Edith Evans’s Handbag

revised 2006.ix.23

   “A hand-bag?” With that simple Importance of Being Earnest question, Edith Evans achieved the most celebrated line-reading in theatrical history. The joke lay in the disproportion: it was just a hand-bag that had been used to contain this baby twenty-eight years ago, but Evans made Lady Bracknell’s outrage colossal, slowly sweeping up, out of chest register, a full octave and then some. Until Evans first uttered it onstage in 1939, this was not known as a key moment of the role. Since she last essayed the role, it has been an obstacle course for every Lady Bracknell since. Judi Dench, although her 1982 Lady Bracknell at the National Theatre was celebrated in its day, later remarked “After the line, people in the audience would say ‘ohh’ disappointedly and shuffle in their seats making it pretty obvious that they felt it had hardly been worth coming”.

   Evans’s slow upward portamento on the word “hand-bag” has been widely imitated, usually offstage, for well over sixty years now. It has been misdescribed as a crescendo, but at least that draws some attention to something the imitators often overlook: what she does with “-bag”, starting it with another terrific chest punch and then adding a massive sudden tremolo as the voice continues to ascend. This tremolo is the nearest Lady Bracknell ever comes to suggesting personal discomposure: the time-honoured decencies of aristocratic existence have been besmirched. It’s like Lady Catherine de Burgh’s “Are the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted?” in Pride and Prejudice compressed into a second syllable.

   Evans played the role onstage only from 1939 to 1942, and only intermittently then. But what with two radio broadcasts, the famous 1951 film, one studio recording, and at least two TV performances (the latter as late as 1960), her claim on the role kept growing: this in an interpretation that had been recognised from the first as classic. She came to regret the disproportionate fame that “A hand-bag?” was accorded. But she never varied it. Her 1954 studio recording of the complete play is newly available (CFP, EMI); her 1952 radio broadcast (extensively cut) came out on Naxos Audio Books last year; and her 1951 film (also cut and re-jigged) is on DVD. Her voice has gained depth in the 1950s, but her phrasing is startlingly similar to her 1939 recording of the interview scene (tucked as a postlude onto the CD Pearl reissue of The Voice of Poetry). When people imitate her “hand-bag” out of context, it sounds like a marvellous “effect”. But she once assured John Gielgud “I never make effects”, and, if you check any or all of these recordings, you hear what she meant. Listen and you find that her entire performance negotiates between chest and head tones, and that grandly interrogative upward-sweeping portamenti (“Found?” “The christenings, sir!”) are a constant feature of her characterisation. So her “hand-bag?” is just an organic part of the way she had determined the phrasing of the whole character.

   Character is where she began with Lady Bracknell. It was Gielgud who first invited her to read the play’s famous interview scene in front of other weekend guests at his house in Essex. He later recalled how, when the laughter had died down, Evans handed back the book to him and remarked gravely: “I know those kind of women. They ring the bell and ask you to put a lump of coal on the fire”. Years later, she said:

“They were caricatures, these people – absolutely assured, arrogant, and that’s the way they spoke. So many people said to me after The Importance ‘It’s exactly like Aunt Lucy’ or ‘It’s just like Aunt Mabel.’ They spoke meticulously, they were all very good looking and they didn’t have any nerves. Nobody had nervous diseases at that time…”

    If there is one sentence I would single out from her Lady Bracknell, it comes as she draws the same interview to a close. “You can hardly imagine <near-pause> that I and Lord Bracknell <pause> would dream of allowing our only daughter <pause> - a girl brought up with the utmost care - <pause> to marry into a cloakroom <pause> and form an alliance with a parcel.” Evans delivers the whole sentence monumentally (in the studio recording, she spreads it over nineteen seconds). She ends each phrase with a massive hammer-blow (“imagine”, “Bracknell”, “daughter”, “care”, “cloakroom”, and “parcel”) which she then allows to bounce vocally upwards - as if asking a question that expects no answer but “No”. Her manner gets only grander and more outraged, until finally her voice is plunging in and out of chest register with absurd balefulness. Even though she seems to spit out the word “parcel”, no other word given as much space, time, and scorn. Jack Worthing has been entertaining ideas above his station: which, she herewith reminds him, is merely Victoria.

   But this classic interpretation, as Evans herself knew, has always been in danger of eclipsing her many other classic performances. According to her biographer Bryan Forbes, she came “to loathe Lady Bracknell. ‘I’ve played her everywhere, except on ice and under water. And I daresay Binkie’ <Beaumont, the impresario> “will suggest one of those next. I did play other parts, you know!’” Indeed she did.

  In the history of British theatre in the twentieth century, there is no actress of greater historical significance: perhaps no actor either. She was hailed as “great” by observers who, having seen Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, and Ellen Terry, used the word sparingly. Today her greatness is still remembered by such actresses as Claire Bloom, Judi Dench, and Vanessa Redgrave, such directors as Frith Banbury, Peter Hall, William Gaskill, and Peter Gill. She was discovered by William Poel, the tireless reformer to whose work in transforming the style of staging Shakespeare all modern directors are indebted. Working with him between 1912 and 1920, she began to understand the principles of Shakespearian verse-speaking and style. She perfected them in 1925-26, when she came to the Old Vic to perform ten Shakespeare heroines (and three other roles): an extraordinary season, in which she played for the first time several roles to which she would return in later decades: Queen Margaret in Richard III, Katharina in The Taming of the Shrew, Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra, Rosalind in As You Like It, and the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet. (Try to think of another actress who has played these five roles in her entire career. Evans, in that nine-month season, also played Beatrice, the two Portias, and others.)

She had played opposite the beloved veteran Ellen Terry in 1917-18 (playing more Shakespeare), and was taken up by George Bernard Shaw, for whom she played in the premiere of his Heartbreak House (1921) and the British premieres of his Back to Methuselah (1923) and The Apple Cart (1929), and who wooed her to play the premiere of The Millionairess with letters beginning “Edith of all Ediths”. At one point in her 1973-74 solo programme, Edith Evans… and friends, she introduced her next item: “This is a piece out of The Apple Cart, by Bernard Shaw. Orinthia. I personally don’t care much for Orinthia. But, er, Shaw wanted one to play it like this, and so one had to do it.” You would think a preface so ironic would sabotage the speech that followed. Not a bit of it. Aged eightyfive, she stings her way into the speech (“Give me a goddess’s work to do and I will do it…”) with such absurd, meritocratic hauteur that Orinthia gets under your skin and stays there. “What are they for, these dull slaves?” she asks with imperious scorn, and then answers herself in a dark, buzzing murmur: “To keep the streets swept for me.”

    During the 1920s (when she performed in many other new plays), she and Sybil Thorndike became known as the supreme British actresses of their day. The critic James Agate and others liked to proclaim that Evans was supreme in comedy, Thorndike in tragedy. This pigeon-holing followed Evans for decades - perhaps because from 1924 on she had discovered the area in which her talents were utterly nonpareil: eighteenth-century comedy. Her Millamant in The Way of the World (Gielgud: “she took the town by storm”) and her Mrs Sullen in The Beaux’ Stratagem were both idolised interpretations to which she returned. Nonetheless, when she played Rebecca West in a 1926 modern-dress production of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, Agate called it “the best thing she has done, full of the most subtle gradations of feeling and of an intellectuality which is not astonishing only because one expects it”; Shaw found it “very memorable”; and the Ibsenite Michael Meyer recalled it in 1966 as the best English Rebecca West to date. During the 1930s, she acted beside many of the luminaries of British theatre in the mid-twentieth century: John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, Peggy Ashcroft, Michael Redgrave, Alec Guinness, and others. She began to play Chekhov (above all in The Seagull in 1936, in a cast that also included Gielgud, Ashcroft, Stephen Haggard, Leon Quartermaine, Martita Hunt, and the young Guinness).  After the Second World War, when she returned to eighteenth-century comedy, she moved into the “old bag” roles of that repertory: as Mrs Malaprop in The Rivals and as Lady Wishfort in The Way of the World (there are still theatregoers who recall how, when the latter looks at herself in the mirror, Evans said “I look like an old peeled wall”).  Her postwar modern repertory included the premieres of James Bridie’s Daphne Laureola, N.C.Hunter’s Waters of the Moon (in which she co-starred with Thorndike), and Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden, all immense successes. After which she returned, now in her seventies, to Shakespeare. In 1958-59, she gave her first accounts of Queen Katharine (Henry VIII), the Countess of Roussillon (All’s Well that Ends Well), and Volumnia (Coriolanus, with Olivier in the title role). Then in 1961 she returned to two roles she had first played at the Vic in 1925-26: Queen Margaret (Richard III) and the Nurse (Romeo and Juliet).

  Her film career had two very distinct phases. She made two silent films in 1915-16, then left the medium alone for over thirty years. In 1948, when she was sixty, she returned to the silver screen, swiftly becoming a mistress of the medium in material ranging from The Queen of Spades to The Nun’s Story. A role was added to Look Back in Anger for her when it was filmed in 1959, and her performance in The Whisperers (1967), when she was seventy-nine, won her a clutch of international Best Actress awards and an Oscar nomination: these roles established, among other things, that she could play working class.

    But it was her stage artistry that inspired most awe. There are many accounts of how eloquently she moved or stood still. None is more breathtaking than Alec Guinness’s 1985 account of a rehearsal of The Seagull in 1936: she was Arkadina, Gielgud was Trigorin, Guinness was a wordless workman in Act One but understudying Stephen Haggard as Konstantin, and the director was Theodor Komisarjevsky or “Komis”:

“Komis had arranged for the spectators of the play-within-a-play to sit on a long bench with their backs to the audience proper. A moment came when it was Edith’s cue to speak. Gielgud was sitting next to her and, after a moment’s pause, he whispered, ‘Edith, it’s you.’ From where I was standing in the wings I could see she hadn’t dried up; she just had no intention of speaking. The stage-manager gave a prompt which was firmly ignored. Komis, in the stalls, sat still; a deep silence fell on the stage and no one moved. I glanced at my watch. After four minutes Edith gave a slight shiver with her shoulders, as if touched by a chill breeze, and then quietly said her line, ‘Let’s go in,’ with infinite sadness and yet somehow callously. And that’s the way it stayed, through the remainder of the rehearsals and then run; a four-minute pause, an unheard-of length of time in the theatre, in which actors and audience seemed to hold their breath. It came of Edith’s supreme daring, confidence and imagination.”

  Others have said that, though “four minutes” was Guinness’s exaggeration, it was certainly a very long time. She could bring off this kind of stillness in silence because, where possible, she also liked to be still when speaking. Gielgud noted in a letter to a friend in the year of her death:

“Have you noticed how Edith Evans never moves if she can help it? I never remember her entrances, and in Millamant’s she was foiled by a stupid great gauze, and had to enter through a narrow side archway. But she scarcely ever moved in that part. She was like a Venetian glass figure in a vitrine, turning slowly now and then with slow, deliberate movements of her neck and arms, never using her fan except as a kind of weapon! And whenever I have directed her - <Lady> Bracknell, Chalk Garden, the Nurse, she always wanted to stay still and let the voice do everything.”

     The voice, whose glamour and lightness she readily submerged when she was playing gorgons, was a marvel of musicality and expressiveness right up to the last years of her life, to judge by the LP recording of her Edith Evans… and friends (1973). (Her consonants, formerly so limpid, had grown more spluttery, especially after her 1971 heart attack. And yet she turns even this to a virtue.) Listening to her way of phrasing, it’s easy to suppose that she came from a bygone era in which all actors spoke with that same kind of imaginative melodiousness. Not so: it was precisely this quality in her acting that critics had singled out as exceptional in the early 1920s. And what was singular about her gradually became, during the years of her glory, a dangerous climate in which other actresses tried to grow in her shade. Writing in 1953, Kenneth Tynan noted how such actresses as Margaret Leighton and Isabel Jeans were “enslaved to the most potent influence since the 1918 armistice – the soaring vocal style of Edith Evans, whose nonchalant music has led our comediennes to believe that to get good notices it is absolutely necessary to mimic Lady Bracknell.”

   When it came to phrasing, however, Evans had real lessons to impart. Peter Hall has said that he spent hours with her learning what she had learnt from Poel. And William Gaskill, who directed her Queen Margaret for the RSC in 1961, has written:

“She showed me how the grasp of a sentence is as important in blank verse as it is in prose, perhaps more important. Sometimes a long speech in Shakespeare will be made up of just one sentence and the actor must carry the shape, thought and feeling through the speech, pulling himself towards the end. Edith didn’t formulate this, though she did give me one tip: ‘Ignore the commas, they’re not important.’ Her understanding of phrasing was based on her ear (‘I have perfect pitch, you know”) and its relation to her emotional response to the part. The phrases, the sentences, were channels through which the feeling ran. It was important to know technically what the channels were and how to keep them unblocked so that the feeling could have free passage. Often the sentence was expressive of an objective in the Stanislavsky sense, but I would not have interfered with Edith’s work process to say this. Analysis would only have been a hindrance. Her relation with the text was very close. She lived through, under it and above it. Like an opera singer she would launch herself at a line with total concentration.”

She felt that she had learnt how to handle the long speeches not from Poel but from her experience at the Old Vic. Later, she gave a tip on them to Michael Elliot: “What you must do, dear, is to take the last line of the speech and pull it towards you.”

    Her role as the link from Poel via Peter Hall to the style of the Royal Shakespeare Company is enough to explain why I call her Britain’s most historically important actress in the twentieth century. And the best way to sense the full dimensions of her art today is in recordings. It’s more than good to have her uncut Importance of Being Earnest out on CD. And though she never performed The School for Scandal onstage, it’s instructive to hear how finely she applied herself to illumine Lady Sneerwell, an epitome of sophistication from her opening sentence who in later scenes can entertain her guests with great charm, never more so than when she laughs. But her voice has earlier reached darker shades in explaining how she was “Wounded myself in the early part of my life by the envenom’d tongue of slander”, and there is something shocking about the imperious languor with which she tells Snake “Heavens! how dull you are”.

   Too bad that the Voice of Poetry album has already been deleted (a copy on Amazon is going for over £50): though both she and Gielgud speak their poems with beauty and clarity that seem definitive, it is her recordings that seem more freshly communicative, from Cymbeline’s “Fear no more th’ heat of the sun” through to Wordsworth’s “A slumber did my spirits seal”. We are far now from comedy or even character. The gossamer legato of her voice at once casts a spell; she finds a cadence for each line that renews the sense of the poem; the beauty of her diction is heightened by her astonishing ability to prolong individual vowels; and the most insidious part of her eloquence is the constantly changing pulse of her rhythm.

    Some of her complete Shakespeare recordings have been available in recent years on Caedmon audiocassette: above all her Nurse in a complete Romeo and Juliet (starring Claire Bloom and Albert Finney). But you have to hunt among LPs and 78s to find her legendary Rosalind in As You Like It (four excerpts, one with the Orlando of Michael Redgrave, though there are reports of a complete BBC Evans-Redgrave recording from 1944), her Countess in All’s Well that Ends Well (severely cut, beside the Helena of Vanessa Redgrave), her Queen Margaret in Richard III (her Act IV scene 4 appearance with the Duchess of York and Queen Elizabeth from Gaskill’s 1961 production), and two accounts of Queen Katharine’s big trial speech in Henry VIII. Harold Bloom writes that none of the women’s parts in Richard III are playable, and that “Shakespeare never could compose a decent line” for “the ghastly Margaret”. If you leave the lines on the page, that may seem fair enough. But that is not how you can feel when you hear the grim humour with which Evans’s quivering, decrepit, but still regal Margaret tells the Duchess of York “From forth the kennel of thy womb hath crept/ A hellhound that doth hunt us all to death/… That foul defacer of God’s handiwork”; or when in an astounding flowering of passive aggression  - competitive bereavement - she tells the Duchess that her sons and grandsons are dead because they “Matched not the high perfection of my loss.”

   One 1964 Homage to Shakespeare Argo LP contains scenes from Judi Dench’s Perdita, John Gielgud’s Prospero (with Vanessa Redgrave’s Miranda), Laurence Olivier’s Othello, Michael Redgrave’s Macbeth, Ralph Richardson’s Wolsey, Paul Scofield’s Lear, Dorothy Tutin’s Desdemona (with Sybil Thorndike’s Emilia), and Irene Worth’s Cleopatra – a cornucopia of Shakespearians as illustrious as any era has surely ever been able to offer – and yet it is Evans’s Queen Katharine (“Sir, I desire you do me right and justice”) that proves the most piercing of them all. You notice here, as in her other Shakespeare recordings, that Peter Hall’s later style of verse-speaking diverges in several particulars from hers: in particular, she goes in for far less end-stopping than he (“for/ I am a most poor woman”, “gave notice/ He was from hence discharged”, “or my love and duty/ Against your sacred person”, “in God’s name/ Turn me away”, “and so give me up /To the sharp’st kind of justice” are all spoken as unbroken phrases, though she certainly shows she always knows where each verse line begins). If you want to hear Evans transcendently refuting her critics, this is the scene. James Agate had written in 1925 that Evans “she has not a great deal of pathos” and Tynan in 1953 had confirmed the old notion that Evans was superlative only as a comedienne:

“Into tragedy Dame Edith, drawn irresistibly, peers from time to time; sniffs eloquently, as if the room needed dusting; and departs, looking highly unimpressed. The women she plays have a gluttonous appetite for life, but tragedy demands a taste for death. She can bring tears to your eyes by the sheer splendour of her voice, which she brandishes like a string of emeralds; the beauty of each vowel hangs in the air, lingering a moment longer than any other actress could have made it, assuming a fondant shape in the mind, and then melting away. If we weep, it is for the passing of perfect sound…. The noise she makes is a kind of heavenly burbling, as if the leading soloist in a celestial choir had taken a nip too much nectar.”

None of which begins to prepare you for this Queen Katharine trial speech. Here she is pathos incarnate, and her vocalism is at its simplest. In one feature, she exemplifies the method of verse-speaking than Hall and John Barton went on to teach at the RSC: where she finds a row of monosyllables, she speaks them all slowly, and in this speech giving them a most extraordinary fragility, as in “That thus you should proceed to put me off/ And take your good grace from me?” and “Or which of your friends/ Have I not strove to love, although I knew/ He were mine enemy?” Other Katharines have spoken the role with a Spanish accent, just as Peggy Ashcroft spoke Queen Margaret with a French R: Evans avoids such effects in either role, and yet she speaks with a kind of slow regal delicacy (quite unlike the beautiful melodious fluency of her Countess of Rossillion) that establishes her isolation as a foreigner in this realm. In all these roles, the real source of her eloquence is the rhythm she finds within the cadences of her phrases, and, as Gaskill writes, she finds this from her grasp of the feeling within the line.

   When it comes to the monosyllables of “Sir, call to mind/ That I have been your wife in this obedience upward of twenty years,” she is quite as slow, but now with a new urgency. Yet then she returns to her gentlest manner for “and have been blest/ With many children by you”. In the next sentence, after asking if he does find any fault she has committed as wife or subject, she reaches her slowest and most awesome with the words “in God’s name,/ turn me away”, hammering out the syllables like death warrants, daring her husband to prove her untrue. To do Tynan justice, her Queen Katharine prompted his most generous appreciation of her. In 1958, high after seeing the Moscow Art Theatre play The Cherry Orchard at Sadler’s Wells, he came to the Old Vic Henry VIII, at first entirely disgruntled. Harry Andrews was in the title role, Gielgud was Cardinal Wolsey, and Evans was Queen Katharine. She was seventy and in the first act she and Andrews “were groping for lines like children playing at blind-man’s-buff”. Then Gielgud, in his final scene, shed tears without moving Tynan.

“Dame Edith, by contrast, moved me. Her death scene lifted her to those serene, unassertive heights where at her best she has no rivals. The quiet, large face, with its prehensile upper lip, shifted and quaked according to the dictates of the character, an unabashed queen in great extremity. Dame Edith ignored the ‘verbal music,’ and thereby made a true music, having to do with the experience of dying. Alone in the company at what foreigners are wrongly encouraged to regard as our national theatre, she could have wandered onto the stage at Sadler’s Wells and seemed at home.”

  An enterprising producer should assemble a CD album of all her Shakespeare scenes and poems. They abound in interpretative and stylistic marvels, and they form a startling spectrum of Shakespeare’s own range. The most acclaimed Rosalind of the postwar era, Vanessa Redgrave, has admitted in her autobiography that a single Evans 78 recording of a scene helped her to find her own Rosalind; and when I compare V.Redgrave’s complete recording of the play to the one excerpt I have of Evans with M. Redgrave, I see the derivation (Vanessa, without mimicry, has learnt from Evans, and perhaps from her father’s accounts of Evans, how to let her voice dance through the prose) while finding Evans the more sparkling, impish, intoxicating of the two. Interestingly, though she darts laughingly through much of Rosalind’s lines, she still slams on the brakes when it comes to a row of monosyllables: “But, in good sooth, are you he that hangs the verses on the trees…? But <pause> are you so much in love <pause> as your rhymes speak?” – both questions asked with infinitely tender curiosity. Then, when he gives the right answer, she tears smilingly away with “Love is merely a madness”.

  In the absence of any such available recordings, let me instead commend, now that at last it is out on CD, her famous album of scenes from eighteenth-century comedy. It contains the plum scenes from four of her greatest roles: both Millamant and Lady Wishfort from The Way of the World, Mrs Sullen (The Beaux’ Stratagem), Mrs Malaprop (The Rivals). Many people will know this as a classic LP; it was reissued in 1977, and I have scratched and worn my copy down with ecstatic re-listening. When you realise that she recorded all the scenes of this eighteenth-century album in the same month (October 1954), you hear what a vocal chameleon she was, even in her mid-sixties: each character has a different register, a different sound, a different accent, a different musicality. She seems to have been one of those artists, like Margot Fonteyn, who changed few of the details of her interpretations over whole decades: her phrasing of Millamant’s and Mrs Sullen’s lines corresponds with astonishing exactitude to Agate’s close description of her first performance of those roles in the 1920s. (“Never can that astonishing ‘Ah! idle creature, get up when you will’ have taken on greater delicacy, nor “I may by degrees dwindle into a wife”a more delicious mockery.’ Still true.)

    Once you know these recordings, they brand you in the way that Maria Callas’s do: you cannot imagine the lines phrased otherwise, and it becomes difficult to accept her successors in them. Unlike Callas – but like Lotte Lehmann and Victoria de los Angeles – her very laughter brands you, although the laughter of Millamant and Malaprop laughter is so unalike (and each wholly unlike Lady Sneerwell’s in the School for Scandal recording). And, pace Agate, she has pathos, as when Mrs Sullen, after revelling in being wooed alongside her sister-in-law, suddenly turns melancholy as she remembers that she is married: “Happy, happy sister! Your angel has been watchful for your happiness, while mine has slept regardless of his charge. Long smiling years of circling joys for you, but not one hour for me.” Her changes of mood are irresistible: heart-catching.

   Imagination, humanity, wit, melody, rhythm: Evans’s recordings exemplify all these to an astonishing degree. She is always classical, working with the punctuation, the grammar, and even the scansion of the lines to illumine them. But it is romantic classicism, and all of it goes to reveal what’s being said. To Bryan Forbes, she said “I don’t think there’s anything extraordinary about me except for this passion for the truth.” When it comes to Mrs Sullen’s closing line – “Though, to confess the truth, I do love that fellow; - and if I met him dressed as he should be, and I undressed as I should be – look’ ee, sister, I have no supernatural gifts – I can’t swear I could resist the temptation; though I can safely promise to avoid it; and that’s as much as the best of us can do” - the expansiveness and stop-starts of her phrasing are inextricable from Mrs Sullen’s melting, perplexed humanity. “Genius” is seldom a word to be used of performing artists. If I were asked to locate it in the recordings of any one actor, I would choose this album of eighteenth-century recordings by Edith Evans.

@Alastair Macaulay, 2006.ix.26

Original version published by the Times Literary Supplement, 2006

1: Edith Evans as Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest”, a role she first played in 1939.

2: The CD reissue (2006) of Edith Evans’s celebrated recordings of scenes from eighteenth-century comedy. Its notes are written by Alastair Macaulay.

3; Michael Redgrave and Edith Evans as Orlando and Rosalind in the 1937 production of William Shakespeare’s “As You Like It”.

4: Edith Evans as the Nurse in William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”, a renowned interpretation that she played between the 1920s and the 1960s. This photograph shows her in John Gielgud’s renowned 1934 production, in which Peggy Ashcroft was Juliet. At first, John Gielgud was Romeo, Laurence Olivier Mercutio; after six weeks, the two men exchanged roles.

5: Edith Evans’s Belgavia home. At another period, she had a suite in Albany, Piccadilly.