PROFILE Christopher Fry, Poet Of Theatre

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29108, 21 January 1960, Page 10

PROFILE Christopher Fry, Poet Of Theatre

[By SIMON KAVANAUGH)

LONDON. The small girl who met him at the tea-table was most impressed. Not because his appearance awed. In his well-pressed suit, the neat, quick little man could have been anyone’s bachelor, uncle. Or just anyone. Not because they had told her he was brilliant and famous. Nor even because a wise little smile played around his sensitive mouth and dark eyes. But when he passed her the currant bread, he called it “dotted bread.” She remembered that. To open a child's eyes to the sharp beauty of the commonplace, Christopher Fry had needed only two words. Profusion of Words To charm and open duller grown-up eyes he has had to use many more. But for this unlikelylooking genius of a theatre poet there has. always been a profusion of words. His studious face, fastidious manner and unfeigned shyness speak rather of the prep school master he once was than the poet. Yet there have tumbled from Christopher Fry a torrent of evocative words, and a tangle of exotic images and soaring metaphors, to set jaded theatregoers of the post-war world at his feet. In a clutch of plays as bright and dancing as a field of spring buttercups, he has thrown open the gates of his private wonderland, where sardonic observation and bubbling laughter go somehow hand in hand. There is heaven in everything in Fry’s sun-flecked world. The only dullards are those who do not want to see. And now (typically, without so much as a mention in the credits) he emerges at 52 as the man who has put much of the magic into the brand-new £5 million superglossy epic of the screen, “Ben- ' Hur.” Smash-hit poetic drama, a smash-hit Hollywood success. What next? Who dare say? In the life of Christopher Fry there could always be another twist as new and startling as one of his darting poetic fancies. Solid Background His background seemed solid and unremarkable enough. But it equipped the self-effacing little poet for his unique niche better than he could have hoped.

Bristol-born, of West Country Quaker stock, young Fry was an architect’s son, reared on the religious works that proved later so rich an inspirational source. But examination results at Bedford Modern School betrayed no early hint of the talent within. At 14 he had written his first verse play. Three years later he had given up learning for teaching. Missing the influence of a university, he spent his formative years commuting uneasily between the blackboard and the stage. Words Mattered Most At his prep school, former pupils report, he read the Oxford Dictionary like a novel, jotting down new words on a pad beside him. Already, words mattered most. But the stage won. First at Tunbridge Wells, then at Oxford, Fry began absorbing theatrecraft the hard way, directing repertory. Seeking to release the splendid fury he felt within himself, he turned his hand to most things. He acted; he wrote sharp little songs and lyrics for a musical comedy; he drew cartoons; he wrote a play about Dr. Barnardo; he toured in a Novello musical. There was more questing yet “Life too complicated for tabulation,” Fry writes in the reference books of his four pre-war years. Then in 1939, before he went off fighting blitz fires in the Liverpool docks, he wrote a pageantplay for the Tewkesbury Festival. The door was beginning to open. Fry scarcely hit London. He slipped in by way of the Mercury and Arts Theatres, spending a year as staff dramatist at the Arts, producing nothing. Silence, Profusion But the poetry was welling up. When he unleashed the flood, the first result was “The Lady’s Not For Burning,” a medieval piece in a new secular style, as tuneful and tumultuous as a church carillon. Silence, then profusion. A pattern had formed. And suddenly, in a burst of polychromatic fire, Fry was blazing fiercely in the firmament at which he so often cast his net. Suddenly theatregoers were taking poetry and actually clamouring for more. In brilliant succession the others followed—“ The Firstborn,” “Thor, With Angels,” “Venus Observed,” “The Boy With A Cart,” “Ring Rround the Moon” (from Anouilh’s French), “A Sleep of Prisoners,” “The Dark is Light Enough.” Soon making theatrical history, he had three verse plays running at once in the West End. The words seemed to dance from his pen as rapturously as Sir Laurence Olivier and Dame Edith Evans proclaimed them. Slow Worker The reality was not quite so fluent. In his Cotswold farm labourer’s cottage, Fry worked slowly and painstakingly, composing verse straight on to the typewriter because its metallic click inspired him. When “Venus Observed,” almost due for rehearsal, was still not completed, Sir Laurence Olivier sent him a tactful reminder—a typewriter ribbon, machine oil, and brush. Seeking deeper inspiration, Fry moved with his wife and young son to a remote house by a lake among the Brecon beacons. For him sweet loneliness did not work. Friends who wanted to ring him up jibbed at asking for Bwlch Exchange. And there were too many trips to London for theatrical conferences. So he returned to the city, moving into a house overlooking Regent’s Canal in “Little Venice," and changed the sign on the gate to read “Beware of the Doge.” The Torrent Narrowed As his plays began to cast their spell around the world, Fry’s shoulders grew heavy with the

literary accolades of London and Broadway (or rather, those of his proxies did. Usually he was too shy to attend the presentation dinners).

Then, puzzlingly, the silver torrent narrowed to a trickle. Nothing, but for a few translations, was heard from Christopher Fry.

The astute found the answer in the film gossip magazines. Fry, who had been abroad only twice before, was in Rome. They had given him a little office and a lot of sharp pencils, and set him to work pointing-up the first draft of the crucifixion scene for “Ben-Hur.”

Again, the quiet before the storm. When the epic burst across a delighted world the critics forgot what Fry once said about “the patter of tiny criticism.” His hand, they agreed, was clearly stamped ion the masterpiece. It lifted “BenHur” clean out of the epic rut.

Then a spot of bother blew up with the American Screen Writers' Guild, whose three-man arbitration committee decided that Karl Tunberg, the original writer of the script, should receive sole credit for writing the new screen version.

Tunberg said he was perfectly willing to share the credit with Fry. William Wyler, who directed the film, said Fry has worked eight months on the manuscript, and eventually had rewritten almost every scene.

Fry did not trouble to press for his dues. He may well have been content to rest his case on Wyler’s comment: “His works will be read 100 years from now. Few members of the Screen Writers’ Guild can make such a claim.”

Fry talked of lingering in Rome. But not idly does he state his recreations as “planning holidays which he does not take.” He is back in London. The study door is closed. There is talk of the early completion of a long-delayed play about Henry 11, and of a fi'm telling the Biblical story of Ruth.

Again, it is time for silence.— (Express Feature Service.)