Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime. Joanne Drayton

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СКАЧАТЬ Company in 1915 that rekindled her interest in writing for the theatre. She was transfixed, as if she was watching the progress of a miraculous comet across the sky. ‘The opening night of Hamlet was the most enchanted I was ever to spend in the theatre.’ English actor-manager Wilkie, his striking actress wife Frediswyde Hunter-Watts, and their travelling company played to audiences in the Far East, North America and Australasia. They were the remnant of a bygone era, but to a centre starved of professional theatre they seemed rare and illustrious. People queued for tickets, Ngaio and her student friends cut evening art classes, and for two weeks Shakespeare took Christchurch by storm.

      Ghosts, gravediggers and Danes walked the ramparts of Ngaio’s quiet nights. She went to Hamlet a number of times. The season ended too quickly, and as abruptly as it had arrived the company was gone. The experience had been ephemeral, like a shadow she wanted to pin down, so between the company’s first and third visits to Christchurch she wrote a romantic regency drama called The Medallion. She hoped Allan Wilkie would cast a professional eye over it. Her mother encouraged her. Towards the end of 1919, they braved the ordeal of handing the script in at the theatre with a note, then seeing Allan Wilkie in person at the Clarendon Hotel. As always, Ngaio was tentative about her writing. The play was mannered and rhetorical, but her raw enthusiasm captured Wilkie’s attention.

      After art classes had finished one afternoon, Ngaio returned to her shared studio with her paint-box slung over her shoulder. She climbed the stairs, walked in, and there they were—Allan Wilkie and his wife. ‘“I obtained the address,” Mr. Wilkie said in his resonant actor’s voice, “from your father. I have a suggestion to make…How…would you like to be an actress?”‘ He thought that if she was going to write for the theatre she needed experience on the stage. She was speechless, stunned. It was as if Wilkie had opened a door through which she glimpsed her future. She had two hours to make up her mind. The Wilkies were leaving town almost immediately, but would employ her when they returned, if her parents agreed.

      Ngaio’s ‘yes’ was immediate, and her father’s followed; Rose Marsh was harder to please. But Peter Tokareff’s suicide was still fresh in her mind, and now there was a new threat. Her daughter had another besotted suitor, this time a middle-aged Englishman. Once again, Ngaio was flattered, but out of her depth.

      ‘Your father,’ [Rose] said, ‘will speak to him.’

      And so he did and to some effect. ‘I felt damn’ sorry for the fellow…He made such a thing of it…He’ll get over it, no doubt.’

      But the Englishman began stalking Ngaio. ‘One night, when I was alone in the studio, he came up the stairs and stood…in utter silence on the landing while I sat petrified and sick, on the other side of the door.’

      Fear forced Rose to agree to Ngaio’s touring with the Wilkies, plus the fact that she was greatly impressed with Allan Wilkie, who was a consummate charmer. Henry was amused: ‘So you’re off…with the raggle-taggle-gypsies, O.’ Ngaio was ecstatic. Rose felt she had been painted into a corner. While she waited for the company to return to Christchurch, Ngaio took a relieving position as lady editor at the Sun newspaper. She wrote about clothes, society hostesses and ‘concocted paragraphs to fill in the gaps’. Her anticipation mounted.

      Ngaio was 25 years old and had never been out of the South Island. She would be living away from her parents and enjoying the pleasures of travel and adult life for the first time. ‘On a warm autumn morning I reported at the Theatre Royal, walked under the ringing iron stairs I had so often climbed and went in at the Stage Door. The world of glue-size, canvas, dust and shadows engulfed me.’ They played a season in Christchurch. The parts for Ngaio were limited. She had a deep contralto voice, which seemed odd in a woman, and was taller than the average leading man. As Wilkie remarked, ‘Only I…am at liberty to take six foot strides on this stage.’ To ensure she took demure steps, Ngaio hobbled her legs together above the knees with a stocking. The kindly Wilkie found her work in spite of this. She played a dubious ‘Franco-Teutonic’ maid in a spy thriller called The Luck of the Navy, where the main character was tied to a chair (like Nigel in A Man Lay Dead); an ex-WAAF, now housemaid, in A Temporary Gentleman; a vicious craggy crone in the farce The Rotters; and, in Hindle Wakes, yet another maid.

      Rehearsals were arduous and Wilkie was a hard taskmaster, but Ngaio’s energy and enthusiasm seemed endless. ‘I learnt how actors work in consort,’ she wrote, ‘like musicians, how they shape the dialogue in its phrases, build to points of climax, mark the pauses and observe the tempi.’ This was an apprenticeship she would draw on for the rest of her life. ‘Without knowing it I laid down a little cellar of experiences which would one day be served up as the table wines of detective cookery.’ The people she met in the company fascinated her. She tended to see them as types: the male heart-throb, his meltingly magnificent woman, the character actor, the juvenile, the straight man, and the comic. She relished the details that made the actors like the characters they played.

      After Christchurch, there was a season in Auckland. They took the ferry from Lyttelton to Wellington, then a 14-hour train journey. Ngaio’s senses were heightened by exhilaration.

      I, however, persisted in my rapture. It was the first of many such occasions and I was to grow familiar with the look of my fellow-players in transit: the ones who read, the ones who stared out of the window, the ones who slept, the cheerful, the morose and the resigned. Mr. Wilkie and Pat Scully [the stage manager], their shoulders hunched and their heads nodding with the motion of the train, played endless games of two-handed whist. Mrs Wilkie read.

      Through the winter they travelled up and down New Zealand with their four modern plays. Spring brought the end of a life she had come to love. Wilkie reformed a Shakespearian company in Australia, taking key players with him, but minor roles, especially maids, were dispensable. ‘On a wet night in Wellington I said good-bye and returned alone in the ferry to Christchurch. One of the first things I did was to wrap up Gramp’s book and sent it to Mr. Wilkie. In return I received a ring of which, he wrote…“It is a trifle of some reputed antiquity.”‘ Ngaio, an only child, had tasted life with a carnival company of actors. Like a desert flower, the experience bloomed, then vanished. She would spend a lifetime trying to recapture its brilliance.

      ‘It wasn’t easy to settle down again: to return to a pattern, that, however freely designed, turned about a small house, one’s parents and a circle of quiet friends.’ Her sepia existence seemed drab by comparison. She painted with her friends and wrote for the Sun. But life was insular and restrained, until the Rosemary Rees English Comedy Company rolled into town and she was invited to tour again. Her mother was adamant that it would ‘lead to nothing…Why do you want to do it? It’s not the right kind of thing for you. I know.’ But Ngaio was determined.

      The tour was fraught from the beginning. The juvenile, who had no understudy, came down with scarlet fever. He had a big part and it was a disaster. Ngaio had an out-of-body experience: ‘I heard myself saying that I thought I could play the boy, “Jimmy”‘—and she did. There were costume difficulties. She could fit Jimmy’s fumigated suits, but cramming her long hair under a wig was torture. In desperation Rosemary Rees suggested she cut it. When Ngaio wrote to her mother, asking for permission, she received a ‘snorter’ of a reply by return post. Rees followed with a pleading epistle, but Rose Marsh was intractable. ‘She was unable to discover,’ Ngaio recalls, ‘why it should be imagined the antics of a music-hall soubrette could reconcile her to the thought of her daughter masquerading in male attire in a third-rate company.’ Rose almost ordered Ngaio home, but was tempered by her own fond feelings for the stage. If she had to abide her daughter playing a boy, there would be no haircut.

      They travelled ‘by buses, trains and coastal steamers’. The audiences were provincial and small, and the company lasted three months before it was disbanded. Rose had won a skirmish, but other battles were inevitable because Ngaio was not СКАЧАТЬ