“There was another circumstance about those early rehearsals that caused some curiosity and disquiet for a while; a stranger had appeared among us whose purpose nobody seemed to know, but who sat in the stalls making notes busily, and now and then exclaiming audibly in a tone of disapproval. He was sometimes seen talking with Sir John. What could he be up to? He wasn’t an actor, certainly. He was young, and had lots of hair, but he wasn’t dressed in a way that suggested the stage. His sloppy grey flannels and tweed coat, his dark blue shirt and tie like a piece of old rope—hand-woven, I suppose—and his scuffed suede shoes made him look even younger than he was. ‘University man,’ whispered Audrey Sevenhowes, who recognized the uniform. ‘Cambridge,’ she whispered, a day later. Then came the great revelation—‘Writing a play!’ Of course she didn’t confide these things to me, but they leaked from her close friends all through the company.
“Writing a play! Rumour was busily at work. It was to be a grand new piece for Sir John’s company, and great opportunities might be secured by buttering up the playwright. Reginald Charlton and Leonard Woulds, who hadn’t much to do in Scaramouche and rather less in The Master, began standing the university genius drinks; Audrey Sevenhowes didn’t speak to him, but was frequently quite near him, laughing a silvery laugh and making herself fascinating. Old Emilia Pauncefort passed him frequently, and gave him a stately nod every time. Grover Paskin told him jokes. The genius liked it all, and in a few days was on good terms with everybody of any importance, and the secret was out. Sir John wanted a stage version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and the genius was to write it. But as he had never written a play before, and had never had stage experience except with the Cambridge Marlowe Society, he was attending rehearsals, as he said to ‘get the feel of the thing’.
“The genius was free with his opinions. He thought little of The Master of Ballantrae. ‘Fustian’ was the word he used to describe it, and he made it clear that the era of fustian was over. Audiences simply wouldn’t stand it any more. A new day had dawned in the theatre, and he was a particularly bright beam from the rising sun.
“He was modest, however. There were brighter beams than he, and the brightest, most blinding beam in the literature of the time was somebody called Aldous Huxley. No, Huxley didn’t write plays. It was his outlook—wry, brilliantly witty, rooted in tremendous scholarship, and drenched in the Ironic Spirit—that the genius admired, and was about to transfer to the stage. In no time he had a tiny court, in which Charlton and Woulds and Audrey Sevenhowes were the leaders, and after rehearsals they were always to be seen in the nearest pub, laughing a great deal. With my very long ears it wasn’t long before I knew they were laughing at Milady and Frank Moore and Emilia Pauncefort, who were the very warp and woof of fustian, and who couldn’t possibly be worked into the kind of play the genius had in mind. No, he hadn’t begun writing yet, but he had a Concept, and though he hated the word ‘metaphysical’ he didn’t mind using it to give a rough idea of how the Concept would take shape.
“Sir John didn’t know about the Concept as yet, but when it was explained to him he would get a surprise. The genius was hanging around The Master of Ballantrae because it was from a novel by the same chap that had written Jekyll and Hyde. But this chap—Roly says his name was Stevenson, and I’m sure he knows—had never fully shouldered the burden of his own creative gift. This was something the genius would have to do for him. Stevenson, when he had thought of Jekyll and Hyde, had seized upon a theme that was Dostoyevskian, but he had worked it out in terms of what some people might call Romance, but the genius regretfully had to use the word fustian. The only thing the genius could do, in order to be true to his Concept, was to rework the Stevenson material in such a way that its full implications—the ones Stevenson had approached, and run away from in fright—were revealed.
“He thought it could be done with masks. The genius confessed, with a laugh at his own determination, that he would not attempt the thing at all unless he was given a completely free hand to use masks in every possible way. Not only would Jekyll and Hyde wear masks, but the whole company would wear them, and sometimes there would be eight or ten Jekylls on the stage, all wearing masks showing different aspects of that character, and we would see them exchange the masks of Jekyll—because there was to be no nonsense about realism, or pretending to the audience that what they saw had any relationship to what they foolishly thought of as real life—for masks of Hyde. There would be dialogue, of course, but mostly in the form of soliloquies, and a lot of the action would be carried out in mime—a word which the genius liked to pronounce ‘meem’, to give it the flavour he thought it needed.
“Charlton and Woulds and Audrey Sevenhowes thought this sounded wonderful, though they had some reservations, politely expressed, about the masks. They thought stylized make-up might do just as well. But the genius was rock-like in his insistence that it would be masks or he would throw up the whole project.
“When this news leaked through to the other members of the company they were disgusted. They talked about other versions of Jekyll and Hyde they had seen, which did very well without any nonsense about masks. Old Frank Moore had played with Henry Irving’s son ‘H.B.’ in a Jekyll and Hyde play where H.B. had made the transformation from the humane doctor to the villainous Hyde before the eyes of the audience, simply by ruffling up his hair and distorting his body. Old Frank showed us how he did it: first he assumed the air of a man who is about to be wafted off the ground by his own moral grandeur, then he drank the dreadful potion out of his own pot of old-and-mild, and then, with an extraordinary display of snarling and gnawing the air, he crumpled up into a hideous gnome. He did this one day in the pub and some strangers, who weren’t used to actors, left hurriedly and the landlord asked Frank, as a personal favour, not to do it again. Frank had an extraordinarily gripping quality as an actor.
“Nevertheless, as I admired his snorting and chomping depiction of evil, I was conscious that I had seen even more convincing evil in the face of Willard the Wizard, and that there it had been as immovable and calm as stone.
“Suddenly, one day at rehearsal, the genius lost stature. Sir John called to him, ‘Come along, you may as well fit in here, mphm? Give you practical experience of the stage, quonk?’, and before we knew what was happening he had the genius acting the part of one of the menservants in Lord Durrisdeer’s household. He wasn’t bad at all, and I suppose he had learned a few things in his amateur days at Cambridge. But at a critical moment Sir John said, ‘Clear away your master’s chair, m’boy; when he comes downstage to Miss Alison you take the chair back to the upstage side of the fireplace.’ Which the genius did, but not to Sir John’s liking; he put one hand under the front of the seat, and the other on the back of the armchair, and hefted it to where he had been told. Sir John said, ‘Not like that, m’boy; lift it by the arms.’ But the genius smiled and said, ‘Oh no, Sir John, that’s not the way to handle a chair; you must always put one hand under its apron, so as not to put a strain on its back.’ Sir John went rather cool, as he did when he was displeased, and said, ‘That may have been all very well in your father’s shop, m’boy, but it won’t do on my stage. Lift it as I tell you.’ And the genius turned exceedingly red, and began to argue. At which Sir John said to the other extra, ‘You do it, and show him how.’ And he ignored the genius until the end of the scene.