Guardian, Stage, Variety and Observer digitised records July 1973-1973

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.

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 55^th 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.