I've given myself a bit of a reading week this week. I started with Nora Nicholson's autobiography, 'Chameleon's Dish', the earliest chapters of which concern the connection between the Nicolson family and the Benson Companies. Nora's experiences as a student member of the Company are particularly interesting - she enrolled as a student in September 1912 at the cost of £40 - the modern equivalent would be around £5,700. "We travelled with the company, spent our mornings in class (drama, diction, dancing and fencing), attended rehearsals and walked on at night - usually seven plays a week (...) We were sent on for ladies in waiting, fairies and screaming mobs in Julius Caesar. I even portrayed a dead woman in Coriolanus."
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| Nora as Puck around 1913. nora_nicholson.jpg (570×413) (warwickshire.gov.uk) |
"I wish I could explain the alchemy of Frank Benson's teaching. As an actor, he came behind many of the youngsters he nurtured into fame, but as a director he was unparalleled. He would stride into rehearsals, start operations with shouts of " Breath! breath! breath! - aimed at some panting student - hit upon a faulty inflection and more than likely spend half the morning correcting it, and then stroll through his own part , littering it with astonishing paraphrase and highly original punctuation. But when it came to interpreting a part for someone else, here was magic. I can still remember his faultless portrayal of Puck, at rehearsal, with myself struggling to imitate him. I found no teacher equal to him until I came under the direction of Lewis Casson and Tyrone Guthrie, twenty years later. They didn't teach you how to act, they taught you to be."
She also claims that it was her brother who gave The Black Swan its alternative epithet of 'The Dirty Duck.' I rather hope it was!
My second read of the week was Constance Benson's 'Mainly Players' which I've read several times since first borrowing it from the University Library in Hull. I bought my own copy in Baggins' Book Bazaar in Rochester in 1991: the first of a considerable number of second hand book purchases since! The last time I read it, I was working on my dissertation and focused mainly on her description of the Newcastle Theatre Royal fire. This time, I was looking to fill out more detail about the members of the company and was able to add quite a few names and dates to check out against reviews etc.
I feel that Constance Benson is rather marginalised in Benson history: she isn't memorialised in a window at Stratford, (although there was newspaper talk of one being added in the 1950s, it doesn't seem to have ever materialised) and, perhaps largely because of her dispute with the Board in 1911, the received Company narrative has sometimes painted her as a hinderance to the Company rather than an asset. However, she inspired a great deal of loyalty from members of the Company and seems to have acted as something of a go-between in the Company's dealings with its Leader, and a sense of her loyalty to him despite their eventual estrangement comes clearly through the text of her book. That she often found him frustrating is clear enough but there is an element of understanding of his motives and drive there too, even if I could sometimes wish she had written just a little less candidly...
During my last visit to Stratford in September, I looked at the minutes of the meetings of the Company after Archibald Flower assumed control and found a copy of the letter which J.C. Trewin quotes in "Benson and the Bensonians" in which Benson asserts "She is invaluable to me...she represents and stands for so much of what is called the Bensonian spirit..." (Trewin, 187) Ultimately, Benson would choose Shakespeare - or perhaps, more accurately, Stratford - over loyalty to her, but I like to think he was entirely truthful. Constance sees the end of the Bensonians as being the final, patchy season in Stratford in 1919 and, in many ways, she is right: what comes after this is a shadow of the Company she helped to steer and shape as well as support financially.
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