Distinguished Company

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 797, 29 October 1954, Page 8

Distinguished Company

OR some three weeks now, the main New Zealand cities have been honouring distinguished guests. They are Dame Sybil Thorndike and Sir Lewis Casson, who have been celebrated, both singly and together, for at least half a century. The route they have travelled from modest beginnings to their present eminence has been neither a Royal

road nor a straight one. It has branched and ramified; it has led Sir Lewis to the Court Theatre under the famous Vedrenne-Barker aegis which first made the name of Bernard Shaw widely celebrated, to the Old Vic as actor and producer, through seasons of Greek Tragedy and Grand Guignol to intimate domestic comedy; Dame Sybil acted in Miss Horniman’s renowned Repertory Theatre in Manchester before the First World War, and then at the Old Vic from 1914-1918, where she played not only all of the most exacting female roles but could also be seen as Prince Hall, Puck,

Launcelot Gobbo, the Fool in Lear, and Ferdinand in The Tempest, joined her husband in seasons of Greek Tragedy and Grand Guignol, was the first Saint Joan and the first Miss Moffatt of The Corn is Green, and thus to plays like The Linden Tree, Waters of the Moon, and A Day By the Sea. All this gives a pleasant and seemingly inevitable shape to their lives. Apprenticeship, maturity, full flowering into the great classical roles, then a slow decline into the skilled but less exacting convention of domestic comedy, the autumn of a vivid and spectacularly successful life. It would be a delightful picture if there were a word of truth in it. But both Dame Sybil and Sir Lewis are as busy as they have ever been, and when one asks just what they are bringing us from their packed careers, the answer is that they are bringing it all. You may see Sir Lewis as the messenger burdened with the awful tidings of Medea’s revenge, as Henry V, as Macbeth, as Benedick, as Wolsey, as an Elizabethan statesman, or the rueful deliverer of the ballad "Carcassonne"; Dame Sybil as Medea, Beatrice, Lady Macbeth, Queen Katherine, Princess Katherine, an old Cockney woman: they do them all, and they do them at the top of their bent. From a lifetime of study, practice and great success, they run for us nothing less than the entire gamut of their art. How is it, one asks, that a woman of Dame Sybil’s age can be so beautiful? Is it just? Is it reasonable? Is it possible? Go and see her then: judge for yourself. For beautiful she is, and how much more, before us, than any photograph can reveal. For a photograph misses Dame Sybil’s wonderful animation, and if you don’t see that, you may miss her altogether. For she is all animation, all life, and all grace. Exquisitely dressed, with no properties to aid her except a light coloured stole, her smallest movement has about it an irresistible eloquence. That curtsey, how regal, yet how benign! Those fine, fluent hands: what delicious arabesques they can describe, yet how inflexibly can they

cut the air, with what serenity do they rest on her gown in moments of quiet! And that voice: what an instrument! Hear it stretch a vowel to its ultimate length, hear speech amplified to incantation, primitive in its power to evoke feeling, yet incomparably rich and subtle. Compare it, tritely, to an organ, and Dame Sybil will promptly confound you with the most delicate cadenzas, or an ironic cutting edge. And how nobly, with what gravity, Sir Lewis accompanies her. His range is smaller, and his manner less demonstrative, but in what admirable taste. If Dame Sybil seems hardly national in the breadth of her art, Sir Lewis seems very English in his. As an artist, how considerate, sensible and controlled. As a husband, how fond, how proud. He uses little gesture where his wife uses much; against the virtuoso technique of her romantic voice, he puts his solid, serviceable and utterly practical instrument to counterpoint it, and reveal it by contrast. Is this, then, the secret of their art? Is it a marriage of true minds in work and in life? There is much of this, certainly. One sees an exquisite intimacy in their performances. If one performs alone. the attention of the other is absolute, and‘not without a certain fond anxiety, which those of us. who have seen our family perform will ‘understand and share; and this is followed by a charming complacency during the applause, and a hint of domestic rivalry in, say, Dame Sybil’s announcement after sustained applause for, her husband’s "Carcassanne": "Now I’m going to do a ballad!" with a "try and me me" toss of the head. The formal. scenes | hen played together seemed ingeniously chosen for their power to elaborate variations on their own relationship. As they face us, as themselves, Sir Lewis is all quiet strength, and solidity, with the accreted wisdom of a long life; Dame Sybil, all brilliance, radiance and charm. In Katherine’s Trial Scene from Henry VIII, Sir Lewis transforms this quiet strength

into the malevolent will of Cardinal Wolsey, and ‘Dame. Sybil’s Katherine is a woman whose great natural charm has been crushed by cruelty and slights. As this poor, harried woman is broken before our eyes, her grief, audible, stirs us, and rouses our own. As Medea, fulfilling a terrible revenge on the husband who has cast her off, Dame Sybil plays a woman whose charms must once have been enveloping, but is now demented by jealousy, and this was our first glimpse of her high, tragic style. Brazenvoiced, colossal in size, an abstraction almost, her face was a mask on which only epic feelings found expression; and contrasting again, Sir Lewis brought his chronicle of disaster to her with an almost casual air, Inexorably, his catalogue of horrors assembled, with a steady and masterly piling of effect. In the scenes from Henry V,,. Sir Lewis's speech before Harfleur was so different from the heroic style with which Sir Laurence Olivier has made us familiar that it seemed absolutely fresh; here was a bluff commander-in-chief, resorting to no high flown rhetoric in the face of battle. "You’re here. men. You're under my orders, and this is what you have to do," was the burden of his speech, and if less visceral. an appeal than Sir Laurence’s, it was an authentic and compelling reading. Dame Sybil gave an astounding performance as the Princess Katherine: sheer sorcery. Could she be older than eighteen? She was pert, skittish, more than eager to be wooed, and with what charm! Sir Lewis won her as he would have won his battles; his siege was carefully planned, and the fortress taken without fuss, and his awkwardness as a. courtier proved both beguiling and successful. For this scene, Sir Lewis produced a velvet cap of antique style, to "make me a little younger and more debonair." It did so. In the final great scene from: Euripides’ The Trojan Women, Dame Sybil played the much-bereaved Hecuba, a figure of majestic grief, and this performance contrasted admirably with the

tortured, strident Medea, for those of us who might have thought that Greek tragedy was one long rant and_= roar. Here was an epic tenderness, an embracing love, a quiet but fathomless indignation. With what wonderful care she receives the imaginary body of her grandson, killed by the Greeks, and wraps him in her stole as an improvised cerement, strokes his limbs and smooths his hair. And Sir Lewis’s Talthybius, caught like Hecuba in the pointless tragedy of war, an observer, yet compelled to witness suffering, sick .of it, yet after ten years, . still compassionate. There can surely be no disagreement about the quality and evocative power of these major performances. The shorter pieces were designed to’ suit all

tastes, and they did that. For myself, I should like to have heard some Hopkins, Pound and Eliot, and some more Dylan Thomas, but this is being greedy when so much was offered. Sir Lewis made something rather fine from the sentimental ballad "Carcassonne"; and Dame Sybil brought a cléar fire to the speeches from Saint Joan, an elegiac heaviness to the sombre Scots ballads, What is their secret? Most of it is unfathomable, and rightly so; a mystery which abhors analysis. But one can at least observe the. triumphant technique, and the superb rapport with which they perform. It is an intimacy which takes us all within its orbit, at once sublime and human: ‘sublime because by its

warmth it puts us at ease and into the mood for transport, and human because of its occasional frailties, such as when Dame Sybil found her memory failing on Browning’s "Home: Thoughts from Abroad." She exclaimed, beating her brow: "What a fool you are, Sybil!" and looked to Sir Lewis for confirmation. And this play between husband and. wife which underlies their performances, and which they often allowed us to observe, with its affection and endearing rivalry, gave their evenings a special: warmth. They are great and mature artists, but also. clearly, invincibly pleasant people.

The photographs on pages 8 and 9 were taken by the National Publicity Studios.