William Gaskill on Edith Evans
William Gaskill (1930-2016) directed the Royal Court Theatre between 1965 and 1972; he also directed a number of productions at the National Theatre, Edinburgh Festival, and other leading institutions. He was also known for directing such leading actors as Alec Guinness, Glenda Jackson, Laurence Olivier, Vanessa Redgrave, and Maggie Smith (he remained one of the directors Smith most valued), and was a champion of playwrights from Restoration comedy to Bertolt Brecht and Edward Bond. After his long and important régime at the Royal Court, he co-founded Joint Stock Theatre Company in 1974, with Max Stafford-Clark, David Hare, and David Aukin: this company - a chapter of British theatre history largely overlooked now - continued until 1989, a vehicle for new plays (by Hare, Howard Benton, Caryl Churchill, and others), many of which evolved through a workshop process.
I first came to know him as an occasional and insightful member of the dance audience in the 1980s: a close friend of the New York dance critic David Vaughan (1924-2017), he had intelligent opinions on a range of choreographers from Frederick Ashton to Mark Morris. In 2000, he spoke about Merce Cunningham, the choreographer he most admired, as part of a Cunningham study day I organised at the Barbican Centre.
Bill scared many in the theatre world: he was tough-minded and uncompromising. When I became a theatre critic in 1990, he let me know he was reading my reviews: since he was a formidable judge of acting, that raised the bar in my mind for my target audience, but our friendship survived, even deepened, and on rare occasions he paid me compliments on my reviews. In 2002, I told Bill (as he was known to friends) that I had a Royal Shakespeare Company LP from c.1964 that included a recording of Act IV scene 4 with the cast he had directed at Stratford-upon-Avon, led by Edith Evans (as Queen Margaret), the single actor he had most admired, and by Esme Church (as the Duchess of York), who had taught him acting in his youth. He had not known any recording existed: I copied it for him. In the following months, he invited me to his annual birthday party, saying dangerously as I arrived, “I just want you to know that you’re the first crrrrritic to cross this threshold.” He then explained that he particularly wanted me to meet Frith Banbury, a legendary director now in his nineties, who had also directed Evans in several plays (and who spoke to me of her); the two men now both took painting class together. At one point at this birthday party, Max Stafford-Clark approached me and asked quietly “Alastair, is that Frith Banbury you’re talking to? Could you introduce me?” I did so, whereupon Frith took both our breaths away with his immediate response: “Max, how very good to meet you. Now, you’re known for directing the plays of Mark Ravenhill. I know everyone talks about his Shopping and Fucking, but I think Some Explicit Polaroids is actually a better play. What do you think?” (May we all be in such form in our nineties.)
In 2003, Bill invited me to interview Frith and himself at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, with an audience including the renowned playwright Mark Ravenhill and the future director Robert Hastie: the interview was filmed. Frith, like Lindsay Anderson and Max Stafford-Clark, was among the several directors who were Bill’s friends and admirers. All this became background for my 2006 Edith Evans essay (“Times Literary Supplement”), republished on this website as “Edith Evans’s Handbag”.
He had already published one important book, “A Sense of Direction”, in 1988. In 2010, he published another, “Words into Action: Finding the Life of the Play”, which Robert Hastie drew to my attention. It was and remains excellent (but too little known): I wrote to Bill from New York (where I lived in 2007-2019) to say, from the heart: “I found it so lucid, intelligent, and thought-provoking, as well as full of wonderful historic examples: it made me wish myself back in London as a theatre critic, as I often do (despite my real pleasure in my current job).”
In the email conversation that followed, Bill wrote: “In some ways, my book is a threnody for a theatre that is no more. A theatre when actors’ voices went up and down musically and the text lived meaningly and gracefully. I have been rereading notices by Agate and Tynan and I am struck by how vividly they describe actors performances. They have an idea of how they see Hamlet and how near the actor come to realising it. The London theatre has had a recent succession of Hamlets, which of course I haven't seen, but I have no what they were LIKE. They are awarded vague brownie points, but how they were different one from another it is impossible to tell. Of course, the critics write about the director's concept - as Lindsay Anderson once said, if there isn't a concept, they've got nothing to write about.
“Incidentally Frith Banbury, who is no longer with us, directed ‘The Old Ladies’ in the early days of commercial television and I shall never forget Edith saying ‘That's beauty’ as she looked at a tinselly Christmas card.”
He also sent me this chapter, which his editor had excluded from “Words into Action”, all about Edith Evans. Although he had admired my own 2006 Evans essay (republished on this website), I recognised at once - and told him - that it was the greatest writing about her acting. With the kind permission of his executors Paul Freeman and John Wilkes, I publish it here. Paul Freeman, himself a distinguished actor, wrote to me “Bill must have told you of his faux pas in daring to correct a line reading of Edith’s? ‘Young man, you are quite wrong.’”
AM.
William Gaskill on Edith Evans:
This is from a letter of John Gielgud’s in 1976:
“The effect of rapid movement does greatly fascinate me both in the case of E.T. and H.I (Ellen Terry and Henry Irving). 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 gate, and had to enter through a narrow side archway. But she hardly 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 – Bracknell, Chalk Garden, and the Nurse – she always wanted to stay still and let the voice do everything.
"Even her Rosalind was not physically lively, I think. But how she played it! Perhaps she hasn’t good legs! But I doubt if Ellen had either – anyway one never saw them, though she did magic things with her long skirts. They say her hands were mannish and ugly but she used them superbly”.
I worked with this great actress only once, as Queen Margaret in Richard III (Stratford 1961) but I remember everything she did and said; every moment of rehearsal. I had first seen her in 1946 playing Shakespeare’s Cleopatra to the Antony of Godfrey Tearle. She was nearly 60 and many thought she should not have attempted the part. The problem of finding the sympathy for Cleopatra in the last part of the play and making the transition to tragic stature is faced by all who attempt the role and I have never seen anyone succeed completely. Evans had the ability to give herself totally to any part but she was more naturally a comedian and she was more successful in the early scenes with Charmian and Iras when Antony is away:
Give me mine angle, we’ll to the river; there
My music playing far off, I will betray
Tawny finned fishes. My bended hook shall pierce
Their slimy jaws; and as I draw them up,
I’ll think them every one an Antony,
And say,”Ah, ha y’are caught
Antony and Cleopatra II.V.
This was high comic acting which could well have come from Restoration comedy with “Ah, ha you’re caught” as memorable as anything in Wilde.
When I asked her to play Margaret, she insisted on reading the part to me first. She gave me supper in her flat in Albany – that strange little enclosure behind Piccadilly Circus - before the reading. She had not prepared the meal herself - it was imported from Fortnum’s – but at the end of the meal she said (I can hear her saying it) “Do try this cheese. I think you will like it. It’s a fromage de monsieur. I bought it at Paxton and Whitfield” as if her words had been written by Congreve. She read for me in her sitting room looked down on by the Sickert portrait which now hangs in the foyer at RADA. Margaret has only two scenes: the first which is mainly cursing of Richard and the second the ritualised lament of Margaret, the Duchess of York and Richard’s Queen Anne. The latter is a deathtrap to all actors with its interminable list of the names Edward and Richard passed between the three grieving women. Evans very soon edited the text so that there was just enough for her to able to sustain her identification with and the audience’s sympathy for the part.
Her sense of musical pitch allied to a dramatic intensity gave the simplest phrase an unforgettable life. Or even a single word, as the notorious “handbag”. It was as if she were offering you all the possible meanings of a phrase at the same time and of the pressures of the situation on the character speaking the line. Her ability to do this was sometimes so intense that she sounded almost drunk, not with the beauty of the writing but with the richnesss of its dramatic resonance. She could handle the architecture and sweep of rhetoric in a great tragic part but only for short periods. She could not maintain the intensity of passion. When she played Volumnia to the Coriolanus of Olivier (Stratford 1959) she was tremendous in this rebuke to Virgilia and Menenius after the banishment of Caius Marcius.
Anger’s my meat; I sup upon myself,
And so shall starve with feeding. Come, let’s go.
Leave this faint puling, and lament as I do,
In anger, Juno like. Come,come,come.
One could hear the authentic surge and swell of Siddons. Two year later, when I told how much I had admired this moment, she exclaimed “ But I couldn’t keep it up, you know. I could do it for four lines”.
Christopher Plummer, who was Richard to her Margaret, describes it more fully in his autobiography.
“Edith, for the first time without book, delivered Margaret’s long soul-wrenching curse. She began slowly and quietly, hypnotising us with those dark, measured tones of hers, then switched to an even more sombre rush of intensity, a gahering storm that promised greater devastation. As we listened we were all turned to stone. Then suddenly she paused and, speaking quite conversationally out into the empty house and to anyone in particular , said, ‘It’s no good. I can’t do it. I simply can’t go on cursing like this forever. It’s all much too long! Katina Paxinou should play this part. It’s in her blood you see – she’s Greek, you know – they can go on cursing all night long without taking a breath. I’m Anglo-Saxon. I’d have to stop in the middle and have a cup of tea’. And then in tones of such power they shook the building and nearly blew me off the stage. ‘Besides, I haven’t the voice for it’ ”.
I would go to the readings she gave for the Apollo society, an organisation which presented programmes of poetry and music. She would read the poetry of Pope exquisitely – “On the Characters of Women,”
Nothing so true as what you once let fall
Most women have no characters at all
and the one about Timon, the rich landowner, in the Moral Essays, in whose chapel
To rest the cushion and soft dean invite,
Who never mentions hell to ears polite.
I could go endlessly with the lines, the phrases, the speeches which have been brought to life by that voice. On one memorable occasion she read a scene of Lady Politick Would Be – surely the unfunniest character in Jonson’s Volpone – and made me laugh out loud. This ability to extract the most out of a single phrase is well chronicled by James Agate in his review of The Shoemaker’s Holiday at the Old Vic in 1926.
“Miss Evans has this characteristic of all good acting – that she takes hold of the dramatists’s conception, absorbs it and then gives it out again in terms of her own personality and delighted imagination, so that you get the twofold joy of one fine talent superimposed upon another. ‘How shall I look in a hood?’asks the new-enriched dame, to be answered,’Like a cat in a pillory’. Whereupon Margery has the astonishing, irrelevant,’Indeed, all flesh is grass’. Hear Miss Evans say this, mark the relish with which she passes absurdity under your nose in the manner of a connoisseur of old brandy – note this , and you reflect first that Dekker was a good playwright, and second, that the best wit in the world gains when it is delivered by a witty actress”
Read Agate on Evans as Millamant, as Mrs Sullen, as Rosalind – none of which I saw - and play the records to know something of her as the lightest, most perfectly phrased of all comic performers. Those who only know her work through the film of The Importance of Being Earnest can have no idea of the range of her work.
She had never been beautiful nor even remotely pretty. Her face was peculiarly lopsided with one eye higher that the other. She was tall but well proportioned. Her features were large. Large eyes, large mouth, prominent but not unattractive nose, big teeth. Juliet was not for her, nor any juveniles, though she had made her name in William Poel’s production of Troilus and Cressida (“They say I was all woman”). Acting was for her character acting and that included playing beautiful women. She had already played the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet before her great success as Rosalind when she was nearly fifty. Beauty and youth had to be adopted as much as age and ugliness and her physical assumption of a part had great sensuality. Her exploration of the language of a part had an unparallelled richness but it was always an expression of the physical identity of the character. This was the difference between her and her colleague, admirer and friend John Gielgud. Gielgud lived only through his voice. “Dead from the neck downwards” Tynan cruelly said. Evans was all of a piece. The voice, the thinking, the imagination came from down in her stomach even in the lightness of her Millamant.
One of her greatest moments - and one of the best pieces of acting I ever saw - was a purely silent one, in Daphne Laureola, a mediocre play by James Bridie. Evans played an alcoholic eccentric who has married an older man for his money. The first and last acts are in a restaurant which has been hit by a flying bomb. The restaurant has reopened for business with diners sitting round a central area of the floorwhich which has been roped off as unsafe. Evans’ character has a long monologue and then she crosses the forbidden floor watched by a young man (Peter Finch) who sees her as a goddess. Everyone knows she is in great danger but she very slowly floats across the stage. It took for ever and was very beautiful. Evans was a big woman with her feet firmly on the ground, but she seemed to have no weight, as if she were indeed the goddess the young man believes her to be. Frith Banbury, who directed her in Waters of the Moon, told me that, even though she was wearing dresses designed by Molyneux, she insisted on wearing flat shoes. Heels would prevent her feeling the strength of the stage floor and weaken her acting.
It is often said to an actor who complains about having to turn upstage “O, you can act with your back.” In my experience, the only actor who could do this was Edith Evans. At the dress parade of Richard III the designer, Jocelyn Herbert, and I were seeing the costumes for the first time. Evans came on noticeably moved by wearing her costume, asked for some adjustments to her wimple so she could hear (not, as she explained, the other actors, but herself) and then Jocelyn asked her to turn and walk upstage. As she turned I was staggered by the effect of the back experienced through the heavy black velvet. “O, Edith,” I exclaimed, “You have such a beautiful back”. She turned. “Not beautiful, eloquent.” And I remembered the descriptions I had heard of the moment in the second act of The Seagull when Arkadina hears the music over the lake and turns to listen to it. Evans had paused – Guinness says four minutes, though I don’t believe him – but it must have been a long time.
There is a review of her performance in The Old Ladies by Charles Morgan, the critic of the Times, which Agate said was the best bit of dramatic criticism since Montague. Evans was playing an old gypsy woman.
“And down the stairs, supporting on the bannisters her monstrous weight,comes Mrs Payne. Mrs Payne says little or nothing. Colour and glitter arouse in her a silencing lust. Her blank, sodden eyes glare at the Christmas tree; her head becomes fixed, her bloated body seems to swell and loosen, her hands are flaccidly covetous. When at last the party is over and, on her way upstairs, she is shown the piece of carved and glowing amber that is Miss Beringer’s dearest posession, her longing is directed towards it and her implacable cruelty towards its owner. The story of the play is still to be told ….but in a sense it is all told when Miss Edith Evans first sees the object of her desire. Her back is towards us; she is powerless to act with her face; but the wrench of that gross body, the horrible greed of the uplifted arm and hand are enough.”
She once said to me apropos something or other: “I may not know very much about the theatre but I am an artist”
@William Gaskill, 2010
1: William Gaskill in 1966, directing Macbeth at the Royal Court Theatre
2: Edith Evans (1888-1976)
3: Edith Evans as Volumnia in William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus: painting by Robert A. Buhler. Evans played Volumnia twice, once at the Old Vic in the 1920s, the second time at Stratford-upon-Avon in the great 1958-1959 season (her Coriolanus was Laurence Olivier, who had directed her in Daphne Laureola a few years before), while the season’s other Shakespeare actors included John Gielgud, Charles Laughton, Michael Redgrave, and Vanessa Redgrave. We may guess, since the painting hangs in the Royal Shakespeare Collection at Stratford-upon-Avon, that this depicts her in this latter production, although the title leaves it uncertain.
4: William Gaskill in the twenty-first century.