May seems to have rocketed by and we're almost at June already. I'm working this month - invigilating exams at the school where I used to teach - and so I've had very little time to do any serious Benson-ing apart from reading and re-reading things with a view to finding out more about rehearsals.
I've also been hunting this week for something I was sure I'd read earlier in the year relating to the seriousness with which the Benson Company approached their rehearsals. And it took some finding. {Keeping better track of what I'm reading is one of the things I am trying to work on. An excellent workshop with Oskar Jensen, as part of the Hexham Book Festival, served as a reminder recently that I am not always organised enough when it comes to noting down references!) The 'half-remembered' anecdote eluded me for quite some time but I finally tracked it down to the biographical writing of Arthur Machen - 'Things Near and Far' (1923)
Machen is probably best known today as a writer of supernatural, fantasy and horror fiction. Among his writings are 'The Great God Pan' which Stephen King rated as one of the best horror stories written in the English language. Machen is not, at first sight at least, a very obvious 'Merry Shrew'. However, after the death of his wife in 1899, Machen made an unexpected leap from decadent fin-de-siecle novelist to Shakespearean actor, joining Benson's company in 1901 as they were coming to the end of their season in London.
Machen's account of his theatrical career is particularly interesting because he joins the lowest ranks of the company as a mature man - nearly forty - rather than someone fresh from school, and his inherent literary skill enables him to really give a flavour of the way the company worked on a day to day basis. His description of being taken through hurried rehearsals for that evening's Merry Wives of WIndsor by an assistant stage manager (possibly Garnet Holme?) is a perfect example. Having been cast as Nym on Saturday, he found himself having to learn the lines on the train from Stratford to Worcester on Sunday.
(...)the next
morning [I] came to the one and only rehearsal.
It was not on the stage, more important things were happening there, but
in the travellers’ samples rooms of one of the Worcester inns. Of course, there
was no scenery, no costumes, no “props” of any kind. A few chairs indicated the set, quite
sufficiently, I may say, to a man of experience, but dubiously enough to a man
of next to no experience. Thus when it
came to my last exit, the Assistant Stage-Manager gave his instructions
somewhat as follows:
“After you
have said the last words to Page, turn round and go up the flight of steps LC
here, between these chairs. When you
have got to the top, turn again and say to Page over his shoulder, “My name is
Nym and Falstaff loves your wife.” Then exit left, along the terrace.” (...)
“Mr Rodney will come on on that cue from the Upper entrance,
where the table is, and you go up to him and meet him Centre, and say so-and-so
and then he speaks the line so-and-so and you cross to the Right…” with much
more to the same effect.
As an example of a scratch rehearsal of an existing play in the repertoire, it gives a sense of how newcomers were taken through their roles. However, Machen is also at pains to point out that, in the case of a newer production, things were not set in stone and that, in fact, Benson remained open to other peoples' ideas about how scenes might be played.
(...)[Benson's] way was not to come down to the theatre with things cut and dried in his head,
with every intonation, every bit of business and every position settled
immutably beforehand, but rather to approach the play, scene by scene, with a
liberal and open spirit. The main
conception he doubtless brought with him, but any light he could find in the
process of rehearsal he would welcome heartily, no matter whether it came from
one of the older brethren or from the newest member of the company. (pg 164)
Interestingly, Machen was in the Company at the same time as Walter Shaw Sparrow - both write about the Stratford performance of King John which was staged in 1901, and the anecdote I'd half-remembered - and have now concerns a rehearsal of the play on the Memorial Theatre Stage and a discussion about possible 'business' :
The scene
was the discovery of the dead body of Prince Arthur. I had to say “What wilt thou…” whereon Hubert
furiously interposed “ My Lord Essex” And then I had to draw away the cloak
away from the corpse and exclaim, “Who killed this Prince?”
And thereupon, a debate arose. Should the words be spoke before the removal
of the cloak? Should the cloak be removed before the uttering of the line?
Should word and action be simultaneous? The point was discussed with the utmost
earnestness, as a matter of vital importance, and I. feeling that I was in
mighty deep waters, suggested in all humility that I should speak the line with
an indicative gesture and that Hubert should step forward, appalled, and remove
the cloak and discover the body of the Prince.
But this started another subsidiary debate
and the rehearsal breaking off at this point, Brydone (Hubert) and Frank Rodney
(Falconbridge) were left on the Stratford stage, wandering up and down, and
wondering in muttered undertones, whether it would be within the limits of
stage propriety for Hubert to snatch that cloak away. Their faces were grave, earnest and
perplexed.
Outside in the sunshine by
the Avon, I encountered ‘Pa’ , He looked
at me with a certain waggishness in his eye, as if he suspected bewilderment on
my part, and said, “Well, Mr Machen, what do you think about it yourself?”
Machen also appears in an episode in Matheson Lang's autobiography 'Mr Woo Looks Back'.
My first real part with Benson
was Bolingbroke in Henry VI part 3* For this I had to learn a
long incantation by which the old charlatan was supposed to raise spirits from
the dead. (...) Another member of the company was Arthur
Machen (...). Benson, knowing Machen’s interest in magic,
black and white, asked him to give me a form of incantation that would be
suitable. This Machen taught me: a long,
Latin invocation which took me a terrible time to learn.
When we came to the first night,
Machen wished me luck.“But be careful of that
invocation,” he said. “It’s a real one,
you know. Goodness knows what may rise
when you speak it.”
I went on stage rather taken
aback by this, I must confess, what with the spooky nature of the scene and its
weird setting, I was quite prepared for anything horrible to happen. Nothing did, however, but for nights after
we got the play started. Machen used to come into the wings and watch. I think he firmly believed that at any moment
I might raise the devil.
(*actually HVI part 2)
Machen would later write the short story which inadvertently inspired the 'Angel of Mons' myth during World War I at around the time that Benson became fascinated with the ideas of Spiritualism, fervently believing he had seen his son Eric at the Western Front on the day the young man was killed.
Machen remarried in 1903, having met his second wife Dorothie Purefoy Huddleston whilst they were both on tour with the Benson Company.
