Goldsmiths, University of London
‘Of course’, said the lofty, superannuated scholar to me during the interval of a recent performance of Beckett’s Happy Days, ‘I saw Peggy’. That phrase has become a kind of byword for my theatrical belatedness: I never saw Peggy Ashcroft on the stage. Knowing only her work in film and television, I set out to explore the nature of her theatrical talent, concentrating on her performance as Margaret in The Wars of the Roses. Devised by John Barton and Peter Hall for the Royal Shakespeare Company, this adaptation of Shakespeare’s first tetralogy into three parts, Henry VI, Edward IV, and Richard III, was performed first at Stratford-upon-Avon in the summer of 1963, transplanted to London that winter, repeated along with the second tetralogy in the centenary celebrations of 1964, and filmed expressly for television and broadcast by the BBC in the winter of 1965.
Two topics will occupy my attention. The first is the vital contribution that Ashcroft’s participation in this ambitious project made to the legitimization of the Royal Shakespeare Company. This moment in theatre history will be familiar to some readers, but given that exactly fifty years have passed, it seems appropriate to reflect again upon the instability of the company in those early days and to reiterate, in a book on Women Making Shakespeare, the constructive effect of Ashcroft’s participation on-stage and off. The second half of the essay scrutinizes a portion of her performance as Margaret of Anjou. This topic, too, is not unknown to theatre historians. But Shakespearean performance criticism was relatively undeveloped in the mid-1960s, and the journalistic reviews, although laudatory and often helpful, fail to provide an adequate account of her achievement. The recent availability of the BBC film, both in the RSC archives and on YouTube, offers an opportunity to examine Ashcroft’s Margaret in detail and prompts me to notice and enlarge upon some qualities that make the characterization so exceptional. I shall concentrate particularly on the Molehill Scene, the moment in the second play in which Queen Margaret, her forces having captured the Duke of York, taunts and then stabs him.1 It should be heartening to certain readers, and appropriate in a book honouring a retiring colleague, that Peggy Ashcroft, at fifty-five, was too old to do what she did in The Wars of the Roses. The improbability is part of her triumph and one of the keys to the success of the project at large.
Making a company
The authority that Ashcroft commanded in the English theatre was invaluable to Peter Hall’s efforts to convert the haphazard Stratford programme into the Royal Shakespeare Company, to attract a stable group of actors with three-year contracts, to create a London base, and to secure public funding. She was the first performer he asked, and she instantly agreed. According to Hall, ‘that we had one of the undisputed leaders of the profession endorsing the whole scheme meant that other actors, other directors followed. The creation of the RSC owes a great deal to her presence’.2 Her ongoing contribution was critical given the shaky beginnings of the company. The first three years were not as bright as its subsequent triumphs might suggest, and apart from a couple of extraordinary productions – e.g. Michael Elliott’s direction of Vanessa Redgrave in As You Like It and the Peter Brook / Paul Scofield King Lear – the initial seasons hardly amounted to a string of hits.
Ashcroft’s cultural sovereignty also assisted Hall in his scheme to obtain government funding for the company. This was a pressing concern in the early 1960s – witness the programme for the Aldwych performances of The Wars of the Roses in the winter of 1963–4. Placed in a central position, along with the cast list, a textual note, and other such necessary business, is a sidebar making a frank demand for state subsidy.
Why does a company playing to such massive audiences need subsidising? The system of presenting plays in repertoire … is very expensive … On the continent it has been accepted for years that this sort of theatre needs heavy State subsidy … But the idea of such a company is new to this country.
The ambition, energy, and imagination exhibited by Hall and his forces in those early years – The Wars of the Roses being a primary illustration – helped to attract government funding and thus to stabilize the company. Ashcroft’s role, in several senses, was crucial.
The narrative of how the project came into being is well known. Hall and Barton since their days at Cambridge had wanted to find a way of mounting the early history plays, but remained doubtful about commercial viability. Hall had more than once approached Peter Brook, but when he countered with the proposal that Hall himself stage them, Hall invited Barton to prepare a script; assigned John Bury to create a distinctive, workable design; cast – after Ashcroft – many young actors who had emerged in the company, e.g. Ian Holm, Janet Suzman, David Warner; prepared to begin rehearsals; watched his marriage to Leslie Caron disintegrate; and promptly suffered a nervous collapse. Ashcroft was engaged personally in the rescue operation, summoning Brook from Paris to provide support, advising that return to work was the road to health, and equipping the rehearsal studio with a chaise longue and an attending physician. Ashcroft, it is said, also suggested the idea of performing all three parts on one marathon day, which was done five times that season. The opening, slightly delayed, took place in Stratford in July 1963, the first two plays in one day. Bernard Levin declared it ‘a landmark and beacon in the post-war English theatre and a triumphant vindication of Mr Hall’s policy’.3
Making a character
The overriding fact about Ashcroft’s performance is her range, mostly of age, but also of emotion. Her Margaret, according to Philip Hope-Wallace,
skipped onto the Aldwych stage, a lightfooted, ginger, sub-deb sub-bitch at about 11:35 a.m. and was last seen, a bedraggled crone with glittering eye, rambling and cussing with undiminished fury 11 hours later, having grown before our eyes into a vexed and contumacious queen, a battle-axe and a maniac monster of rage and cruelty.4
The transitions were aided by the costumer and wig-maker. As the young Princess, she wears long hair streaming down her back from a gold circlet on the head; as Henry’s young queen her hair is plaited into side circles, like Princess Leia in Star Wars; on the battlefield her head is hidden under chain mail; and in Richard III the coiffure is a gray fright wig, teased and out of control.
An essential feature is her voice. The formidable Kenneth Tynan had frequently hectored Ashcroft in print for her ‘Kensington vowels’, code, probably, for old-fashioned acting that he sought to replace, and in 1958 had complained that ‘there is not in her soul the iron’ required by a character she played. But he thought her Margaret ‘balefully persuasive’.5 In creating the French princess, AKA the ‘she-wolf of France’, Ashcroft manipulated the pitch of her voice, deploying a higher, lighter tone in the early scenes and lowering the tonal range practically to a female baritone for the deposed lunatic. For an actress famous for vocal sweetness, a purr which suited many of her West End characters and which audiences expected, such baritonal pitch and the fierceness of utterance made a strong impression. Repeated modulation proved taxing, however, given the schedule of performances. As she explained in an early interview, ‘What is sometimes worrying is when I play an old woman at night and then the young girl the next day. The voice is lower for the old woman. Overnight it retains its depth, and that has to be watched’.6
The other celebrated aspect of her speech, dominant throughout, was the affectation of a French ‘r’, or rather a conversion of the English ‘r’ into a ‘w’. Ashcroft devised the trick as a signal of her Gallic heritage, a way of emphasizing her isolation from the English court; and as her sojourn in England continues, the tic diminishes slightly, as presumably she becomes more at home and more practiced at English. At the dress rehearsal, Peter Hall advised her that while the accent had allowed her to imagine the character at first, she no longer needed it, but she retained it anyway, and it became one of the hallmarks of her performance. Her deformation of the ‘r’ is striking at her first entrance, the encounter with Suffolk who, considering her suitability for marriage to King Henry, vows to approve the union and to take her for his mistress. It is a flirtatious exchange, much of its sexy humour deriving from her play with the noun ‘ransom’ (‘wansom’), which she speaks in three successive lines and then revisits with a wink at the audience on ‘random’ (‘He talks at wandom; sure, the man is mad’).
The Molehill Scene (Scene 36 in the Barton script; 1.4 of 3 Henry VI) is certainly a showpiece for her extraordinary talents, but more than that it is an epitome of the whole, in which Ashcroft conveys the complexity of the role perhaps more persuasively than anywhere else in the script. Throughout the cycle she contributes many cherishable moments, to be sure: the scene in which she must conceal from Henry her glee at her having disposed of the faithful Duke Humphrey, or the contest of lamentation with Queen Elizabeth and the Duchess of Gloucester in Richard III. But in the Molehill Scene we witness both the extent of her violent malice and early intimations of her capacity to be injured. Her sexual and political scheming and her disloyalty to Henry manifest themselves early in the show, but the duel with York exposes her bloodthirstiness, her triumphant glee at being able to terrorize her enemy with the bloody napkin, the ghastly relic of infanticide.
It is a commonplace that great acting differs from good in that the supreme performer is as committed when silent as when speaking. Here Ashcroft’s interactions with York and responses to his meltdown attest to the completeness of her characterization. His curse is lengthy, and throughout the cinematic close-ups mostly focus on the speaker, but we see enough of Margaret’s reaction to feel the brute power, the practically psychotic ruthlessness with which she treats the enemy. There is a frankness in her relish at York’s suffering, as when she demands visible and aural evidence of his misery: ‘Stamp, rave and fret, that I may sing and dance’. But, surprisingly, she reacts to his curse with an unwonted vulnerability. As he assaults her verbally, she initially gestures to him with inverted palms and beckoning fingers, as if to say ‘come on, give me your worst’, and as he gains traction she seems to intone a high-pitched vocalize over his lament, as if his emotional outburst were arousing her, the wordless hum something like a hysterical version of the familiar laugh. Just previously Sinden, responding to her concluding insults (‘O, ’tis a fault too, too unpardonable’), had begun to emit a low moan beneath her words. Without overstating, we might describe the contest as suggesting fierce sexual engagement, a struggle between two forceful, passionate beasts. Her ironic disgust at his contumely also expresses itself in a gleeful cackle; but as York builds to his curse, weeping, howling over the murder of young Rutland (‘That face of his the hungry cannibals / Would not have touched’), Margaret’s hysterical joy, so her face suggests, is gradually converted to anxiety, perhaps even latent sympathy. We see, and it may be that she feels, intimations of the horror she will know when she watches her own boy stabbed by York’s ‘mess of sons’ in Scene 51. By the end of his attack she is reeling, and Exeter’s sympathy for the doomed father’s pain, a compassionate response that Margaret brusquely dismisses, patently represents a displacement of her own emotional damage.7
The verbal skills for which Ashcroft was famous account for her power in the scene and are audible in both the audiotape and the televised version. (One hears slight differences between the two performances, but her delivery of most lines is similar.) The overriding quality is her capacity for conveying the meaning of the verse. Having identified and absorbed those poetic and grammatical turns that shape the content of a phrase, a sentence, or a passage, she is able to highlight the trope and thus clarify the sense for the auditor. Repetitions sound especially juicy because she uses them semiotically, usually to mock her victim:
What, was it you that would be England’s King?
Was’t you that revell’d in our parliament […]
Having placed the mock crown on his head – an especially grotesque moment, since York’s battered head is bloody and the crown now nothing but crumpled paper – she ceremoniously introduces him, hammering the repetitions with ironic force:
Ay, marry, sir, now looks he like a King!
Ay, this is he [pause] that took King Henry’s chair;
And this is he [pause] was his adopted heir.
This sensitivity to the rhetorical substructure bespeaks her instinct for the musicality of the verse, a gift that reviewers had been applauding for decades. Her attention to vital consonants and vowels animates line after line (note particularly the m and l sounds in ‘Come, make him stand upon this molehill here’), and she unequivocally endorses the Peter Hall principle of verse speaking: although most lines are end-stopped, characteristic of early Shakespeare, even those that are not receive a slight pause at the end. All these techniques acknowledge and delight in the artificiality of the text while at the same time promoting its meaning.
One of her favourite devices is modulation of pitch. At this mid-point in the cycle she mostly sustains a medium register, something between the higher reaches of the girlish princess and the darker depths of the vengeful crone. There is, moreover, an unusual degree of steel in the sound, surprising in one famous for ‘the moonlit softness of her voice’.8 This medium range allows her to achieve emphasis, surprise, and other such effects. But the most telling manipulations of pitch are the quiet leaps into the upper register: the lift on ‘England’s King?’; the squeak on ‘And made a [tiny pause] pweachment of his high descent’; the gleefully high ‘valiant cwook-back pwodigy’; the high giggle on ‘Alas, poor York’; and especially the ascent in the arching phrase ‘York cannot speak, unless he wear a cwown’. Descent into the lower register is less frequent but is sometimes combined with an emptying of the tone (see below) and usually signals a logical shift.
She also introduces shifts in pace and volume. Most of these lines are delivered at a moderate tempo, since there is a stentorian quality to her taunting of York, but variations occur. She takes a ritard on ‘Where are your mess of sons to back you now?’, and sometimes she races forward, as on ‘Why art thou patient, man? thou shouldst be mad; / And I to make thee mad, do mock thee thus’. She also makes brilliant use of short stops, as in ‘Or, with the west, [pause] where [pause] is your darling, [pause] Wutland?’ The three words that open her first three speeches, the imperatives ‘Yield’ and ‘Come’ followed by the ironic ‘What’, are relatively high-pitched but come straight from the diaphragm, almost shouted, thus establishing her merciless command. Occasionally she suddenly drops the volume, as in her revelation of Rutland’s murder: ‘Look, [basso] York, I stain’d this napkin …’ Lowered volume imparts extra venom to the question, ‘But how is it that great Plantagenet / Is crown’d so soon, and broke his solemn oath?’ Especially effective is the quietly spoken word combined with an altered timbre, as in two related instances of ‘where’:
Where are your mess of sons to back you now …
Or, with the rest, where is your darling Rutland […]
The adverb is almost whispered, but with greater spookiness because bleached of tone. This is another of Margaret’s vicious weapons: her delivery implies suspense, surprise, and irony, teasing the listener with the horror to come.
This 120-line scene is only a small part of a huge work, and my reading has scarcely covered its many strengths, some of them authorial, some directorial. One Shakespearean detail that Hall emphasizes is the chiasmic function of the napkin: Margaret gives the bloody cloth to York to wipe away his tears; some fifty lines later he returns it to her, having used his tears to wipe away Rutland’s blood. Similarly, the bloodstain on her mouth is chilling. One guarantor of the power of the scene is the talent of Donald Sinden as her victim. The two actors seem to have inspired each other to greater levels of savagery. At the dress rehearsal, as they met in the wings, exhausted, just after their vicious confrontation, Ashcroft turned to Sinden and said ‘You were best’; his reply was ‘But you were funniest’.9
1My analysis is based chiefly on two documents: 1) an audio clip of part of the scene from the British Library’s anthology, Essential Shakespeare Live; 2) a videotape of the BBC’s televised version, held in the archives of the Shakespeare Centre in Stratford-upon-Avon.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrXGG45zrm0&list=PL90CCB99663A5A0DA continuing at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSI6j3-HpeA. I wish to express my gratitude to Patricia Tatspaugh, Carol Chillington Rutter, and Russell Jackson for their help in preparing this piece.
2Quoted in Michael Billington, Peggy Ashcroft (London: Mandarin, 1988), p. 183.
3Daily Mail, 23 July 1963.
4The Guardian, 13 January 1964.
5The lack of ‘iron’ is found in a review of Shadow of Heroes, the praise of her Margaret in his review of the first two plays in their Stratford run: they are printed in Tynan Right and Left (London: Longman, 1967), p. 7 and p. 142.
6Daily Mail, 19 August 1963.
7Barton and Hall have reassigned Northumberland’s lines to Exeter.
8Kenneth Tynan, Evening Standard, 30 June 1953.
9Billington, p. 202.