [Walter Scott] works on a scale so big that Miss Beatrix Lehmann’s Mrs Alving shrinks to the size of a carving on a cherry stone.

Friday, Jun 15, 1951 Tuesday, Jun 19, 1951 Friday, Jun 22, 1951; (last week)
Embassy Theatre – Ghosts by Ibsen – ad

Monday, Oct 08, 1951
The day’s mischief by Miss Lesley Storm Miss Beatrix Lehmann included in cast list

Monday, Nov 26, 1951
Duke of York - The day’s mischief from Dec 11 Miss Beatrix Lehmann listed last among principal players

Monday, Dec 10, 195
Duke of York – The day’s mischief – opens tomorrow – Miss Beatrix Lehmann listed 2nd

Wednesday, Dec 12, 1951
Duke of York’s Theatre – The day’s mischief by Lesley Storm – review
Follow up to success of Black chiffon “with another rattling good specimen of modern melodrama… the dialogue runs so smoothly it is so neatly expressive …”
Schoolmaster and a pupil who has a crush on him
Miss Beatrix Lehmann is with extreme plausibility the worse “case” of the lot, having been driven by disappointment in love into a malevolent insanity”.

Monday, Nov 03, 1952
The devil is a woman – Mexian film MBL did the dubbing of the main character

Monday, Feb 23, 1953;
The Father – Strindber at the Arts Theatre (revival)
Miss Beatrix Lehmann will be the wife of Mr Lawson’s Captain.

Friday, Feb 27, 1953;
Arts Theatre – The Father by August Strindberg new version by Max Faber.- review with photo of Beatrix
Miss Lehmann makes a terrifying figure of the woman, but even her immearuable malice would take on a last glint of horror if it were not seen against a stronger light.

Monday, May 25, 1953
BBC third programme – Obey’s Lazarus
“Miss Beatrix Lehmann brings to Martha her own characteristic intelligence and warmth of feeling”.

Friday, Dec 04, 1953
Savory Theatre – No sign of the dove by Peter Ustinov– review with photo (Beatrix obscured behind a rail) Miss Beatrix Lehmann twitters energetically… bit it is largely a waste of talent.

Monday, Mar 01, 1954
Blood wedding at the Arts Theatre, include Miss Beatrix Lehmann

Thursday, Mar 04, 1954
Arts Theatre – Blood wedding by Frederico, Garcia Lorca, translated by Richard O’Connell and James Graham-Lujan
Beatrix Lehmann as “mother”
Miss Beatrix Lehmann completes a fine study of the mother whose cruel losses have turned her life to tragic bitterness.

Friday, Feb 11, 1955;
Mourning becomes Electra - revival mentions Beatrix's previous performance of 1937 “Arts theatre the only private theatre left to London of the kind that theatregoes knew before the war”.

Monday, Mar 07, 1955;
BBC third broadcast – Women beware women by Thomas Middleton
“what the play has to offer before that is a cleverly developed plot designed to exhibit a full length character study of Livia, who destroys the marriage of Leantio and Bianca and is finally caught in her own schemes. .. Livia takes the embittered Leantio as her lover. … Miss Beatrix Lehmann is the right actress to interpret Livia, a disquietingly human character and not merely a Jacobean fiend in human form.

Friday, Jun 10, 1955;
Reference to Miss Beatrix Lehmann’s 1938 “brilliant” performance in Mourning becomes electra

Saturday, Feb 25, 1956;
Arts Theatre – The Waltz of the toreadors by Jane Anoulith translated by Lucienne Hall
Beatrix Lehmann plays “his wife”
“this farce has a bitter, some will say a sour, flavour, but even those who resent its hard realism will be highly amused in spite of themselves.”
Miss Beatrix Lehmann is quite terrible as the aging wife whose lack of delicacy so shocks the easy going philanderer that he tries to strangle her.

Saturday, Feb 25, 1956
Arts Theatre – The waltz of the Toreadors – AD with Photo

Friday, Mar 09, 1956
Arts Theatre – The waltz of the Toreadors – review
Miss Beatrix Lehmann transferred to the Criterion on March 27 “hard realism and resourceful wit supported by a brilliant sense of theatre”

Thursday, May 31, 1956
BBC third programme – The Broken heart Beatrix Lehmann will be performing (17th century love and revenge)

Monday, Mar 25, 1957;
Criterion Watlz of the Toreadors Beatrix Lehmann will mark the completion of a year’s run of this comedy on the London stage!

Saturday, Apr 13, 1957
BBC Third programme Beatrix Lehmann and Maruice Denham in The Repair of heaven

Monday, May 19, 1958
Lyric theatre – The birthday Party “By a promising young playwright, Mr. Harold Pinter”
In the cast Beatrix Lehmann (play read)

Tuesday, May 20, 1958
Lyric theatre – The birthday Party – review
“puzzling surrealism of the birthday party”
Meg – Beatrix Lehmann
This essay in surrealistic drama at the Lyric…Miss Beatrix Lehmann Richard Pearson and John Slater struggle valiantly to give them dramatic life.
The first act sounds an off beat note of madness; in the second the note has risen to a sort of delirioum and the third act studiously refrains from the slightest hint of what the other two may have been about.

Monday, Aug 11, 1958;programme
Arts theatre – Garden district – Tennase Williams “our own Miss Beatrix Lehmann”

Wednesday, Sep 17, 1958;
Arts Theatre – Suddenly last summer (Garden district general title) and Something Unspoken
Mrs Venable in  Suddenly Last Summer and Cornelia Scott - Something Unspoken
Miss Beatrix Lehmann is superb as the bitter old lady obsessed with her past grandeur and her present grievance and when she has had a glorious melodramatic fling she passes the ball over to Miss Patricia Neal.
“we are in no doubt however, about the wickness of Sebastian’s mother. This old lady has all the money in the world and no scruple as to what use she makes it. She sees her dead son as a great poet whose one poem every nine months completed a life which revived the glories of the great renaissance princes. … The old lady has accordingly had the girl immured in a lunatic asylum. …
Something unspoken which studies the relations of a dominating new Orleans woman and the secretary she dominates. Miss Lehmann is perhaps more of a grotesque than the quietly mocking secretary need be, but Beryl Measor makes a terrific battleaxe of the tyrant.

Friday, Oct 17, 1958;
Old Vic – “Miss Lehmann as Lady Macbeth : guest stars at Old vic” )Macbeth with Lady M as headliner!
Miss Beatrix Lehmann and Miss Flora Robson are to join the Old Vic Company as guest artists during the present season. .. Miss Lehmann is to play the part of Lady MacBeth. … this will be the first time that ML will have played a Shakespearian part with the Old Vic.
(mentions previous roles in Stratford)

Tuesday, Nov 04, 1958;
Old Vic – Macbeth – reahearls begin with Miss Beatrix Lehamnn and Mr Hordern at the head of the cast. The play will be brought in Dec 17

Monday, Dec 01, 1958;
Old Vic – Macbeth mention of opening Dec 17

Thursday, Dec 18, 1958
Old Vic – Macbeth – review, “noisy production … somewhat hollow and swaggering”
Miss Beatrix Lehmann and Michael Horden appear totally miscast… both brilliant exponents of the mock-heroic, they seem ill at easy and rely extensively on tricks of delivery and sonourous rhetoric as a substitute for expression. They have one good scene together – and significantly it is the desolately realist moment after the banquet.

Friday, Dec 19, 1958;
Old Vic Macbeth
Occasional moments of real quality (word for word copy of previous review)

Wednesday, Jan 07, 1959;
Old Vic Macbeth “and old vic record”
“For the first time in its history the Old Vic Theatre, according to the management, has been completely full at every performance for a whole week. The play which filled the house was Macbeth, in which MrMichael Horden has the name part and MBL that of Lady Macbeth. This record will no doubt come as a mild surprise to many a theatregoer who remembers the “full house” notices that sent him sadly away from the theatre when some other remarkable production or eminent actor or actress had drawn him to it”.

Saturday, Jan 10, 1959
BBC Third program, Beatrix Lehmann as the Landlady

Thursday, Jan 15, 1959;
A year of short runs
The birthday party at the Lyric Hammersmith disappeared very rapidly in spite of the presence of Miss Beatrix Lehmann and Mr John Slater in the cast

Friday, Jun 12, 1959; programme
The Aspern Papers by Henry James has been adapted for the stage,Mr Michael Redgrave will head the cast with Miss Flora Robson and Miss Beatrix Lehmann

Wednesday, Jun 17, 1959 programme
Aspern papers 0 Miss Beatrix Lehmann (intention of transferring to US)

Tuesday, Aug 04, 1959;
BBC Third programme  The Landlady – review (first review of radio play)
The landlady is a disturbing study in terms, at times harshly comic of possessiveness. … All this provides MBL with a part that might well have been written for her mannered, idiosyncratic style. With no weapons other than her voice at her command she charms wheedles denounces suffers and triumphs.

Thursday, Aug 13, 1959;
Aspern Papers – review and photo
Miss Beatrix Lehmann supports him as the terrifying Miss Bordereau with her implacable power of retort and the green eye shade drawn like a death mask over the remains of her past beauty, an extraordinary old creature, who seeing clearly the intruder’s motives, counters his acquisitiveness with a cool, high-staking acquisitiveness of her own.

Saturday, Sep 12, 1959 Tuesday, Sep 15, 1959 Wednesday, Sep 16, 1959 Saturday, Dec 12, 1959; Monday, Dec 21, 1959
Queens Theatre Aspern papers – ad (third billing)