RAFAEL SABATINI AND THEATRE - 3

Part Three

1925: Dissatisfied with the limitations that a play enforced on the story, Rafael re-worked THE RATTLESNAKE as a novel, The Carolinian, which he dedicated to J.E. Harold Terry.  Charles Wagner, however, was not giving up!  Release of the novel had begun the year; Wagner’s production of the play – as THE CAROLINIAN – was to round it off.  More of that below.

March: One may choose to imagine Rafael rubbing his hands in anticipation before he drew forward his “Goldoni Book” and pen, folded the pages so as to write in two columns, and embarked on THE KISS OF JUDAS.  1920, states George Locke, on no internal evidence.  It may have been so, but the play that was finally presented was called THE TYRANT.  All on his own, Rafael adapted his own long short story The Lust of Conquest.  Whatever the reader may think of it, Matheson Lang, the eminent actor and manager, the glamorous, the one who filled seats and enthralled audiences, friend of Rafael, adopted the play.  At all events, that was sufficient in the U.K.

Neither collaboration with successful playwrights, nor the criticism in such reviews of THE RATTLESNAKE as the one that appeared in the Times had taught Rafael a lesson regarding his besetting weakness.  THE TYRANT was deservedly criticised for informing theatregoers at tedious length of historical circumstances – Rafael lacked the skill of Shakespeare, who could do this so magically with the Prologues in Henry V.  The swift cut-and-thrust of verbal exchanges, the rapidly moving action, that characterise so many of Rafael’s novels, are missing here.  And Cesare Borgia had become an obsession; certainly Rafael was combative in defending most people’s favourite villain.  That inevitably undermined his play.  Yet it is the only one to be published and so to be available for evaluation.  (Hutchinson in London and Thomas Allen in Toronto published it in 1925, but Houghton Mifflin waited until 1927, appending it to The Nuptials of Corbal, which was the title more likely to be sought.)  How was it published at all?

Matheson Lang was an actor whose face, physique and voice would each have sufficed, married to his acting ability and stage presence, to carry him to the success and fame that he enjoyed.  All brought together in one person, they made him a powerful attraction.  Lang’s connection to Rafael went back a long way – to the Laleham days by the Thames.  Lang evidently saw the possibilities in a flamboyant role in this gorgeous costume melodrama, a grand opera without music (which is what this play is).  In fact, he designed the sets, and instead of the pomander that Rafael assigns to Cesare, Lang carried a red rose.  (Laurence Olivier, in his notorious 1964 Othello at the National, also carried a long-stemmed red rose, but he had no justification for it in Shakespeare’s play.)

THE TYRANT opened at the Royal Theatre, Birmingham, in early March.  At London’s New Theatre (now Noel Coward Theatre), from its opening in mid-March the play ran for 126 performances until early July.  The programme featured Matheson Lang with his red rose, looking devilishly cunning and cruel, a picture that Hutchinson and Thomas Allen reproduced on the dust jacket of the first edition.

Said the Illustrated London News, “Mr. Lang’s admirers do not mind so long as he is provided with a picturesque masquerade and there is the excitement of plots and sword-play [there’s none!], threats of torture, duping of assassins, and love at fever heat.”  However, it noted that Cesare “sees through conspiracies a little too miraculously for the human interest to be kept strong,” and when the chief conspirator, on whom the tables are turned, falls in love with her intended victim, “the sentimental scenes have an air of artifice.”  Two other critics put a finger on the play’s faults.  “If the play marched in a stately way,” said the Manchester Guardian in an entertaining review, “it also plodded upwards and had the unusual quality of a fourth act more potent than the third.”  The Christian Science Monitor gave good advice: “It is probable that, with wider experience of stage requirements, this clever writer of romances will be able to do better still.  He will be less disposed to work in duologue, and more ready to bring upon the stage effective acting scenes.”  Too much action took place “off” and Matheson Lang’s ability in action was neglected, while his part was over-full of “catechising and of love-making.”  From this comment on Lang it is clear that the actor-manager carried an unsatisfactory play to its success: “probably no actor upon the English stage could bring to Cesare so authoritative a bearing, and so supple a massiveness of style.”

Rafael Sabatini frequently cites ‘Fortune’ in his fiction, and Fortune did favour him in giving him three actor-manager friends, each able to take their companies on tour with one of his plays.  After moving to the King’s Theatre, Hammersmith, THE TYRANT went on tour around Britain, to the Grand Theatre, Leeds, the Opera House, Manchester (in mid-August), His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, and the Wimbledon Theatre.

What does reading the printed play script reveal?  There are a few good things in it; passages which demonstrate how much better Rafael could have been as a playwright had he taken instruction.  One notices also the influence of Victorien Sardou once more, this time his Fedora more than La Tosca.  (Both were turned into operas, which tells one something about Rafael’s play.)  Cesare’s outcry at the end of the play – so like Cagliostro’s in THE TRAVELLER – is matched by many such moments in opera.

October: THE CAROLINIAN, presented by Charles Wagner at the Sam H. Harris Theatre in New York, with Sidney Blackmer as Harry Latimer, lasted twenty-four performances.  It was also performed at the Bonstelle in Detroit, and in Boston.  I have no access to reviews at all, or to information about its showing in either of the latter places.  George Locke has a typescript for sale (£225).

1927: More good friends, a couple in fact, Sir John Martin-Harvey and his wife (whose stage name was Nina da Silva), and their company, threw themselves with gusto into Rafael’s play, SCARAMOUCHE, presented at the Garrick Theatre, London.  It had opened at the King’s Theatre, Glasgow, on 4 April, and ran in London for 64 performances from mid-April to mid-June, besides being given at the Prince’s Theatre, Bristol, and possibly elsewhere.  This being a touring company, it went to Canada with the play (among others), a country always welcoming to Sir John Martin-Harvey.  Although he was then 64, playing a character in his twenties, he is said to have looked the part.

Did Rafael revise it after the devastating reviews in New York?  The reviews in England and in Canada took a different line, contrary to that of the critics in New York.  In London, the slightly tongue-in-cheek review in the Times praised Sir John and Gordon McLeod (the Marquis) for making “portraits out of sketches.”  I read that as a side swipe at the playwright, whose main characters are “sketches,” but “swift action, a high romantic colour,” is unequivocal commendation.  Equally unequivocal is Graham Sutton in the Bookman: “The whole theme is admirably handled,” and “the play is both intelligent and well written.” 

George Locke is of no help unless one tries to ferret a choice out of this data, keeping in mind that there are four acts: Typescript One has 52+34+37+approximately 40 pages, bound in cloth, and states that it is typed from the original manuscript; Typescript Two, looking a little worn, has 45+33+54+35 pages and is string-bound in card covers, but has laid into it Rafael’s pencil sketches for stage settings, and the programmes for both productions, in New York and in London.  On so little data I would not venture an opinion.

1928: THE PROMISE by F. Kinsey Peile and Rafael Sabatini had one matinee performance in March at the Scala Theatre, as far as I can find out.  It would appear to have been so insignificant a theatrical presentation that the only reference I could find (and I consider this a lucky chance) was in J.P. Wearing’s The London Stage 1920-1929.  Even there the data is meagre.  It may have been a comedy or even a burlesque, and may have been an entertainment meant for children (an odd turn for Rafael if so), since it was a performance in aid of the Princess Louise Kensington Hospital for Children, and the “Schoolboys” are played by six girls and “Timothy Tomkins” is played by an actress.  No music is mentioned, precluding any resemblance to the style associated with Gilbert and Sullivan.

1930: J. Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times shredded THE TYRANT with savage wit.  The play, he said, lacked glamour, its characters “as solemn as doctors of philosophy,” in spite of everything being draped “in festoons of ornamental verbosity.”  The torture scene “is drowned under a flood of phrase-making,” and he found it the first drama in a long while that “has cut its cloth with so many flounces.”  Like the English critics, Atkinson and Stirling Bowen in the Wall Street Journal deplore the painfully detailed discussion of tactics by the Council in Act I, and the equally slow following through of a plot that is already known both to theatregoers and to the intended victim.  In Act II, Bowen remarks, “there is more than enough swashbuckling and courtesying.  After all, this is not opera, though Meyerbeer could have used it.”  Atkinson is equally sharp: “‘Conduct their notabilities,’ says Cesare to a page, “Mr. Sabatini has conducted his notabilities with a guide’s fearful caution through the lounging rooms of a tediously frescoed play.”

Far from being able to carry the play with his personality and acting, Louis Calhern gave a “perfunctory” performance, “more dashing than sinister,” Macchiavelli was not audible, at the premiere some actors were unsure of their lines, and some were more concerned with their costumes as they moved about heavily over-decorated sets.  And Rafael Sabatini was there to witness this; he had supervised the staging.  THE TYRANT only lasted thirteen performances at the Longacre Theatre, New York.
post 1932: We know of THE BLACK SWAN: Play in 3 Acts by Rafael Sabatini and Harold Simpson because a typescript is being offered by George Locke (for £850; along with The Head of Tom Leach, which was published as The Duel on the Beach).

In an irony that could have come from Rafael’s own pen, the financial returns from, and the reception accorded by theatregoers to, three of his plays (one in collaboration), mainly because of the actor-managers who each embraced one play, gave Rafael Sabatini a false idea of his ability in writing for theatrical presentation.  Only the catastrophically altered circumstances of his life (when Rafael-Angelo died) prevented him from pursuing a Fata Morgana.

NOTES

Matheson Lang (1879 – 1948) was Canadian-born, a stage and film actor as well as a playwright.  However, his career was chiefly in Britain, and began with Shakespeare, for which he was suited in every way.  Lang and his actress wife, with their company, toured India, South Africa and Australia from 1910 to 1913, mainly with Shakespeare, but presumably also playing BARDELYS occasionally, since he had bought the South Africa rights and probably it was he who bought the India rights.  Coincidences abound in Rafael’s life-story: Matheson Lang died in Bridgetown, Barbados.

John Martin Harvey (1863 – 1944), was knighted as John Martin-Harvey.  He was slim, with an intense look, and first tasted fame as Sydney Carton in The Only Way, a part and a play thereafter frequently invoked almost as a calling card or a label for this English stage actor.  He and his Chilean wife had both begun in Sir Henry Irving’s company.  They and their company regularly toured Great Britain and North America.

F. Kinsey Peile – the little that can be found indicates that he was an actor (played Lane in the premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest) and a playwright mostly of short comedies, accustomed to collaboration and to dramatisation.  His most ambitious effort was the dramatisation of Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King, the ms sold at auction in 1935.

Harold Simpson – all that can be found out at present is that he was a song writer who occasionally collaborated on plays.  In 1927 he collaborated in Daisy Fisher’s The Cave Man, staged at the Theatre Royal, Portsmouth and the Savoy Theatre, London.

Ruth Heredia is the originator and holds the copyright to all material on this blog unless credited to some source. Please do not use it or pass it off as your own work. That is theft. If you wish to link it, quote it, or reprint in whole or in part, please be courteous enough to seek my permission.

RAFAEL SABATINI AND THEATRE - 2

Part Two

1919, March: Rafael completed his most ambitious stage work so far, a play named JOHANNA in manuscript, revised and re-named THE SACRAMENT OF SHAME for the typescript – a title more likely to pique interest.  (He altered the name in the list of Characters on the first page of his manuscript from Sapphira to Johanna, but it remains Sapphira in the rest of the document.)  The conclusion of the play in the manuscript version has no part for Kuoni.  (At present I have no information about the manuscript beyond the first and last pages.)  The play called for costly outlay on its production, but its chief drawback was the imbalance of roles between leading lady and leading man: the former was undoubtedly dominant.  In opera that is no problem; in plays of his time, from a novice playwright, it was.  It was also a matter of the existing theatre world.  Neither of Rafael’s friends, Matheson Lang and John Martin Harvey would have accepted the relatively feeble role of Count Arnault, while there was no English actress who had such drawing power as a Sarah Bernhardt in France.  Without a star to fill the theatre, no producer would look at the play.  Charles Kenyon might be an acquaintance, even a friend, but he returned the typescript.

Was it a well written play?  Mine is a personal view.  The chief fault in this play is that in Act I Johanna is impressed by Count Arnault but she is newly married and much in love with her husband; by Act III she can be deeply grateful to Arnault and overcome by his offer, but one cannot believe that she falls in love with him at once.  Arnault is very much ‘a romantic prince’, but in Act I his praise of Johanna to Philip (“purity and wisdom”) on so little acquaintance seems extravagant.  His expressions of admiration in Act III are heard by Duke Charles with understandable surprise followed by scepticism.  In retrospect, at the end of the play, one may wonder if it is not almost cynical to foist on the Philip of Act I the Philip of Act II, even though he has been cruelly tortured by then.  It may almost appear that Philip had to die as he did to bring Johanna and Arnault together legitimately, just as it was necessary for Johanna to love Philip so much that both her sacrifice and her demand for justice stem from her love.  That Rafael recognised these weaknesses is clear from the note he placed in the typescript.  Yet the play would have been well worth saving if he could have obtained some guidance from an experienced playwright.  There are some fine scenes, and the latter part of Act III, after the entrance of Duke Charles, is notably effective.  The depiction of the Duke here, the give and take of dialogue, and the justice he metes out, are in consonance with the story from which the play derived.  It was a story to which Rafael apparently felt a special attachment and, pre-existing in its original form, was better worth this attachment than some others (such as that of Princess Yola)!

How hard did Rafael try to get the play staged?  We do not know.  But we can be thankful that it survives in manuscript and typescript, and that his failure led to his reworking much of it into his novel, The Romantic Prince.

1920s: THE TRAVELLER is a strange piece of work.  Although George Locke assumes that it dates to “the 1920s” he cites no evidence for this.  It was found as a typescript with numerous margin notes by Rafael, but no date nor any indication of whether it was intended for a play or a film scenario.  (One has to remember that in the early 1920s Rafael was active as a co-founder of the Hardy Film Company.)  Whatever his intention, THE TRAVELLER would only have met with rejection and even ridicule. Its demands for scene setting and action were not practical.  To some extent Rafael realised this, and his notes offer alternatives to the arrangement of scenes, but the action required in the Prologue (which Rafael admits is taken from Alexandre Dumas’ novel, Memoirs of a Physician/ Joseph Balsamo) was not going to work in either play or film.

An important detail in Joseph Balsamo Part 1, Chapter 15 is copied in the scene in Cagliostro’s laboratory, when he shows Marie-Antoinette her future.  With so much lifted from the novel one might well ask if this concoction was meant to be a dramatisation of it, but it is not, and it draws even more matter from Rafael’s own writings, The Night of Gems, and The Lord of Time.  Into this he stirred a large helping of the operatic, and a speech in blank verse, with a note that another speech is also to be set in blank verse.  His special new ingredient is Cagliostro’s recognising in Marie Antoinette his soul-mate down the ages, whom he has rescued in certain reincarnations but on this occasion must send to her doom – a familiar operatic element.  “Passionately now he inveighs against the work that Fate has thrust upon him, against the suffering he has caused the Queen, and against what she must yet suffer that her destiny may be fulfilled.”  This has the making of a final aria for the primo tenore in a grand opera!  The final moments of THE TRAVELLER are unmistakably out of opera: the beloved goes to her death while the lover cries out her name and the drums roll before the curtain falls.

THE TRAVELLER as found is a detailed plan for scene setting, motivation of characters, and action for them, interspersed with fully worked out passages of speech for them.  Even a seasoned and successful playwright would have had some difficulty in converting the passages descriptive of action into theatrical interplay that would convince an audience.  The Masonic ritual taken from Dumas is one such case.  In the scenes requiring animated gossip from a crowd of ‘extras’ this cannot be suggested by murmurs of “rhubarb.”  Their chatter is meant to convey to the uninformed audience what has been going on between scenes.  On the whole, reading this work is not advised for an admirer of Rafael Sabatini.

1921: J.E. Harold Terry collaborated with Rafael on a play titled THE RATTLESNAKE.  Rafael’s name took second place, which may reflect the extent of his contribution to it.  First performed in November at the Theatre Royal in York, the city of Terry’s birth, it moved to the Shaftesbury in London the following January and had a modest run of twenty-two performances (according to The London Stage 1920-1929 by J.P. Wearing).  A balanced review in the Times praised THE RATTLESNAKE as full of “picturesque” characters who, naturally, could not be fully developed within the limits of a play, but could be realised by the skilled actors who took those parts.  Praised too, the “critical moments of dialogue” which were “frequent and agreeably stimulating,” and the local colour, which was “fresh and amusing” – citing the “British hauteur, the American earnestness” and the language of the time, which would not be familiar unless one had read Thackeray’s The Virginians.  But, said the critic, there were too many complications which resulted in an excess of explanatory detail that required too much “mental gymnastics” from the playgoer.  However, “that the play was received with every token of favour attests not only its dramatic merits, but the tact with which its authors have contrived to present incidents of British discomfiture without offence.”  (Those were civilised societies!)  There is a copy of the play typescript (presumably) in the New York Public Library.  George Locke has a copy for £335.

1923: Either because he now felt confident of success with a play of his own, or was possessive about his novel, or was persuaded by Charles Wagner, Rafael wrote SCARAMOUCHE.  Wagner was an irrepressible enthusiast all his life and took a special interest in Rafael Sabatini.  He came to London, along with Sidney Blackmer whom he had chosen for the main role, to make sure they got the production and interpretation done as Rafael would have wanted, pressing him to attend the premiere.  Yet, somehow, the play was an artistic failure.  John Corbin in the New York Times described it as a romantic melodrama long past its time, the tinsel having lost its attraction.  In what Corbin found an unsatisfactory part, Sidney Blackmer’s performance had occasional moments of charm, “marred throughout by tricks of slovenly speech.”  The parts of Aline and Climène were also judged “unsympathetic and undramatic.”  Only the production was praised without reservation.  Nevertheless, doubtless riding on the astounding worldwide popularity of the novel, SCARAMOUCHE saw 61 performances at the Morosco Theatre in New York, during the last months of the year.  (Photographs of Blackmer do not suggest an acceptable physique for the role, and at 28 he was slightly older than the character was at the start of the novel.  In the film, Ramon Novarro both looked the part and was the right age.)  George Locke has two undated typescripts but is unable to say, lacking background knowledge, which is the original and which the revised version, or even if they differ at all.  Only someone able to examine them or willing to pay £3100 for the two would be able to decide.  The story of SCARAMOUCHE the play continues, later.

1924: IN THE SNARE resulted from the keeping of a seven-year-old promise made by Rafael to his long-time friend Leon Lion.  Lion had “given him the story” for the novel The Snare, widely recognised to be eminently suitable for dramatisation.  And this was a promise between the two friends.  But it took long to fulfil.  On this occasion, it was Rafael Sabatini’s name that took precedence over Leon Lion’s.  Whether or not that reflected the nature and degree of each collaborator’s contribution can only be guessed from a copy – of which none has at present been found.  As a writer for stage and screen and an actor on stage and screen, Lion knew his onions, which his old friend had not learned to.  However that may be, it is the more likely that Lion’s influence got the play staged at the Savoy, although the producer was Tom Walls, whose stamping ground was the Aldwych.  It ran for 66 performances and was reviewed by several publications of repute but only the Times’ review is available to me.  That review largely gives away the plot but almost nothing of the critic’s opinion of the play!  The labelling of a collection at the Harry Ransom Center suggests (and material with George Locke supports the supposition) that Rafael designed costumes and sets for the play but, yet again, only examination will deliver a correct opinion on this.

NOTES

If there is a thing that George Locke did right with his priceless Sabatini Hoard, it was to transcribe THE TRAVELLER and publish it in his Researcher’s Companion.

Charles Kenyon (1878-1955) was an actor-manager.  He toured with his own company and produced shows.  Kenyon was wealthy, handsome, and possessed a fine deep voice.  He was generally to be found at the Savage Club, known for its membership from the literary circle and the stage.  He also enjoyed foxhunting and tennis, and was reputed to be one of the best dressed men in London.

J.E. Harold Terry (1885-1939) was a novelist, playwright, actor and critic, from a family strongly connected to the theatre: he was a grandson of Sir Joseph Terry, and a nephew of Eille Norwood.  He was a member of the Savage Club as well as the Garrick.

Charles Wagner was a renowned concert manager and theatre producer.  It was said of him that “the mere fact that Mr Wagner will book an artist is accepted by the local managers as a guarantee of the artist's excellence.”  He is remembered for being the one who launched the careers of stars from Allan Jones and Jeanette MacDonald to Walter Gieseking, Alexander Kipnis, pianists, Jussi Bjorling, Amelita Galli Curci, opera singers and Helen Hayes, Walter Huston and Claudette Colbert, actors.

Leon Marks Lion (1879–1947) was an English actor of stage and screen; playwright, theatrical manager and producer.  His successful career on the stage included touring with light opera and Shakespeare companies, regularly performing in London's West End; as well as writing and producing for the theatre.  He was a member of the Savage Club from at least 1917, when he cited it as the address to which to return his copy of The Snare, should it be lost by him and found by another.  (It reflects his sense of humour that in the copy, after the address, he inscribed: All rights reserved and protected.)

Ruth Heredia is the originator and holds the copyright to all material on this blog unless credited to some source. Please do not use it or pass it off as your own work. That is theft. If you wish to link it, quote it, or reprint in whole or in part, please be courteous enough to seek my permission.