VIENNA 1934 - MUNICH 1938: A FAMILY ALBUM at The Rose Theatre, Kingston - Vanessa Looks Back...

Last Saturday I finally visited the Rose Theatre in Kingston, it's only taken 11 years!  So, Constant Reader, you will know that it had to be something fairly special to get me there, how about Vanessa Redgrave's debut as a playwright and stage director?  Fairly special.

VIENNA 1934 - MUNICH 1938: A FAMILY ALBUM was billed as a work in progress - and it was definitely that.  There were three performances at the Rose which followed on from two weeks of workshops on it, and the actors were certainly all ready for an audience and gave committed performances.  The problem was the shape of the piece itself.

Written in response to the rise of right-wing political parties particularly across Europe, Vanessa Redgrave has attempted to show us the lives of people who confronted the rise of Fascism in the 1930s.  The play started disarmingly with Vanessa wandering on to put some papers down on a table at the side of the stage, turn to look at the audience and say "Hello!"  She then proceeded to sit down and tell us what she hoped to illuminate through the play and also to introduce us to the main characters via photographs on the stage's backcloth.

There was the poet Stephen Spender who - on a holiday to Croatia in the early 1930s - met the American psychoanalyst and doctor Muriel Gardiner who, using her family's wealth, had come to Vienna to hopefully be taught by Freud.  Although Spender was in a sexual relationship with his 'assistant' Tony Hyndman, he and Muriel started an affair.  The affair petered out when Muriel fell in love with a militant socialist leader Joseph Buttinger.

By now Muriel could see first-hand the danger that her friends who were communists, socialists and Jews faced from the Austrian and German Fascists and in the years leading up to the start of WWII - when she, her young daughter Connie and Buttinger managed to escape to America - Muriel worked tirelessly for the anti-Fascist Underground, smuggling false passports from Prague into Austria.  In these efforts, she was also helped by a brave Tony Hyndman with whom she remained friends.  This took up part one of the play with Daisy Bevan (Vanessa's grand-daughter) playing Muriel - and two of Vanessa's co-stars from THE INHERITANCE - Russell Boulter playing Spender and Paul Hilton playing Buttinger.

 

But doesn't this all sound familiar?  Rich American studying psychology in Vienna becomes tireless anti-Fascist activist?  After the 1973 publication of Lillian Hellman's PENTIMENTO - which was later turned into the film JULIA starring Jane Fonda and Vanessa - friends asked Muriel could she possibly be 'Julia'?  Hellman insisted she had never met Gardner and her character 'Julia' actually existed; Muriel agreed she had never met Hellman, but when she arrived back in the US she had been a neighbour of Lillian Hellman's lawyer who knew of her life in Austria.  All of which proved fuel to the long-running fire that raged between Hellman and fellow-writer Mary McCarthy who said of Hellman on a TV show "every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'".  How strange that Vanessa stands now at the crossroads of that story, having played and won an Academy Award as the possibly fictional Julia and now having written a play about Muriel too.

Vanessa never met Muriel but she did meet her daughter Connie just before she died and also was a very good friend of Stephen Spender's wife Natasha Litvin.  A snapshot of Tony Hyndman appeared which linked Vanessa to the story in a more direct way - Hyndman had been her father Michael Redgrave's lover too, briefly in 1940.  She showed photos of Michael and Rachel Kempson in the year of their engagement and also a photo of her brother Corin.  The second act was primarily based around the section of Corin's book MICHAEL REDGRAVE - MY FATHER where he attempts to identify who his father's elusive lover called 'Tommy' was while he was appearing as Macheath in THE BEGGAR'S OPERA.  It turns out that 'Tommy' was Tony Hyndman's real name - and one of the many aliases he used.  Michael and 'Tommy' went on a painting weekend in the countryside during their brief affair - which was also attended by Spender!!  In this act Boulter played Michael and Paul Hilton played Corin.

It should have ended there - but no.  After a pause, we were meeting through photograph's Rachel Kempson's brothers Nicholas and Robin - the latter killed in WWII.  Just to complete the family album we also saw a photograph of Vanessa's husband Franco Nero - "isn't he nice?" she said bashfully!  Franco was up there just so Vanessa could tell us that his father had been an officer in Mussolini's Carabiniere - Oh well, we can't all be on history's right side I suppose.

The whole play is based on letters, memoirs and diaries and this - for me one act too far - was based on her Uncle Nicholas' journals kept as a Midshipman.  He gives us a contemporary account of Mussolini's Italy occupying Abyssinia in 1935 which happened despite being damned by The League of Nations.  Their sanctions were never fully carried out and Great Britain and France also secretly agreed to give over two-thirds of Abyssinia to Italy.  Which of course Vanessa ties in with Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler over the Sudetenland and the annexation of Czechoslovakia that followed it. Uncle Nicholas (Russell Boulter) gives way to Thomas Mann (Paul Hilton) and his essay 'This Peace' in which he dissects the fact that Hitler was appeased by the Governments of Europe.

Very much like her film SEA SORROW which dealt with displaced persons through history, VIENNA - MUNICH fairly buckles with the weight of material that it carries.  Vanessa needs to hand the whole play over to a play doctor who would be able to tie-in all the connections - and there are many - while containing a dramatic through-line; be that the fight for political freedom (Gardiner) or sexual freedom (Michael Redgrave).

The third act could very easily be dropped as it has no immediate bearing on the relationships established in the first two acts between Spender - Gardiner - Hyndman - Redgrave, but I suspect that Vanessa would be loathe to drop the third act as it is the most political and has more of a bearing on the current worldview of turning a blind eye to world-wide injustices.  The trouble being that - despite Paul Hilton's impassioned reading - ending it with the verbatim reading of Mann's essay is dramatically deadening.

All the family have discussed their identities within the family and the outside world - Michael wrote his autobiography assisted by Corin and, after his death, Rachel, Vanessa and Corin all wrote memoirs, while Lynn addressed Michael's emotional remoteness in her one-woman play SHAKESPEARE FOR MY FATHER so it is no surprise to find Vanessa mining this seam, indeed for me it provided the emotional centre of the play.  It was very moving to see Vanessa onstage as her father and mother's married life was explored with it's acceptances, compromises, emotional cruelty and concomitant guilt; Rachel Kempson emerging as a remarkably forward-thinking 25 year-old in unconditionally accepting Michael's bisexuality before they were married.

So it will be interesting to see the next steps for the play; in the evening there was a Rose Theatre fundraising event AN EVENING WITH VANESSA REDGRAVE where she was interviewed onstage by director Roger Michell.  She obviously likes him as, for once, she did not seem overly wary as she usually is in onstage interviews - she was downright playful at times - but he let her stray too often away from the point of the question asked.  However during the event she said that she and The Rose were looking for avenues to explore with the play and she hoped she might be able to get it booked into the Edinburgh Festival.

Among the clips shown - the BBC recording of her legendary Rosalind in the RSC's AS YOU LIKE IT, ISADORA, VENUS (directed by Michell) and JULIA, was a segment of a film that her son Carlo had compiled for her 80th birthday party which showed her activism from the 1960s onwards - Vietnam, Ireland, Women's Rights, The Palestinians, standing as an MP, UNICEF, Kosovo - they were all there and while she would not be drawn on whether she felt that her career had suffered, her remarkable fearlessness was there to be seen.  In particular in her remarkable speech at the Academy Awards where, battling against boos from some sections of the audience, she commended the Academy for not being swayed by the "Zionist hoodlums" who were burning her effigy outside the theatre.

I was going to include that here but I will settle instead on this delightful compilation of moments from over 60 years of film performances - yes, Vanessa, you have a canon of work!

150 word review: A FAMILY AND IT'S FORTUNES by Rachel Kempson

Essential reading for any fan of the actress or the Redgraves but more impartial readers may find Kempson's style too opaque to be fully enjoyable.

Rachel Kempson had a strange habit of being in the right place professionally at the wrong time personally; whenever she discovered she was pregnant with any of her three children she had to leave a promising season of roles so her career had a frustrating stop-start quality to it.

In her book, Kempson muses on her regret at missing out on a more high-level acting career but seems to have found a contentment in being Michael's wife and Vanessa, Corin and Lynn's mother.

While her discretion is understandable in discussing Michael's bisexuality, it is by reading between the lines that her sadness at his frequent disappearances is evident, even when she later reveals a long-running extra-marital affair with an unnamed actor.

Sad news this afternoon about the death of Lynn Redgrave aged 67, only a month after her brother Corin's.Much has been made of Lynn's feelings of being a 'spare thumb' while growing up in her theatrical family but in the same year as Vanessa was acclaimed at the RSC for her performances in AS YOU LIKE IT and TAMING OF THE SHREW, Lynn and Corin made their London stage debut's in Tony Richardson's MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM at the Royal Court with Rita Tushingham.Lynn then appeared at the Old Vic in the first years of the National Theatre and showing the range of her ability, from Coward (Jackie in HAY FEVER) to Shakespeare (Margaret iin MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING), Farquhar (Rose in THE RECRUITING OFFICER) to Brecht (Kattrin in MOTHER COURAGE). She made the move to film with a supporting role in her brother-in-law Richardson's TOM JONES then to co-starring in THE GIRL WITH GREEN EYES as Rita Tushingham's more gregarious, wordly roommate which earned her a BAFTA nomination.However she gained her biggest success by switching personas in Silvio Narizzano's GEORGY GIRL. Now playing the gauche and unloved flatmate to Charlotte Rampling's glamorous but nasty friend, Lynn's eye-catching performance made her an unlikely heroine for the swinging sixties audience and she found herself nominated with sister Vanessa for a Best Actress Academy Award - Vanessa was nominated for MORGAN: A SUITABLE CASE FOR TREATMENT - but ultimately they both lost to Elizabeth Taylor's Martha in WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? Personally I can't say I am a big fan of either film - I guess you had to be there to appreciate them.However she only made two more films in the 60s - SWINGING TIME again with Tushingham as two Northern girls seeing fame in swinging London and as the Sergeant Major's daughter in THE VIRGIN SOLDIERS.

Her work then seemed to proceed in a haphazard manner, no doubt due to family commitments - she married John Clark in 1967 and had children in 1968, 1970 and 1981.

Take for instance the first few years on the 1970s:
1970: appears in LAST OF THE MOBILE HOT SHOTS, a little-seen or remembered Sidney Lumet film with James Coburn based on a Tennessee Williams flop "The Seven Descents of Myrtle" with a script by Gore Vidal (!); appears at the Garrick with Richard Briers in Michael Frayn's debut play THE TWO OF US.

1971: appears at the Royal Court in David Hare's debut play SLAG with Anna Massey and Barbara Ferris; appears in an Italian spaghetti western with Vanessa's next amour Franco Nero called VIVA LA MUERTE...TUA. 1972: appears in Woody Allen's EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK as a Queen seducing Allen's Court Jester and in the woeful EVERY LITTLE CROOK AND NANNY as a woman posing as a Nanny to a mafia Don.

1973: appears in the little-seen Jack Gold film of Peter Nichols' savage comedy THE NATIONAL HEALTH which contrasts the run-down reality of a failing NHS hospital with the antiseptic fantasy of a hospital soap opera; appears at Greenwich Theatre in BORN YESTERDAY directed by Tom Stoppard.

She then appeared on Broadway in MY FAT FRIEND with George Rose and John Lithgow and settled in America permanently. Her career in the 1970s then drifted along with acclaimed performances on Broadway - a Tony nomination as Vivie in MRS. WARREN'S PROFESSION, ST, JOAN directed by her husband - and appearances on US TV. Her only other big screen appearances at this time were as real-life madam Xaviera Hollander in the utterly godawful THE HAPPY HOOKER and, to better effect, as the nymphomaniac fashion designer in the disaster movie send-up THE BIG BUS. Lynn was cast in the Glenda Jackson role in the tv spin-off of Jackson's film HOUSE CALLS but this ended in turmoil with Universal TV sacking her in 1981. Costly legal proceedings dragged on for years - she claimed she was sacked for breast-feeding her newborn baby Annabel and if nothing else the case did much to highlight the continued problems mothers faced with this situation in the workplace. However the case all but bankrupted her before it was thrown out of court. Needless to say the 1980s saw her concentrate heavily on US TV work - she became a spokesperson for Weight Watchers - and the occasional stage appearance. The 1990s saw a return to the London stage on two occasions - the only times I saw her onstage. She was an emotional Masha with Vanessa and niece Jemma in Chekhov's THREE SISTERS at the Queens in 1990 but the production wasn't well received and the press gloated when Lynn vilified Vanessa for her condemnation of the first Iraq invasion. They had also just filmed an unnecessary tv remake of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE which truly deserved condemning.

However for Lynn there was always material in her family and in 1993 she wrote and starred in SHAKESPEARE FOR MY FATHER on Broadway. An exploration-cum-exorcism of her feelings towards her father as viewed through the words of his beloved Shakespeare, she received a Tony Award nomination for the piece and I saw it when it had a month-long run a the Haymarket.By then she had co-starred in the Oscar-winning SHINE and in 1998 received a second Academy Award nomination, this time for Best Supporting Actress, for her role as James Whale's disapproving maid in GODS AND MONSTERS.

However - in a seemingly endless pattern of good/bad strokes - this was the same year her personal life was splashed over the newspapers. In 1991 her assistant had a baby boy and refused to name the father. The assistant later married Lynn's son but this marriage foundered. in 1998 - at a Thanksgiving dinner yet! - Lynn's longtime husband John Clark admitted he was the father. He had tried to start the relationship up again with the assistant who was having none of it and was threatening to tell Lynn.The marriage's dirty linen was washed in public for two years before a divorce was granted in 2000. She made her final appearance on the London stage in 2001 at the Piccadilly Theatre in the National Theatre revival of NOISES OFF when she replaced Patricia Hodge for the west-end run. The same year she received an OBE but in 2002 she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Her battle against the disease and subsequent mastectomy and chemotherapy formed the basis of a 2004 book with photographs by daughter Annabel but by then Lynn had already won a Drama Desk award for Best Supporting Actress for an off-Broadway production of Alan Bennett's "Talking Heads" monologue MISS FOZZARD FINDS HER FEET.

Her role in Maugham's THE CONSTANT WIFE won her another Tony award nomination in 2005 and in the same year, she appeared alongside Vanessa and niece Natasha in James Ivory's sadly rather leaden THE WHITE COUNTESS.

More supporting roles followed in films and US television - her last screen role was a guest star in UGLY BETTY - and she was working on stage almost to the end in NIGHTINGALE, another 'family' play she wrote, this time based on the life of her maternal grandmother.
Her career was certainly full and varied but one can't help wondering what greater legacy she might have left had she not moved to America at such a crucial point in her career.

Amid the ballyhoo over the called election was the news that Corin Redgrave died today aged 70.

Much is made of sister Vanessa's politics and the effect on her acting career but Corin's promising acting career in the 1960s was the one that took the biggest knock as he concentrated more on outside interests, working for the Worker's Revolutionary Party and later taking on the care of his father Michael when his Parkinson's Disease became more advanced.

His early work on screen always seemed a bit colourless, a bit unformed. In the 1970s his screen work slowed down during the decade and in the 1980s he only appeared in two films and two tv projects. But with Michael's death in 1985 and the fading away of the WRP, he found a new interest in performance and slowly started to re-emerge as a strong stage actor - particularly in late-Shakespeare roles - and also carved out a new career as a character actor on screen, ironically usually as upper-class roles. He was of course still a political activist, passionate on the rights of political prisoners and in attempting to get Blair impeached for the Iraq War.

I was lucky to see a few of his stage performances. Among his regular appearances at the Young Vic and National Theatre I saw him at the former in Ibsen's ROSMERSHOLM with Francesca Annis and at the National I am remembering his unfaithful husband opposite Eileen Atkins in HONOUR and the brutal prison warden in the early Tennessee Williams play NOT ABOUT NIGHTINGALES which won him the Olivier Award and a Tony nomination in New York.

He also appeared at the National in a revival of Pinter's NO MAN'S LAND as a supercilious Hirst and at Greenwich in a revival of Clifford Odets' THE COUNTRY GIRL in the role of the alcoholic leading man that his father had originated in the London premiere in 1952.He also appeared twice with his older sister in recent years - at the National he was a masterly Gayev, pampered and snobbish, opposite Vanessa's Ranyevskaya in Chekhov's THE CHERRY ORCHARD and at the Gielgud, they played the combative ex-lovers in Coward's SONG AT TWILIGHT. His performance as Hugo Latymer, a man made to confront the memory of his dead gay lover, was marvellously nuanced and ultimately very moving. It must have been strange to play the role bearing in mind he knew that Coward and Redgrave had been lovers when they were younger.

Corin had been aware of his father's bisexuality for many years and while the secret was still kept when he helped write Michael's autobiography, after his father's death he wrote a memoir of their life as father and son as well as making a powerful Omnibus profile on their relationship. It revealed Corin as a man seemingly at ease with himself and the legacy that had passed to him and this I think informed his performance.
Like his father, his later years were filled with cameos and supporting roles in films - he was particularly effective as the pompous Sir Walter Elliott in Roger Michell's 1995 adaptation PERSUASION and as the icy interrogator in Jim Sheridan's IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER.

Corin had suffered a serious heart attack in 2005, coming a few years after being diagnosed with prostate cancer and the last time I saw him - in 2008 at an early evening talk being interviewed with Vanessa about their family on the stage of the Lyttleton Theatre - he was still obviously frail. He appeared for the last time on stage last year at the Jermyn Street Theatre in a play about blacklisted Hollywood writer Dalton Trumbo at the same time as his niece Natasha Richardson was killed. His last screen role was in the television adaptation of Henry James' THE TURN OF THE SCREW which was broadcast last Christmas. Again ironically, Michael had appeared in the 1961 screen version THE INNOCENTS.

Corin's generous and humanitarian spirit will be missed both on and offstage.