Thanks to Michaela for typing the article.
by Philip Purser
Maggie Smith plays comic and serious parts with equal sensitivity. She returns to the London stage in January in Edna O`Brien`s Virginia
She wears a sagging fawn cardigan over a shapeless brown dress. A brown polka dot tie is knotted loosely round the collar. Her hair is hauled back in a schoolmistressy bun. She moves round the simple set – two chairs, a screen – in quick, nervous strides. When she stands still it is with her feet planted firmly apart, the toes of her unlovely thirties shoes at twenty-to-four. Maggie Smith is doing her stuff as Virginia Woolf in Edna O´Brien´s play Virginia which opens in London on January 29.
It is obviously a great challenge, in that Virginia Woolf has become a kind of literary saint since her suicide 40 years ago. Many in the audience will have sharp expectations of her from her books, her letters and all the literature about her. Miss Smith´s impersonation has to satisfy them while winning over those for whom Virginia Woolf has never been more than a name bandied about in that movie with Burton and Taylor. It is also, I suspect, the performance with which she it once again, at the age of 45, having to lodge her claim to be regarded as a serious actress as ungrudgingly as she is recognised to be a very funny one.
More than most she has been dogged by this strange compulsion among theatregoers to treat art and entertainment as different things. I happend to be in on the very beginnings, when in 1953 – and, again, in 1954 – a bunch of students calling themselves the Oxford Theatre Group barnstormed up to the Edinburgh Festival as part of the „fringe“ which in those pioneering days was wholly unofficial. They set up shop (and home) in a mediaeval slum in the Royal Mile, putting on a play in the evening a late-night revue to follow and serving hot chocolate in the courtyard between whiles. Gareth Wigan and Patrick Dromgoole, now eminent in film and televison production, were members. So were the actresses Dilys Hamlett, Wendy Williams and the late Virginia Maskell. Caspar Wrede directed. Ned Sherrin and Colin Shaw, Director of Television at the IBA, contributed material. Margaret Smith, as she was then, was with the company without being absolutely of it. Most of the others were from the university; she was a town girl, daughter of an Oxford scientist, and except for a walk-on part in the play one year, confined to the late show.
„We would be rehearsing Strindberg on the ground floor“, Dilys Hamlett remembers, „and down in the basement, was this very thin girl, performing“. Ah, but the revues were the smash-hits, as much so as Rowan Atkinson´s shows these days. And Margret Smith was about ninetenths of the reason why.
After so many years I cannot reconstruct what she did in any detail. She had a number as a marionette one year, in a red and white gingham play suit. She sang a song called I like. She whizzed through a breathless, very undergraduate-ish comical amalgam of all the advertising slogans of the day. She was a little on the skinny side, I suppose, with reddish fair hair cut short an, even then, a voice which seemed to break naturally to point up every rueful nuance in the material. She was funny, pretty, ambitious and wound up like a spring. As theatre critic-cum-graveyard-shift reporter on the Scottish Daily Mail I gave her ecstatic reviews and asked her out to lunch. As a retarded romantic ten years her senior I became rather sweet on her.
This must have been 1954, because I took her to The Matchmaker, Thornton Wilder´s boisterous comedy with Ruth Gordon in the lead, which was one of the official Festival´s chief offerings that year, and was – I now learn – to have a decisive influence on the future Maggie Smith. Our romance was not otherwise one to scorch the annals. For one thing, she was already carrying a torch for the pianist of the company.
The others will never forget the night he brought another girl to see the show. „Maggie put on“, says Caspar Wrede, „quite the most brilliant, brave, deadly performance I have ever seen. She improvised. She dazzled.“ The other poor girl did not know what had eclipsed her.
Tootling south in my Morris Eight two-seater in the autumm, I nevertheless looked Margaret up in Oxford; and the next year, when I had moved to London and she used to stay there with brothers or aunts, haunting the agents, we went out together a few times. Once I drove her to Camebrigde to see the Footlights Revue, innocently supposing that as an Oxford revue star she would be interested in what they were doing at the other place. It was like taking a Spitfire pilot to visit a Luftwaffe squadron. Every fibre in her body bristled. When we went backstage afterwards it was worse, because they were all talking about the West End offers which had come their way, while she had done nothing since Edinburgh.
Then, a few months later, my ´phone rang and it was Margaret calling from her agent´s office to give me the first news of the Big Break at last. She was going to America as one of the new new faces in a fresh edition of New Faces, the Broadway revue which had famously launched Eartha Kitt. It did not repeat the success of the original, but la Smith – by now become Maggie – returned sufficiently unscathed to team up with Kenneth Williams in the revue Share My Lettuce, which enjoyed a vogue success in London. However, her critics say that this was when she acquired the acting mannerisms they cannot stand: she was so thick with Kenneth Williams that willy-nilly she took on his style of fluting nasal outrage. I would not know. All I can remember are her incredibly straight, stalky legs below skirts which were just beginning to climb again as the New Look finally died.
After that we lost touch. In the next 25 years my acquaintance with her would be limited to what came my way as a television reviewer and occasional film-goer. She was in a sweet little television play by Peter Draper set in a seaside town out of season. She was in an Ealing Films thriller called Nowwhere To Go , written by Ken Tynan. She had deliberately, though perhaps no one noticed, put song and dance behind her in pursuance of what had been her real ambition all the time, to be an actress not just a revue star. Anyway, revue was dead. She married and had two sons by the actor Robert Stephens; later they parted. She married again, to writer Beverley Cross. And as the years trundled by, my goodness, she had become a pillar of the National Theatre, a CBE, an hon. D.Litt of St. Andrews University, twice an Oscar winner and a real film-starry film star. If only I had caught one TWA flight earlier to Los Angeles last year I would have seen her in California Suite as the inflight entertainment.
The clip from it shown in the Academy Awards ceremony on television was pure Maggie Smith. She and Michael Caine are having a mild row while he is changing his clothes. „I saw your privates“, she suddenly says in a squeak of disbelief tempered with delight which would throw any man off his argument. Her struggle, at least in this country, has been to convince everyone that she is more than a funny voice. Her Private Lives and Hay Fever and Prime of Miss Jean Brodie are always remembered, her Hedda Gabler and Miss Julie have sunk into a collective forgetfulness. When she played Portia in Jonathan Miller´s The Merchant on televisions, a delightful performance was inevitably dismissed as lightweight and flip.
It was partly to turn her back on such indifference at home, people say, that in the last five years she has identified herself so wholeheartedly with the Stratford Festival in Ontario,
3 500 miles from ours in Warwickshire. „She feels safe there“, they say. „She feels appreciated“.
Certainly it was on the Stratford audience that she insisted on trying out Virginia Woolf for the first time, last summer.
My wife and I drove up for it from Ney York, through the Catskills and the Finger Lakes and the mesh-like urban sprawl around Toronto. Stratford is in the rich farming country to the very south of Canada. It used to be a railway town like Crewe or Wolverton in England, until the railway went away after the Second World War. In order to help fill the void left by this departure, a local journalist, Tom Patterson, proposed an annual Shakespeare Festival trading on the town´s name – it also has a river called the Avon opening into a manmade lake with swans. This year, ist 18th, the Festival ran for five months and had grown to 15 productions in three different theatres.
Virginia was in the Avon, the town´s old playhouse, then cinema, now playhouse again. The locals pronounce it „a-von“ with as short „a“ though, judging by the first night audience, Avid would be a better name. We had never sensed such hunger for a meaningful cultural experience. Many of the devotees came from across the border, Detroit or Buffalo; later in the season, we were told, the majority would be Americans. There were critics from London, New York, the Canadian papers and all the local radio stations. There could not be that magic madness presses and Viriginia is drawn to that dreadful morning in 1941 when she filled the pockets of the baggy cardigan with stones and waded into the flooded river near her home?
At the end there was a real old-fashioned ovation, the audience standing and clapping and cheering. Maggie looked gratified but exhausted. In our hotel in the small hours we were kept awake by the tap of a typewriter in the next room and then bits of critics` prose as someone (we never did discover whom) dictated his notice over a bad line to London.
Eighty two! „There were 82 critics there“, said the heroine of the occasion when we went for a drink the next day. She made it sound as if that were 82 Gestapo men – but I am rushing ahead on what was, after all, the climax of a minor pilgrimage, meeting her again after nearly a quarter of a century. Mr and Mrs Beverley Cross, due to be joined in the summer holidays by her sons, were living in a pleasant, square Victorian house in an avenue of pleasant, square Victorian houses. Edna O´Brien was almost opposite.
„Actually we were allotted another one“, Maggie volunteered in reply to conventional noises of approval, „but we didn´t even unpack, it was so ghastly. You know, different wallpapers on every wall. We were able to swap with a young director who said he didn´t mind ... This house was Tom Patterson´s, the man who founded the Festival. He gave it to them“.
She was elegant in a blue chalkstripe trouser suit with ruffed cream blouse; absolutely erect, thin as ever, constantly flicking at her hair with a long, narrow hand, and still wound up like a spring. Mr Cross, amiable and bearded, popped the cork on a nicely-chilled bottle of champagne. Stratford was a good place for writing, he said: no pubs to distract you, only the church. It turnd out that he meant a restaurant called The Church (because that is what the building used to be) whose evening buffet constituted the nearest thing to a convivial rendezvous in the town. Mrs Cross said she liked the place for ist theatres but would not want to settle permanently. In winter it was all rather Russian, when the snow came.
We swapped a few names from the past. Wendy Williams of Oxford Theatre Group days she referred to, for some reason, as Wendy Wellyboots. She dropped into a lightning imitation of Edith Evans in order to tell a story of Dame Edith missing a cue in Hay Fever and loudly demanding, „Is it my turn“? Then, out of the blue: „Of course, you started me off, when you took me to The Matchmaker that time. Ruth Gordon! That´s when I realised you can be a comic and yet be an actress. If she can do it, I thought, I can“.
„In fact“, she went on, unless I am guilty of tidying up recollections in the moment of the rising, since it was already up to reveal the two wide cane-backed chairs, the silvery scrim on which ghostly trees would be projected. But the lights could still dim, and the atmosphere was electric ...
Virginia Wool, née Stephen, novelist, larist and tireless letter-writer, was the very heart of the rather high-minded artistic cirle known as the Bloomsbury Group. With her husband Leonard Woolf, a former colonial administrator in Ceylon, Virginia founded and ran the Hogarth Press; they published T.S.Eliot´s first poems. Viriginia had suffered her first mental breakdown in dolescence, after her mother died, and was haunted thereafter by fears of recurrence.
The play was originally commissioned (by the H. M. Tennent organisation) as one of those fashionable one-person exercises. Edna O´Brien persuaded them to let her expand it at least into a three-hander, with Virginia´s husband Leonard Woolf on the stage almost as much as Virginia, and a colourful intervention by Vita Sackville-West, with whom Virginia had a Sapphic love affair. It is still austere, rather rarefied drama. Time and place are abstract. Conversation turns into meditation. The only music is the viggy sound of a clarinet. It becomes other touching as Virginia remembers the death of her mother, which has something she wrote about over and over again, and more than what when she fears another onset of her own madness. It is also unexpectedly warm as Maggie Smith brings out Virginia´s deep, underlying affection for her matter-of fact husband, and sometimes very funny when Virginia empales a rival with an epigram and Maggie´s voice shivers on the edge of a gurgle. Against the delicate transcent scrim her arms and hands, you notice, cannot help tracting extradinarily graceful gestures.
„Isn´t she fabulous“? we overheard the interval, though some of the canadian critics, anyway, were already busting off familiar objections about her mannerisms. „I have this feeling she can´t wait for the serious bits to end“, said one of them, „so that she can go for a laugh“. But would he still thinking that in the second half, as interests of a thesis, „one of the things I am anxious to show about Virginia that she could be funny, and good company, not just a gloomy blue stocking. There is a story about Strachey and Clive Bell stuck a boring house party. One of them said to the other, „Who would it be nicest to see coming up the drive now“? They thought for a minute and then came out with it together – „Virginia“! ? Clive Bell could crush her with things he said, she wrote somewhere. She was easily crushed by criticism“. Inevitably the woman she had been studying, to whose interpretation she was turning over a whole slice of her life, was starting to dominate the conversation. I said, „Why do you make her so dowdy“?
„Virginia hated buying clothes. The exception was when she was going to stay at Lady Ottoline Morrell´s and went to the Editor of Vogue for advice. Otherwise it really was woollies and things – did you hear about the First Night present Nick Pennell, who plays Leonard, got from one of the other actors, Richard Monette? A tote bag with VW stencilled on it and inside this rather damp cardigan with the pockets full of stones“!
„You don´t have her smoking at all“, said my wife. „She used to roll her own cigarettes from shag, didn´t she“?
„And the bundles of cheroots she would hand to young writers to take away. But there simply isn´t time for me to be fiddling with cigarette papers and matches on the stage and nowhere to put an ashtray in the set. It´s all right for Nicholas and his pipe, he can always stick it in his pocket“.
„What about the feminist line which the feminists are going to look for – are already looking for“?
„I don´t think it´s there. It´s rubbish. All that Virginia wanted was for women to be educated just as well as men were. She was very articulate about it“.
„Where do the words come from in the madness passages“? – „All from her books, but pushed togehter“.
We moved on to the future of the production, at that time still undecided between New York and London, and between a straightforward run and part of a repertoire of plays. Maggie favoured London because the people who knew Virginia Woolf would be there, and the people who knew the places invoked, like Hungerford Bridge. And, after all, England was still her home, insofar as she had a home – with six-month seasons in Stratford, regular Hollywood sojourns and holidays in the Bahamas, the Crosses lead a necessarily rootless life: their base in this country is a house near Godalming which they share with Maggie´s brothers, architects who also spend much time abroad.
As for the kind of run it would be, she was frankly terrified of playing such an arduous part night after night. She would end up in the lake herself. Before the opening monologue, she said, she had to suck a Meggazone to stop her tongue cleaving to the roof of her mouth. She was never so glad to see anyone as when Nicholas came bumling on as Leonard, because that meant she was going to have a respite in a minute. Yes, it was tiring and – with a grin and a lightning Maggie Smith imitation – as a kindly visitor had said to her quite seriously, it must break into her evenings.
It is to be London. It is to be a straight run, beginning in late January. In due course the unfathomable mixture of critical reaction and word of mouth will declare it to be a HIT or a MISS. Whichever that proves to be, I can´t help feeling flattered, if it is true, that once I nudged Maggie Smith along the course that has brought her to Virginia. She is, like the woman she is playing, easily crushed by criticism. She is – someone remarked to me – a performer who relies on inspiration and, if inspiration is lagging, will sometimes force an effect.
But I like to think that here we see a rare actress taking on a character whose sensitivity and insecurity and ambition and genius are not all that remote from her own.