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 HA'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 Henry 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 beside me 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!