The Memory be Green...

I missed out May and almost missed June as well! I'm so sorry.  I started writing something and then it got left behind when the world took over, as it so often does.  

I'm struggling to comprehend the fact that the first year of my PhD has almost officially finished.  It seems no time at all that I was in Stratford in September feeling excited and out of my depth.  Still excited, still out of my depth... However, I seem to have been successful enough to be allowed to continue into Year 2.  The Progress Panel meeting I was dreading was actually really supportive and the chance to talk about my project was really helpful.  Sometimes I feel as if I'm just stumbling around in the dark, making up a route as I go along, so getting feedback on my work in progress from an outside eye was very useful.

A couple of serendipitous things happened in June.  I regularly do an ebay search for anything Benson or Greet related, and most of the time the same few items reappear.  However, in June, on two separate occasions, I struck gold.

The first was a very unassuming piece of paper, which had obviously been kept and treasured by someone for a very long time.  It refers to performances in Bristol in June 1888 at the Clifton Zoological Gardens, later better known as Bristol Zoo and contains a wealth of information about the productions - staging and effects, prices of admission and a full cast list.

It had to be mine!!! I love the fact that the AYLI side contains a synopsis of Act 1 for those unfamiliar with the play, as Greet's outdoor version only included the scenes which take place out of doors, a practice that Harcourt Williams and Garnet Holme also adhered to in their productions around the turn of the century.  

However, the excitement did not stop there.  A few days later, I found the most incredible publicity postcards for the Benson production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, from a postcard dealer in Boston, Massachusetts.  Not only have I never seen anything similar before, but the detail of the overprinting of the venue gave me goosebumps, because they are advertising performances in my home town 3,165 miles away from where they ended up:

They must date from 1907 because of the performance dates and are in wonderful condition.  The perforated edge suggests that they were printed as a booklet or part of a larger sheet and then separated.  Were there just these two designs, or were they part of a set?  

The choice of characters seems unusual - Puck and Starveling as Moon, rather than Titania or Bottom.  The Puck illustration seems to have a quite generic Art Nouveau inspired setting, although the texture of the upper part of the costume and the horned headdress is similar to the costume shown in photographs of Nora Nicholson seen here.  The 'Moon' postcard is unmistakably H.O. Nicholson, accompanied by... the dog! 

Sadly, there's no printer credited anywhere on the card - the back is just a standard divided back postcard - but there is a name, presumably of the artist 'Montravel' . Although I've not found evidence to  confirm this,  I did wonder if they might have been painted by May de Montravel Edwardes, a young watercolour artist studying at a private art school in South Kensington in 1906-7, prior to her acceptance to the Royal Academy.  There are very few examples of her work available on-line but the background blues and the shadows in the 'Starveling' one and clear, almost illustrative outline seems very similar. Benson's art-world connections are well documented through his brother, William and it is possible that this commission came about through that connection.   

Whether or not these are May Edwardes's works, they are absolutely delightful and I can't believe that I have managed to bring them all the way back home to where they started from!  Like the Greet flyer, someone has treasured these as souvenirs, perhaps keeping the memory green of a particularly happy theatre visit.

"and the weather, and the wars, and the King..."

Easter holidays and so back in Stratford very briefly this week to see Henry V  and check out the changes to the Swan gallery exhibition, which reopened a couple of weeks ago.  

There'd been several major changes of costume since my last visit and I was eager to see if they'd changed the contents of the Benson cabinet. Delighted to see this dress, which is also mentioned in M.R. Holmes' catalogue:

Dress of grey velvet powdered with small stars and with extensions of black velvet on border of skirt and  ends of hanging sleeves. Close set-in sleeves of black velvet with white cuffs. Applique girdle of bright steel beads with effect of ends hanging down the front,  Hanging sleeves lined with silver, and applique ornaments of purple and green velvet on silver on hanging sleeves and low on front and back of skirt.

(M.R. Holmes, London Museum Stage Costumes and Accessories, HMSO, 1968)

My photographs were taken on a very sunny day so there's lots of glare from the Benson window and from a video screen directly opposite the cabinet.  In the lighting of the gallery, the black velvet elements had a blue tone.

This is probably the only extant Benson costume that can actually be seen 'in action' - the BFI website has the 1912 Richard III film available for free viewing Watch Richard III online - BFI Player  Lady Anne appears from around 4:14  in what is clearly the same costume.  Its different elements work better on stage than in the static case, where it is difficult to see details of the hanging sleeves and the train.  The steel beads clearly provided weight which allows the sleeves and hem to move in a specific way, and Constance makes the most of the that movement in the film.  The volume of fabric is also noticeable.

One thing that struck me with this costume was the element of make do and mend: the cuffs, for example, appear to have been loosely tacked on to the sleeves and the appliqued decoration is clumsily done. It is also a very recognisable Art Nouveau motif, reminiscent of embroideries from the Glasgow School of Art, rather than being something of the period.

As can be seen from the film and in the screenshot below, there would have been a collar, probably of the same fabric as the sleeves, covering over the bodice of the dress as well as a wide headdress.  The label dated this as 1901 - post-fire.  I did wonder whether it had been altered and pressed into action as a replacement.

The sheer volume of fabric in these costumes and the weight of them makes me think again of the issues involved in transporting these baskets of costumes across the country. 

Stratford was basking in summer temperatures on Wednesday and was crammed with visitors enjoying the unseasonable weather.  By Thursday it was back to grey skies and, when I got to Birmingham, something rather like a mini cyclone in New Street.  By the time I reached Newcastle last night the temperature had dropped considerably.  

I spent Thursday morning in the Shakespeare Institute Library, making notes from several books I'd earmarked before going down, and managed a quick visit to the Shakespeare Hospice Bookshop where one of the two books I'd not bought in February was still there - the better of the two, I think, with lots of images from the Mander and Mitchinson collection. 

I greatly enjoyed Henry V although I did feel the lack of Henry IV parts 1 and 2 to establish some of the impact of the minor characters. The extrapolated opening scene - Hal's taking of the crown from the death bed of his father from H IV pt 2 - was entirely missing the heart it ought to have and was played almost flippantly, although it was made clear by the ending why it had been used.  Alfred Enoch was excellent as was the ensembles use of the set, which was reminiscent  of the ESC's scaffolding for The Henries in 1985 crossed with the Barricades in Les Miserables. The battle scenes were choreographic and the speed and precision of their execution was impressive.  No one, perhaps needless to say, pole-vaulted into Harfleur... but there was a goodly cast of local supernumeries!

I don't have tickets to see Kenneth Branagh in The Tempest, having refused to jump on that particular 'membership' bandwagon when the booking opened last year, and the RSC seems to be boycotting Shakespeare in favour of Game of Thrones this summer, and, inexplicably,  has nothing at all scheduled for September so I don't know when I'll next be back.  I miss the 'good old days' of the extended repertory season - I'd have liked to seen how this Henry developed after four or five months, not after a couple of weeks.  I understand the reasons behind it, but the theatre was not full on Wednesday - and Stratford had been packed all day.  How do you get some of those people through the theatre doors and into the vacant seats?  Just by short runs, 'star casting' and TV tie-ins? 

I hope there's a longer term plan for the company which addresses the potential of the visiting audience. Three years ago. I was able to see four productions in four days... An extended rep has its own issues, but surely if you can entice people to stay and see more than one play that has to be useful and not including any Shakespeare apart from a cut-down version of Midsummer Nights Dream for the full summer seems to be a real mistake.  There's a reason why 'Shakespeare' is in the title of the Company, after all.  I can't help feeling the Flowers would be rather disappointed.

New Friends and Stranger Companies...2!

I've spent much of the last six weeks either fretting about my new found status as a driver, fretting about the purchase of a car or fretting about an impending PhD deadline.  The solution, I have found, has been to retreat to 1881 and read old newspaper reviews of Shakespeare productions.

A crash course in Shakespearean touring companies of the 1880s has left me realising that I really don't know very much at all.   I've thoroughly enjoyed reading about George Rignold, for example, whose production of Henry V gave star billing to his white charger 'Crispin'.  I have also enjoyed discovering that Ellen Wallis wasn't above falsifying some of the glowing reviews she used in publicity.  I've felt sad for Charles Dillon, former London star, who died on the High Street in Hawick where he was playing Othello at the Corn Exchange - rather a come-down for a man who once ran the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane - and I've marvelled at the extent of Henry Irving's tour of just about every bit of Lyceum scenery, drapery and property that could be crammed onto a specially chartered train by the redoubtable Messrs Loveday and Stoker.  

There are some things I've been unable to find a home for as yet, including a fabulous story about Barry Sullivan losing his temper over a prie-dieu which Charles Flower had purchased for the new Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. Sullivan had it banished from the stage on the grounds that it would distract the audience from his rendition of 'To be or not be'.  

But my favourite story concerns an American actor, a certain Daniel Howard Harkins, who toured through the UK from 1879 to 1881.  D.H. Harkins billed himself as a great star - one of the foremost tragedians of the age - although one of the Belfast newspapers, reviewing his performance as Othello, confessed that they had been unable to cope with his bizarre methods of emphasising apparently random words in his speeches.  

Advert from The Era 16/4/81

As well as acting, Harkins had been a soldier in the American Civil War, rising to the rank of Major in the Unionist Army as part of the 1st New York Volunteer Cavalry.  His career on stage seems to have had its fair share of disputes and fallings out, and in 1868 he was involved in a wrangle over royalty payments which had a bizarre and rather terrifying outcome.

The Daily Alta California for 11th September 1868 relates the entire event with evident relish, quoting the New York Times at length.  Complications over the royalty payments owed for a production of  Foul Play seem to have led to the closure of the theatre and the sacking of Harkins, who then decamped to another theatre and staged the exact same play there.  The owner of the rights to the play then took out a warrant for Harkins' arrest.  

That evening, the first and second acts of the performance ran smoothly, but just before the start of Act 3 a series of pistol shots  and the sound of one of the actresses shouting 'Oh my husband!' alerted the audience to the fact that a full scale drama was unfolding behind the scenes.  Around 9pm, six men - 'ruffians' in the paper's words, although they were actually working for the Sheriff - had gathered at the stage door and demanded admittance in order to confront and arrest Harkins.  On being denied admission, they had barged through the door, injuring the stage door man and run up the steps into the wings, looking for Harkins. Not finding him they then went through the Green Room, disturbing the ladies of the Company  who were dressing there, and then seem to have rampaged through the dressing rooms, before heading back to the stage.  

Harkins, realising what was happening, had slipped under the stage, through the orchestra and escaped through the auditorium into the street.  The men - who were armed with revolvers - tried to follow him but found themselves surrounded by the backstage crew and performers who would not allow them to pass.  Shots rang out and the elderly theatre nightwatchman and one of the gas-lighters were both badly injured. By this time, reinforcements had arrived and five of the six men - one had managed to escape.

Incredibly, the performance continued with an understudy stepping into Harkins' role. The whole production was apparently later closed down by a high court injunction.  

Now, none of that is of the slightest use to me really.  But I  thoroughly enjoyed reading about it!

Like a tangled chain

(Warning - this post is rather a ramble!  There's a lot going on in my brain at the moment!)

Apologies for the radio silence. What a few weeks it has been since Christmas...

I've spent the last six weeks giving myself a crash course in the state of touring Shakespeare in 1881 and I'm finally about to try and bring it all together to create some sort of comprehensible document.  I have so much I want to say about this topic that leaving any of it out is going to be hard,  

I've also managed the 'untangling' of Winifred Isaac's book about Ben Greet - a fascinating task, not least because I've had to ask myself the question, 'Why does the structure of this book annoy me so much?' 

Isaac had clearly done a huge amount of research and had gathered together a vast number of (mainly uncredited) sources.  Pulling it all together into one volume would have been a complex task - and I don't understand why she made it more complicated by arranging the material in themes rather than chronologically, allowing us to see the development of each of the elements of Greet's work. Why couldn't she just be a bit more 'J.C. Trewin' about the whole thing and structure all that disparate material into a coherent narrative?

It was the word 'narrative' that made me stop and think.  As a former English teacher, amateur crime-writer and self-confessed book addict, I'm aware I think primarily in terms of building narratives whenever I write something.  I want there to be a 'story' of sorts and I'm sure this love of narrative is  the thing that draws me to history as well. 

But I'm aware that any history worth its salt has to be more than just a narrative, that any 'story' we construct from the facts is very much dependent on our overview - the distance between then and now allowing us to see a pattern or structure emerge from the events of someone's life is not the way they experienced it.  This distance is both illuminating and distorting.  For example, when I read about Benson being knighted at the Tercentenary performance in May 1916, I already know what follows - the loss of Stratford upon Avon, the death of Eric Benson, the break-up of the company, the collapse of a marriage and the years ahead of touring in a world that had shifted away from his type of theatre towards the 'realism' of cinema and Hollywood.  I have the advantage of being able to construct a narrative from the facts. 

Isaac's book is, in some ways, a good example of how not to do something - the traps that lie in wait for those who think writing history is a doddle - but it has also been something of a wake-up call.  I've noticed my own total lack of academic confidence can often be masked by an approach which comes across as the exact opposite: a confident arrogance bordering on the smug. I have absolutely no right to have any sense of superiority: I've yet to prove myself capable of anything.  It is always easy to be critical of the players from the bench...

Whatever its flaws, Isaac's book has proved an absolute gold mine of information and my research would have been much more difficult without it. In some ways, the fact that it is arranged in the way it is means it AVOIDS narrative: the facts presented without any attempt at making them tell a story, leaving me free to weave my own narrative from what it suggests.  

I'm not sure where I'm going with this just at the moment, but I do know that as a direct result of reading Isaacs' book, my own research has taken me along a different road to the one I thought I was on in December.  It has shifted something in my thinking and that can't be a bad thing at all.

We will GREET the time.

Until two days ago, the only 'Greeters' I knew of were those irritating employees that used to lurk at the entrances of ASDA supermarkets, dishing out shopping baskets with enforced bonhomie and a kind of manically frozen grin, no doubt brought on by standing for hours in the draught of an automatic door.

I am now aware, however, that the term also refers to those performers who worked with Sir Philip Ben Greet, the actor and theatre entrepreneur who was a direct contemporary of the Bensons and, arguably, the closest thing to a rival to the Benson tradition in the provinces.  As a purveyor of Shakespeare in the era I'm researching he is a  significant character. Although his activities were not confined to Shakespeare touring, his 'Woodland Players' (also sometimes referred to as 'Pastoral Players') were influential in bringing 'outdoor' Shakespeare to Edwardian Britain, followed by other companies such as Benson's and the Williams/Holme Summer touring company.

I knew a little about Ben Greet, mainly in connection with Granville Barker, Lillah McCarthy, H.B. Irving and Sybil Thorndike.  I'd also read Don-John Dugas's book 'Shakespeare for Everyman' when it first came out which deals specifically with Greet's activities in America and Canada.  

There is only one other book about Greet - a self-published volume from 1964 called 'Ben Greet and the Old Vic: a biography of Ben Greet' by Winifred Isaac, which landed on my desk on Thursday of last week and has proved to be fascinating and frustrating in equal measures. 

I should've been warned, really.  Dugas summarises Isaac's book in one sentence: 'More interested in programme transcription than analysis, unedited, often failing to specify(let alone cite) its sources, lacking an index and self-published, it is as frustrating as it is scarce.'  Actually, I think he may have been understating some of the issues. And yet... there's gold hidden in there.

Although the title itself is completely misleading, the biggest problem with it is with the arrangement of material.  Having appealed for information from former Greeters (as Trewin also did with Bensonians) Isaac seems to have been completely overwhelmed by what she was given and has tried to impose some kind of order onto it.  Instead of treating the topic chronologically, she divides her book up into chapters on various aspects of Greet's career - as actor, actor-manager, in Stratford, at the Old Vic, in America, at Regent's Park. The result is like an overfilled tumble-drier muddle of unconnected garments that have somehow become tangled together.

Having tried to 'read' the book conventionally, I found it impossible to keep track of what was going on as Isaac jumps from 1887 to 1891 to 1916 and then back to 1901 listing performance after performance, with cast list after cast list. The only way of dealing with it has been to make copious notes as I'm going along and then start to collate them into some sort of chronological order so that I can see where the gaps are and start to plug them from the British Library Newspaper archive.

So that is how the Christmas holiday is shaping up for this Merry Shrew: armed with highlighters and a stack of coloured paper, I'm going to try and 'sort out' the career of Ben Greet in analogue form by the New Year into something I can actually use as part of my research.  

I suspect I may need a lot of chocolate...

Volumes that I prize...

I'm loving reading new things and  also revisiting some old favourites for the PhD work.  I was reading  J.C. Trewin's book again a couple of weeks ago, when I happened to look at the date inside the front cover.  I used to have the habit of putting the date and my name on the flyleaf whenever I bought a book, although I stopped doing it a while ago. This particular book is dated October 1994 and I can pinpoint the exact time and place where I bought it. 

There used to be an excellent (if rather expensive) second hand and antiquarian bookshop in Stratford, a couple of doors down from New Place, called David Vaughan Books.  We were in Stratford to see A Midsummer Night's Dream directed by Adrian Noble - a starry cast including Alex Jennings, Stella Gonet, Barry (now better known as Finbar) Lynch, Toby Stephens, Emma Fielding, Desmond Barrett and Philip Voss.  It was a magical production.  The trip was also memorable as the first time I visited the Shakespeare Centre reading rooms and spent a day looking for information about Henry Ainley.  The book was purchased with birthday money and, at that time, it was the most I'd ever spent on a book - £18.  

Another book I'm going back to this week is the one that started off this madness in the first place.  The Shakespeare Memorial Theatre by Ruth Ellis was bought in a second hand book shop in Harrogate in July of 1986, shortly before my first visit to Stratford.  It was here I first read about the Bensons.  

That first book led to years of hunting through second hand bookshops for hidden treasure, wherever we went, and then, much later, using ebay and Abe books trying to track down specific and sometime elusive titles. The magic of second hand books, bookshops and websites is in the serendipity of it, finding hidden and often unprepossessing gems in the most unlikely of places.  (I once bought a book by H.B. Irving that had definitely been gnawed by something rotent-y! There are clear teeth marks on the cover...) 

In Stratford, two weeks ago, I read a fabulous Post Graduate diploma dissertation by Mary Rose Allen, in which she had compared one of the prompt books to the Memorial Theatre edition of Hamlet and made some really interesting points about the performance texts the Bensons used. She included some information about the Memorial Editions - the fact that they were edited by Charles Flower, published by Jarrold and sold in the 'Reading Room' of the theatre (now the room off the Swan bar). I suddenly realised that the accounts entry - 'Dream books' - for one of the visits to Sunderland would have been for sales of the single play edition. 

I hadn't really thought about Flower's texts being a basis for Benson productions.  However, for some plays, added to the repertory after being 'The Birthday Play' in Stratford, it was the most likely blueprint for the cuts and rearrangements which were made.

On the journey home, pondering over this, I remembered that I'd seen several volumes on ebay, ages ago, part of a collected edition.  A quick hunt through the listings and I found they were still there - five volumes out of the eight which formed the 'Collected Edition', half-bound in leather, at (incredibly) £6.99 each.  I  ordered three of them, which covered many of the plays I'm most interested in, although I felt bad about leaving the other two behind and almost immediately wished I'd bought all five.  By the next morning, I was on the verge of adding the other two to the order, when I had a message from the seller who said he was having difficulty locating them in his recently-renovated house.

My heart sank - I've had a couple of disappointments with ebay purchases which have started out with such a message, only for it to transpire that the article in question has already been sold or has been 'lost in the post'... However, after a day or two a further message arrived, headed 'Success!'  (The seller had, apparently, asked his wife to search for them and she'd found them within an hour... I have no comment to make on this!!!)  and the seller very kindly offered to send the remaining two volumes free of charge to make up for the delay. 

So I now have all five, in really excellent condition: they look virtually unread. They are going to be useful in the next couple of years, but they are fascinating in their own right, to see what was considered appropriate or inappropriate on stage in 1898.  

And, of course, I now have a new second hand book quest - to try and find a copy of volumes 3, 7 and 8 from somewhere...! 

The squirrel's hoard...

 

Stratford in the Autumn is always lovely, particularly when the weather is as kind as it was on Monday and Tuesday of last week.  After a nightmare journey during which delays and severely overcrowded trains led to missed connections and my intended arrival time of 5.30pm became 7.45pm, it was a relief to step out on Monday morning to this gloriously blue sky.   I'd travelled on Sunday to maximise time to research and offset the more expensive accommodation costs of Monday and Tuesday nights with a bargain Sunday stay and, on the whole, it was worth the extra effort.  Engineering on the East Coast mainline all weekend had threatened a lengthy bus replacement journey and so I opted for travel to Carlisle and then onto Birmingham - a trip that costs approximately half the cost of a CrossCountry train from Newcastle to Birmingham... a cost fully re-imbursed without question thanks to 'Delay Repay'! 

Monday was spent in the Shakespeare Institute Library which is an absolute delight: space, silence, helpful librarians and things one just can't get anywhere else! Working from 10 till 4, I accessed several books that have eluded me over the years and also a dissertation that I needed to look at and which opened up a few more lines of enquiry for further visits.

Tuesday and Wednesday morning were spent in the more familiar surroundings Shakespeare Birthplace Archives where I'd asked to see the boxes of material connected to W.H. Savery, the former business manager and sometime partner of the Bensons.  

There are several large boxes which have been loosely organised into themes, but there is no catalogue listing of what is in each box, so it really felt like a bit of a treasure hunt.  Some of it was not really useful to me - Savery remained connected to the Memorial Theatre long after Benson left in 1919 - but all of it was fascinating, particularly the material connected to the laying of the foundations of the new theatre and its subsequent opening.

As always, time went quickly, and although there were sparks coming off the paper I was writing so fast, there remains one (very large!) unopened box which I still need to explore the next time I'm there in February.

 I've come home with around 60 pages of handwritten (scribbled!) notes which I'm gradually deciphering and expanding, with several things I'm already following up in the British Newspaper Archive.  

One of them concerns the Coronet Theatre in Notting Hill where the Bensons had a regular four week season, supported by subscription bookings.  As I went through the contents of Box 2, I found a stack of typed and handwritten letters going back and forth between  W. H. Savery and Henry Tossell, the Company's representative in London, concerning the rather dubious financial activities of the theatre's Lessee, one John Halpin.  

Because of the way the letters had been arranged in the folder, the most recent was on the top so I effectively discovered the story in reverse order.  The first letter confirmed the cancellation of the Coronet season for 1912 which came as something of a surprise - the Company generally did well out of the season and it provided a London showcase for their productions (albeit away from the West End).

Letter followed letter, criss-crossing between London, Liverpool and Birmingham through the middle of October, (Company headed notepaper contained the sub-headings 'This week' and 'Next week' on the address side!) much the way that emails do today.  Tossell's letters were typed, but several of Savery's were handwritten - he had very even and readable handwriting, thankfully!  and between them they reveal an attempt to defraud the Benson Company of advance bookings.

Savery was initially concerned at the way Halpin - who only held a six month lease on the theatre - wanted to handle all the subscription booking through his own box office.  The Company offered good discounts for patrons who booked across all ten productions in the season and, generally, the money for these would be placed in a separate joint account, set up by the Company and the Theatre, to be kept separate from general box office takings.  Halpin had initially agreed to these terms but then become difficult, saying his 'Directors' would not countenance such an agreement. In addition, Savery discovered Halpin was offering the Company's tickets at a further reduced price as part of his own 'subscription season'.  

"It shows there is some shady business behind everything(...)" Savery wrote to Tossell on October 16th.  "It all proves he wants absolute cash in his hands and this would never do. (...)  I like Halpin's sauce in saying the agreement must lapse unless we stand to arrangements made. He is the one not sticking to arrangements..."

Tossell agreed: "It is perfectly obvious that he does not want to agree to this in order that our advance bookings may be at his disposal."  

By doing a bit of digging through accounting and legal channels,  Savery  discovered that the 'Directors' were actually just Halpin himself and a sleeping partner friend, that Halpin was in serious financial difficulty and that he had set up John Halpin Ltd whilst still an undischarged bankrupt as a result of a previous theatrical endeavour which had collapsed.

Halpin, in the meantime, stopped replying to letters and did not appear at prearranged meetings with Tossell, claiming illness.  Savery then took the decision to cancel the season, writing to the 'Committee' of supporters - some 220+ people - to explain that due to "an inability to agree to terms", the season would not be going ahead, even though the publicity materials had all been printed.

Savery's instincts were proved entirely right. By December, Halpin was up in court, having been arrested for 'non-compliance' with a court order to hand over box office funds in lieu of rent, the theatre landlord having started proceedings against him.  Halpin again pleaded illness for his delay and was released. The theatre was forced to close through lack of funds in February 1912 and by April, 'John Halpin Ltd' had been declared bankrupt.   Halpin's expenditure on the theatre had been greater than he had expected and the costs for the lavish pantomime 'Babes in the Wood' had not been recovered through ticket sales. At its winding up, the liabilities of the company stood at £2,762 and its assets, which included the office furniture, were only worth £164. 

From the details in The Stage and The Era, it seems as if Halpin was more a chancer than a rogue: he found work quickly as Company Manager for a touring company and continued in that role until his sudden death from consumption in 1916.

Savery found alternative dates for the Benson Company in February 1912 and when they returned to the Coronet  in October 1912, it was under new management, sub-let to Messers Murray King and Clarke by lessee W.H. Savery! 

J.C. Trewin wrote Savery's obituary when he died, aged 81:  "Probably he knew and kept more secrets than anyone in that organisation [The Memorial Theatre] (...) Frank Benson, with his charming vagueness about expenditure, owed a great deal to Bill's financial knowledge. Time and again, Savery was able to ease FRB through periods of stress with (...) charm and understanding."  Birmingham Post 11/8/1960

Having spent so much time 'with' the man last week, I have a great deal of admiration for him - and am very grateful for his hoarding instincts!

Safe in a ditch...?

It is safe to say that this week has not worked out as I expected it to.  I had great plans to visit Sunderland University Library on Wednesday to do a lot of writing and quite a bit of reading.  Only I reckoned without the Gas Board who, in the process of digging up my little quiet terraced street to lay new gas mains, also went a bit 'gung-ho' with my front path and effectively barricaded me in by digging a two-foot deep hole directly outside my front door... without telling me!

As if that wasn't enough, my existing gas pipe was inspected, deemed unacceptably narrow - 3/4 inch rather than 1 inch - and there was talk of having to drill a hole in the outside wall - which necessitated me moving a bookcase (and the 70 books that live on it) and quite a bit of Shakespeare memorabilia which is in the porch.  It appears now that the issue wasn't quite as bleak as was painted and the bookcase could've stayed put...

The gas workers hadn't brought any boards to cover the hole (!?) and they made the very unhelpful suggestion that I use the back door instead.  Since access to my backdoor is down a dimly-lit back lane, where ghoulies and ghosties are known to lurk, I decided to wait till the coast was clear and then embrace my inner FRB. Thinking of his pole-vaulting into Harfleur in Henry V, I valiantly 'jumped' the space (having first removed the hurdles - I know my limitations!) to make my escape.

Unable to settle to anything with all this going on, my blissful writing day evaporated into indulgence in much comfort food and whinging to anyone who would listen to my woes.

Two days on, my gas is currently disconnected and I'm sitting feeling sorry for myself whilst hoping someone will come and fit the new pipe back to the meter...

A somewhat larger hole is also preventing me from reaching my garden which is directly opposite my house. The sharp-eyed may notice some vulgar (and non-Shakespearean!) graffiti added by local youths, I suspect, which appropriately sums up how I feel about the whole situation this week... 

I had started to write a much nicer post about books and another one about Garnet Holme, but they will have to wait till the crisis is over and I can at least put the heating on again!

Confined to barracks, I've created a little Bensonian corner with copies of a few postcards on one of the cupboard doors next to my desk.  The hope is that the Bensons and Bensonians will smile down at me when I'm feeling 'in despair with fortune.'  

Seriously hoping for some better days next week...!

Much matter to be heard and learn'd...

I am recently returned from Birmingham and Stratford, having spent a week attending the induction for the PhD course, with all the anxiety and excitement which inevitably goes along with such a thing.  On balance, the excitement has been foremost, revolving around finally setting foot inside the Shakespeare Institute, being able to talk about Benson to my heart's content, having a full week to think exclusively about what it is I'm trying to/want to do and of course, the joys of being able to use a University Library again.  

Dashing though to Stratford last Monday, I managed to squeeze in a brief visit to 'The Play's the Thing' exhibition, which changes some of its exhibits each year around the end of March.  I was keen to see if there was a 'new' Benson costume, and was delighted to see that it was the red Lady Macbeth dress I'd missed the last time it was on display, along with a sumptuous red velvet cloak.  Sadly, the label was entirely wrong - it actually referred to the pink and purple dress which was displayed two years ago - and I found myself feeling a tad indignant on CB's behalf: how much more effort would it have taken to create the right label? And does no one ever check these things?

So, to keep the record straight, this is the description of the costume from 'Stage Costumes and Accessories in the London Museum' by M. R. Holmes, published by HMSO in 1968.

Dress of deep red silk, with full skirt and very wide bell sleeves gathered into a body made of oriental brocade and three horizontal bands of green silk and gold braid.  Sleeves edged with gold fringe.  Long train of vermillion velvet lined with yellow silk and augmented with elaborate gold embroidery and jewels.  Worn by Constance Benson in the Banquet scene.

This costume was actually chosen as the frontispiece of the catalogue - the ONLY colour plate in the volume - and Holmes writes about it more fully in his introduction. He begins by referencing the fire in Newcastle and then continues:

"Irving was touring in America, but cabled his agents and had baskets of rich dresses and materials sent from his own store, and one of Constance Benson's dresses as Lady Macbeth shows what ingenious use was made of them.  In the banquet scene of the third act, she wore a magnificent mantle of vermillion velvet, rich with embroidery and jewels, and with it, a gown made by combining a bodice made of rich-looking oriental fabric with sleeves and a skirt of deep red silk.  The two make an impressive and harmonious whole and it is only a detailed scrutiny of the embroidery on the mantle that reveals it as having been intended originally for a court train of the [French] First Empire, presumably in the scene of the Napoleonic reception in Madame Sans-Gene which Irving had produced a little before [in 1897], but was not likely to revive."

Brackets are my additions.  

My photographs suffer from the usual light glare on glass - it was a very sunny day and the Benson window was positively glowing! - and I was very aware that I was running late for getting food and catching my train back so they are not quite as crisp or detailed as I  would have liked.  

 

 

I returned to Stratford on Friday for the Shakespeare Institute Induction day, one of the highlights of which was a tour of the absolutely wonderful library! I'm now plotting and planning a return in order to browse the shelves at greater leisure.  

My tables...

As promised, a little more information about the spreadsheet of performers I posted last week:

Benson Company sample performer spreadsheet

I've used the casting from the Stratford upon Avon Festival performances, as catalogued by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and I've added in casting from the London 1900 season and the 1913/14 North American tour, both of which can be found in the appendices in J.C. Trewin's Benson and the Bensonians.  

The Stratford dates, in particular, also cover guest appearances, often by 'Old Bensonians' who came back to slot into productions alongside the regular cast.  Where this appears to be the case I've marked their entry with an asterisk after the name.  Other 'special guests' include performers such as Johnston Forbes Robertson, Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Ellen Terry who were never members of the Benson Company.

Sheet 1 lists the performances for each season along with the performers who appeared, with FRB and CB first and then others arranged in alphabetical order, with the parts they played.  I've separated out performers who were listed as only appearing once in the season into a separate alphabetical sequence.  Often these are people local to Stratford who might appear in small or 'thinking' roles. They also include some 'faux' performers - the company often doubled roles using different names, the most famous being 'Walter Plinge' (and at times, his extended family!). Some, like B.Righton and M.Argate are clearly intended as puns - my favourite so far has to be L.Oakel - but others which are less conspicuous such as 'Mr James' 'Mr Sherrard' also appear frequently. Trewin makes it clear that these names could be inter-changeable between performers, making it difficult to identify how role-doubling worked in performance.

Sheet 2 takes performers who appear in at least two seasons with the Principal Company and lists their roles chronologically.  The intention here is to show some degree of career progression and the range of roles undertaken by each person both within any given season and across seasons. Again, an asterisk implies a guest role.

(I am intending that Sheet 3, which is currently blank, will provide some basic biographical information for each of these performers - I'm still working on this at the moment!)

The information is, inevitably, very Stratford-centric at the moment, which isn't necessarily reflective of the Company on tour across the provinces.  As I come across casting - either on programmes or in reviews - I will add to this.  I also want to extend the casting to later iterations of the company and expand it to cover the North and South Companies where possible.  

A surprise popped up on my Facebook page this week - a publicity postcard advertising the appearance of Oscar Asche and Lily Brayton at the King's Theatre in Sunderland.  Now long gone - as is Crowtree Road where it stood and the 1970s leisure centre that replaced it - the site is today part of the Bridges  shopping centre , having been badly damaged in an air raid during the Second World War.                                          

Kings Theatre in the centre of the picture with the dome of the Londonderry pub - now the Peacock - clearly visible at the end of the street.

O Time...

Slightly off topic this morning... looking at Osmond Tearle's touring in the 1870s through the old pages of the Era, I came across one of those fabulous stories that just have to be shared.

It concerns Tearle's business manager, Walter Hastings, and is only funny because it could have been tragic:

The photograph is of Ayr's town hall clock - presumably the culprit!

What a piece of work...!!!

Last time I posted, I had decided to create a basic reference spreadsheet of performers in the Principal Company, taken from the records in the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust archive catalogue, Well, I might have slightly underestimated how long that task would take, even given such a limited frame of reference.

However, I think it will have been worth the effort when I finally reach the end of it...

Up until now, I suppose I've just had lots of names sloshing round in my head, with only the vaguest idea about dates,  roles and career progression. It has been fascinating to see how the personnel of the Principal Company changed over the years that they were the resident company at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre.  The spreadsheet has also highlighted some persons of interest outside the 'usual suspects' who may be worthy of further exploration because their stories suggest something about what it meant to be a touring Shakespearean in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

J.C. Trewin's  'Benson and the Bensonians' gives as much credit in its title to those who passed through the companies as FRB himself and the list of Bensonians name-checked in the book is impressive. Re-reading it again this week, every sentence seems crammed with information and I'm in awe of the research and collation such a work must have taken.  It has done very little for my Pre-PhD nerves or my inevitable imposter syndrome.  I once sat behind the seat dedicated to  Trewin in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and I feel that's still where I am - just sitting in his shadow!

A few interesting things I've stumbled across this week include two separate essays about Lily Brayton's career, information about Alice Denvil's theatrical family (one of her sisters was apparently the wardrobe mistress at Drury Lane) and the revelation that actress Tita Brand was actually Michael Morpurgo's maternal grandmother.  

I've also unearthed another article by Arthur Machen which contains some fascinating details about 'Pastoral' performances, based on his experiences with the 'vacation' company of Harcourt Williams and Garnet Holme.  Because of the spreadsheet it has been really easy to identify the other performers he refers to, usually only by character name or as 'A'. 'B' or 'C' and I can see it will also be useful when trying to identify actors in uncredited photographs.

He finishes his recollection with the following, which I rather liked: 

I remember once in Hampshire, Rosalind and Orlando, Jaques and Touchstone, and the rest of that company of forest wanderers, made their entrance by strolling down under the pines, knee deep in heather and bracken; and I should think those fantastic figures, glinting amongst the green, must have added no small charm to the show (...) In a wicked, tiresome world such as this is, when men earn their living for the most part by ‘doing  business’ or by such other evil and squalid tricks, there seems nothing more innocent or more charming than this device of wandering from wood to wood in odd dresses, in doublets and trunk hose, with false beards and painted faces, speaking Shakespeare’s lines, and trying to murmur the airs of Arden in the fairy age to this dull and gloomy time. 

According to the review in the Derbyshire Advertiser and Journal  on Friday 12th July 1901, Rosalind was played by Constance Robertson, Orlando by Harcourt Williams, Arthur Whitby was Jaques and H.O. Nicholson played Touchstone.  

(The illustration is by Charles A. Buchel)

UPDATE: Benson Company Performers sample database is now here!!!  Some tweaks and changes still to make but v1 is live.  I'll post more details next week, but Sheet 1 focuses on rep, Sheet 2 lists the roles played by any performer in the sample who spent two or more seasons with the company within the framework of the Stratford 1886-1916 performances.

You were best to call them generally...

After my visit to York last week, I was spurred into action by Maurice Crichton's comments about the way Benson's company might have reflected Shakespeare's own, with specific roles marked for particular players. His interest in the range of roles played by actors within the repertory, has led me to think about how to start thinking about the actor's perspective of the company. 

I'd wrestled before with trying to catalogue actors who were part of the company across the years of its existence, and had been defeated because I didn't know what I would find most useful and in trying to record 'everything' I quickly became overwhelmed by it. However last week's conversation led me to think much more about the kinds of information that I actually need to know, the best way to document it and and how it could be made usefully accessible. 

Midweek, something did suggest itself as providing a potentially useful sample - a kind of 'snapshot' of the company across its many iterations.   J.C. Trewin includes a table as an appendix to his book which covers the 1900 Lyceum season and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has cast lists for all the productions at Stratford.  Looking at these creates a possible starting point.  Hopefully, then, by supplementing this with reviews and advertising, it might be possible to create comparable data for the  'missing' years when the Company wasn't in Stratford, and even potentially extend that into information about the North (B) and South (C) companies.

I tried to think about what information that would be the most use to anyone who was sufficiently interested to look at it.  As well as knowing what roles any actor played, it might be useful to see if any 'career progression' could be noticed and to note when people joined, left or returned to the company.  When I began to look closely at the SBT material, it was clear that there were also a number of 'one role' people each season - could they be locals, recruited for the Festival, rather than regular members of the company? And then there are the doubling 'names' - Walter Plinge and F.Anney being, famously, the ones most employed, although  M.Argate, B. Righton and (my personal favourite) L,Oakall  all appear on cast lists! (There's also good chapter in 'The Dillen' about local supers -there are some fabulous bits about the theatre and FRB in there, which I will return to in a later post!)

I've used Microsoft Excel to create a spread sheet with three separate pages, using the same information slightly differently on each. The main page is arranged in listings for each season to allow for searching across a specific production or year; the second focuses on actors in alphabetical order with their chronologically arranged roles across the years to show career progression and continuity, and the third lists the 'extra' one-role actors and doublers.  

After two days of pretty solid work - and a steep learning curve as far as Excel is concerned! - I've reached 1906 and am already noticing interesting patterns. Benson purchased what was basically an 'old fashioned' stock touring company from Walter Bentley and the structure of that seems to have remained largely unchanged, with actors employed for a specific 'line' of roles.  Some years are 'watershed' years with a high turnover within the company - 1900/01 being the main one because of the financial fallout from the London season - but there is a surprising amount of stability within the Company, generally provided by a backbone of  actors like George Weir, H.O. Nicholson and Arthur Whitby.  

Casting for events like the 'Histories' and the 'eternity' Hamlet in 1901 show a challenging range of roles which were out of the usual rep.  And I had no idea that there were so many characters called 'Balthazar' across Shakespeare's plays. Usually played by an actress, poor Leah Hanman (who was also the Company's resident Puck) must have had to keep her wits about her to remember which Balthazar she was playing each day!

As the Festival grew, and the number of performances increased, there are 'guest' returners for specific parts - Genevive Ward for Volumnia, Alice Denvil and Eleanor Aickin for Mistress Quickly - and later on I know there are many guest appearances by former Bensonians - Henry Ainley as Orlando, Matheson Lang and his wife Hutin Briton as the Macbeths etc - and guest 'stars' - Constance Collier, Lena Ashwell and Ellen Terry.  These 'non typical' repertory weeks will certainly need to be supplemented by material from touring reviews and programmes as it would be more useful to me to know who played these roles on a day-to-day basis

Programme from Theatre Royal Belfast 1899 

I don't know, without that conversation last week, whether any of this would have occurred to me. As it is, it has come at a perfect point - I'm now desperate to 'get going'  - and amassing background material like this can only be a useful occupation! Being 'accepted' as a student again (my official ID card arrived this week and my log-in details work on academic publishing websites) has also made me feel I once again have the right to spend hours pouring over all this stuff and can stop feeling guilty about it!

And this is only one of several things I jotted down after speaking to Maurice - a timely reminder that sharing knowledge and hearing others' opinions can only improve my thought processes!

Programme from Theatre Royal Belfast 1899 

(Hopefully, next week's post will be accompanied by a link to the spreadsheet - once I've finished its first iteration and figured out how to convert it to Google Sheets!)