Beatrix's will

The copy of the will arrived today. It was interesting, if a bit disappointing. First of all it said that all her personal papers and letters went to her brother John. Which means they are all at his archive deposit in the states and NOT in the UK. Which is terribly disappointing. She gave Central her books about theatre, so was more of a special collections deposit, rather than an archive. Her address was the same one in Islington that I had previously. But Shelaugh wasn't living with her. At first it didn't look like Shelagh got the "bulk" of the estate but rather "carpets, curtains and electrical and other fixtures and fittings but also her dog!! (and Shelagh didn't live with her but lived in SW London). But then I noticed in the last paragraph it said that she got the house! (Which I have googled and is a very fancy lovely old house in Islington).

Bea's archive located!

So I must say google books is proving useful beyond what I could possibly have imagined! A small reference to Beatrix in a Judi Dench biography stated that Beatrix was working at Central School of Music and Drama in the late 1950s, where she helped Judi Dench with her final year monologues. I wrote to the librarian there asking if they held the school archives to see how long Beatrix had been teaching there. She wrote me back to say that Beatrix had in fact donated her archives to the school!!!! Over three decades later they are STILL uncatalogued and not listed anywhere! But they exist!!!

From google ebooks only

No sign of the Dove

Facades: Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell Sitwell

 By John Pearson

And that same week Peter Ustinov had produced his new play at the Lyric, Hammersmith, No sign of the dove. Not for the first time in their lives, the Sitwells found themselves the subject of a satire on the stage. Edith was soon predictably enraged by the reports that filtered through to Hollywood. As she wrote irately to her biographer, Max Wykes-Joyve, Osbert and  I have been most gravely libelled by a creature called Peter Ustinov in a play called No sign of the dove. This is about a famous writer who is also a baronet, his sister who is a “famous poetess” and wears a turban (I always did, before anyone else) and their eccentric old father. Three papers identified us by name. The witty Mr Ustinov gave the family the name of d’urt!!! Both osbert and I are represented as sex maniacs and one theatrical paper that identified us by name said I was shown hunting an unwilling gentleman through bedrooms, looking for a bed!!!!! What makes it especially disgraceful is that the part of me was taken by Beatrix Lehmann, whose brother is a great friend of mine and to whose sister Rosamond I have been most kind…. What filthy people to do that to a poor crippled man who has never harmed them.

Had Edith seen the play she might have realised that it was little more than a fairly harmless romps, which soon found the extinction id deserved.

Garden District (1958)

NOT IN FRONT OF THE AUDIENCE: Homosexuality On Stage

 By Nicholas de Jongh

Suddenly last summer was staged both in New York and London in such humble circumstances that it looked as if Williams was on the verge of losing his box office appeal, or so producers reckoned. …

In London the play’s subject matter would have meant that it could only be staged in club conditions, had not the lord Chamberlin, just relaxed his ban on plays about homosexuality. Yet the play was only presented at the small Arts theatre club, directed by Herbert Machiz, who had also staged the play in New York. The principal roles of the cousin and the mother were at least taken by Patricia Neal, the former film star, and Beatrix Lehmann, one of the principal classical actresses of her generation, with a particular facility for conveying elements of the sinistergrotesque in which her part as the mother abounded. The producers diffidence may have been inspired by the conviction that the play’s horrifying homosexual Grand Guignol and its expressionistic frame, staged in a Victorian Gothic garden would prove too much for traditional audiences.

Yet the play garnered superlatives from the critics both in London and New York. For despite the play’s shock tactics, its

Climactic revelations of cannibalism and stratagems for a dangerous lobotomy, Suddenly Last summer was construed as a shocking but highly moral fable. It handed out exemplary, fatal punishment for Sebastain, a homosexual writer whom Williams had conceived as a monstrous aberration of nature. It is as if Williams were disavowing what he had professed about homosexuality.

HUGE analysis of the homosexuality in the play and how it relected Williams life. Brillaint stuff but too much to type out.

The Aspern Papers (1959)

Blood on the Stage, 1950-1975: Milestone Plays of Crime, Mystery, and Detection  By Amnon Kabatchnik

Contains description of the Aspern papers and Michael Redgrave’s carreer.

p. 311 Ran for 370 performances in London

p. 313 though bisexual, Redgrave was married to the actress Rachel Kempson for fifty years until his death [no wonder him and Bea got on so well and did so many productions together].

Huis Clos

Peter Brook: A Biography  By Michael Kustow

p. 45 The arts theatre where he did huis clos, was a members-only club theatre. This was doubtless because of the lesbian undercurrents of Satre’s philosophical melodrama, in which two women and a man are trapped together for eternity, inflicting the utmost pain, of an emotional rather than a physical kin on each other…

Shakespeare festival (1947) Twelfth night

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy

 edited by Alexander Leggatt

“Once the second World War’s social disruptions brought the image of the ‘masculine’ woman who wore pants inside and outside the home into view, theatrical trousers no longer marked women actors as ‘transvestite’ performers. For thirty years after Beatrix Lehmann’s 1847 Cesario ‘appeared every inch a man’ Violas were praised less as feminine ideals than for their skills as acting the ‘boy eternal’

Desire under the elms (1940)

Censorship in Theatre and Cinema

 By Anthony Aldgate, James Crighton Robertson

Psubmitted in March 1925… When George Street, reader of plays since 1914 and senior reader from 1920 until his death in 1936, believed it was simply too horrible for a public performance in britian [citation needed] He recommended a ban but went on to state that this should not be decided purely on the basis of his report. Lord Cromer, the Lord Chamberlin from 1922 to 1938 agreed with street about a ban, noting that he was not prepared to sanction a play with such a horrible theme and observing, it is in fact typical of the sort of American play against which there is a growing resentment …[citation needed]

p. 10 Cromer’s decision to gran a licence to Mourning becomes electra, which encountered no public criticism, encouraged the Westminster Theare to try its luck with Desire under the elms in 1938. By then Cromer had been succeeded as Lord Chamberlin by Lord Clarendon, who held this post until 1952, and Game reported as follows:

Perhaps a refusal was justified in 1925, but I hold very strongly to the opinion that is is no longer justified now.

The potential audience for serious plays has very much increased during the intervening years, thanks to the work of the Sunday producing societies and such theatres as the Westminster, and because of the great increase in the number of published plays, the Censorship, recognising this development in public taste, no long treats the theatre audience as if it was entirely composed of children: and the theatre is now in the process of attaining aat long last a reasonable amount of freedom.

At the Westminster, where the play is to be staged, the management has built up a numerous audience which wishes to see serious drama; and which by no conceivable flight of imagination can possibly derive any moral harm from the work of a man who is undeniably a poet and an artist.

It is to me a humiliating thought to think of all the comedies of adultery and fornication which have passed… while a work of art such as this lies under our ban,

p. 11 just because it treats of the primal passions of a rude society… and finally I would ask upon what grounds can the play be forbidden? It would be difficult to substantiate a claim that it is morally harmful, or to forbid a play because some people prefer drawing-room drama or comedies is quite indefensible. [citation missing]

Lord Clarendon concurred with Game, so that this time Desire under the elms was allowed in full despite the addition of a final scene showing Abbie and Eben ascending the gallows. However, the Westminister theatre did not perform the play until January 1940 with Beatrix Lehmann as Abbie, Mark Dignam as Ephraim and Stphen Murray as Eben. It ran for approximately ten weeks, during which time there was no adverse press comment and the LCO did not receive a single public complaint.

Mourning becomes electra Censorship in Theatre and Cinema

 By Anthony Aldgate, James Crighton Robertson

 However, in Mid0September 1937 the westminister theatre in London submitted a script for O’Neill’s Mourning becomes electra, the story of Mannon family tensions at the end of the American civil war. This included references to adulty, an attempt to induce a heart attack through physical sexual submission, murder, suggested but unfulfilled incest, and finally a double suicde. Despite the depressing atmosphere, Henry Game, Reader of plays since 1930 and Street’s successor as Senior reader in 1936, recommended that the play should be allowed but with several dialogue cuts involving the use of ‘god’ ‘christ’ and two references to a woman offering herself physically to her husband. In Game’s view the incest proposal was allowable, partly because the incest did not actually occur and partly because it was dramatically justified within the context of the plot [citation needed] Cromer commented that the play was more to American tastes than British and questioned whether British audiences would accept such a long play, although he expressly endorsed Game’s recommendation that the incest suggestion should be retained. In the event the play lasted for only two months at the Westminster theatre, from mid-November 1937 to mid January 1938, and it was not until 1947 that RKO Radio filmed it. A turgid version which the BBFC allowed uncut in June 1948 by which time the board had relaxed its pre-1939 sexual standards.

So fair a Satrap (laodice and danae)

The London Stage 1930-1939: A Calendar of Productions, Performers, and Personnel  By J. P. Wearing

Lyric Hammersmith 28/3/30 1 matinee performance review observer 30/3/30

Brain Savoy 27/4/30 Producer

The London Stage 1930-1939: A Calendar of Productions, Performers, and Personnel  By J. P. Wearing

The Birthday Party (1958)

Modernity Britain 2014

David Kynaston

Mention of Birthday party

Heap, “just the sort of lunatic stuff they love to inflict on us at the court” “all its characters are clearly insane, all its dialogue completely irrational, and what the whole thing is supposed to convey or signify is beyond understanding. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it tedious or boring, for its young author, who is probably just trying to cash in on the stupid contemporary cult for avant-garde obscurity, has at least the knack of somehow holding one’s attention. But its utter incomprehensibility becomes irritating, its calculated idiocy, embarrassing, and not even the excellent acting of John Slater, Richard Pearson and Beatrix Lehmann as the three craziest crackpots gathered together in the dingy seaside boarding house that comprises the setting, can redeem its lack of sense and sensibility. “

(146)

(doesn’t say what the quote is from)

The young author of the Birthday party was Harold Pinter, who as a jobbing actor called David Baron, had written this, his first professionally produced play, during a tour of Doctor in the House. The next morning, few if any of the critics dissented from Heap’s unfavourable verdict. “The author never got down to earth long enough to explain what his play was about,” complained the Telegraph’s Darlington, bemoaning the lot of critics “condemned to sit through plays like this”. Alan Dent in the News Chronicle (Mr Pinter Misses his target) declaraed, after outlining the plot, that “the moral would seem to be that every man-jack of us is a raving lunatic”. And for the Mail’s Cecil Wilson, though not denying Pinter’s “wit that gleams through the mist of a play”, it was altogether a “baffling mixture”. Pinter himself, some forty years on, recollected in tranquillity the emotion of that Tuesday morning. “I went out at 7.30 am to get the morning papers, went to a café and had a cup of tea and read them. Each one was worse than the last. I thought I might give the whole thing up and go and write a novel. But my wife at the time Vivien [Merchant] said, “come on, you’ve had bad notices as an actor, pull yourself together.” There was still the Evening Standard headline to endure, “Sorry Mr Pinter, you’re just not funny enough” but by then the discussion had already been take to pull the plug at the end of the week. Audiences for the rest of the six day run were desultory, and by the time a eulogising review by Harold Hobson appeared in the Sunday Times, “Mr Pinter on the evidence of this work, possesses the most original, disturbing, and arresting talent in theatrical London’ it was too late.

The Times 20 May 1958

Crewe Chronicle 24 may 1958

(Anthony) Heap, 19 May 1958

Michael Billington The life and work of Harold Pinter (1996) p. 74

Daily Telegraph 20 May 1958

News Chronicle 20 May 1958

Daily Mail 20 May 1958

John Walsh That nice Mr Pinter,

Independent 8 Feb 1999

Billington, Pinter p. 84-85

Sunday Times 25 May 1958

Christopher Isherwood Diaries vol. 1

p. 92 February 6 1940 Tonight at a party at the Viertel’s The Huxley’s Anita Loos and Gottfried were invited. The real object of our presence was to convince a producer, who has bought They walk alone, that Beatrix Lehmann should be brought over from England to play the chief part. Unfoutunaetly the Huxley’s had never even heard of Beatrix, so our propaganda fell rather flat.

Bethold was in a tense, jumpy state, lika a cannon, loaded and longing to be fired.

Hoopla 1929

The Plays of Ernst Toller: A Revaluation

 By Cecil Davies

p. 323 “Hoopla wir Leben! Was translated into English by Hermann Ould and published by Ernest Benn in September 1928 and produced twice the following year, 1929 in London and Cambridge.
The London production was at the Gate Theatre Studio, directed by Peter Godfrey under the title of Hoopla! It ran from 19 February to 16 March. The cast included Gaveley Edwards (Karl Thomas), Beatrix Lehmann, (Eva Berg) Keith Pyott, (Albert Kroll) Ronald Simpson (Kilman) Joan Pereira (Mrs Meller) Robert Newton (Pickel).

A programme note by David Joseph indicated the direction which interest in the play was weighted:

p. 324 “Hoopla is interesting from a technical standpoint for the manner in which it utilises the film, not only to act as a commentary on the stage action but so that it performs an individual function towards the obtaining of a full common dramatic effect.

The moving pictures shown in this play were made with a cine-Kodak, and are projected by a Kodascope B. Only non-inflammable film is used”

The setting has been preserved in a newspaper cutting where a photograph shows that four simultaneous scenes were staged (Two up two down) on which the caption says is, “the smallest theatre stage in London”) [citation needed]

Ould’s translation is uninspired and occasionally incorrect (32) Toller’s more poetic passages suffer particularly badly (33) The inadequacy of the translation, together with the emphasis on technical novelty, may in part account for the hostility of the reviews; but the actors must have also  been at fault, even though the Times praised Graveley Edwards and Beatrix Lehmann as Karl Thomas and Eva Berg (34) For that anonymous reviewer the play was

“intolerably tedious… weighed down with stage mechanism masquerading as experimental technique. It is hard to believe that I was written in passion, yet if passion is not the explanation it is altogether unpardonable.

The dialogue, when it does not smack of a communist Sunday School is jerky and lifeless.

It is all very like the performance of a nasty tempered child whom no one prevents from inflicting his nonsense on the world, and who continues his elephantine pranks for hours and hours and hours.”

Another anonymous critique was nastily hostile to Toller and ended

“A pretentious evening, during which the audicen was completely bored.

Ivor Brown revied the production in the Saturday review of 23.2.29 and again on 24.2.29 presumably in the observer.

p. 325 Brown thought there was too much movement and activity, “The patron saint of the Gate Theatre is evidently St Vitus (39)

He pointed out that the 4 scene simultatneous stage was unoriginal. It has been started in Drury Lane and familiarised by Eugene O’Neill. (40)… Clearly on a tiny stage in a small studio an opportunity had been missed to free Hoppla Wir Leben from its mechanical trappings and to emphasise the qualities of the author’s language. Which were also destroyed by Ould’s unsatrisfactory translation.

p. 343 Eva berg is only seventeen and at this age deeply romantic. She, the young revolutionary, would like to emulate the French aristocrats who danced the minuet on the way to the guillotine. She is passionately in love with Karl (I’ll kiss you to death”) and cannot forbear with weeping. But she cries shame on Kroll’s attack on Kilman. …When Karl is led off to see a doctor, Eva, apparently unhindered goes with im.

p. 346 [by the end of the play] Eva has destroyed or suppressed her romanticism nor can her utter honesty prmit her even at the end of the play in Act 4, sc 3, to respond with warmth to Karl’s last declaration o flove.

He for his part carries into 1927 the pastsionate intensisty of 1919, both in sex and in politics. His inability to accommodate himself to the non-romantic sex for fun ethos of the 1920s is matched by his inability and unwillingness to accommodate himself into the politcs of elections, trade unions, patience and compromise.

p. 347 When eva unexpectably returns, having been sacked because of her union activity, and ironically says she could go away with him now, he still clings to the idea but Eva retorts: “Do you seriously believe I’d leave the comrades in the lurch?”

p. 353 The last witness is Eva, independent, fearless. She refuses to be bullied as to her sexual relationship with Karl Thomas, Asking the judge whether he is living in the fifteenth century. She witnesses strongly on Karl Thomas’s behalf, while at the same time, she retains her crystal-clear honest.y.

The birthday party

Post-War British Theatre Criticism (Routledge Revivals)

 By John Elsom

To begin with there is meg (BL) who lets lodgings in a seaside tow. She is mad. Thwarted Maternity (I think) her trouble and it makes her go soppy over her unsavoury lodger Stanley.

[I don’t think she was mad, just a bit dim, and NO WHERE is there any reason to suspect lack of children as the cause to her madness that seems to be such a sexist assumption, as to what would drive a woman mad and ironic cause Bea wasn’t mad and had no kids either]

Harold Hobson Sunday Times review 25 May 1958

“Peter wood has directed the play with an absolute response to its delicate nuances. It has six players, every one of them superb, Beatrix Lehmann is strangely funny and macabrely touching as the landlady…

Mr pinter and the Birthday party despite their experiences last week will be heard of again. Make a note of their names.”

Central School of speech and drama 0 1956?1957 BL was on Staff!!!

Judi chose two Shakespearan passages – Miranda’s second scene with Ferdinand in the Tempest, which begins ‘Alas now! Pray you, work not so hard’ and a speech of Julia’s from The two gentleman of Verona. She was able to study Barbara Jefford playing the latter part at the Old Vic and was coached in both pieces by Beatrix Lehmann, who was then on the staff at Central

Merchant of Venice (1947)

The Merchant of Venice: Critical Essays

 edited by John W. Mahon, Ellen Macleod Mahon

“But Bl’s casting puzzled people. A deep-voiced woman in her forties, with a strong stage presence, she gave a brisk, cool Portia, wich though obviously intelligent, failed to move audiences.

Huis Clos (1940)

Powers of Being: David Holbrook and His Work

 edited by Edwin Webb

Chapter by Roger Poole, England’s only existential philosopher.

p 211In a very illuminating autobiographical account of the books he has read over a lifetime, David Holbrook describes, with typical frankness, to what an extent a youthful encounter with Satre alienated him,

“one of the most disturbing experiences I had as a boy of seventeen was seeing a play by Satre, Huis CLos, put on with Beatrix Lehmann, and enthusiastically supported by the leftwing “people’s convention” of those days (1940). I was appalled by the work, because of its hatred of human beings, and its nihilistic picture of the inevetivable frustration of inter-human relationship and love. I have loathed Satre ever since.” (citation needed)

Strangers on a honeymoon (1936)

British Popular Films 1929-1939: The Cinema of Reassurance

 By Stephen Shafer

In SOAH a comedy released in 1936 and based on Edgar Wallace’s novel The Northing tramp, Constance Cummings plays October Jones, an orphan living unhappily with unpleasant relatives on the border between Canada and the united States. A wealthy but stuffy would-be suitor seeks her hand in marriage, but she resists, telling him she would rather marry a tramp than live with him, in spite of his wealth. To make her point she encounters a tramp named Quigley, played by Hugh Sinclari, who she does in fact wed for spite; but Quigley turns out to be an English peer in disguise who is searching for two parts of a valuble deed of land containing oil, which has been held by his cousin and rival, Elfrida (Beatrix Lehmann) and Sir Andrew Gregory (Edmund Breon). The remainder of the film is a standard comedy adventure plot including a night in a deserted house, auto chases, imporabable escapes, and an ultimately happy ending with the peer recovering the deed, defeating the villains, and also, of course, the heroine falling in love with the man she had married.( no page number given)

Salome 1931

File On Wilde  By Margery Mary Morgan

Festival theatre Cambridge, 23 Nov 31 (dir Terance Gray, des Gray and Pastong with Constant Lambert’s score, dance choreographed by Ninette de Valois, other movement devised by Hedley Briggs, With Beatrix Lehmann as Salome and Robert Morley as Herod. P. 17

Birthday Party (1958)

TBP was first presented by Michael Codron and David Hall at the Arts, Theatre Cambrdige, on 28 April 1958 and subsequently at the Lyric Opera House, Hammersmith.

The master builder (1934)

Donald Wolfit invited Margaret to appear in a special Sunday night performance of the Master Builder for the Scandinavina Society at Westminster Theatre. The production transferred to the Embassy Theatre, Swiss Cottage, and opened on 30 April 1934 for a short run. Margaret repeated her role of Aline, opposite Donald WOlfit’s Solness. Beatrix Lehmann and John Clements were also members of the cast. The embassy was situated several miles from the West End and the programme reflected a more suburban attitude to theatre-goin, in the form of two gentle reminders to the house; ‘Ladies are respectfully asked to add to the comfort of the audience by removing their hats. No alcholo will be served after 10 pm.”

This time the critics did take notice of her work: the much respected Ivor Brown declaraed that he was ‘especially struck by miss Margaret.

…
Eric Keown remartked on the importance of this production in terms of Miss Rutherfords career, to be acting at the Embassy in 1934 was much more than filling in time, for under Ronald Adan’s adventurous leadership this theatre had earned a glowing reputation: in that year no less than five of its productions were running at onece in the west end.

(no page numbers given)

The Silver tassie (1929)

The silver tassie was first performed at the Apollo Theatre, London on 11 October 1929, the cast in order of appearance was as follows,

Barry Fitzgerald, Sydney Morgan, Eithnee Magee, Beatrix Lehmann, Una O’Coonner. Charles Laughton, Billy Barnes…

Director Raymond Massey

Salome (1931)

The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays: Lady Windermere's Fan ...

 By Oscar Wilde Oxford University Press, 23 Feb 1995

Xiii Salome has largely neglected within the English theatre. Terence Gray’s 1921 production at the Festival Theatre Cambridge, with Beatrix Lehmann aas Salome was one landmark. Gray saw the play’s virture in its verbal treatment, which corresponds to a musical composition: accordingly, he produced it for sound and movement, and not at all for character.

The Silver Tassie (1929)

Seán O'Casey, Writer at Work: The Definitive Biography of the Last Great ...

 By Christopher Murray

(great deal of history on the play and its reception.

It was only at the start of September 1929 that Cochran asked Raymond Massey to direct the Tassie, scheduled to open at the Apollo on 11 October, which by today’s standards is unthinkable. Cochran engaged charles Laughton to play the lead, … Beatrix Lehmann, well-known in London , was to play Susie Monican…the musical qualities of the Tassie were acknowledged from the outset. As Massey remarked, It was essential that the war scene be cast with careful regard to the musical capability of chanting plainsong in the Gregorian manner. 159 “Reviews on the whole were favourable just a few dismissive… For the Tassie is not just about the horror of modern warfare but also if not primarily about the helplessness of the individual in the face of injustice of life itself. But the play in O’casey’s characteristic manner, mingles comedy with tragedy, at times too blatantly, indeed as if to stem the flow of empathy. …

While the reviewers were happy to have a piece to get their teeth into they were under no illustions about its prospective popularity. As to queue for thirty hours. Its artistic qualities and challenging experimentalis worked against its popularity. … So the Tassie was a success d’estime but a commercial failure. It ran until Saturday 7 December, a total of only eight weeks. Massey quoted Chochran as saying it was the proudest failure he ever had.

1939 political activity

Margaret Storm Jameson : A Life:  By Jennifer Birkett

As 1939 drew to its end, the situation in Europe grew darker. Jameson wrote to the Paris Centre asking for news of collegues who had vanished into prison and camps. H.G Wells and Beatrix Lehmann had both expressed to her their concern for the novelist Jean Giono and the philosopher Alain.

Garden district (suddenly last summer)

Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance

 edited by Philip C. Kolin

p132 International productions of suddenly last summer have not been so favourably received.

p., 133 The play premiered in London in September 1958 at the Arts theatre starring Beatrix Lehman as Violet Venable…Although Machiz also directed this production, it was coldly received by British critics. Robert Robinson regarded suddenly last summer as “primarily an anecdote, a melodrama (407) Alan Brien castigated the play as a ‘pedagogic approach to pederasty” (quoted in McCann 122). 

All gods chillin (1929)

Twentieth-Century British Theatre: Industry, Art and Empire

 By Claire Cochrane

p. 106 The growing interest in avant-garde American drama, especially the plays of Eugene O’Neill which featured black characters, began to stimulate the employment of black actors in the interests of theatrical innovation. The arrival in London in 1928 of the major American musical Showboat which featured black singers such as Paul Robeson who were also powerful actors, permitted a seque inot experimental theatre. A 1929 Court theatre revivial of Peter Godfrey’s production of O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun replaced the original blacked up actor with African American Frank H Wilson in the central role of the black lawyer Jim Harris and also included other black singers and actors. Wilson had both acted and sung the title role in Porgy (an early dramatisation

p.107 of the novel which became George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess) and played a supporting role in the first New York production of O’neill’s play when Robeson played Harris. Some reviews of All Gods Chillun commented on the ‘repellent’ aspect of the theme of tragic miscegenation embodied by the black Harris married to the white Ella, who was played by Beatrix Lehmann. This was a play dealing, it was claimed, with ‘very remote problems’. When Paul Robeson played Othello opposite Peggy Ashcroft as Desdemona at the Savoy Theatre in 1930 the issue seems to have moved closer to home. Outside the uncertain critical response to Robeson’s performance – the first by a professional black actor since they 1880s – there was racist hate mail and the suggestion that he was not welcome at the savoy hotel.

Wit and bisexuality

The Art of the Put-Down  By Winfred Coles

I’ve had them both, and I don’t think much of either

BL, actor, theatre director and author, during a wedding.

The dark lady of the sonnets (Oct 2 1955)

The Tudors on Film and Television

 By Sue Parrill, William B. Robison

UK bbc Sunday night theatre

90 minutes black and white writer George Bernard Shaw, BL Elizabeth I

The bbc Sunday night theatre, which ran from 1950 to 1959 presented quality programming in the early years of television. This episode is a presentation os Shaw’s short play, The dark lady of the sonnets.

References from google books search

Our time – 1941 -1949

Edited by Beatrix Lehmann and 3 others

Beatrix contributed several articles, including vol 2. no. 7 (on sale on abe for 15) The theatre and its audience

At BL http://catalogue.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/display.do?tabs=moreTab&ct=display&fn=search&doc=BLL01002850651&indx=2&recIds=BLL01002850651&recIdxs=1&elementId=1&renderMode=poppedOut&displayMode=full&frbrVersion=&dscnt=0&scp.scps=scope%3A%28BLCONTENT%29&frbg=&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1420622050377&srt=rank&mode=Basic&vl%28488279563UI0%29=any&dum=true&tb=t&rfnIncGrp=1&rfnGrpCounter=1&mulIncFctN=facet_rtype&vl%28freeText0%29=our%20time&fctIncV=journals&vid=BLVU1

Our time 1941-1949

Comrade heart a life of randall swingler by andy croft

p. 122 “early in 1941 Swingler wrote to Edgell Rickword, outlining plans for new magazines.

p. 123 “”the paper will cover architecture, medicine, education, art, literature, etc. and the general plan is to devote the space to four or five quite substantial pieces per month rather than attempt by scraps and bits to cover the whole ground every time. One should, for instance, include a central article every month up to about 6000 words with critical and constructive work really thoroughly done… The great thing is that the field is now ours undisputed. …

The first issue of the new magazine, Our time, appeared in February 1941 (incorporating Poetry and the people). Edited for the first seven issues by Swingler, Banting, Frankel and Beatrix Lehmann, the magazine ran to twenty-eight pages and cost just 6d. A short editorial in the first issues announced the magazine’s wider remit, arguing that the arts “are not luxieries or decorations on the border of social life” but “necessities to its development as essential as food and sleep. And like food and sleep there is now too little of them”. …”a short story by Beatrix Lehmann”.

Blood Sweat and Toil: Remaking the British working class 1939-1945 by Geoffrey G Field, quotes

p. 243 “Communist actress Beatrix Lehmann pondered the difficulty of surmounting these social and cultural barriers. Workers with little education and long experience of unemployment, she wrote, wanted “to laugh, to relax and to remain intellectually unstirred”; they had little idea of “how to approach an art (ie drama) that wakes up the intelligence rather than putting it to sleep”.

Ref BL The theatre and the audience Our Time 2(7) Nov 1942 p. 25

The Church Militant – (The sword of the spirit) (1943)

Comrade heart a life of randall swingler by andy croft

p. 134 broadcast in censored form on 25 March 1943 starting Walter Hudd and Beatrix Lehmann, old friends and comrades both.

p. 120 “The Saturday night concert [1940] opened with a prologue written by Swingler and spoken by Beatrix Lehmann and Walter Hudd, followed by Terina and her.” The show was reported in the Daily Worker, 23 December 1940, Swingler wrote a two-hander for BL and Walter Hudd called Freedom on trial, produced some time in 1939 by Andre Van Gyseghem, with the Hendon and Hampstead Choir conducted by David ellenburg . p.270

p. 113 in 1939, “another time I remember staggering into his office at the Workers Music Assocation off Charing Cross Road, being sobered up by a single glance from the extremely intense eyes of Beatrix Lehman. “

Witch of Edmonton 1936/37

Introductions, notes and commentaries to texts in The dramatic works of…

By Cyrus Henry Hoy

p. 239 Thirteen years later Edith Evans assumed the title role in the production of the Witch of Edmonton directed by Michel St Denis at the Old Vic Theatre in London during the season 1936.7. Dekker’s name appeared along as author on the Old Vic program, a point duly noted by the reviewer in the London Times, who pointed out that the claims of Ford and Rowley had been passed over. The program carried a statement to the effect that “The dog should be accepted as the symbol of mental and emotional conflicts which can still torment us to-day” While the Times reviewer found this a reasonable suggestion, he considered it to lead “to difficulties of subjective and objective interpretation if it be pushed too far.”

p. 240 “For him it was “better to think of the play as a plainly melodratmatic morality… He had words of praise as well for Marius Goring as Frank Thorney, for Beatrix Lehmann as Winnifried (Playing “an awkwardly confused part with a successful determination to give it a clear outline”.

“There is a picture of Marius Goring and Beatrix Lehamann as Frank Thorney and Winnifride In Harcourt Williams’ Old Vic Saga. (London 1949) p. 148

The Master Builder (1936)

Ibsen plays 1 Ghosts, the wild duck, the master builder by Henrik Ibsen Pub A&C Black 2014 (Which translation?) From introduction to the Master Builder by Michael Meyer

p. 242 “The most admired English Hildes have been Elizabeth Robins (1893) Octavia Kenmore (1907 and 1918) whom C. E. Montague rated the finest he had seen, Lillah McCarthy (1911) Beatrix Lehmann (1936) and Mary Miller (1962). … Of Beatrix Lehmann’s performance, Ivor Brown commented [She] Is perfectly cast as Hilde Wangel, for, with her sharp, expressive profile, and her eyes all eloquence, she can be at once the ecstatic worshipper and remorseless bird of prey. Many HIldes have been industriously “fey”; none, in my experience, so essentially the falcon, a thing of air as well as of fire, demonic, taloned, soaring.”

Reference to Ibsen cycle in London (including Bea in the master builder)

Theatre Arts MAY 1936; Vol. XX, No. 5

Macbeth (1958)

Macbeth and the players by Dennis Bartholomeusz

p. 267 “In December 1958 at the Old Vic, Michael Hordern and Beatrix Lehmann, both “brilliant exponents of the mock-heroic” seemed to the dramatic critic of the Times to rely too much on “tricks of delivery” and “sonorous rhetorix” To the dramatic critic of the Daily Telegraph [Dec 19 1958] Hordern, as Macbeth, gave “a distinct impression of artifice rather than nature”, though the “true voice of feeling was heard in the “tomorrow and tomorrow soliloquy”. The critic of the Manchester Guardian [Dec 191958] quarrelled, however,

p. 268 with “the enormous pause” after “hereafter” which “while being magnificent in its audacity’ dissipated rather than intensified the initial emotion. Michael Horden and Beatrix Lehmann appear to have been most convincing, in fact, during the banquet scene. In this scene Hordern successfully used, with a  slight variation, a piece of business first invented by Benson. Their playing subtly disclosed the opposite courses the characters were to take. After the departure of the guests both slumped in exhaustion. When they at last broke the silence, every speech seemed to widen the gulf between them. At the end of the scene, Macbeth emphasised his blood-thirst resolution by driving his knife into the table, while his wife reached a nadir of dumb despair. In Beatrix Lehmann’s hands, the character of Lady Macbeth “declined from initial hardness to something like sweetness”. [Daily Telegraph Dec 19 1958] The sleep walking scene was played at unusual speed. Beatrix Lehmann saw Lady Macbeth as mad and Ophelia-like in her last moments. To Miss Lehmann it seemed that Lady Macbeth’s eventual suicide could only be explained in terms of the fact that she’d lost her reason. [stated in conversation with the author] .

When Beatrix Lehmann and Michael Hordern played at the Old Vic, the nature of the stage and the acoustics of the theatre made it difficult for the player to project Shakespeare’s verse naturally and be heard [also stated by Bea in conversation with the author] This was probably one reason for the artificial delivery noted by the critics.

Relationship with Isherwood

W.H. Auden a biography by Humphrey Carpenter

The two had grown tired of the Group Theatre and were wanting to plan a new play that would be a hit in the west end, “In this they were encouraged by two of Isherwood’s friends, the film director Berthold Viertel and the actress Beatrix Lehmann. (1937ish?)

Garden District (1958)

Patricia Neal an unquiet life by Stephen Shearer

p. 197 “By the end of August, Patricia was deeply involved in stage rehersals of Garden District, a new work by American playwright Tennessee Williams, first presented on the American stage earlier in the year in New York. Garden District consisted of two one-act plays, Something unspoken and Suddenly last summer. She had been asked by director Herbet Machiz to appear in Suddenly last summer and was eager to make her British stage debut. Garden district opened at the Arts Theatre Club on Great Newport Street in London on Tuesday, September 16, 1958.

Suddenly last summer opens in the tropical, lush garden of the home of the wealthy Mrs Violet Venable (Beatrix Lehmann). She has asked Dr. Cukrowicz (David Cameron) to her home to talk about her niece, Catharine Holly (Neal). Mrs Venable wants Catharine to submit to a lobotomy to rid her of her delusions.

p. 198 “about the death of Venable’s son Sebastian, a poet. Catharine has accompanied Sebastain to the small island of Cabez de Lobos during the last summer of his life. She says his death is too terrible to imagine. Her suggestions about what happened to him are too vile to believe.

Catharine has been released from an asylum and arrives at her aunt Violet’s home, where she is joined by her mother (Beryl Measor) and her brother, George (Philip Bond). George tells Catharine that Aunt Violet will give them $50,000 if Catharine agrees to be admitted to the asylum and submit to a lobotomy. Dr. Cukrowitz administers a truth serum to Catharine, and the horrific story emerges.

Catharine’s memory gives up the horror she has witnessed: Sebastian used her, and possibly his own mother, to procure young boys for his sexual appetite during annual summer excursions. At Cabeza de Lobo the young boys lived naked and hungry on the beach. Suddenly last summer, Catharine witnessed those hungry youths turn on Sebastian, chase him through the white hot streets of the town, and eventually catch him. His naked body is discovered, parts of it devoured by the hungry young men. The young doctor believes Catharine and realises it is Mrs Venable who is deranged.

“how I wanted to do that role” Patricia wrote “if for no other reason than the last scene, which is in fact a fifteen minute monologue. I was back to my roots. Herbert staged the scene very simply, with only a single spotlight on my face. I remember I acted my heart out on that single beam of light shinging down on me.

“On opening night, the curtain went down slowly and there was what seemed an eternity of silence. Then the applause came, rolling over us like thunder. It was the crowning moment of what was, for me, the most thrilling acting experience of my life. [ref missing]

Garden district, especially Suddenly Last summer, did indeed create a sensation. London’s West End sported more than forty active theatres, comparted to New York’s twenty-odd. Tickets in London were still around $3, and audiences were hungry for new and exciting productions, which were scares – so scarce that theatre critic Kenneth Tynan had told Holiday magazine a couple of years before, “There is nothing wrong with the London theatre that a couple of masterpieces couldn’t cure.” Garden District was one such production, and it stunned London audiences, although its combination of homosexuality, cannibalism, and insanity was not for everyone.

Patricia received the strongest reviews of her career. One critic wrote, “British theatre critics squirmed.. [and] termed the play ‘squalid’ ‘slimy’ and ‘lurid’. But they praised the dramatic power of the work and raved about

p. 199 the performance of Hollywood actress Patricia Neal, who made her London debut in the role of Catharine Holly [10]. Said Cecil Wilson in his London Daily Mail review, “one thing to be said at once for Suddenly Last Summer, the longer, grimmer and better of these two plays in one, is that it introduceds Patricia Neal to the London stage. We have suffered with this American actress in films like The hasty heart and a face in the crowd. We have admired her intelligent beauty on tv. And last night we saw her playing, quite brilliantly, one of the most tortured women Tennese Williams ever created… The strength of Patricia Neal’s performance last night lay in her agonized and agonizing picture of a maligned person protesting her sanity to the very edge of sanity. [11].

Other reviews were in much the same vein. Milton Shulamn in the London Evening Standard said, “Patricia Neal brings a quivering intensity to the role of the niece that haunts like a high-pitched scream in the night.  [12] John Barber, the Daily Express, “an unscripted cry of Help, tore from the throat of actress Patricia Neal last night to climax the latest melodrama by Tennesee Williams. She seemed to have terrified herself with the horror of what she was saying.” Suddenly last summer, Barber wrote, “is the most insane, the most lurid, and the most shock creating [play] that even this author has achieved. It held the audience frozen stiff in the black sorcery of explosive words, most of the spoken by… Miss Neal.” 13

And Harold Conroy, of the London Daily Sketch, said of the concluding monologue, “Brilliantly spoken and acted, it was the most horrible, loathsome speech I have heard in the theatre.” 14

In the London Tribute reviewer Weyland Young wrote, “sometimes in a torrent of velocity which reminded me of the records of Sarah Bernhardt, sometimes convulsed, gurgling after the loaded word, sometime dispersing her whole personality among the characters whose words she was repeating, so that she had for a moment in her throat an angry man or a frightened little girl, and sometimes laying out across us like a bell tolling the life-slow death simple monosyllables which crown this awful vision, she brought a range and a control to the job which we do not often see on the London stage. 15

It was left to London Observer critic Kenneth Tynan to place Patricia among the demigods of the theatre, “I must pause here to alute Patricia Neal, the American Method actress who plays the girl. The power and variety of her dark brown voice, on which she plays like a master on the cello, enable her to separate the cadenza from its context and make of it a plangent cry from the depths of memory. Rhetoric and realism, in this harrowing performance, not only fuse but fertilize each other… Mr. Williams, whose speciality is hysteria

p. 200 precariously held in check by formal habits of speech, has given Miss Neal some of his richest prose – a symphonie en blanc majeur, in which image after imageof blazing pallor evokes the climate of Sebastian’s death. 16

During the six week run of the play, the audiences, too, were mesmberised by Patricia’s performance. Wrote one admirier:

When I read the criticisms of Suddenly last simmer I had no idea that I was going to see a performance I would always remember.

Whatever the difficulties of writing the part of Catharine Holly they could hardly compare with the arduous task of acting it. That you accomplished it goes without saying, but what needs to be said is that you did it magnificently.
From the moment you came on the stage you imprisoned everybody’s attention, and it is no exaggeration to say that when the other characters spoke they appeared as impertinent interrupters.

One can only thank you for what must be described as a soul stirring performance and great revelations 17

So impressed by Patricia’s performance in Suddenly last summer was film producer Sam Speigel that he purchased the movie rights, with the idea of filming Patricia in the role for Columbia pictures in London in 1959. He sent people over from the states to watch Patricia in every performance, and Gore Vidal was assigned to write the screenplay. So it was with great shock that Patricia read on the flight home to the US that the part had been given to Elizabeth Taylor. “Losing that film was the hardest professional blow of my life” she wrote. 18

Pysche 59 (filmed July 1962)

Patricia Neal an unquiet life by Stephen Shearer
p. 233 “filming went smoothly and briskly. The plot of the adult melodrama involves beautiful Alison Crawford (Neal), wife of industrialist Eric Crawford (Cutr Jurgens). She has been blind for five years; doctors believe that Alison’s condition is physchosomatic, due to some traumatic event of her past. Alison’tsyounger sister Robin (Samantha Eggar) comes to London for a visit, and Alison senses a certain tension between her sister and Eric. Family friend Paul (Ian Bannen) arrives, and Robin and he are attracted to each other. Eric discloses to Paul that he seduced Robin when she was a schoolgirl. Alison begins to regain her sight after a fall in the garden, but she does not tell anyone, not even her annoyingly odd grandmother (Beatrix Lehmann). After Robin announcers her engagement to Paul, Alison finds Robin and Eric in bed together. She suddenly realises her blindness was caused by her having witnesses a similar scene between them years before. Paul leaves Robin and Alison leaves Eric. Off with the glasses, bright sunny sky, and The End.

Commie friends (1943)

British writers and MI5 surveillance 1930-1960 by James Smith

p. 57 “Continued surveillance

“Even when these individuals were judged to be politically safe for sensitive work, the routine entry of security information in their files did not cease. At around the same time MI5 was vetting Day-Lewis for PWE work, other sections of the agency were recording the fallout within the CPGB since Day-Lewis removed himself from activisim. A January 1943 NORTH report (as the intellirgence from the bugging of the King Street CPGB headquartes was called) recorded Emile Burns and a visitor discussing the current standing of Day-Lewis. The visitor had been discussing the case of Day Lewis with Beatrix Lehmann and the following information was unwittingly relayed:

Visitor: Day [Lewis] has really dropped out of the party not because of any anti-party line. He was worried about the Finnish business that was the final thing but he’d practically disappeared before then because he felt that the party was taking an anti-cultural line and he was rushing about speaking and doing this that and the other and not being allowed to write poetry. It’s probably not true but –

Burns: You tell Beatrix that I tried every conceivable method when I heard that he was drifting away to get him to meet either rme or Harry and never got an answer out of him. The fact of the matter is he was completely antagonistic to the party’s line on the question of the war as well as on the question of Finland and the result of it was that he just deliberately refused to meet leading party people who were wanting to make an effort to talk it over with him. He may be sorry he did it now, but don’t let him put that kind of thing up. He wasn’t doing any speaking for us.”

(also includes a brief history of the Communist Party Great Britain)

Shakespeare festival (1947)

As she likes it Shakespeare’s unruly women by Penny Gay

Twelth night

p. 19 “The most striking unconventional casting was that of Viola the 44 year old Beatrix Lehmann. Since her debut in 1924, she had made her name as an actress of modern ‘strong’ roles, those of Tennessee Williams, for instance. [Am pretty sure her TW plays were after 1947] She  became president of the Acotrs Equity in 1945. Lehmann had not played Shakespeare professionally until this Stratford season, when her roles were Portia, Isabella, Viola and the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet. She was a strongchinned, short-haired, modern-looking woman despite the Caroline costume for Cesario (photographs give the impression that she looked more ‘masculine’ than Sebastian, which opens up charming possibilities in the cross-gender comedy). The critics were surprised but pleased:

“one must say of Miss Lehmann that her Cesario is every inch a man… If you will put by any preference for the openly wistful, Miss Lehmann seems here superlatively well cast and well spoke: here may be the nearest thing to the Violas that Shakespeare saw since the part ceased to be played by boys of flesh and blood. (Guardian 26 April 1947)

p. 20 (Every inch a man? This delightfully naïve response, relying as it does on outward signs of gender, has already been deconstructed by Viola’s A little thing would make me tell them hou much I lack of a man)

She laughs at Olivia more readily than she sighs for Orsino, and would obviously have much pleasure in trouncing Sir Andrew if the text allowed. She greets her brother with cool, sisterly affection, and the betrothal to the Duke seems a comfortable settlement rather than the realistation of the heart’s desire (Ruth Ellis) – [but no citation]

This was a production not intent on foregrounding sexual confusion, but confidently presentint an image of the emotionally independent, self-reliant, and rather interestingly ‘masculine’ woman whom the social disruptions of the second world war had brought into being. At the same time it reasserted, through the marriages and the ultimately unthreatening Malvolio-Olivia axis, an ideal of a mutually interdependent (though still strongly hierarchical) community ablte to heal itself and to find a place for all types and conditions of people in the post-war world.

p. 26 (“touchingly young and boyish” comment on a play from the 60;’s) Contrast this use of the “true Shakespearean” criterion with that of the comment on Beatrix Lehmann’s admirable mannishness in 1947. Fashions in gender performance are as much subject to historical change as other fashions.

Measure for Measure

p. 122 “Revived in 1947 with some cast changes, it gave Beatrix Lehmann as Isabella another Shakespearean role in this season. As the critics obviously expected from the president of Actors’ Equity, it was a performance of feminist worldly authority. The Birmingham Gazette (12 April 1947) said, “She is hard, even calculating, and we get the impression that here is a woman – chaste or not, as you will – who knows her world and her men”. The Birmigham Post (12 April 1947) spoke of her “intense intelligence and assurance”, her ‘pos[ing] a cold detachment against Angelo’s smouldering plea’ (the previous year’s Isabella, Ruth Lodge, was sweet and tearful and did not impress the critics). Unfortunately neither the Angelo nor the Duke presented a real challenge to this Isabella; the production remained what punch called ‘ a kind of ethical fantasy” September 1946.

Passing of the third floor back (1935)

Destination London: German-speaking Emigrés and British Cinema, 1925-1950  edited by Tim Bergfelder, Christian Cargnelli

Has discussion of the film and Conrad Veidt’s British film-making

The Birthday Party (1958)

Harold Pinter by William Baker

The first performance of The Birthday Party took place on 28 April 1958 at the Arts Theatre, Cambridge. Directed by Peter Wood, Meg was performed by Beatrix Lehmann, Stanley by Richard Pearson and Goldberg by John Slater. The play then moved to Oxford where it was well received, moving to the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith on 19 May and closing after one week. The influential drama critic of the London Evening Standard, Milton Shulman wrote a review entitled, “Sorry Mr Pinter, you’re just not funny enouhg’” that @sitting through the Birthday Party at the Lyric Hammersmith, is like trying to solve a crossword puzzle where every vertical clue is designed to put you off the horizontal.” Shulman continutes, “it will be best enjoyed by those who believe that obscurity is its own reward. Others may not feel up to the mental effort needed to illuminate the coy corners of this opaque, sometimes maracbre comedy’. (20 May 1958).

However, Harold Hobson reviewing the Birthday Party in the Sunday Times shortly after Shulman’s negative comments defended the play. Hobson writes, ‘Mr Pinter has got hold of a primary fact of existence. We live on the verge of disaster.’ Hobson’s observations titled, The screw turns again, penetrate with remarkable insight to the core of much of Pinter’s work:

“There is something in you past – it does not matter what – which will catch up with you. Through you go to the uttermost parts of the earth, and hide yourself in the most obscure lodgings in the least popular of towns, one day there is a possibility that two men will appear. And someone will be looking for them too. There is terror everywhere… the fact that no one can say precisely what it is about, or give the address from which the intruding Goldberg and McCann come, or say precisely why it is that Stanley is so frightened by them is, of course, one of its greatest merits. It is exactly in this vagueness that its spine-chilling quality lies (25 May 1958).

(Pinter’s quotes on the nature of Stanley as a character and discussion on the nature of the play)

Punch 1952 review of something (?)

The Illustrated London News, Volume 233, Issue 1; Volume 233, Issues 6213-6225 1958

Theatre World, Volume 54 (1958) for garden district review

Relationship with Isherwood

Isherwood  By Peter Parker (2005)

Xiii Roland Philips for BL [who is that and can I talk to him?]

224 “The actress and writer Beatrix Lehmann, was bisexual [but no references to back this up]

250 Isherwood was therefore delighted when John Lehmann’s sister Beatrix arrived in the city. Like Jean Ross before her, she came in forlorn hope of finding work with Ufa as an actress [However unlike Jean she has already toured Germany working as an actress]. Beatrix had looked forward to dining with Isherwood on her first day in the city, but he couldn’t make this. Instead she ‘went to his slum for tea’ a description of Nollendorfstrasse that would have mortally offended Frl. Thurau. ‘And was I glad to she him!’ she told her hister Rosamond. [so guessing this is quoted from one of her letters at the archive]. She found him ‘sympathetic and amused’ [it is worth pointing out that they were already friends at this point and had met previously]. When she told him of the difficulties in her personal life. [which were???] Unlike Rosamond, ‘Peggy’ Lehmann was no great beauty, [!} but she was certainly striking in appearance. Fiercely left-wing, funny, a gifted actress and mimic,

p. 251 and an admirer of his writing, she represented for Isherwood ‘woman in an acceptable form’ as Spender put it. Isherwood himself though he and Peggy were ‘much alike in temperament, a natural elder sister and elder brother’ which was indeed the only relationship with a woman Isherwood wanted. They shared a sense of humour and brought out the best in each other. That first day they ‘made dates for future cheap fun’ and thereafter met regularly. ‘I see a lot of Christopher and like him more and more,’ she told Rosamond. ‘He is just a spot tragic I think. And undeveloped in a way that doesn’t disgust but only makes one’s heart ache. He and I and a peculiar be-wigged, Edwardian Oscar Wildeish perscon called Gerald Hamilton (ask John) lunch together in a a filthy pension most days. Three giant courses for one mark! It’s all very funny and slightly nightmare.’ She also met Wilfrid Israel, whom she described as ‘aristocratic and more beautiful than anything I’ve ever seen’. She rather shared Isherwood’s view of him as tantilzingly mysterious and almost impossibly refined. ‘Quite certainly homo, but nobody really knows anything about him’, she told Roasamond. ‘He took me out the other evening and I felt dirty-fingered and clumsy. He is so princely and exquisite. But it gave me a deeper insight into the Jewish character than ever before.’

Despairing of making any money by acting, Beatrix thought she might take another look at a novel she had written, hoping that she would be inspired by Isherwood’s company and example. She became his closest woman friend, but she was due to return to England at the beginning of 1933 and this added to Isherwood’s sense of gloom.

p. 269 ‘Over the next few days Heinz had lunch with Hector Wintle and his fiancée, tea with William Plomer and Humphrey Spender, saw Beatrix Lehmann in a play [figure out which one] went on a motoring trip to Windsor…

p,278 “there was very little work to be done on the script, and to Isherwood’s annoyance the shoot was dealayed for another week while the cast was being finalized. Eventually a cast was assembled,… Isherwood had tried to use his influence to get Beatrix Although he was unsuccessful, the meeting

p. 279 between Lehmann and Viertel had an unexpected result: they embarked on an affair. [Jan-Feb of which year1934?]

p.288 “in the wistful list he provided for Lehman of those he would invite to his birthday part if he was having one, You Stephen, Wystan, Edard Wiliam [Plomer], Forster, Roasamond, Beatrix, Wogan [Philips], Gertald, The Tonys [Lehmann and Spender’s boyfriends] and Olive Mnageot.

p. 354 Wystand and Christopher arrived late in the afternoon, accompanied by Beatrix Lehmann and Bertold Viertel, like two black corws, an univited professional backing. Medley recalled in 1983 with a bitterness the invervening forty six years…

p. 360 Lehamann and his sister Beatrix were to be the book’s dedicatees.

p. 385 Spender came round for an early cold supper and then accompanied Kathleen and Christopher to the Westminster theatre, where Beatrix Lehmann gave a remarkable solo performance in an English translation of Cocteau’s La Voix Humaine…

p. 412 On 15 January he had lunch with Upward and tea with Forster, then went to the Café Royal for a farewell dinner with Viertel and Beatrix Lehmann. …

p.464

p. 530 “Beatrix, the latter represented for Isherwood “woman in an acceptable form”

p., 533

p. 576” “If that sounds brutal, here’s what Beatrix Lehman wrote to C many years earlier (19387) while she was having a sort of love-affair with Viertel, “absence of poor old b.V. for a few days – really like coming out of a mad house into a green field.

Photo of Beatrix published in the Sketch 29 Dec 1937

Desire under the elms (1940)

The London Stage 1940-1949: A Calendar of Productions, Performers, and Personnel  By J. P. Wearing

DUE Westminster 24/1/40-4/4/40 86 performances

Illustrated London news 10.2.40

New Statesman 3/2/40 133-134

Observer 28/1/40 p. 11

Spectator 2/2/40 p.144

Stage 1/2/40 8

Sunday Times 28/1/40 4

Times 25/1/40 4

Comment: a bad performance would reveal the play’s weaknesses, but a good performance such as this one can be persuasive (Spectator), New statesman observed that the play is ‘a play of poetic realism’ but that O’Neill ‘has not a poet’s command of words’. On the censorship o fhte play, see Aldgate, 8-11. Paul Scofield’s professional daebut in an unidentified role. The NY production ran for 420 performances (including transfers to different theatres).

Close quarters (1941)

The London Stage 1940-1949: A Calendar of Productions, Performers, and Personnel  By J. P. Wearing

Apollo 31/7/41-23/8/41 28 performances.

New statesman 9/8/41

Observer 3/8/41

Stage 7/8/41

Times 2/8/41

Comment: New statesman commented on the restrictions imposed by the duologue format. Karel Stepanek’s successful London debut.

Jam to day (1942)

The London Stage 1940-1949: A Calendar of Productions, Performers, and Personnel  By J. P. Wearing

St. Martins 19/2/42-9/5/42 92 performances

Observer 22/2/42

Spectator 27/2/42

Stage 26/2/42

Sunday times 22/2/42

Times 21/2/42

Comment A comedy about infidelity.

Ghosts (1943)

The London Stage 1940-1949: A Calendar of Productions, Performers, and Personnel  By J. P. Wearing

Duke of Yorks 25/6/43-28/8/43 74 performances

New statesman 10/7.43

Observer 27/6/43

Spectator 2/7/43

Stage 1/7/43

Times 26/6/43

Comment; Poor performances by the supporting cast rendered Beatrix Lehmann’s Mrs Alving ‘ less a tragic heroine than the luckless heroine of a thriller (times) However spectator thought that the acting was ‘good and efficient’.

Uncle Harry (1944)

Garrick

29/3/44-8/7/44 121 performances

New statesman 8/4/44 29/4/44

Observer 2/4/44

Spectator 7/4/44

Stage 6/4/44

Sunday times 2/4/44

Times 30/3/44

Comment Michael Redgrave and Beatrix Lehmann both gave ‘virtuoso performances’ in a play that ‘does not bear close examination’ (new statesman 8/4)

Uncle Harry (1944-1945)

The London Stage 1940-1949: A Calendar of Productions, Performers, and Personnel  By J. P. Wearing

Garrick 7/9/44-17/2/45 188 performances

Vicious Circle (no exit) (1946)

The London Stage 1940-1949: A Calendar of Productions, Performers, and Personnel  By J. P. Wearing

Art theatre 16/7/46-11/8/46 27 performances

New statesman 27/7/46

Observer 21/7/46

Stage 18/7/46

Sunday times 21/7/46

Times 17/7/46

Times found the production unimaginative. New statesman praised the ‘beautifully sensitive acting’ but found the play unengaging. On the production and Peter Brook’s particular involvement see Trewin 22, 24 [I have]

On the way by Helge Krog(1946)

Arts 10/10/46-20/10/46 14 performances

Observer 13/10/46

Stage 17/10/46

Sunday times 13/10/46

Times 11/10/46

Comment a doctor discovers she is pregnant and refuses to marry the father.

The rising sun (1946) - producer

The London Stage 1940-1949: A Calendar of Productions, Performers, and Personnel  By J. P. Wearing

Lyric Hammersmith

Pd Beatrix Lehamn (PD?) [producer? First produced with Alec Clunes, might be worth investing his biographies?]

Times thought that the performances obscured this play about the relationship between a failing businessman and his family. Stage said the performances were generally ‘consientious’ but with Michael gwynn being ‘most striking’.

Fatal Curiosity (1946) - producer

The London Stage 1940-1949: A Calendar of Productions, Performers, and Personnel  By J. P. Wearing

Arts theatre dir alec clunes

5.12.46-29/12/46

Comment on the production see Trewin, 25 [I should!]

Romeo and Juliet (1947)

The London Stage 1940-1949: A Calendar of Productions, Performers, and Personnel  By J. P. Wearing

His Majesty’s Theatre

6/10/47-11/10 (20 17/10-18/10 (2) 22/10 (2)-23/10 (2) 11 performances

Illustrated Lonndon news 11/10/47

New satesman 18/10/47

Observer 12/10/47

Stage 9/10/47

Sunday times 12/10/47

Times 7/10/47

Shakespeare memorial theatre company. Only the visual elements  of the production attracted critical praise. New statesman noted that the last scene was cut drastically and a black clocked chorus quietly enunciated the last words given by Shakespeare to the Prince of Verona.

Twelfth night or what you will (1947)

The London Stage 1940-1949: A Calendar of Productions, Performers, and Personnel  By J. P. Wearing

His Majesty’s 8/10/47-10/10; 15/10; 16/10; (2) 20/10-21/10 47

Illustrated London News 11/10/47

New statesman 18/10/47

Observer 12/10/47

Stage 16/10/47

Sunday times 12/10/47

Times 9/10/47

Shakespeaere Memorial Theatre Company. Stage also praised Scofield but found much else unsatisfactory.

No trees in the street (1948)

The London Stage 1940-1949: A Calendar of Productions, Performers, and Personnel  By J. P. Wearing

[missing notes for appareances]

New statesman 7/8/48

Observer 1/8/48

Stage 29/7/48

Sunday times 1/8/48

Times 28/7/48

The play was about working class life in East London and the violence it engendered. John Stratton’s London debut.

Folios of New Writing - Volume 5 - Page 187

1938 BEATRIX. LEHMANN. THE. TWO-THOUSAND-POUND. RASPBERRY. I was new to film-making. I never saw the script — they said there wasn't one. I asked why they made me count six to myself before turning my head and speaking in one of ...

Nearby librariesto E14

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The plays of Eugene O'Neill, Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams on the London stage, 1945-1960.

Author:

Lee Beltzer

1965 PHd thesis

Mentions Bea’s thoughts on O’neill’s writing.

Theatre World Annual (1965)

A cuckoo in the nest

Stratford scene (1946) [though must be  1947]

For Bea’s Shakespeare scenes 15 references no preview check at BL.

Drama: The Quarterly Theatre Review,

(1947) for Shakesperare festival

Charlotte Corday (1936)

Drama : the quarterly theatre review, Issues 65-75 1962

“I may be permitted a personal reminiscence. When my Charlotte Cordway was produced at the enterpiring Q theatre in 1936 (with Beatrix Lehman as the heroine) I was cautioned against…

At my suggestion he entrusted the chief part to Beatrix Lehmann, then in the early stages of a brilliant career. She possessed a stark simplicity combined with a rare power of evocation that enabled her to convey by a mere glance or gesture ...

Flirting with women (Jan 1935)

The Blue Hour: A Portrait of Jean Rhys (Bloomsbury Lives of Women)

 By Lilian Pizzichini

 “Jean accepted an invitation for tea at Rosamund’s house. Roasamund’s sister [note the misspelling of her name] Beatrix, a well known actress, and Mrs Violet Hammersley, [a name to look up] the widow of a rich banker and patron of the arts, joined them. All three women were looking forward to meeting this daring new writer who had clearly drawn on her life for her work. Jean turned up dressed like an Edwardian matron in dusty black. She wore an old-fashioned hat and lacy gloves that she refused to remove. She sipped at her tea priml and spoke little. This was the act she had prepared and she was sticking to it. Mrs hammersley tried drawing her out with risqué stories of Paris where she had lived. Beatrix winked at her saucily. Roasmund had no cohhice but to accept her new friend’s show of respectability.

Although Jean had not been ale to remove her disguise she had like R and wrote to say so. R wrote back to her saying, I guesed and now am sure that you are frightened of people. This was an invitation to drop the act.
The next time she saw her, Jean had a black eye. The last time she saw her, Jean was too drunk to speak.

Michael redgrave autobiography – 2 mentions

Mask or face: reflections in an actor's mirror

The Book Review Digest, Volume 30

1935 review of Rumour of heaven

Ivy Compton-Burnett

(who Bea did all the radio plays for)

Ivy Compton-Burnett: a memoir Cicely Greig

“Now, however, she was pleased to tell us that Manservant and Maidservant was to be broadcast. Ivy liked Beatrix Lehmann to play the parts of her elderly women tyrants, but there would be no part for her in Manservant and Maidservant, nor, ...”

The Stratford festival: a history of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre

3 mentions

Affair with Viertel (1930s)

Berthold Viertel: Leben und künstlerische Arbeit im Exil

Irene Jansen 1992 15 mentions

p. 209 1934 Bekanntschaft mit Beatrix Lehmann

1937 Kirse in der Beziehung zu Beatrix Lehmann

Angus McBean: Facemaker

13 matches to Bea

“he requested some special publicity shots of his new “find” Beatrix Lehmann. She had stolen all the notices in Mourning becomes Electra, and ..

Our time

In 1941 Beatrix edited and contributed to the magazine, Our time, a left wing short periodical only 23 pages in length. Described in detail in Comrade Heart: A Life of Randall Swingler By Andy Croft

(check for copies at BL - on ABE for £20 each)