MARIE TEMPEST

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 21986, 9 January 1937, Page 15

MARIE TEMPEST

Her Biography

Marie Tempest. By Hector Bolitho. Cobden-Sanderson. 313 pp. (21/-)- % [Reviewed by NGAIO MARSH]

not pretending or deceiving myself now, when I say that my one concern was my voice. She stopped singing because George Edwardes wanted her to wear trousers and she cut them into shorts. Neither Mr Edwardes nor Miss Tempest would'give in and she left Daly’s to set about the tremendous business of becoming a comedy actress. St. John Ervine has said of her: “She is the most determined actress I have seen rehearse a part.” But there was more than determination behind what Noel Coward has described as that turned-up face. There was the fierce, small light of specialised genius. Mr Bolitho makes us see how for half a century she has been at the business of polishing, perfecting, and giving point to the technique of the comedienne. He tells us how the timing of her , gestures with the dialogue, the small pauses, the accents, are all worked out to the finest degree of perfection, and how, once settled, they are , never varied. The author says that he knows nothing of the tech-” nique of acting; but his account of Marie Tempest at work might well be pinned up on the walls of all amateur societies’ rehearsal rooms. It is a crisp answer to slipshod dabblers who talk about the inspiration of the moment. Artificial? Of course she is! She is the last, perfect expression of artifice. It is a thousand pities that, in the days when she turned her exquisite poise into such Brummagem vessels as “Good Gracious, Annabelle,” Congreve was considered too coarse for London audiences. Now. young as she is, she is not quite young enough for Millament. It is curious to read how, over and over again, the critics complained that her plays were unworthy of her. The truth is that few Englishmen can bring off precisely the kind of brilliance that best suits her. Somerset Maugham and Noel Coward have served her-welL There is a sardonic edge to Maugham’s dialogue that is more Gallic than British. He gave her a weapon with which she could make her best play. Partner Mr Bolitho pays full tribute to the influence of Graham Browne:

In 1909, when he first met her, she was suffering from the penalties of success. . ... She had a set of tricks with which she could conjure laughter out of the author’s flimsiest line. .• . . Marie. Tempest might have remained, in this narrowed field if Graham Browne had not brought his talents and his love, to refresh and enlarge the scope of her art [and] induced her to abandon some of her cherished ways of getting a laugh. It is true that her acting is full of tricks; it is equally true that she plays more with her head than with her heart. To quarrel with these characteristics is merely to confess that you do not care for stylised comedy. Only twice did she step outside the neat plot of drawing-room i comedy, and that was during her ■ Australian and Nelv Zealand tour, ; when she played in “The Outcast” - arid “The Great Adventure.” To - those of us who remember her in ! these pieces, there can be no ques- • tion of her ability as a dramatic ! actress; but London producers and t - London audiences have insisted on * • “Marie Tempest comedies,” and [ Marie Tempest herself has said that : she does not regret it. Perhaps Mr Bolitho is happiest when he is writing of her. early training under Garcia, Frohman, and Dion Boucicault, whose stage mechanics were “as fine as those of a watch”; but the book is evenly and pleasantly written throughout. Though the style is not particularly distinguished, it is fortified by his sincerity, his enthusiasm, and ' his lack of affectation. Though his subject’s reluctance to pose for her portrait, her constant refusals to talk about herself, and her cool lack of interest in her past triumphs evi- ■ dently tried him rather high at , times, it is obvious that he was in love with his task. His pages are salted with affectionate exasperation. From them emerges, fullfigure in the grand tradition, an indomitable and an intellectual actress, a magnificent little tartar. It is a book that tempts one to quotation: I took my question to her one night after the theatre. We drove back to her house for supper. I had been obliged to wait at the stage door ... t and overheard a remark which must » not be passed by. A fattish little man [ was talking. to the stage, door-keeper, t “She’s a bloody marvel, you know. I There she is, 70 odd, and she’s the i only actress in London who can fill a i theatre with a thin play. That’s what I she is, the only ‘cert’ they’ve got. All , these others, they don’t seem to last, ■ you know. But she goes on. She Is i a Moody marvel.”

Given the right sort of part in a r certain type of play, a good French * comedienne can make her English contemporary look remarkably like a draught filly. I have seen Yvonne < Arnaud do this to Joan Hay, and | Alice Delysia to Peggy Wood. The j work of an accomplished French- ] woman shows an absence of senti- ( ment, a glitter and poise that simply ! do not belong to most English \ actresses. There is one outstanding ! exception. No Gallic actress for the , last 50 years has been able to make ' Marie Tempest look blunted or.dull; , Alone in half a century of English . comedy, she has brought to the stage ' a particular kind of sharp finish, a , peculiar excellence of assurance, of technical achievement, _ that has . never been equalled or indeed approached by her English content- , poraries. ' Art’s Long Labour In this group of biographical episodes Mr Hector Bolitho helps us to discover the ingredients of her art. Miss Tempest would not disdain the culinary metaphor. She is an epicure and chooses her dishes with the same fastidious care that she gives to her dresses, her gestures, and the last shade of inflection in the .least important of her lines. Mr Bolitho - tells us of a lifetime of scrupulous attention to detail. It is a little* as though he invited us to watch the cutting of a fine diamond. Fifty years hence some novelist or writer of plays may light on this book and after reading the first 100. pages mutter excitedly and reach for his pen. Here is the very stuff for a long novel or a semi-biographical play. We have the first scene, where large, dictatorial, old Mrs Etherington took her little grand-daughter, Mary Susan Etherington, to call at No. 10 Downing Street. Perhaps dear Mrs Gladstone would be able to intimidate this defiant child. The interview takes place. Mrs Gladstone raises her mittens in protest. “Oh, not the stage, oh, not the stage! I must ask William to speak to the child.” William speaks smoothly and charmingly but to no avail. Back they go to the gloomy old house in Whitehall and soon Mrs Etherington dies, saying to Mary: “Dress well, my child, remember that, for you will never be anything without it.” And in a little" while Mary Susan Etherington turns, first into Marie Etherington, and” then into Marie Tempest. That was in the May of, 1885. Mr Bolitho carries us on through the next 50 years, .building up a sharp picture of the woman to whom he says he gave his calf love, when as a boy of 18 he first saw her across the footlights of a New Zealand theatre. He describes ihe writing of his book, perhaps too importantly, as the great ! conflict of his life. He says that for eight years he tried to nail Miss Tempest down to the task of collaboration: If there had been letters to help, me in my work, I could have done, better. . .. . But Miss Tempest has kept no papers. Letters from Bernhardt, Rejane, Duse, Anthony Hope, Sullivan, and Boucicault; all have been destroyed by these impatient, unaccumulating fingers. Although she frankly showed her dislike for Wilde, he wrote her self-revealing letters, almost every fortnight when he was in prison. “Where are they?" one asks. “Oh, I tore them up when I got them,” ■ she answers. “The Most Determined Actress” Mr Bolitho tells us that his book was written in fits and starts and that he has left it so,. Wisely. It has as little in common with the usual tedious theatrical biography as Marie Tempest has with the average actress. Through his . 27 episodes marches firmly an indomitable little figure,* shrewd, determined, an 1 artist, as they say, to her finger tips, but with no nonsense about it. There is not a bogus sentence in the book, and there are no spurious, appeals either to the sentimentalists or the intelligentsia. “Musicians,” said Miss Tempest, on one of the rare occasions when Mr Bolitho lured her. into talking of her past, “are often, unintelligent over interests outside their profession. I was trained as a musician.” Although to-day she is.a connoisseur of Oriental art and a judge of modern painting, it took years for ; these tastes to develop. She says of her early aesthetic leanings: _ . Of the books that survive from that , day I find Swinburne’s poems, but also •Rlln Wheeler Wilcox. Of pictures I knew very little./ I began with a liking for chocolate-box art. I adored Winterhalter and still do. ... It was a long time before I advanced to a „ point where I saw something beyond daubs in Degas, Manet, and Renoir, i and I had to wait still longer for Gauguin and Van Gogh. . . . lam