PROFILE Bernard Miles, Man Behind The Mermaid

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 29024, 13 October 1959, Page 24

PROFILE Bernard Miles, Man Behind The Mermaid

[By

SIMON KAVANAUGH]

LONDON. Around 6 o’clock every week night, the City of London disgorges the workaday throngs from its banks, insurance companies, and mercantile houses and becomes a ghost city. When the great doors close a tide of humanity streams away in buses, cars, tubes and trains, leaving the world’s richest square mile—its rateable value is £11,400,000 —to its 5000 regular inhabitants, to cats and caretakers and cleaners.

Nobody, except a safecracker or two, would ever have thought of having himself a good time in the City after' dark.

But there is an andidote these days to the gloomy desolation that hangs by night over the huddled, closed business buildings of the City of London. That antidote comes from the vigour and imagination of a balding, cheerfully illkempt man with a rural burr and the fires of fanaticism burning behind his thick-rimmed spectacles. His name is Bernard Miles. Miles has dreamed up and built the first theatre in London for 26 years and the first in the City since the puritan merchants, shouting “Rogues!” and “Whoremongers!” drove out actors with shot and whip 250 years ago.

“Act of Lunatic” It is called the Mermaid Theatre. And it stands in Puddle Dock, a tiny tidal inlet by Blackfriars Bridge with dockland on one side and the City on the other, as a challenge to convention and a defiance pt the time. The Mermaid is, says Miles, “the act of a lunatic.” It is also a testament to one man’s perseverance.

When it opened its doors at Puddle Dock in May this year it marked a new pattern of patronage in which banks and dramatists, livery companies and brewers, press and labourers shared the financial backing.

Classifying Bernard Miles is like trying to generalise the entries in “Who’s Who.” He lists himself, for sake of convenience, as “actor.”

He might have added schoolmaster, variety comedian, playwright, producer, manager, artist, carpenter, bricks-and-mortar magnate—and visionary. The visible Miles is frankly less than impressive. He is slight, and looks gentle. The strands of his lank hair, long around the ears but vanishing on top, point tircdly in all directions. The face is long but fleshy, sporting surprisingly a small, smiling mouth. His thick, horn-rimmed spectacles magnify the size of his eyes. But behind this insignificant facade, and again behind a wall of modesty that has him listening more often than talking, there glows a creative and administrative genius seldom found in the world of the stage.

Raised £70,009 He just wafted in and raised £70,000 for the Mermaid’s construction (with a small amount for reserves) with the adroitness and ease of aJ. P. Morgan. And already, he’s talking enthusiastically of doing it again elsewhere.

Bernard Miles was born 52 years ago at his parents’ modest Hillingdon (Middlesex) home and, after attending the local grammar school, won a scholarship to Oxford. He left Oxford to become a schoolmaster in Yorkshire, and why he did not finish his days as a schoolmaster he still cannot adequately explain. Perhaps it was the memory of a Shakespearean play at his Hillingdon school in which he scored such a youthful triumph. He was still in his early twenties when he turned from teaching to acting, taking a carpenter’s job to “get his foot inside” the theatre.

The foot, but only the foot, stayed “inside” for the next five years while he toured the country in repertory, helping in every job a theatrical production requires, acquiring and developing a deep love for the art which has led him on from one venture to another.

In London, he made two lowly appearances—as Second Messenger in “Richard III” (1930), and a year later in “St. Joan” at His Majesty’s. But by 1937 he was getting small film parts and by 1938 was walking frequently on to the West End stage. Miles’s range has had to be immense, from lago (with the Old Vic in 1943) to Antonovich in “The Government Inspector,” to his own comedy acts at the London Palladium.

“Tawny Pippit” He has also delighted millions with his dialect monologues on radio and television. And at least a dozen post-war films, including “In Which We Serve,” “Great Expectations,” “Moby Dick,” and “The Smallest Show on Earth,” have been the better for his acting.

The famous 1940 "Thunder Rock” had him in yet another role, that of the screen play’s

co-author. He swept the board with the film, “Tawny Pippit,” which he wrote, co-directed and starred in, and repeated that achievement with “Chance of a Lifetime.”

But always Miles, the quiet, inveterate stage adventurer, has turned his hand to something new. The Mermaid idea began nine years ago in his back garden in London’s St. John’s Wood, where he built a small Elizabethan theatre in an old schoolroom and gave Shakespeare as nearly as possible as it was done in Shakespeare’s time.

It was here that he wheedled the consent of intemationallyfamous Kirsten Flagstad to sing 13 performances of “Dido and Aeneas” —for nothing more than a bottle of stout a day. Miles's pleasant but driving personality dominated the small, oldworld environment of the first Mermaid Theatre from back row to stage door. A second season followed. Then, as the result of an offer by the Lord Mayor, the stage of the Mermaid was torn up and re-erected at the Royal Exchange. During the summer of 1953, 70,000 people flocked to the exchange to see Elizabethan plays. New Vision But now, behind those thick spectacles, came a new vision. Two and a half centuries ago, London’s much maligned actors, aesthetically and physically bruised, had fled the City never to return. Today’s dignified City, into which his actors had trodden for the first time in all those years, was just the setting for Miles’s vision. And besides, it appealed enormously to his sly sense of humour. “Rogues!” and “Whoremongers!” the City fathers had shouted. Now why not have their descendants acting in penitence as the benevolent godparents of a brand-new theatrical enterprise? In 1940. a German bomb had cleared the site around Puddle Dock, an apron of land and a tiny inlet, just a few yards across, below Blackfriars Bridge. Inland, a little way down on the opposite bank, had been Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. In a nearby street, Shakespeafe himself had bought a house for £l4O. In 1946, the Corporation of London had offered a lease on this historic site and that offer was still open when Miles stepped in. “Let’s Ask” The next problem was how T to get the money. Says Miles: “It was my wife who answered that one. ‘Let’s ask people for it.’ she said . . . (she) argued that since the happiest people are poor, it is really doing the rich a good turn to take money from them, especially in a good cause.” That was all very well. But Miles started out with more than a few misgivings. Rich people can be inexplicably deaf when it comes to entreaties like this. Curiously, however, Miles was as instant a hit with the tycoons as he ever was on stage, radio or screen. They liked his soft-spoken idealism; they saw, behind the mask of gentleness, a steady purposefulness.

Fat cheques began rolling in. Foundations and trusts responded eagerly. Gifts in kind (radiators, steel window frames, washbasins, bricks, tiles and dustbins, etc.), came from manufacturers, and at the same time in swept a tide of small contributions. Passers-by could buy a brick or two, at half a crown each.

Miles swept a money-gathering dragnet through London. “Possibles” and “improbables,” all found their way into his little book, against marginal entries like “A fair touch,” “Mind you aren't asked to do a free cabaret . . .”

But the Mermaid, then just a husk of crumbling brick walls, also cost Miles and his wife a good deal of personal sacrifice. "We knew,” he says, “that if we were to stake our fortune on the Mermaid it would be goodbye to the fleshpots. So to begin with we exchanged our beautiful home, with its gardener and two ser-

vants, for a tiny house with a window box in Camden Town. We sold our library, our piano and our Rolls-Royce . . .” Then, in May this year, Miles’s creation stood proud and ready, a modern masterpiece arisen from the rubble. It has a span barrel roof, paved courtyard, with bars and cloakrooms, 500-seat auditorium built in one sharply raked tier, England’s finest open stage, a river-view restaurant. Crowds Flock

Immediately, Bernard Miles’s wildest expectations came true. Thousands flocked to see his first production, a musical based on a Fielding play, “Rape Upon Rape.” “We changed the title to ‘Lock Up Your Daughters.’ It’s a pleasantly improper piece.’’ Its original six-week season was extended, and extended again. Today it still runs to packed houses. Next will come “a complete mix-up—‘The Antigonel,’ of Sophocles, ‘Journey’s End,’ a new comedy, an Elizabethan play, and ‘Great Expectations.’ adapted by Alec Guinness.”

With this “mix-up,” Bernard Miles is bringing a vitally new breeze into English theatre. Not without a personal loss (he expects to clear £3OOO from the Mermaid, as against £20,000 as an actor), but with a great deal of personal satisfaction. London, particularly the City, has good reason to be grateful to the man who, taking note of the groan, “The theatre is in decline,” rolled up his sleeves and set about rebuilding it.— Express Feature Service.