Stanislaysky at Newport Pagnell

P: How good of you to come !' I exclaimed for the fourteenth time.

Id iss a brivelege,' replied Ronnie in a preternaturally guttural accent. He was wearing a dark-green ulster (or ulcer, according to the children) and a Germanic-looking hat.

`You got my letter?'

The fiend in human shape nodded impatiently.

`You have ze map?' he barked.

`That's super,' said the Director politely. 'I'll shoot now.

The light's better than it was.'

`And nobody is to giggle,' said the Film Star severely.

`No, Mummy,' said the little girls. They were by now drained of laughter.

`Profes'sor!' I began once more. 'How good of you to come!'

We got to the last shot about tea-time. The bloodstained corpses of the Professor and his female accomplice (the Film Star, in a leopard-skin coat) sprawled in the wet grass, kipper- ing gently in the burning wreckage of their plane while the Director waited for a break in the clouds. Around them, erupting from an ornate coal-scuttle, was strewn the buried treasure which they had attempted to purloin.

It had been an exacting day. What with catching and saddling Red Knight and Isabel (for the obligatory chase), keeping the dogs out of the picture, finding the revolver, persuading the junior members of the cast that they could not give of their best as actresses while holding live grass- hoppers in their hands, and solving various other problems which do not (1 imagine) arise when a Cast of Thousands is deployed in California. we had done well to finish the whole film in a day; for although, according to the Director, it will run for only about seven minutes, it is packed with incident.

The Professor, who had now been spreadeagled on the ground for a quarter of an hour, uttered a low moan; and my mind went back to the last occasion, nearly thirty years ago, when Ronnie and I were in show business together.

In those days Newport Pagnell was not widely recognised as a centre of culture; nobody spoke of it (as for all I know they do now) as the Athens of Buckinghamshire, and I can- not recall that any dramatic critics came down from London to attend the production of Bulldog Drummond in which Ronnie played the villain and 1 the hero.

Country-house cricket survives, if it does not flourish; country-house theatricals are a vanished folkway, of which this ludicrous performance must have been one of the last manifestations. The whole thing was organized—we probably used the more descriptive expression, 'got up'—by some nice people with a large house near by, and in this the non-resident members of the cast stayed during the two or three days deemed necessary for rehearsals.

The hard core of the enterprise consisted of keen followers of the Whaddon Chase, and the exigencies of the hunting field had not been without their influence on some of the casting. (`Don't yQu think we ought to give George something to say? I believe he'll be good for a lawn meet next season, now he's got rid of that bloody keeper.') But most of the principal parts had gone to people, like Ronnie and me, with no local roots. The play was presented in a cinema.

Bulldog Drummond is not a drama in which—as for instance in Hamlet----the author relies extensively on subtleties of characterisation or on verbal felicities of one kind and another. What he does rely on is the stage manager. In Hamlet all sorts of things can go wrong backstage without the audience being mystified or even seriously disconcerted. If, where the stage direction reads [A flourish of trumpets, and ordnance shot off within], either nothing at all happens or the audience hear a cock-crow which really belongs to another scene, nobody minds much; the action of the play goes forward and the little contre- temps is overlooked.

It is far otherwise with Sapper's masterpiece. When, for instance, Drummond shoots out the light with his revolver, it really is pretty well essential that the stage should be instantly plunged in darkness, preferably to the sound of breaking glass. Time and again, not only the suspension of disbelief but the suppression of tumultuous guffaws depends less on what the actors say or do than on what is done off-stage. Motor-horns, pistol shots, screams, the simulated cry of an owl, daggers quivering in the wall—it is phenomena such as these which are the very lifeblood of a play in which the line `My God! What was that?' (not once, I think, used in Hamlet) punctuates the dialogue.

Although I had only once before acted in amateur theatricals (as the Lion in Androcles and the Lion) I was for some reason regarded as a sort of Stanislaysky at Newport Pagnell, and found myself producing as well as playing the lead. An assistant stage manager had already been put in charge of all noises off and special effects. His name was Leslie Something; he was said to be quite fearless over timber and had been given the job to make up for his disappointment at not getting a part.

A keener man you could not have wished to find; but at the dress-rehearsal Ronnie and I, laboriously conducting our battle of wits with the aid of the prompter, realised that Leslie's grasp of his duties, and particularly of the sequence in which they had to be performed, was dangerously infirm.

`My God! What was that?' Pause. 'What was what?"Er. well, didn't you hear the cry of an owl?' Bang !

Leslie, once he realised that he had erred, was contrite. `I'm terribly sorry,' he said. `I thought this was the scene— Oh no, of course; it's the next one. I hope I shall manage better tomorrow.' We all hoped this.

Towards the end of Act I the heroine's drink-sodden uncle (played in this revival by Lord Pakenham, with real hiccoughs) shoots himself off-stage. At tie sound of the shot Drummond dashes out, dashes back, and says, 'My dear, you must be brave,' or words to that effect. The curtain falls with Phyllis sobbing on his shoulder. This was a bit difficult to arrange in our production as the heroine was much taller than I was; but whatever size the actors may be it is scarcely possible to start playing this scene until a shot has been fired.

On the first night the heroine and I waited in vain for the pregnant detonation. After a long, embarrassed pause I bounded into the wings. Leslie was tensely poised over a bucket full of empty medicine bottles, ready to drop a plough- share into it. I found the pistol, fired it, and rushed back to the heroine, followed by the sound of splintering glass. 'My dear,' I said with manly emotion, 'you must be brave.'

At the second performance Leslie did not miss his cue, but afterwards one or two of the unfortunate people who had been in the audience wanted to know why the heroine's uncle had taken two shots to blow his brains out. I might have given Stanislaysky the credit for this novel and arresting touch, but his was not really a name to conjure with in the Whaddon Chase country at that time. 1 told them to ask Leslie.

STRIX