1952
Jan 17 1952 The stage
A play that makes audiences talk
Catherine Lacy on The day’s mischief includes photo of Bea and two other women)
Few plays have provoked so much discussion as Lesley Storm’s The day’s mischief. At the duke of york’s. Some have seen it as a profound psychological problem, some as a sociological challenge, others as a warning of the dangers of malicious gossip, and yet others as a kind of pathological study of a jealous woman.
That a play can show so many facets is a sign of its quality. How do the company – an admirably cooperative team under Norman Marshall – see it? Let Catherine Lacey, who plays the wife of the wrongly –suspected schoolmaster, sum up her reactions.
“I think it is true”, She says, “that the play has all these aspects never anything but good theatre from beginning to end.”
“An audience is essential to an actor, Whether one is playing a sympathetic or an unsympathetic part, a good audience is aware of the truth. And there is no doubt that this is a play that makes audiences talk. We had eight weeks in the provinces before opening in the West End, and there always seemed to be somebody who got something out of it we never thought of, for not of the characters are completely without sympathy. A jealous wife will somehow always arouse interest, either for or against – nobody seems to mind a jealous husband. This wife, however, is more than jealous she has the, but I wouldn’t like to use the words “psychological” or “problem” in dealing with work that shows so much human understanding. I would say that it is just a play, a story that holds people, which is what a play is meant to do. It deals with jealousy and love, and these subjects are always interesting, because they are universal and fundamental. And here Miss Storm has, I think, provided us with wonderful material, which has absolute truth and carries complete conviction. She has treated the story without any theatrical sensationalism and with true humanity and tenderness, as in the scene in the last act, when the father without any reproach, tries to help the girl and give her strength for the future – and yet the play is honesty to admit it, and that is what makes her so interesting. Another thing that gives the part – and the whole play – conviction is that Miss Storm has drawn the characters of the two men so well. Only too often women writers fail in drawing men – they make them as women want them to be, instead of as they really are.
The play certainly has at least half a dozen well contrasted parts, and that is why it such an excellent vehicle for acting. But acting is a thing I hate talking about, the only time for talking is at rehearsal, with author, producer and fellow actors. But I am always glad to be in a play that sends the audience home with something to talk about. The more they disagree and argue the better I like it.”
The stage March 27 1952
Bristol old vic
Family Reunion on March 25 at the Royal
Denis Carey’s production has all the sympathy and sensitivity which made the cocktail party such an impressive example of the company’s work. This even performance demands, but does not always compel, the very closest attention, while the author weaves a web of voluble symbolism around so simple a question as Did Harry’s wife fall or was she pushed? The acting has the calm implacable quality which persuades us that the cast are fully conversant with the author’s intentions. In the neurotic sort of role which suits him best, Laurence Payne gives a stark yet not inflexible performance as Harry. Dorothy Reynolds is the most impressive of aunts… The distinguished guest artists, Beatrix Lehmann, is not always carrying complete conviction as to Amy’s age and authority, gives her an appropriately bleak asperity…
(for the rest of the year just 2 mentions of radio play featured elsewhere)
1953
Feb 19 1953 The stage
The father
A new adaptation of Strindberg’s play, the Father, by Max Faber, will be produced by Peter Cotes at the Arts next Thursday next. Wilfrid Lawson returning to the West End stage after an absence of nearly 10 years will play the Captain with Beatrix Lehmann as the wife…
March 5 1953 The stage
The father arts
On Feb 26 London Arts Theatre Committee presented a revival, in a version by Max Faber, of the play by August Strindberg,
Has it ever before happened that two plays based on wifely attempts to persuade doctors that they woman’s husbands are insane have run simultaneously in London? Surely not. The theme could hardly be more unusual – or for that matter more uncomfortable. This is not the occasion for a comparative analysis of the Strindberg drama The Father and the modern American play The Shrike, but one wonders whether the author of the latter found some inspiration in the 65 year old Swedish exercise in domestic gloom and terror.
In his lifetime Strindberg was accused of having written “too sad” a tragedy, an accusation which he refuted with spirit. Certainly the struggle between the unfortunate solider-scientist father and his malevolent wife, Laura, is both powerful and terrible. The father is indeed a horrifying play, notwithstanding – or more accurately because of – its great dramatic strength… True the sinister wife’s motives seem inadequate. Could such ruthlessness be inspired merely to keep a daughter under the family rooftree? Laura, one feels, is every whit as acute a pathological case as her husband is. So far as that goes one is left in some slight degree of doubt about the depth of the husband’s inanity….the drama is so gripping that all adverse criticism is easily stilled in the theatre.
The title part is taken by Wilfrid Lawson, that fine dramatic actor who has been too long absent from the West end. He returns in an extremely testing role, and occasionally – but only occasionally – a somewhat higher degree of emotional intensity is required. But Mr Lawson, still a highly distinctive actor in his vocal inflections achieves just this. That by the end of the evening one all but forgets the performer in a wave of sympathy for the character.
Beatrix Lehmann, another player who we should like to see more often in parts worthy of her talents, is positively terrifying in her intensity as Laura….
Guardian Apr 20 1953
A Strindberg play The dance of death by our radio critic
“a nice piece of tormented gloom last week on the third programme. The theme is Strindberg’s obsession – the hate between men and women, and the sense of imprisonment they can inflict upon themselves….This was more dramatic because of the fiery acting of Beatrix Lehmann as Edgar’s wife and the cleverly judged performance of Michael Horder as Edgar…
August 13, 1953 The Stage
On the air – Two star plays Recordings of a number of interesting productions from the third programmes past dramatic output have been selected for the third quarter of this year. Among them are two short plays by Satre…
Guardian, Sept 28, 1953 Men and wives radio (third programme)
Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novel broadcast as a play.
Through every line of that precise dialogue there look out at us the passionate, the odd, the neurotic, the selfish, or even ordinary characters of the families whose attachment and feuds she writes about. Each one is drawn so finely that to see them in the person of actors would blur the edges. In Men and wives the devouring Lady Haslam, brilliantly acted by Beatrix Lehmann, is one of those who, with the highest motives, ruin the lives of their nearest and dearest.
Oct 20 1953 Guardian No sign of the dove
Peter Ustinov’s new play, Noah at Leeds.
Peter Ustinov’s new play, No sign of the dove, which opened here at the grand theatre is partly fantasy and party satire at the expense of the intellectuals…Mr Ustinov’s aim is evidently to be not so much fair as wickedly funny, and the appearance of Beatrix Lehmann and Raymond Huntley as a high born and high minded brother and sister in a lordly mansion swooning with chinoiserie is mprision(?) though ominous. How long can the joke possibly last? And indeed, it turns out, that not Sir Mohammed nor the thrilling, prophetic voice of his sister Niobe, … can save the central situation from wearing thin. …
October 22 1953 The stage
Leeds premier No sign of the dove
On October 19 at the Grand Linnit and Dunfee Ltd presented a new play by Peter Ustinov.
NSOTD is set in a mansion where, for purposes as strange as they are diverse, a weired collection of nine people are marooned by floods. Five are intellectuals two are bored type of gentlemen and his poetry adoring sister who sits at his feet and thinks his high flautin ideas and speech are wonderful: and others a titled poseur with money and no brains, his wife, with nothing more than good looks and an incredible old fool of a professor so absorbed in his theories that, as they say in Yorkshire, he is plain daft. …
Peter Ustinov sets his people talking – an easy flow, sometimes small talk, sometimes profound, almost all the time amusing. They touch on many phases of life and living with brilliant satire and wit. The point the author would appear to be making is that far too many people are frittering time and opportunity away, instead of getting down to hard realities and accepting the challenge of the present and future.
Raymond Huntley and Beatrix Lehmann, the one suave and superior, the other just poetry struck, lead the intellectuals…
Peter Ustinov himself directs this very entertaining and provoking play, and N. Benois, his mother, is responsible for the brilliant décor and costumes.
Dec 3 1953
The stage No sign of the dove
Comes to the savoy tonight…
Dec 9 1953 Variety
New Ustinov Legiter Major London flop
London Dec 8
The major flop of the legit season is Peter Usinov’s new play, No sign of the dove, which Linnet & Dundee stage at the Savoy last Thursday (3) after a short out-of-town try out. The audience became restless early in the second act, and ironical jeers came from various parts of the house with boos at the final curtain. Critics were unanimous in their pans.
The theme deals with a present day Noah who shows his contempt for civilisation during a new flood, but the build-up to the climax is laboriously treated with pretentious dialogue. There is hardly a whiff of satire, which is, after all, the author’s forte. Principal roles are played by Miles Malleson, Beatrix Lehmann and Raymond Huntley, but they proved unable to salvage much from the wreck.
Dec 9 Variety
Plays abroad No sign of the dove
Peter Ustinov, justifiably regarded as the boy genius of the British theatre has over-reached himself with his latest effort by writing a play which mainly consists of pretentious nonsense. And its rather dull nonsense at that. Apart from one dramatic sequence in the last act, it fails to grip the imagination and flounders precariously between arty talk and bedroom farce. A bleak and dismal failure, which will have to be written off as a total loss…
Beatrix Lehmann and Raymond Huntley as his son and daughter were unreal characters although they as well as other members of the cast did their best with the inadequate material. The author claims directorial credit.
Dec 10 the stage No sign of the dove
A cordial second night reception can have done comparatively little to cushion the blow suffered by the author when the play’s opening performance was marred by interruptions during the action and boos at the end, and when the first critics released their missiles. The saddest reflection is that doubtless the dramatist felt reasonably confidence in advance of appreciation and success. Much thought must have gone into his satiric sallies and philosophical probing, and on paper the play probably seemed witty enough at least to pass muster. But on the stage it just fails to add up or work out in the manner obviously expected. One reason may be that the three acts differ so widely in manner and apparent intent. The first is an elaborately epigrammatic but often obscure study of those intellectual coteries which rhapsodise about little literary periodicals offering generous dollops of incomprehensible poetry. The second is a dull burlesque of bedroom and bathroom farce. And the third is a pessimistic essay, in the Shavian manner, on the theme of mankind’s deserved doom…
Old Mathew’s son and daughter, poets and posers both, are played by Beatrix Lehmann and Raymond Huntley. But neither of these fine artists is happily cast. Their special quality is a kind of spiritual intensity, a quality which cannot be expressed through the worthless D’urts….
Feb 25 1954 The stage
Blood wedding
Frederico Garcia Lorca’s Blood wedding translated by Richard O’Connell is to be directed by Peter Hall at the Arts on Wednesday next. Beatrix Lehmann will appear as the mother…
Mar 11 1954 The stage
Blood wedding This production is a brave attempt at the impossible… for those who like their theatre going to be an experience, Blood wedding, is something not to be missed.
The opinion of those who profess to find the play “incomprehensible” can be discounted as inverted snobbery. The passion of the bride who elopes on her wedding day is as elemental as the passion of Cleopatra and phedre, and the deaths of the lover and the bridegroom are inevitable from the first mention f blood and the symbolic flash of steel and a few seconds after the curtain has gone up. Perhaps it is difficult for an English audience to think of blood shedding as mystic rite of passion as a form of tragic suffering. But it is impossible not to respond to the drama that Lorca has wrought from those two elements, a drama that moves from guilt to retribution as swiftly and as certainly as a Greek tragedy; or to the rich glittering verse (mostly quite happily translated) with which he lends universality to the small, enclosed world of Andalusia.
Peter Hall has cleverly overcome most of the problems of presentation suing bold, bright cut-outs and sharp lighting to set the atmosphere and bringing the paly to an impressive climax. Unfortunately, the production sags at the very place where the play is most in need of bolstering up with spectacle. The half-hearted pretence that the wedding guests are enjoying an occasion, the arch way they deliver their chorus lines, and the poor impression of a Spanish dance are too amateur theatrical for words.
…Beatrix Lehmann begins very well as the bridegroom’s mother, gossiping at cross purposes with her son; but her elaborate mannerisms are out of place in the stark simplicity of the final scene./..
Wed March 17 1954 Variety
Blood wedding, London March 10 Arts theatre
Although this Spanish play has been the motif for a ballet, this is its first production here as a straight play. It is a gloomy impressionistic opus alternating between prose and verse and suitable only for this intimate type of theatre, which mainly attracts the intelligentsia. Symbolism is heavily underlined both in the fragmentary scenery and the interpretation by the players. Of its kind, it is impressively presented and at times moving, with artistic lighting and grouping effects.
A widowed mother broods over a family feud that over the years has robber her of her husband and elder son. All her devotion and apprehension are centred on her remaining boy, who is anxious to marry, but the match fills his mother with foreboding. The girl seems good and suitable, but it develops her former sweetheart left her to marry her cousin, and the attraction is still in the blood of both of them. The wedding takes place and while the guests feast and dance the bride runs off with her former lover, a member of the hostile clan…. (more plot)
Beatrix Lehmann gives a fulsome display of haunted misery as the bereaved mother…
June 24, 1954
Rada on tv stars at jubilee gala
Then came a stimulating performance of Barrie’s Shall we join the ladies? First seen in 1921 at the opening of the earlier RADA Theatre by the Prince of wales. Mervyn Johns played the host on Sunday, admirably supported by Beatrix Lehmann, Valerie Taylor, M….
Guardian Oct 4 1954
Manservant and Maidservant 3rd of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels broadcast as a play. … The unique flavour of her work comes out on the radio not because her people are rather strange – for in fact they are quite real – but because they seem to come so much closer than most literary characters. In Manservant and Maidservant there is more kindness and more humanity than in the two earlier plays; though all equally have a strong moral sense, which is after all what makes these things interesting… He had an excellent cast especially Norman Shelley as Horace and Beatrix Lehmann as his wife…
June 20th 1955 Guardian
Another play by Ivy Compton-Burnett can be heard on the third programme. This is Pastors and masters, the action of which takes place in a school, where there is an attempt to steal the literary work of a dead friend….A strong cast includes Beatrix Lehmann, Norman Shelly….
Observer July 3, 1955 Pastors and masters Beatrix Lehmann to take (as Emily) so calm and bitter a view of her brother’s basic inanity…
Guardian July 4 1955 Almost a laugh
Pastors and masters. In Emily Herrick played by Beatrix Lehmann, who must be the perfect Compton-Burnett actress, there is the forerunner of the terrible women who people the later books…
The stage July 21 1955
First night, Pleasure gardens Folkestone, on Monday next with BL
Disillusioned actress
Here is the story of Sylvia Knight an actress who has had her day and opposes with great bitterness the intention of her daughter to follow her in the profession. Years of success in the theatre have not brought her happiness, rather they caused disillusionment, for her all-pervading devotion to the stage has cost her the affection of her husband, from who she has been separated for a long period.
A young playwright, Martin Blake, brings to the no longer young or attractive Sylvia a new play in which there is a leading role for her. By the lengthy arm of coincidence the impresario who takes on the play is her husband, and he in turn selects their daughter, the conflict between mother and daughter becomes embittered, and the former shows an antagonism amounting almost to obsession in her endeavours to persuade the girl to relinquish the part ad give up the stage.
The character of Sylvia Knight, played with great intensity by Beatrix Lehmann, is extremely well drawn and has the hallmark of reality. Miss Lehmann makes the passe actress a figure of disillusionment, disappointed in domestic life yet still bound by the invisible cords that hold her to the stage and will not release her…
Oct 6 1955 Dark lady of the sonnets
Review of BBC tv drama Dark lady
When Shaw put forward his plea for a national theatre in 1910 he mingled admiration and contempt for Shakespeare in typical mocking vein. The Dark lady of the sonnets still remains a wittily enchanting trifle, and the good sense put into the mouth of Queen Elizabeth still holds, for we have no national theatre and little hope of ever seeing one… Beatrix Lehmann made the queen an imposing figure, combining dignity and an ironic sense of humour, and every gesture added weight to her lines…
The entire production made perfect television. It has atmosphere, realism and a light, intimate touch….
Dec 4 1955 Observer
A.A. Lloyd’s translation of Lorca’s poem, the lament for Ignacio Sanchez Majias was magnificently read by Beatrix Lehmann on the third programme. All blood and sadness drumming its way into your head and making the use of poetry kind of talk sound threadbare.
January 26 1956 the stage
Peter Hall is directing the first professional production of Anouilh’s play, The waltz of the toreadors, at the arts on Feb 22, with Brenda Bruce, Hugh Griffith and Beatrix Lehmann in the cast…
Feb 9 1956
The stage The new opening date for Anouilh’s play Waltz of the toreadors at the arts is Feb 24…
Feb 26 1956 Guardian
Waltz Beatrix Lehmann, mopping and mowing is horribly funny as the wife. And Hugh Griffith’s decaying satyr is the richest performance of this fine actor’s career. I shall return next week to a production which, meantime, none should miss.
The stage March 1 1956
Waltz presented at the arts on Feb 24
The marvel is that it does not offend; it is witty, forthright, shrewdly penetrating and event at times faintly suggestive of soul… Beatrix Lehmann effectively combines vicious rage and pathos as the general’s haggard wife,…
Variety March 7 1956
Waltz Shows abroad, London Feb 25
“the latest is restricted to the privacy of the Arts Theatre Club where the censor has no control over earthly dialog and primitive emotions. It is unlike even with cuts to move elsewhere. … an odd mixture of pathos and bitter satire…
Beatrix Lehmann emerges as a venomous, vituperative spouse who gloatingly reveals she matched her mate in promiscuity…
March 15 1957 The stage
Peter halls production of The waltz.. now running at the arts is to transfer to the criterion on March 27…
June 2 1957 guardian
Ibsen on the radio Peer Gynt
In Monday’s production Beatrix Lehmann as Mrs Borkman was ideally cast, for there is this character a core of hardness for which her voice is an expert indicator…
August 1 1957
General St. Pe after sixteen months
Waltz of the toreadors even after sixteen months, continues to attract considerable audiences to the criterion. It is the most fascinating play for years to come to us from France. With its strong story and strong characters, nostalgic theme and startling revelations of family life, its passion and humour, drive and daring, poetic sensibility and intellectual fire, this brilliant Anouilh work offers practically everything any type of theatre goer could desire…
The newest change is the replacing of Beatrix Lehmann – who has left because of illness – by Vivienne Bennett, an actress who we have not been allowed to see in the west end for some time. She gives an impressive study of the General’s wife, not so appallingly hysterical and grinding as Miss Lehmann’s, but having understanding and power…
Mar 7 1957 the stage
Beatrix Lehmann was in the chair at the meeting of the Gallery First Nighters’ Club on March 3 at the duke of Argyll, great windmill street. The speaker was Micahel Croft, found and director of the youth theatre. In her introductory remarks Miss Lehmann said how much she welcomed the Youth Theatre project, which she considered would not only teach the actors technique and appreciation but would also serve to educate audiences…
April 17, 1958 the stage
The cradle song (Tv)
ATV gave us a nice serene and beautifully photographed play last Friday in the television playhouse series, the Cradle song by Grgoria and Maria Martinez Sierra with an English version by John Garrett Underhill dealt with the problem of a small child being left on the doorstep of a convent.
The nuns have great difficulty in loving the child as foster mothers, selfish love being a little against their vows, but in the end they all love the child and are very upset when she marries a nice young man called, naturally enough, Antonio.
My only complaint about this hour length production was that the story line was so thin that in needed the acting talents of Nora Swinburne, Beatrix Lehmann, Barbara Chilcott and Carol Wolveridget to hold the whole thing together.
However, the play, nicely directed by Peter Potter managed to survive. Even, if this production was not terribly exciting or for that matter interesting, it remains in my memory as one of the most charming plays I have seen for along time.
April 24, 1958 the stage
Birthday party Michael Codron and David Hall for Talbot Productions Ltd, are responsible for the presentation of the Birthday party by Harold Pinter at the Arts, Cambridge on Monday next.
May 15 1958 the stage
Play in a boarding house (with photo of bea as meg)
John Slatger and Beatrix Lehmann in The birthday party by Harold Pinter with Michael Codrun and David hall are to present at they Lyric Opera house Hammersmith Monday next.
Guardian May 21 1958
Birthday party Lyric Hammersmith
At the end of the third act of Harold Pinter’s the birthday party a young girl flounces out of a seedy boarding house where she has narrowly escaped strangulation but not seduction with the words, I know what you’re doing. I’ve got a shrewd idea. Here Lulu, for that is her name, has an unfair advantage, for although the author must have explained his play to the cast, he gives no clues to the audience.
Meg, a dim-witted woman who runs a boarding house, indulges in an unhealthy devotion to her only lodger, Stan, a sloppy, dirty third rate pianist, and forgets to make breakfast for a depressed deck chair attendant husband. Stan persuades Meg she is insane and tells her that two new lodgers will take her away in a wheelbarrow. By the time a Jew and an Irishman arrive San is established as a lunatic and it is no surprise to find the new arrivals are mad as hatters. They play blind man’s bluff, watch Stan try to strangle Lulu, brainwash him into a silent inert lump and finally take him off to see Monty.
What all this means only Mr Pinter knows for as his characters speak in non sequiters, half gibberish and lunatic ravings, they are unable to explain their actions, thoughts or feelings. If the author can forget Beckett, Ionescu and Simpson he may do much better next time. But in spite of the play all is not lost at Hammersmith. Beatrix Lehmann and Richard Pearson and Meg and Stan fascinate and repel with their powerful studies of repulsive half-wits. While John Slater and John Stratton make the two other madmen almost as revolting. Peter wood directs.
May 22 1958 the stage
Comic horror of the Birthday Party
To say that Harold Pinter, the author of the birthday party, at the Lyric… has not made his meaning clear is, for once, no reflection of his ability. I is rather as though he had thrown his cap over a windmill and said, let those whom it fits wear it.
He is working on the general theme that those who bury their heads in the sand are bound to get kicked in the portion of their anatomy which that pose leaves most exposed. In reply to an earnest lady who told him that she “accepted life” Dr Johnson replied, my god madam and you had better. Mr Pinter seems to hold that view also; with a rider to the effect that, if you try to dodge it, life, like the goblins, will assuredly come and git year. What he had not made clear is whether he regards this as a good thing or merely as a thing.
Into a household of reality dodgers, who are peacefully engaged in avoiding all issues without a thought in their tiny minds, the author brings equally cranky go=getters from the outer world. They are determined to bring one member of the household, at least, to his senses, or drive him out of them in the attempt.
The result
The result, no less than the method of its achievement, carries an atmosphere of comic horror which seems to have sprung from Kafka, out of Ionescu. There are a number of possible emotions which this play might arouse in any member of the audience, but boredom is unlikely to be one of them…
The author is well served by his cast too. Beatrix Lehmann give on of the finest performances of her career, cleverly moulding her intelligent countenance into the required cast of depressed vacuity. …
Observer, May 25 1958
Harold Pinters’ the birthday party is about a fat torpid young lodger who wants to be left alone, especially by his oppressively maternal landlady. A beaming Jew and a snickering Irishman visit him, nudge him into a game of blindman’s bluff, break his spectacles and lead him off as their captive. Ionesco and Nigel Dennis are the obvious influences; the theme is that of the individualist who is forced out of his shell to come to terms with the world at large, an experience which in all such plays is seen as castratingly tragic.
The writing contains some effective and even witty non sequiturs. Which have led to several critics to compare Mr Pinter with N. F. Simpson. The analogy breaks down in one vital respect. Mr Simpson uses a surrealist technique to say things that could not be said in any other way. Mr Pinter employs a similar technique to say something that could easily be said in many other ways; has, indeed, often been said in them; for the notion that society enslaves the individual can hardly be unfamiliar to any student of the cinema or the realistic theatre. That is why Mr Pinter sounds frivolous, even when he is being serious, and why Mr Simpson is serious, even when he sounds fivilous.
Peter wood’s direction is all we expect of directors name peter, which is to say a great deal. And there are assured performances by Beatrix Lehmann, John Slater and Richard Pearson.
Variety, Shows abroad The birthday party Jun 4 1958
The current vogue for symbolic, incomprehensible plays continues with Harold Pinter’s the birthday party. Presumably the author, the director and the cast know what the piece means, but generally the audience are likely to be baffled.
Party was rapturously received opening night, but the enthusiasm was apparently sparked primarily by the skilful performance. The charade is set in a shabby seaside boarding house, run by a frowsy, frustrated woman and her depressed but harmless husband, a deck chair attendant. Their sole lodger is an uncouth would be piano player who is taken away to an asylum (or to his death) by a pair of crackpot arrivals, one Jewish and the other Irish.
The play wobbles unhappily between comedy, farce, melodrama and allegorical symbolism. Perhaps the author’s conclusion is that the world is inhabited by madmen who batten on others. Some of the dialogue shows a nimble sense of the ridiculous, and an opening breakfast sequence, for instance, capturing the platitudinous chatter of birdbrains, would make a slick revue sketch.
Beatrix Lehmann gives an amusing and often touching performance as the frustrated wife…
Variety June 18 1958 illustrated ad for the Key film
August 7 1958 the stage
Return of Son et Lumiere to Greenwich
Son et lumiere which opened at Royal Greenwich park on July 31, had the weather been in its favour and there was nothing to mar what should have been an impressive and spectacular occasion. From the sound aspect, it was both, Hugh Ross Williamson’s rewritten script is admirably suited for the purpose, for it is not only historically accurate and unusually interesting, but it is witty, dramatic and falls extremely melodiously on the ear.
In the last three qualities it is greatly assisted by Charles Laughton’s beautiful and thoroughly English delivery and by the fine vocal acting of a large cast headed by Beatrix Lehmann as Queen Elizabeth I. …
Variety August 13, small add for the key
Aug 14 the stage
Two Tennessee Williams plays for the arts. (garden district)
Paper also has feature on above piece of son et lumiere that might be worth looking at. Even without mention of bea
August 14, 1958
Limelight! [FINALLY]
One of our most powerful and individual actresses, Beatrix Lehmann will be seen at the Arts next month in Tennessee William’s Garden District. Only recently she had a personal success in The Birthday party, a play of value which was treated indifferently by the public at the Lyric, Hammersmith. Previously she had returned to the West End stage after a long absence, to triumph as the neurotic wife in The waltz of the Toreadors at the Criterion. She studied at RADA and with Rosina Filippi before making her début in 1924, when she succeeded Elsa Lancaster as Peggy in The way of the world at the Hammersmith. In the green hat at the Adelphi she played the Lady’s maid and also understudied Tallulah Bankhead, and at the Royal Court appeared as Judy O’Grady in the adding machine. A memorable production for her was the Silver Tassie, at the Apollo, in which she played Susie Monican. She gave a striking performance in the title role of Salome at the Festival, Cambridge. We remember her too, as Emily Bronte in Wild Decembers, Stella Kirby in Eden and above all, Lavinia in Mourning becomes Electra. A performance of remarkable understanding and poetic feeling. A woman of intellect with a highly developed social consciousness, she is also an artist of depth, passion and originality.
Guardian Sep 17, 1958
Modern Clytemnestra in a wheelchair
Beatrix Lehmann in Tennassee William’s Suddenly last summer
by Philip Hope-Wallace
Two plays by Tennessee Williams new to this country were staged at the Arts Theatre Club last night, under the cover title of Garden District, to wit the wealthier quarter of New Orleans where they take place.
The first Something unspoken, is little more than a curtain raiser and depicts the crisis in the rich home of a domineering spinster whose dismay at not being elected as head of the local branch of the Daughters of something or other, allows her downtrodden companion a moment of long-delayed satisfaction. It is, like so many of this author’s plays, written out of a chiding yet compassionate contempt for the female of the human species but written with a fine ear for the unspoken overtones above banal speech. Naturally, such speeds needs ot be given in some kind of American rhythm, which Miss Beatrix Lehmann as the decayed and put-upon secretary in some measure achieved, though she was made up too old and too grotesque. Beryl Measor, on the other hand could offer nothing but imperious gestures and quite missed the tonal nuances.
The second piece, Suddenly last summer, put a far tighter grip on the audience. This too is mostly subtle worded, an inquest, conducted by a psychiatrist, as to the truth or otherwise of the story of a half-crazy girl about how her rich cousin met his death somewhere in Mexico (it would appear). The story which is wrung from the wretched girl by drugs and moral coercion from the dead man’s mother, a devouring, rich matriarch, is hideously unedifying. The man was a mother’s boy to put it mildly; so much, it is not injourous to give away: and indeed, the chair-borne mother as depicted by Miss Lehmann is a performance of dreadful striking power, like a modern Clytemnestra in a wheelchair, would have made a freak of any child, but suddenly last summer this young man had gone off with his unstable cousin (herself the victim of rape by her own account) and had used her, in some hot and hungry land, as a bait to procure creatures [!] for his lust – and had come to a bad end. All this, whether true of false we are left guessing, is brought to the surface as the shadows lengthen at the cocktail hour in a long-drawn confession (sometimes backed with music, so overtly melodramatic are Mr Williams’s methods). The scene was played with finely calculated tension by the American film actress Patricia Neal. The confrontation of Miss Lehmann and Miss Neal again recalled something classical – such is the measure of what on the surface might seem no more than a sordid “true revelation” story. David Cameron as the doctor also made his mark, but the casting is otherwise not very convincing.
The producer, Herbert Machiz, who did the plays in New York, presumably has the author’s sanction for most of the fancy lighting effects. But there were odd details – the doctor, himself wearing a white suit, who stands, with one show on the seat of the can chair, for instance. On the whole the Arts Theatre has done the plays proud and the two leading actresses make an indelible effect, wilder cats on hotter tin roofs.
September 18, 1958 the stage – photo of bea in garden district – suddenly last summer
Observer Sep 21, 1958 Tynan, Kenneth
Garden District Suddenly last summer, the longer of the two plays by Tennese Williams has put together under the joint title of Garden District (arts) has about it a strangely truncated look. It does not end, it stops; leaving us suspended amid loose ends that trail like lianas [?].
We have just listened to one of the longest, most febrile recits in modern drama. A souther spinster, her tongue loosened by a truth drug, has described how she witnessed the death of her cousin Sebastian, a homosexual poet who was set upon and in part devoured by a mob of enraged Spanish street urchins. The audience for this bloody tale consists of the poet’s mother, a decaying witch bent on avoiding scandal; the young doctor whom she hopes to bribe into performing a silencing operation on the girl’s brain; and the girl’s mother and brother, who fear that the old lady will somehow cheat them out of the money Sebastian has left them. The recital ends, and three or four lines later the curtain comes sighing down.
It comes down not on a ply but on a short story recited to a group of lay figures. Once the girl has finished, the curtain must fall, since we care nothing about the others. The Ogress-mama (Beatrix Lehmann at her most ghoulish) is a conventional caricature of maternal rapacity. The doctor functions solely as interlocutor, and Mr Williams interest in the girl’s greedy relations is so slight that he fails to explain why or how her brother’s inheritance could possibly be endangered.
Above all, there is the dead poet. |The failure here is of a different kind. The picture we get of him is all too clear: a pampered dandy, patrolling the Riviera with mama on his arm, whispering flatteries and dubedatteries into her ear while his eye roves the beaches for likely lads. The trouble is that we do not see him with Mr Williams’s eyes, in which all aesthetes are sacred. It is one thing to sympathise with a man who has been garrotted by the old umbilical cord. It is quite another when we are asked to see in his death (as Mr Williams clearly wants us to) a modern re-enactment of the martyrdom of St Sebastian.
If Mr Williams had really dramatised his subject this might not have mattered. But he hasn’t; his approach is strictly literary, a series of teasing diversions leading up to the girl’s big monologue. His purpose is not to tell us a story but to have someone else tell it; and a long retrospective narrative, no matter how impassioned, is not the same as a play. I must pause here to salute 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 of 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 fertilise each other, and I was more than once reminded of Maria Casares’s incomparable Phedra. We need more actresses like this in the West End, that garden where a hundred blooms flower. Mr Williams, whose speciality is hysteria 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 image of blazing pallor evokes the climate of Sebastian’s death.
What a writer one murmurs during these passage. But one cannot honestly add: what a play Nor can one feel that it represents an extension of Mr Williams’s talents. Rather, is is a narrowing-down. It picks out, like a torch in a charnel house where a jewel has been lost, one quick bright thing in a world of hatred, cupidity and squalor, exclusively dedicated to the persecution of purity. Nature is destructive, mother is destructive, families are destructive: even the nun who acts as the heroine’s nurse is a sadist. We are in a world where mighty black conspires to victimise puny white: and any black and white world is dramatically a dull one. After this excursion to the bring of paranoia, we must pray for Mr William’s return to the true dramatic world of light and shade, where the easy violence of melodrama is softened by compassion.
Herbert Machiz’s direction is thick with atmosphere, and apart from Miss Neal’s outburst there are assured performances by David Cameron and Philip Bond. When Mr Machis has done to something unspoken, the shorter of the two pieces, is nobody’s business except perhaps that of Mr Williams and his lawyers. Unsubtle is the gentlest word for this triumph of misunderstanding. Mr Williams wrote a compact study of a tyrannous Southern matriarch who appears to be dominating her mouse-like companion, until we realise that the mouse is in fact the cat; vengeful and blandly, she has decided not merely to reject her employers advances but to ignore their existence.
Mr Machiz, who may have read too many of those reviews which portray Mr Williams as a coarse grained shock-vendor, sees the play as broad farce. The companion (Beatrix Lehmann, more ghoulish than ever) becomes a Charles Addams woman, bristling with tics; and and Beryl Measor gets nowhere near the monstrous pathos of the lesbian despot. [FINALLY!] a civilised, oblique, relentlessly funny piece of writing is entirely blunted. It is like seeing vintage Strindberg performed by punch and judy.
September 18 1958 The stage
Garden District In Suddenly last summer, which is by far the longer of the two parts of Garden District, at the Arts, Tennessee Williams extends his morbid range to leucotomy and cannibalism.
Mrs Venable, in her sultry semi-tropical New Orleans home, is mourning her poet son, Sebastian, whose death has been something of a mystery. She accuses her niece, Catherine, who has been away with him to remote tropical regions, of corrupting his purity, dividing him from her mother-love and being responsible in some way for his death. The girl herself has had a shock as the result of what has happened, and talks wildly, Mrs Venable, under the care of her doctor after a recent stroke, favours a leucotomy operation on the girl to blot out the past.
… culminating in his being attacked by a horde of savage, starving, black, naked children, who pursue him and tear of his flesh and eat it…But it misses both tragic and sociological significance. Too many subjects are touched on and followed through – mother love, shattered ideals, medical expediency, wills, celibacy, procuraion. The long evocation of the past is vivid in its picturesque detail – everything is there except the characters of the unfortunate poet and the distracted girl; without these there remains horror without tragedy or sympathy.
It is powerfully acted, With Patricia Neal showing a wide range of voice and emotional intensity, as well as a pathetic quietness, in the role of the girl, and Beatrix Lehmann as the mother again reevaling her strange power, half sinister, half tender, of lifting every part she plays away from the conventional.
Herbert Machiz’s direction extracts every ounce of dramatic significance, with a subtle oppressiveness over all. There is a suitably florid, exotic setting by Stanley Moore, and the atmospheric lighting and musical effects are just sufficiently disciplined not to militate against the prevailing naturalist.
The short preceding play, Something unspoken, is a comparatively insignificant trifle about a voluble club-woman’s election and resignation (on the telephone) and her twittering subservient companion- too remotely parochial to have much impact. Beryl Measor and Beatrix Lehmann play it with appropriate formidable and feeble contrast.
Variety Sept 242 1958
Garden district – shows abroad
London Sept 17
(general description of the two plays)
Suddenly last summer the more important of the two plays, is an obtuse study of emotions, superbly written and powerfully acted with a stand-out performance by Patricia Neal…
Beatrix Lehmann makes the mother a powerful, dominating and selfish personality..
Something unspoken, is a contrast of character. Beryl Measor is the wealthy socialite and Beatrix Lehmann her companion secretary. Within the space of half an hour the two characters are etched with subtlety and perspicacity. Miss Measor’s frustration at being rejected as the top girl in the local Daughters of the Confederation is the basic theme, [no it’s not!] but an undercurrent of conflict provides the real drama. The two performers are excellent, but on opening night Miss Measor tended to fluff her lines.
Variety Oct 15 1958
Garden district, recoups London
Oct 14, Garden district currently in its fifth week at the arts theatre here, earned back its investment after only a fortnight at the house. The production, capitalized at around $5,600 cost about £3000 to open. Its slated to remain at the arts at least one more week and then may move to a west end house.
The Tennessee Williams double bill…. Opened Sept 16, Patricia Neal who was co-starred with Beatrix Lehmann, exited the cast last Sunday (12) to fulfil a commitment in the upcoming production of Far away the train birds cry on Broadway…
Dec 24 1958
Fine Macbeth at the old vic
Douglas Seale’s direction and Michael Hordern’s performance in the lead make the new production of Macbeth at the old vic one of the most impressive in recent years. There is, too, a striking if not entirely satisfactory, Lady Macbeth in Beatrix Lehmann. The clearly defined production, which is burning with atmosphere and tension, moves from start to finish on a high level of theatrical effectiveness and imaginative interpretation… the banquet is brilliant staged and acted, with Beatrix Lehmann at her best…
Beatrix Lehmann
Miss Lehmann begins by conveying the remorseless Lady Macbeth and always she speaks to good purpose. Her early scenes promised a performance which will be a match to Macbeth. In urging Macbeth to renewed resolution, and in her reaction to his wild horror at the appearance of Banquo’s ghost, she is excellent. But her attack and power to convince weaken, and the sleep walking scene passes as very little…
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