Mar 22 1973 The stage
Stratford’s opening
The Royal Shakespeare season at Stratford-Upon-Avon opens on
March 28 with Terry Hands’ new production of Romeo and Juliet which has Estelle
Kohler and Timothy Dalton in the leading roles… Beatrix Lehmann as the nurse
Brenda Bruce as Lady Capulet, Tony Church as Friar
Lawurence, Jeffery Dench plays Capulat Bernard Lloyd Mercutio and BL as the
nurse. In other roles are Brain Glvoer, Peter Machin, Clement McCallin, Richard
Mayes, Anthony Pedley, David Suchet, Janet Whitseide, John Abbott, Ray
Armstrong, Robert Ashby, Annette Badland, Gavin Campbell, Janet Chappell,
Michael Ensign, Nickolas Grace, Denis Holmes, Louise Jameson, Colin Mayes and
Lloyd McGuire.
April 5 1973 the stage
Sharing at Stratford
The new Royal Shakespeare Company production of Richard II
directed by John Barton opens at Stratford on two successive nights, April 10
ND 11. Beatrix Lehmann is the Duchess of York… Also with Lou and Jan and Brian
Glover…
Apr 5 1973 the stage
Action, vitality but
little heart in Romeo and Juliet by R. B. Marriott.
Terry Hands’ production of Romeo and Juliet which opened the
season at the Royal Shakespeare. Stratford-upon-Avon on March 28, is packed
with action, vitality and visual variety but overall effect of harshness being
enhanced by iron work settings by Farrah. The Montagues and the Capulets
battle, or rather brawl viciously, and the atmosphere of Verona – though it is
hard to believe we are in Verona – is filled with foreboding of blood and disaster
to come.
The prince demands discipline and order, he gets so mad
about the warring of the youngsters, the Romeo of Timothy Dalton is relatively
quiet through all this; then is loud in cries for Juilette, and athletic in
movement as passion grows….
The play as a whole emerged rather scrappily on the opening
night; probably integration will come later. Styles may be better co-ordinated
or matched too. Beatrix Lehmann’s nurse is rough, sensible, old world., while
the lady Montague of Janet Whiteside is somewhat modern-day…
The stage and Television today May 8 1975
Did no one have heart to tell writer? By Patrick Campbell
Let no one, in these days of the stereotype and the
predictable, decry experiment in television drama. By all means let our
dramatists break the rules if the result is entertainment. After all, today’s
avant garde will be tomorrow’s old hat.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s The place of Peace (Granada, Sunday May 4, 10.15) could hardly be said to break the rules; since before you can break them you must know what they are. Mrs Jhabvala clearly had no idea and no one at Granada, it seems, had the heart to tell her so.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s The place of Peace (Granada, Sunday May 4, 10.15) could hardly be said to break the rules; since before you can break them you must know what they are. Mrs Jhabvala clearly had no idea and no one at Granada, it seems, had the heart to tell her so.
The place of peace lacked every thing but good intentions,
nor must the author herself be allowed to shoulder all the blame. Robert Knight’s
direction made no attempt to create the atmosphere that was so essential to
what development there was in the story.
Apart from some authentic and disconcerting irritating music
(credited to Neil Cotton) the setting
might have been Guildford, home of the thrice-raped and inexplicable
Suzie.
And even allowing for the naivety, the staginess and the
artlessness of the lines, to say nothing of the utter inconsistency of the
characters, the actors gave their author minimum of support – a charge from
which Renu Setna’s Babuji is absolved.
It is hard to see why Beatrix Lehmann, a fine actress,
allowed herself to be saddled, not with Clare – a character from which she
might, left to herself, have built something to remember – but with Clare’s
dialogue which, in a literal sense, was unspeakable with conviction.
Basically too, her storyline was impeccably simple. Jean
arrives with her boyfriend Willy at an Indian hill station to visit her dying
aunt Clare who has devoted her life to the poor and the outcasts. Jean has
always admired her aunt and would like to follow her example, but the pull of
sex and England is too great. Exit Jean and Willy, leaving Clare and the
faithful Babuji to muse on what might have been. The promiscuous Suzie from
Guildford and the sensuous karim whose wife (apparently Indian fashion) has
given him two sons but no sexual fulfilment were presumable dragged in to make
30 minutes worth of material….
What lingers on the taste is a sickly sentimentality
encapsulated in one of Clare’s final dicta, so completely out of character in
one who has devoted her life to the Indian poor. “All they need,” she says, “Is
a little kindness from someone more fortunate than themselves” ugh!
Dec 21, 1975 guardian
Greek blood and thunder
Nothing happened in David Rudkin’s working for radio of
Hecuba that Eruipedes wouldn’t have recognised. John Tydeman’s production was a
long, noisy version, Greek blood and thunder with knobs on Ulysses was a bureaucratic politician, Agamemnon was a smoothly, but the screams were straight
out of a nightmare.
Radio doesn’t need to worry about credibility to the same
extent as television, you accept naked voices –without faces, clothes or
landscapes. Then and now are more easily interchanged when there are no hair
styles or marble pillars to wreck illusions. Instead of the ghost of Plydorus
(Hecuba’s son nastily butchered after the fall of Troy) Rudkin gave us the
actual floating corpse, as wounds and disgusting sea gurgles. The corpse
addressed us, the modern audience. It was like the start of a documentary about
the cruetlies of man.
The electronic sound effects were important, either as
ominous sea and thunder noises in the background, or to enhance a bit of foreground agony. Polynestor, blinded with brooch pins, was given a peculiarly
evil drill-like buzzing to go with the groans. Beatrix Lehmann’s Hecuba was
left, more or less, to weep and gnash her teeth without electronics…
Sep 23, 1976
The stage and tt
Short list for Imp radio awards
First year of the annual awards for radio, sponsored by
Imperial Tobacco for the radio writers association presented on Nov 4,
Outstanding radio performance by an actress
Hecuba – Beatrix Lehmann
On a day in Summer Julie Hallam
(Bea won)
Nov 11, 1976 television today
BBC gets nine out of ten radio awards
Bea gets award for Hecuba
Sat Nov 27 76 Cat and canary starts shooting the stage
Dec 1 1976 Variety – Cat and canary currently filming
Feb 17, 1977 Televsion today. Love for Lydia is nearing
completion with hopes of a transmission date in the autumn
May 20, 1977 stage and television today shooting love for
Lydia
Sep 4, 1977 Observer The week in view
Includes photo of Bea and Rachel in Love for Lydia
Another massive adaptation set in the almost obligatory inter war years and possessed of a cast
of characters, who, even if they are more or less instantly recognisable, are
not displeasing. Set in the wintry East Midlands this episode depicts the
initial encounter of Lydia, young isolated and rich, with one of the men with
whom she will soon fall in love. …The appeal of Mel Martin’s Lydia is rather
lessened by her almost wanton tiresomeness.
Sept 22, 1977 Television today
Lydia slow but looks promising (Love for Lydia)
Television today reviews by Patrick Campbell.
(discusses the inconsistency of the characterisation)
Mel Martin, so far, has made a commendable job of combining
the new-found power of Lydia with the nastiness that accompanies it. She
engages the attention but not the sympathy and will doubtless, before the
series is out, have established herself as an actress fully capable of
sustaining one of the most difficult roles television has offered this year.
Chirstopher Blake has, so far, been given the less rewarding
task of creating a substantial and logical character from the young reporter, a
task more successfully undertaken in his scenes with Lydia than when he has to
play against the subtle characterisation of David Ryall as Bretherton.
The delightful double-act of Beatrix Lehmann and Rachel
Kempson as aunts Bertie and Juliana cannot be faulted as they alternately
support or discourage the skating lessons; while Michael Aldridge’s Captain
Rollo appears always to have something up his sleeve – though what he has, as
yet, never let us know.
If Love for Lydia has not, at this stage, made quite the
impact its advance publicity promised, at least it cannot be called dull. Well
acted, directed with style and a sense of period, striving hard to be faithful
to the intentions of the original, its report so far might well read “shows
promise – possibly a late starter”.
June 26 1978 Cat and Canary rights for the UK go to Gala
Jan 5, 1979 Guardian Ad
Exchange theatre company at the new round house,
Edward Fox and Beatrix Lehmann in the family reunion by T S
Eliot directed by Micahel Elliottt 18 April-12 May
Jan 14, 1979 Observer
Ad as above
Jan 31, 1979 Guardian
Theatre rebuilds itself
Opening of the Round house in camden as a theatre instead of a rock venue, starting feb,
with the Manchester Royal Exchange Theatres presentation of several plays
including BL in Family Reunion
April 12, 1979
Production of Family Reunion opening at the Round house on
April 18
Aviril Elgar, Joanna David, Daphne Oxenford, Wllliam Fox,
Constantce Chapman, Jeffry Wickham, Hilda Schroder, Harry Walker and Esmond
knight also feature. Laurie Dennett is the designer and costumes are by Clare
Jeffery.
Jun 20, 1979 The Guardian
Family reunion
de Jongh, Nicholas
Review but mentions that Pauline Jameson has taken over the
part of the matriarch when Beatrix Lehmann was taken ill.
Aug 1, 1979 Guardian
News in brief
Beatrix Lehmann, the actress, died in hospital yesterday
after a long illness. She was 76 and was celebrating her 55th year
in the theatre. Obiturary page 2.
Aug 1, 1979 Guardian
Beatrix Lehmann, rare classic actress by Nicholas de Jongh
Beatrix Lehmann, one of the least publicised but most highly
regarded classical actresses in the last 40 years, died in London yesterday
aged 76.
She had a stroke earlier this year while playing the leading
role in Eliot’s The family reunion in Manchester.
Her death deprives the British theatre of one of its
strongest emotional performers and also one of the most individual. She
excelled in roles requiring intense emotional energy and passion or a touch of
the macabre.
In old age with her hard, crackling voice she created a
great gallery of ancient harridans of tragic heroines; perhaps the most
flamboyant was the centenarian Miss Bordereau, in an adaptation on Henry
James’s short story.
“Does the sun still shine?” she croaked in a voice and tone
sufficient to send shivers down the best maintained of spines.
Her entire career was notable for the quality in her
selection of roles. Having understudied Tallulah Bankhead in 1926, she played a
succession of dramatic roles in the 1930s including Ibsen’s Hilder Wangle and
the tormented Mrs Alving; O’Neill’s heroines in Desire under the Elms, All
God’s Chilin and Mourning becomes Electra.
Apart from a Stratford season in the late 1940s her career
went into decline at this period. She had been a communist, a president of
Equity and was banned from the BBC along with Michael Redgrave for her support
of the Communist Convention.
She recovered her place in the 1950s with her glorious
performance in Anouilh’s The waltz of the Toreadors, the landlady in Pinter’s
first play The Birthday Party, and the horrific Tennessee Williams matriarch in
Suddenly last summer.
She moved into a long, sunset phase at the National Theatre,
in classical Greek Tragedy and with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
[Well, as a side note
almost EVERYTHING about this obit is wrong. She wasn’t a classical actress at
all. She spent her entire career performing new works which dealt with
contemporary issues and was very interested in the new developments in theatre.
Most of the plays she was in were new and not revivals. She didn’t appear in
Shakespeare till she was in her mid 40s and did not do any Greek tragedy apart
from Hecuba on stage. The “ancient harridan” she played in her “old age” were
in fact when she was in her early to mid 50s where she was made up to look old.
That same year she also played Lady Macbeth without the ageing makeup. She acted for 55 years on the stage, not 40.
She wasn’t banned from the BBC for the “Communist Convention” but the People’s
Convention. And this was only a temporary situation which was resolved quite
quickly. She did loose her presidency of Equity because she was a communist. It doesn’t mention that she was also a
writer, her work with the Arts Council, her activism, or any of the kindly and
amusing old ladies she played on television in her last decade which, because
they are some of the few performances that survive, are what most people
remember her best for now. This was easily the worst obituary of Bea I’ve read
so far.]
Aug 5, 1979 Observer
Beatrix Lehmann by J C Trewin
Beatrix Lehmann’s death last week, at the age of 76, takes
from the London theatre its most imaginatively idiosyncratic player.
A sister of the writers John and Rosamond Lehmann, she had
acted for more than half a century since her years at drama school. Spare, pale
and relentlessly compelling, her gift of suggestion could carry audiences
beyond the boundary of any part. We recall her Lavinia in O’Neill’s restatement
of the Electra theme, and an Emily Bronte that did indeed bring Haworth Moor to
Clemence Dane’s Wild Decembers; but she could modulate also the aged enigma in
the Venetian palazzo of the Aspern Papers, splinter into the madness of the
wife in The Waltz of the Toreadors and establish both the agony of the lesbian
in Sartre’s hell (Huis Clos) and the defiant melodramatics of a homicidal farm
servant in a forgotten shocker, They walk alone.
In a sense, she always walked alone, for her performances –
sometimes adventurously and hauntingly off key – owed nothing to tradition. She
did relatively little Shakespeare, but her Portia, Isabella, Viola and – for
Peter Brook – Juilet’s nurse at Stratford (1947) her chilling Lady Macbeth (Old
Vic 1958) and the nurse in another Stratford revival (1973) linger with their
remembered urgency, adding fresh, sometimes strange, resonances to familiar
texts. And as she showed in her last part, the dowager of Wishwood in Eliot’s
The Family Reunion, she could be a mistress of the charged silence.
Aug 8, 1979 Variety
Beatrix Lehmann, 76, British legit actress whose 55 year
career in showbiz included stage, film, radio and television roles, died Aug 1
in London. Best known for her work on the stage, Lehmann appeared in a number
of West End classical dramas, including Euguene O’neill’s Mourning becomes Electra, All god’s chillun, and desire under the elms and Tennessee Williams’
Suddenly last summer.
Her roles on the screen included the Key with William
Holden, Trevor Howard and Sophia Loren, in which she had a supporting role and
the Spy who came in from the cold, with Richard Burton.
She began her career in 1924, in a production of William
Congreve’s The way of the world, succeeding in the role previously held by Elsa
Lanchester. She was also the British Actors’ Equity President in the late 40s
and continuing her radio and television career in later years., was radio
actress of the year in 1977.
Aug 9 the stage
Letters
Beatrix Lehmann
Sir – I am deeply saddened to hear of the death of Beatrix
Lehmann. She was distinguished in the best sense of that often debased and much
abused word and was an old friend and much admired colleague.
Her own inflexible will as an actress and a TRUE
professional critic made her formidable but a joy to work with, it is a lasting
pleasure – both to have seen her at work in rehearsal and then performing
opposite the late great Wilfrid Lawson in the Father, which I had the privilege
of directing in the early 50s at the Arts Theatre Club.
It is by happy chance that we talked together recently in a
recording on Radio 3 for a script on Lawson that I had completed for the BBC.
As this may well be the last occasion upon which “Bea” will be heard, it could
be considered something for your readers to look forward to when the programme
is transmitted later in the year.
Peter Cotes
Aug 16 1979
The stage
Obiturary Beatrix Lehmann
Although Beatrix Lehmann, who died on July 31, aged 76,
began her career at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1924, when she took over from Elsa
Lanchester as Peggy in the way of the world, it was not until 1937 that she
came into her own as a player of distinction and originality. This was when she
gave a magnificent performance as Lavinia in a memorable production of Eugene
O’Neill’s Mourning becomes Elecatra, at the Westminster. She had given
performances of considerable interest previously, but her Lavinia had the stamp
of great acting.
Beatrix Lehmann studied at RADA and with Rosina Filippi and
following her debut at Hammersmith was seen at the Adelphi in a small part in
The green hat, then understudied Tallullah Bankhead as Amy in They knew what
they wanted at the St martin’s at the court she played Judy O’Grady in the
Adding Machine, other parts in the next few years including Lady Constance Lamb
in Byron, Ella Downing in All god’s chillum, Susie Monican in the Sivler Tassie
and Myology in Brain, all in London.
At the Phoenix she was seen as Luella Carmody in the
original West End production of Late Night Final, and at the Apollo as Emily
Bronte in Wild Decembers.
She stood alone in suggesting the sinister with a touch of
the macabre, which was brilliantly evident when she played Emmy Baudine in
They walk alone. She made vivid impressions as Hilda Wangel in The Master
Builder. Stella Kirby in Eden End, Mrs Alving in Ghosts, and Madame St Pe in
the Waltz of the Toreadors, but was not so striking when she went to
Stratford-upon-Avon to play Portia Isabella in Measure for Measure or Viola in
Twelfth night.
She gave studies in the true Lehmann creative mould as Miss Bordeaux in the Aspern Papers at the Queen’s in 1966 and as Aase in Peer Gynt
at Chichester in 1970.
She was a hard worker for equity being president in 1945 and
wrote several novels. Her brother is John and her sister Rosamond, the
well-known writers.
R. B. Marriott.
The stage
Dec 20 1979
There was a unique occasion on December 6, when John
Lehmann, distinguished poet and man of letters, visited the Central School of
Speech and Drama to present Beatrix Lehmann’s library of the theatre and
theatre personalities to the school.
The library was received on behalf of the school by Norman
Collins, Chairman of Governors, and Laurence Harbottle, Vice Chairman.
Norman Collins referred to the enormous contribution that
Beatrix Lehmann has made to the British Theatre and to the benefit which future
students of the school would derive from her bequest – a most handsome addition
to the present library resources of the school.
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