8 Hotels E-Book

Nicholas Wright

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

'Iago only suspected it. I know.' Celebrated actor, singer and political campaigner Paul Robeson is touring the United States of America as Othello. His Desdemona is the brilliant young actress Uta Hagen. Her husband, the Broadway star José Ferrer, plays Iago. The actors are all friends, but they are not all equals. As the tour progresses, onstage passions and offstage lives begin to blur. Revenge takes many forms and in post-war America it isn't always purely personal – it can be disturbingly political too. Based on true events, Nicholas Wright's play 8 Hotels was first staged at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester, in 2019, in a production directed by Richard Eyre.

Leseprobe

Nicholas Wright

8 HOTELS

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Introduction

Original Production

Characters

8 Hotels

A Note About Sources

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Nicholas Wright

‘I am so happy! I am so happy!’ Uta clasped her arms around herself, delightedly curled up in her chair, almost knocking her head on the tablecloth. It was 1996, the start of the tour of my play Mrs Klein, in which she was playing the title role. She, the director William Carden and I were having dinner after the show in an old, once-grand, now slightly dusty hotel in San Francisco. Was she happy, I wondered, because the show had gone well that night? Yes, very likely. And she liked long runs, and she loved touring. But it felt as though something deeper was in the air. It was she who had chosen this hotel: she had made rather a point of it. Was this, I wondered, where she had stayed over fifty years before on that wartime coast-to-coast tour of Othello in which she played Desdemona, her husband José Ferrer played Iago and Paul Robeson was the Moor? And what did it mean to her to be there again?

That night is where my memory leads me, when I ask myself the origin of this play.

I had never been so flattered in my life as when, a year or so before that, William Carden – whom I didn’t know – called me from New York to say that Uta Hagen wanted to do my play. Would I agree to that, he asked? I replied that I had idolised Hagen ever since I’d seen her playing Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Piccadilly Theatre in 1963 and that, as far as I was concerned, she could do whatever she wanted. She had created the part on Broadway – it was her ‘signature role’, as people say – and she was unforgettable in it: furious, funny, heartfelt, wounded, unforgiving.

We all look different as we get older, but I think Uta changed more than most of us. Photographs of her in that wartime Othello show a blonde with the all-American cute good looks of Rosemary Clooney. (Whom, oddly, José Ferrer would later marry not once but twice.) My memory of her in Virginia Woolf was of a rangy intellectual broad, almost mannish. When I finally met her in New York, in her little studio theatre where my play was being tried out, she was seventy-seven: gaunt and aquiline – ‘eagle-like’ – with burning energy and a warm voice that decades of smoking had touched with gravel. From time to time one caught a hint of a German accent: ‘ex-OWS-sted’, for ‘exhausted’. Or was that the character taking over? She was still a magnificent actress and she was feisty. ‘Oh, Uta,’ said one of the other actresses, rather nervously, ‘I’m leaving a little pause there. I hope it’s okay with you?’ Uta replied with spirit. ‘Sure, sweetie, you leave that pause and I’ll walk right off the stage because there won’t be a damn thing to keep me on it.’

Robeson had first played Othello in 1930, in London during his and his wife’s long, long stay in Britain. It was a fertile time for him: he starred onstage in Show Boat, he made some great recordings and some mediocre films, he became celebrated for his charm and looks, he was taken up by high society and he earned a fabulous amount of money. Britain was important to him for another reason: it was where his political awakening took place. He made an alliance with the struggling Welsh miners, whose love of song struck a chord in his heart. And through meeting African exiles like the future Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah and the future Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta… and also the great Trinidadian writer and thinker C. L. R. James… he discovered the anti-colonial cause that he would support for the rest of his life. By the time he returned to the USA, at the outbreak of World War II, he thought of himself as an activist first and an artist second. From now on, his acting and his singing, however highly he valued them, would be adjuncts to his political life: ‘They give me a platform,’ he would say.

For him to play Othello in the USA was a political message in itself. In 1940s America, actors of colour seldom appeared onstage except as servants, slaves and nannies. This was Robeson’s chance to show a black man as a hero: brave, articulate and admired by all. He chose his director with care: Margaret Webster, an Englishwoman who was making a name for herself in the USA as a Shakespeare specialist. She found that casting would be tricky. For the part of Iago, she turned to her friend Maurice Evans, a suavely decorous English actor who was collaring the market in Shakespeare roles on Broadway, but he turned her down. ‘America isn’t ready for a black Othello,’ he told her. Other offers produced the same reply. It wasn’t just fear of precedent: there was real alarm at the prospect of a man of colour appearing in a romantic situation with a white woman. (The African-American Ira Aldridge, a celebrated Othello of the nineteenth century, played the role throughout the length and breadth of Europe but never in his home country.)

Just when it looked as though Iago would never be found, Webster’s partner – the actress Eva Le Gallienne – suggested a young actor who had scored a hit in the vintage farce, Charley’s Aunt: his feat of diving horizontally into a Victorian women’s gown and emerging from the other end fully dressed was a nightly showstopper. Once Ferrer was cast, it was only natural for Desdemona to be offered to his young wife, Uta Hagen. Webster had seen her, aged seventeen, as a sensational Ophelia to Le Gallienne’s Hamlet, and they’d recently played together in The Seagull – Webster as Masha, Hagen as Nina – in a revival starring America’s theatrical royal couple, the Lunts.

Othello enjoyed a long Broadway run and then set out on a nationwide tour. Now its political aim came into focus. It couldn’t tour to the American South: that would be crazy and unsafe. But wherever it travelled, there would be theatres that had never before hosted a racially integrated audience. Robeson, Webster and the management insisted that performances should be open to all, irrespective of colour or race, and the show held fast to this, despite the occasional date where they found that white ticketholders and those of colour had been deliberately seated on opposite sides of the stalls with a kind of firebreak running down the middle. There were other problems too. It wasn’t unusual, when Hagen, Ferrer and Robeson ate together in a restaurant, for waiters to come rushing up to place discreet screens around them. Some hotels operated a colour-bar, and there were times when Robeson was asked politely if he would mind travelling in the goods elevator in order not to upset the other guests, never mind that he was one of the most famous Americans in the world.

He would play Othello once again, in 1959 for the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, as the RSC was then called. His passport had been taken away years before by the US State Department and there was no guarantee that he would get it back, so a standby actor was engaged, but Robeson arrived in Stratford-upon-Avon in time to rehearse and play. I was a drama student then, watching the show from the back of the stalls. It was thrilling to see this mighty character in the flesh. Some of his earlier magic was apparent, but not very much of it: one had to make allowances for his age. It was not long after this that he suffered a rapid deterioration in his health, the cause of which remains mysterious.

Margaret Webster’s career in America never recovered from the setback that appears in the play. She returned to Britain, where she was thought reliable but old-fashioned and where she failed to find the prestigious work that she was used to. As a young actor, I auditioned for her in the Hampstead living room of her partner, the novelist Pamela Frankau. Frankau had written the play, which was modestly scheduled for a single week in Windsor. When one is an out-of-work actor, one places a lot of importance on the courtesy one is shown at auditions and, in this department, Webster received top marks from me: she was respectful of my terrible acting and turned me down with charm. I liked her a lot.

José Ferrer went on to enjoy a flourishing set of careers as actor, producer, director of plays and movie director. It was a matter of pride to him that in 1950, he became the first Latino to win an Academy Award for Best Actor: this was for Cyrano de Bergerac, which was also an iconic role of his on stage.

Uta continued acting for as long as the years allowed and became an important teacher. Her book, Respect for Acting, remains an essential guide for actors of today and of the future.

8 Hotels was first performed in the Minerva Theatre, Chichester, on 1 August 2019. The cast was as follows:

UTA HAGEN

Emma Paetz

JOSÉ FERRER (JOE)

Ben Cura

MARGARET WEBSTER (PEGGY)

Pandora Colin

PAUL ROBESON

Tory Kittles

Director

Richard Eyre

Designer

Rob Howell

Lighting Designer

Peter Mumford

Sound Designer

John Leonard

Video Designer

Andrzej Goulding

Casting Director

Charlotte Sutton CDG

US Casting

Jim Carnahan CSA

Company Dialect Work

Penny Dyer

Costume Supervisor

Lucy Gaiger

Props Supervisor

Sharon Foley

Hair, Wigs and Make-up

Campbell Young Associates

Assistant Director

Eva Sampson

Production Manager

Kate West

Company Stage Manager

Suzanne Bourke

Deputy Stage Manager

Lorna Earl

Assistant Stage Manager

Harriet Saffin

Characters

UTA HAGEN, twenty-five

JOSÉ FERRER (JOE), thirty-two

MARGARET WEBSTER (PEGGY), thirty-nine

PAUL ROBESON, forty-six

Time: 1944 and later

Place: The United States

The characters are American except for Peggy, who is English. Their ages are given as at the start of the play.

This ebook was created before the end of rehearsals and so may differ slightly from the play as performed.