Oh Brave New World!

Somehow, remarkably, it is already two weeks since I arrived back from Stratford.  I'm not sure why time is rushing past so quickly - I naively thought it would slow down once I'd left work, but instead it seems to be galloping onwards and incredibly, we're already into March. 

This week I've been working thorough the events of the 1913/14 Canadian and American tour by Benson and the 'Stratford upon Avon Players' .  Expecting to have to try and recreate the tour from scratch, I was astounded to see that someone had beaten me to it and - in the process- saved me a lot of hard work! Marcia Jesson hosts a website dedicated to the actor Basil Rathbone - of Sherlock Holmes fame, among many other film roles. Basil Rathbone: Master of Stage and Screen 

Basil Rathbone c.1920 - NPG

Frank Benson c.1900 - post card image

Rathbone was actually a distant cousin of Benson's - they shared a great great grandfather - and Benson gave him his first acting role. Rathbone was also one of the twenty five actors of the Stratford upon Avon Players Company who set sail for Canada and North America in October 1913, touring 14 plays to 52 different venues in 40 weeks.  He was later to recall in his autobiography "In all I have played fifty-two roles in twenty-three plays of Shakespeare, some forty of these in about twenty of his plays in my first three years in the theater."  The two were also strikingly similar in appearance.

Jesson has produced a comprehensive account of this tour, including venues and performances given, along with selections from newspaper reviews of the time, many of which are far more complimentary than received history would have one believe.  However, the fact remains that the tour was not the success Benson and the Memorial Theatre Board had intended it to be.  

Benson had left Avonport on September 20th, admirably supported by William Savery as his business manager, with Randle Ayrton and Harry Stafford as stage manger and assistant.  Constance Benson, unhappy with the rather limited roles she had been offered, did not accompany her husband on the tour, choosing instead to tour a variety circuit with a play she'd written with H. O. Nicholson.  

The minutes of a Board meeting in early December make it clear that the tour was haemorrhaging money and an overdraft had to be arranged with the bank to keep the Company on the road.  Their initial success in Canada quickly evaporated as they reached Chicago. Newspaper reviews ranged from scathing to downright hostile. 

The reasons for this hostility appears to have initially resulted from a newspaper article in the New York Times, suggesting that the Board of the Memorial Theatre had instructed Benson NOT to appear in New York because 'the general tenor of plays that seems to engross the metropolis at this time (...) It has become a "show town" instead of a theatrical centre for things worthwhile."  This, purportedly, had been communicated as an official announcement, made by Benson himself.

This was 'repudiated entirely' on behalf of the Governors in the American Register, the following Sunday as 'the product of the fertile imagination of an American Press Agent' and (reported The Era) 'entirely without foundation. The Stratford upon Avon Players would, it was claimed, 'have been very pleased to visit New York had a theatre been available at the time they wanted it.'  However, the damage had already been done.  Many reviews in Chicago were brutal, often singling out Benson as a poor actor, too old for the roles he was playing.

J.C.Trewin (regrettably if characteristically not citing his source) relates how Benson addressed his company on stage on November 4th - his 54th birthday - after the disastrous notices: ' They don't like us.  They have every right to their opinion, and I have no doubt it is all my fault, but I beg you not to lose heart, and to continue playing as if the notices had been splendid.'  

By December, Bill Savery was cabling Archibald Flower, chairman of the Board of Directors, to say that the profits they had made in Canada had been wiped out by lacklustre houses in the US.  The Company were initially bailed out by Herbert Clark Hoover - the mining engineer and financier who was later to become the 31st President of the United States - who as a shareholder in the Stratford upon Avon Players sent £200 to Columbus and then contributed a further £200 in return for further shares to keep the Company afloat. Savery was instructed to cable weekly reports to the Company's Henrietta Street offices in order to keep a closer eye on what was happening.

The tour continued until June 1914.  Reviews improved in some cities but audiences were generally small as the account book for 1913/14 bears witness.  All told, the company had travelled just under 12,000 miles in forty weeks (an average tour might see them do 2-4,000 miles), most of it by train, lugging scenery and costumes with them.  Overall, losses topped £1000 - around £150,000 in today's money.

The North American tour would prove to be the final nail in the coffin for Benson and Stratford.  Although he would return to Stratford for the Summer Festival of 1914, it would quickly be overshadowed by the outbreak of war on August 4th.  

I'll take the ghost's word...

Stratford is always full of ghosts.  You can't move for them.  (The RSC have now started running 'Ghost tours' on Sunday afternoons - predictably all fully booked when I tried to get on one.  Probably just as well - who knows who'd pop up to greet me?)

I'm just back from a more spring-like Stratford - my second visit since Christmas - drawn back by the need to see 'Hamlet' - or perhaps more accurately,  Anton Lesser as the Ghost. Lesser is one of the last links with 'my' RSC of the 1980s, of those glorious Newcastle seasons and the golden lads and lasses who would come and make our streets glitter with Shakespeare.  And he was wonderful: mercurial, sharp, ageless, restless and oh so clear.  His 'First Player' was like his Feste, only 40 years on.  

It was a unique production - not least because they'd set it on a sinking ship - and there were some things I disliked about it - not least the addition of lines from RIII for Gertrude and the 'dancing' (pointless?) extras.  However, Luke Thallon's Hamlet was excellent: his somewhat halting delivery of those (oh so familiar!) lines made them seem fresh and newly coined and  I got some sense again of just how powerful and devastating Hamlet can be when you don't know it like the back of your hand... and there was a sense of theatrical tradition in at least one bit of business which was taken straight from Mark Rylance's performance in 1989.

There are so many ghosts in the walls of that theatre and, of course, up in the old Memorial Library where the shells of performances hang, pretending they're just costumes.  The RSC again posted the 'Merry Wives' dress for Constance's birthday on Wednesday and I'd already visited it - and the windows - and indulged in a bit of birthday cake! That the Bensons and Bensonians are still commemorated in the theatre is reassuring, although I still don't think the RSC currently make the most of their history or heritage. I've really loved the productions I've seen there in the last two years but I worry that the short run system they are currently working to isn't really helpful for Stratford's survival. More shops and cafes had gone, even since I was there six weeks ago. Guest houses have disappeared from Rother Street and there's still no sign of life at the Shakespeare Hotel. I know February is 'out of season' - and that's always been why I've loved going there at this time of year, but I worry that so much of what made Stratford Stratford is dwindling.  Like so many other towns, it is becoming a ghost of its former self - and if Stratford's cafes and shops can't survive, what hope is there for the rest of the country?

Stratford was sunny on Tuesday and drizzly on Wednesday.  I was booked into the Birthplace Reading Room on Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning - not, of course, anything like the amount of time I'd want to be in there, but I do seem to be getting better at working out how long things will take me to look at.  This time I was exploring the minutes of the board of the 'Stratford upon Avon Players' - the Company that replaced 'F. R. Benson and Co Ltd' from 1913 and dwindled on into the 1920s.  It made for sad, if fascinating reading - the disastrous American tour, the winding up of the company and the  wrangling over who actually owned the costumes, sets and properties that had stood FRB in such good stead for twenty years.  For a while, Stratford and Benson had been synonymous, but by this point his star had waned and Stratford was pulling in a different direction.  (I think the Board had Stratford's best interests at heart - the theatre had to outlive Benson if it was to survive. In today's current economic climate, with COVID era loans to repay and years of dwindling support for the arts in the UK, running a financially successful company whilst staying true to an ideal must be an equal challenge.)

I'd also reserved Matheson Lang's autobiography 'Mr Wu Looks Back'. Lang's photograph was next to Henry Ainley's in Ruth Ellis's book about the Memorial Theatre and their careers ran roughly parallel, although Lang had notably more success as an actor-manager. Over the years, a copy of his book has eluded me - about the only theatrical memoir from the time I've been unable to buy.  Although I'd looked at it before - many many years ago when I was just starting at this and the Reading Room was in its original setting - I'd been preoccupied with just looking for information about Ainley and had not really focused on the other Benson bits. 

Written with intelligence and humour, Lang spins a good yarn: Benson comes across in the stories as a character of wit and some wisdom and Lang's love and respect for both Bensons is clear.  Several of the stories he tells were repeated by J.C. Trewin but there were a few that were new to me: I particularly liked the story of  Oscar Asche daring Lang to perform his small part in 'Twelfth Night' in broad Scots and Lang then having to talk his way out of being sacked in Benson's room immediately afterwards, Benson sending up a cup of tea to George Weir who had dried on stage as the Fool in King Lear, partly a result of the amount of alcohol he'd consumed before going on stage, and Benson attempting to get away with supering in King John at Stratford, only to be recognised by the audience.

Matheson Lang died in Barbados in 1948 and was then buried in Inverness, but I'd wager his ghost was definitely sitting at my elbow on Wednesday morning!

And so home, with the thought that, like Hamlet, I sometimes need a good ghost or two to spur me into action...

A history in all men's lives

I had an unexpected day to myself last week, and I spent part of it printing off all the cuttings I'd saved this month from the American Newspaper Archive and starting to organise my thoughts.

I've mined a rich seam of information about Garnet Holme, memorialised in the Benson windows as 'Stage Master' but who took stage mastery to a whole different level as he masterminded pageants across California and the National Parks of America.  Piecing together a life story from newspapers leaves a lot to be desired, of course, and there are so many things I would love to know which will remain shrouded in history.  I can surmise, I can guess, but I can never know more than those facts and opinions which people bothered to write down.  However, gaps aside, I do feel I am almost ready to put pen to paper and write what I've learned so far, once I've done a final bit of digging around. 

In the rabbit warren that is the Benson company research, there are many side scrapes and another one opened up this week as a result of what I'd found out about Holme. An early part of his career saw him working closely with Harcourt Williams on a series of summer 'pastoral' performances, and this fact has led me to look at Williams in more detail.  A clearly identifiable Merry Shrew on the Benjamin Stone 1900 photograph, he also appears next to  Holme in the photograph of the Shakespeare Memorial Statue.  

Although he did not leave an autobiography (for which I am now quite angry with him!), he did write two books about his experiences as producer at the Old Vic - today he probably would be considered as its 'Artistic Director'.   'Four Years at the Old Vic' and 'Old Vic Saga'  the first of which has been sitting on my bookshelf for around twenty years, just waiting for the right moment to be read. In both books he refers several times to his experiences as a young man beginning his career with Benson.  He writes candidly. tells a good anecdote (even if some of his language is not always politically correct enough for a modern audience!) and I've really enjoyed 'hearing' his 'voice'.   Ironically, the post at the Old Vic was offered just a month after Holmes' untimely death and I'm sure this must have been something that he was thinking about when he accepted it. 

As someone who had one foot in the theatrical past - he writes about seeing Irving at the age of seventeen about a job and his admiration for Benson is clear - he was also clear sighted about the future - a champion of Gielgud. Richardson and Ashcroft, closely following the lead of Harley Granville Barker and interested in the staging ideas of Edward Gordon Craig.  

He went on to have a successful career in films which took him through to his seventies.  As such I've always thought of him as a rather elderly character actor - the fussy diplomat in 'Roman Holiday' for example - and to have him restored to youth through his books has been really refreshing.  

I particularly like this photograph with Margaret Halstan in 'As You Like It' at the Queens Theatre in Manchester, in 1908.  Halstan is also a Merry Shrew: she joined Benson in 1900 and then acted with Alexander and Tree. She and Williams worked together in several plays at the Queens and this is one of several photos of them.   The production featured a running brook, two fountains and three live deer who are memorialised in Harcourt Williams' book:

"The deer used to make their appearance at the beginning of the act when Orlando enters to hang his verse upon a tree.  The herd was in charge of a sinister looking [stage-hand] who would lure them on stage with a paper bag of bread and then, as soon as he had left, the curtain would rise to rapturous applause from the audience who felt they were getting a circus thrown in gratis.  [Richard] Flanagan [the director] one afternoon conceived the notion that Orlando would look well along the deer and asked me to be discovered with them.  The [stage hand]left me in their midst and stood discreetly in the wings,  The curtain rose, but unfortunately the beasts took my crackly paper of verses for another paper bag of bread and  began to chase Orlando, looking as heroic as he could in the circumstances, around the stage.  His heroism was further strained when a stentorian voice reached him from the wings: 'Mind the big beggar don't bit ye'.  And the word was not 'beggar'..."   ('Four Years at the Old Vic' pg 191/2 edited )

At least the deer in the Benson production was a stuffed one!

This time last year, I was heading to Stratford with a heavy cold and chest infection to cough my way through a couple of days of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Winter School.  Having seen the newly announced 25-26 RSC season, it seems unlikely that I will be heading back there at all this year.  Timings and performances do not lend themselves to my usual week in early September and so I'm having to accept that I won't be getting back into the SBT archives any time soon.  I can't complain really, but I will miss my summer-holiday extension and, of course, my lovely cottage!  I've been on this journey for so long now - I first 'discovered' Benson's existence in 1986! - and I'm so grateful for the chance to still be digging in the dust to find such golden moments.

There'll be more from Harcourt Williams, I hope!

EDITED: After writing this, I MAY have just booked a couple of nights in Stratford to see 'Hamlet'... carpe diem!

When Icicles Hang By The Wall

My, but it was SO cold in Stratford last week...

My Christmas present to myself was one night away to see Twelfth Night at the RST.  It was one of my favourite plays - perhaps only eclipsed by Midsummer Night's Dream in my affections - and I had been desperate to see it.  As it happened, I could not have chosen a better way to start 2025.

That's Newcastle Castle in the background...

Leaving home before 7am to catch a bus to Newcastle, however, I wondered if I was being entirely sensible.  My phone suggested that although it was -3 C it FELT like -12 C and although I had six - yes SIX - layers of clothing on, I was still cold.  Transport was reliable, for once, and I was in Stratford by just after 1.30pm, managed to thaw out at the theatre and then checked into the Premier Inn which is very close by - a lovely room which I'd got at a very good rate, it being midweek, midwinter and term time.

I was booked on a Costume Tour at 3.30 which I was really excited about and which absolutely lived up to expectation.  The improved Costume department headquarters are very impressive and it was lovely to see work in progress as we were taken through each of the departments by our knowledgeable and very enthusiastic guide, Josh.  The highlight, undoubtably, was the chance to wander through the costume racks - as a costume geek, I was in heaven.  (Apparently there are also two other similar floors and some 'historically significant' costumes are stored in archival conditions off-site!) I admit to a pang or two of envy at those working there and a desire to rifle through some of the costumes to see if there were any I recognised...  

Being able to meet up with my friends from University for tea afterwards was also lovely - they'd already been to see Twelfth Night so gave me a hint of what to expect.  I'd booked a 'partially restricted view' seat in the Stalls which was actually excellent - at a fraction of what the person sitting next to me had paid, I don't think I actually missed anything.  And as performances go, it was one of the best I've seen and the music was wonderful. (Actually, I've never seen a poor production of Twelfth Night - I think there's a bit of magic in it!)

I couldn't actually see what the camera was taking when I framed this: the sun was so bright.

I woke up with a bad migraine on Thursday morning, brought on possible by the extreme cold and air pressure issues. My usual remedy of Paracetamol, flat Coca Cola and '4head' applied, I was determined to try and make the best of it and after coffee and food (Huffkins' breakfast bun!) I did feel much better. By Thursday morning the waters of the Avon, which had burst their banks on Tuesday, had subsided and so I was able to do my usual walk, along past the church, over the bridge and back along the recreation ground side.  It was icy and muddy and a bit tricky in places, but very peaceful and a glorious day, despite the cold. The canal basin was frozen - the second time I've been here when that's happened.

A quick visit to the exhibition -  just to see the Benson windows really - and then back to the station, to Birmingham and home. I'd been in Stratford exactly 24 hours - enough time to top up the batteries and touch base.  It is never enough, however long I'm there, and I'd really seen and done everything I could in the time.

Why do I love it so? Our friend Jacqueline maintains my heart and soul have long resided there and I just have to follow them sometimes! I am so grateful to be able to take off like this and have the resources and time to indulge what is more than a passion now - it is an essential. I probably won't get back until the end of the summer - when hopefully I can visit the archives so this wintery visit is going to have to last me for a while.  

Shadow-selfie with Bobble Hat!

In the meantime, there are newspapers still to search and data to collect and maybe - just maybe - stories to write...

And so once more return...

 In the five days since Christmas Day I have made the rather ridiculous decision to go down to Stratford to see Twelfth Night before it closes on January 18th. I can justify it to myself in lots of ways but it still feels a little self-indulgent.  I can't even combine it with an archive trip. But it is calling me back and I know I'd regret it if I didn't go. My friends who live in Leicestershire have already seen it and were really impressed and I am desperate to see Sam West as Malvolio.   I received some unexpected money just before Christmas and it seemed like a good way to use some of it.  The Wardrobe tours have started up again as well and that is an extra incentive.  

So, last night, after much soul searching, I booked a very reasonable hotel -  midweek and out of school holidays - a much less reasonably priced train ticket and a bargain seat in the stalls - partial restricted view.  I'll only be in Stratford for 24 hours.  It will be freezing cold - Stratford is always cold in January and the forecast is grim for the coming weeks - and I won't have the luxury of staying in my little cottage, but having made the decision, the thought of it cancels out all sane logic.  I needed something to look forward to once the Christmas festivities are over.  And if, as I suspect, 2025 becomes another tough year to navigate, at least I'll have started it with something positive.  

There's been very little time to work on the database at all since the start of November - Christmas preparation, other commitments and family illness.  Today, I spent the whole day digging into the American newspaper archive again to finish off the hunt for Garnet Holme and discovered a link between him and Henry Herbert, the leading actor of the Benson North (No 2) Company, which added another layer to the story and helped identify another face on the V&A Benjamin Stone photograph.  By 1914 he was living in New York and his wife - Gladys Vanderzee -seems to have worked with Holme on several different productions. (My favourite find today was an interesting story about a parrot called Lola who decided she did not want to take part in a play and made her dislike of both Holme and of Mrs Herbert VERY clear...!)

Unvalued jewels

Two events this week have helped me reflect on the ridiculous nature of historical research and how it can never be entirely complete, but also on its importance.  Still very busy excavating Garnet Holme,  I've now reached 1918 in the Newspaper Archive and have so many questions I want answers to, but which, to be honest, I'll probably never find. 

On Wednesday, I joined the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Research Conversation for November on Zoom, in which the inspiring Dr Varsha Panjwani was discussing "Women making Shakespeare today". In a really accessible and thoughful presentation, she drew attention to the fact that there is still a lack of documentation of how female performers approach roles in Shakespeare and a tendency to overlook the contribution of many of the female characters when writing about productions.  I know there is a definite male bias in documentation around the Benson Company- largely a result of the time in which it operated - but I hadn't stopped to consider that, a century later, the 'white, male, middle class'
narrative might still be the 'received version' when it comes to theatre history.  Looking at the V&A Benjamin Stone photograph, I was much more able to identify many of the actors, whereas the women in the Company were much harder to find out about.  Apart from Constance Benson and Elisabeth Fagan, I haven't really found much written from the female perspective of the Company and that is a shame.  What I took away from the hour was a reminder that any history is, by definition, an incomplete one. 

Then, on Thursday, I took a trip to York to see Paterson Joseph's one-man show 'Sancho and Me' which proved to be, in some ways, the flip side to Dr Panjwani's talk.  I'm a huge fan of Paterson Joseph - his acting AND his writing -any evening in his presence is always a starry one. His novel is based on the play he wrote about Charles Ignatius Sancho and came about because of a fascinating research rabbit hole he fell into.  Unable to find answers to the questions he had about Sancho, he used creative imagination to invent a fictional narrative, using the information he did have and the experiences of others who lived at the time.  His enthusiasm (- obsession? - ) was infectious. With a sense of theatrical mischief, he gave over the second part of the evening to a kind of sophisticated 'teacher in role'  exercise in which he became Sancho to answer the audience's questions.  It was an evening of pure joy - watching an actor communicate, move and challenge an audience through passion, energy and sheer exuberance. 

And both events have made me think again about those 'unvalued jewels' that slip through the pages of history, people who may have been important, once, but didn't leave a record of their lives, just little glints here and there for us to wonder at.  As I continue to sift through my own obsession's long-buried treasure, both valuable cultural encounters last week have given me pause for thought and not a little determination to keep on digging...

Anonymous squirrel in York's Museum Gardens, burying his own bits of treasure.

Happy Birthday, FRB!

 Just a quick post this week - I'm still busy with Garnet Holme! - to commemorate the birth on November 4th 1858 of Sir Frank Benson.  Still inspiring, all these years later.