Category: Theatre

Book review: Colin Chambers (ed.) (2018) PEGGY TO HER PLAYWRIGHTS: THE LETTERS OF MARGARET RAMSAY, PLAY AGENT

This is an excellent and enjoyable holiday read, sat here in Tuscany, Italy in the dying days of May 2024. This Oberon book is evidently vital stuff for anyone with the slightest interest in immersing themselves in British theatrical culture from the 1950s to 1980s. Ramsay’s vying tones – emotionally baroque and austerely astringent – make this book’s appearance on a certain bookshelf in Rose Glass’s recent British horror film Saint Maud (2019) seem the inspired piece of set dressing it is.

I find Ramsay’s insights and feelings about drama, the purpose of writing, and her advocacy of talent and work over success and status highly persuasive. She has an awareness that writers and spectators are best when they have feelings about the characters they are witnessing. Plays should not merely be a weekend diversion, but should affect how you feel about life, and how to live it, sometimes imparting profound secrets.

While these words can apply fairly well to cinema and television, it is very clear that Ramsay does not seem as interested in those mediums as in theatre or literature, though clearly most of her clients whose correspondence is included here did notably screen work, especially single TV plays. Her tart dismissal of John Hopkins seems a veiled dig at the domestic ‘enclosed room’ nature of certain TV dramas. Interestingly, nor does she seem to admire client Robert Bolt’s lucrative and even OSCAR winning stabs at film screenplays, feeling that these expansive spectacular epics like Lawrence of Arabia (1962) are also taking Bolt away from the intense and direct human communication of theatre.

Interestingly, while Ramsay’s judgements and interpretations seem largely unerring, her perception of the underlying theme of John Bowen’s Robin Redbreast (1970) is a notable snapshot of strange early 1970s attitudes, in taking Norah’s disturbing impregnation as being an event of necessary pagan vitality.

This book of collected letters from a renowned theatrical agent contains an honest waspishness that reveals much about the temper of the times it documents. She doesn’t often pronounce directly on politics, but when she does, there is an utter steadfast morality in the way she urges Alan Ayckbourn and Donald Howarth to do the right thing and join John Mortimer, Peter Nichols, Alan Plater et al in a cultural boycott of Apartheid South Africa by not permitting productions of their plays there. These letters from 1970-71 nobly reflect Ramsay’s later advice to David Hare in March 1974 to ‘Look OUTWARD, my dear child. Don’t muck about picking at your entrails, and shitting on yourself.’

Colin Chambers does an excellent job in selecting telling and entertaining letters, though given the richness of the archive in the British Library, a scholar like myself wishes this had been at least 300 pages, to incorporate even more. Nonetheless, it’s apt that key figures such as Ayckbourn, Hare, Orton and Bolt do constitute the book’s mainstay. Simon Callow’s foreword is exceptionally controlled: distilling the essence of Ramsay’s extraordinary cultural contribution. Implicitly, when reading, we feel the cavernous sense of cultural loss and the closing down of challenging voices and imaginative possibilities that have arisen with Thatcherite philistinism and the linked Blairite view of the Cultural Industries as primarily businesses. Not that Ramsay is not attentive to the financial imperatives for writers, but she realises that material comfort is often a byproduct which comes later, and is far less important than how art changes our minds and helps us understand life.

As notably, Margaret Ramsay’s high standards in her judgement of scripts that clients send her are grounded in her immersion in the European naturalist and modernist canon – Beckett, Gide, Genet, Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg – and expressed through her absolute commitment to talented playwrights with distinctive, unique voices.

Book review: Richard Hewett (2017) THE CHANGING SPACES OF TELEVISION ACTING – From studio realism to location realism in BBC television drama

This book, published by Manchester University Press, seven years ago, is a detailed academic study of TV acting. It provides a clear contextualised historical framework, conveying the progression from studio realism to location realism. With Outside Broadcast video as the transitional technology towards single camera DV/film that we largely now have. Hewett tantalisingly notes some exceptions which have marked a return to multi camera studio live – EastEnders and Corrie live episodes and the live event drama Frankenstein’s Wedding (2011). There’s a great account of the throwback The Quatermass Experiment (2005), which reached a 542,000 peak audience on BBC4, and pointed to some notable possibilities that were being neglected. Here, I feel Hewett could have explored the crucial previous attempt at doing live dramas, Live at Pebble Mill (BBC2, 1983) and engaged with arguments about why there was an unfairly negative critical response to fine dramas like Keith Dewhurst’s The Battle of Waterloo.

Hewett traces how, initially, very gestural stage derived acting styles were still prevalent among some in the 1950s Quatermass cast, like Van Boolen, but that Reginald Tate was pioneering the ‘scaling down’ of performance that would go onto dominate TV acting. He evocatively and economically describes and analyses the subtleties of acting gestures, movement and vocal delivery in impressive detail. In the 1970s, studio realism and restrained performances were very much hegemonic, but in the Survivors episode analysed, Talfryn Thomas using far a more expressive and gestural and large style where the acting performance is very much evident. And viewers were still very much admiring and accepting of this, at this point. Most of the actors were developing a location realism on OB video in real spaces, not created ones in the studio. Perhaps Hewett here could have explored key precursors to this like Up the Junction (1965) and Cathy Come Home (1966) which began using 16mm film for TV dramas.

This book contains a wealth of reflective analysis of changing training for actors, with a gradual decline in the central of stage training: IMO, which hasn’t really benefited screen acting. There are telling and caustic Broadsides from Tony Garnett and Timothy West that more people should have been listening to. There’s also great and intelligent testimony from actors like Louise Jameson and Denis Lill. While Hewett records how the younger generation of actors feel that some older, more theatrically rooted actors only really act with their voice. This reminds me of Roger Lewis’s significant observation about the stillness of Richard Burton in his excellent recent book.