Rattigan’s
Ross
at the Haymarket and the Lunts in Peter Brook’s production of Dürrenmatt’s
The Visit
at the Royalty. Maggie had instantly signed up to the élite. The
News Chronicle
described her as ‘cool, crisp and wonderfully matter-of-fact as Daisy, the last woman in the world to join the rhinoceros ranks’. Maggie had little rehearsal time with Welles, but remembers being fascinated by the size of his feet. Olivier was suffering from gout at the time and Maggie set the pattern for their warily competitive relationship by sitting on the gouty leg during rehearsal.
Levin in the
Express
admired the way Maggie tamed her ‘natural razor-sharpness … into the simple, consoling girl she should be’ and
The Stage
averred that she was ‘gradually developing into an actress of distinction’. But
The Times
thought that she failed in the final long duet with Berenger: ‘Her coming to look after him in a world beset by rhinoceroses is all too casually presented to us as a matter of comparative unimportance, so that her eventual desertion does not shock us as it should. Miss Smith’s charm and lightness are not quite all that are needed here.’ This idea that Maggie might be out of her depth in serious stage drama was one she never completely shook off, though there is ample evidence from Maggie Wylie onwards – through Desdemona and Hedda Gabler to her blistering performances in Edward Albee in the 1990s – to contradict it.
The force of her comic and indeed sexual presence certainly impressed Olga Franklin in the
Daily Mail
, who reviewed a television adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s three-act comedy
Penelope
. Maggie played a doctor’s wife who wins back an errant spouse by affecting indifference. Franklin said that the production’s one weakness was that ‘the beautiful Maggie, dressed to the nines with more sex appeal in her little finger than Monroe and Bardot in the nude, made it seem hopelessly unconvincing that her doctor husband should prefer another woman’.
The ripening of Maggie coincided with her appearance in Beverley’s crucial second play. After the première of
Strip the Willow
in Nottingham, a new pre-London tour was presented in Cambridge, Newcastle and Brighton in September. Maggie was cast as Kathy Dawson, a politician’s mistress sheltering from an imminent nuclear attack in a decaying West Country folly, along with an archaeologist (played by Barrie Ingham) and a private detective (Michael Bates, who had also been in
Rhinoceros
). Beverley had inverted the Judgement of Paris myth by requiring Kathy to choose the man with whom she would begin procreation after the bombs had fallen in the first interval. For one reason or another, Maggie spent much of the play wearing very few clothes.
Maggie’s decorative qualities were politely referred to on the road, but
The Times
, venturing forth to the Hippodrome at Golders Green, last stop before the West End, ran a review under the unpromising headline ‘Britain Wiped Out in Comedy’s First Act’, while the
Daily Telegraph
killed kindly, but killed nonetheless, with ‘Horror Comedy a Bit Flat’. Beverley wrote his personal tribute to Maggie in the form of a stage direction at Kathy’s entrance: ‘She is about twenty-five and very beautiful. As elegant and sophisticated as a top international model. A great sense of fun. A marvellous girl.’ Binkie Beaumont of H. M. Tennent, who had gone to Golders Green at Beverley’s invitation, told him that the West End did not like ironic comedy but that ‘the girl is very, very good’. So good, in fact, that he started planning her West End career while putting a stop, for the moment, to Beverley’s:
Strip the Willow
never made it onto Shaftesbury Avenue.
Also in the cast was a young Australian actor, Michael Blakemore, who, thirty years later, would direct Maggie in
Lettice and Lovage
. He played an American soldier on security patrol after the fall-out.
It was an odd play, derived from
Ross
at the Haymarket and the Lunts in Peter Brook’s production of Dürrenmatt’s
The Visit
at the Royalty. Maggie had instantly signed up to the élite. The
News Chronicle
described her as ‘cool, crisp and wonderfully matter-of-fact as Daisy, the last woman in the world to join the rhinoceros ranks’. Maggie had little rehearsal time with Welles, but remembers being fascinated by the size of his feet. Olivier was suffering from gout at the time and Maggie set the pattern for their warily competitive relationship by sitting on the gouty leg during rehearsal.
Levin in the
Express
admired the way Maggie tamed her ‘natural razor-sharpness … into the simple, consoling girl she should be’ and
The Stage
averred that she was ‘gradually developing into an actress of distinction’. But
The Times
thought that she failed in the final long duet with Berenger: ‘Her coming to look after him in a world beset by rhinoceroses is all too casually presented to us as a matter of comparative unimportance, so that her eventual desertion does not shock us as it should. Miss Smith’s charm and lightness are not quite all that are needed here.’ This idea that Maggie might be out of her depth in serious stage drama was one she never completely shook off, though there is ample evidence from Maggie Wylie onwards – through Desdemona and Hedda Gabler to her blistering performances in Edward Albee in the 1990s – to contradict it.
The force of her comic and indeed sexual presence certainly impressed Olga Franklin in the
Daily Mail
, who reviewed a television adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s three-act comedy
Penelope
. Maggie played a doctor’s wife who wins back an errant spouse by affecting indifference. Franklin said that the production’s one weakness was that ‘the beautiful Maggie, dressed to the nines with more sex appeal in her little finger than Monroe and Bardot in the nude, made it seem hopelessly unconvincing that her doctor husband should prefer another woman’.
The ripening of Maggie coincided with her appearance in Beverley’s crucial second play. After the première of
Strip the Willow
in Nottingham, a new pre-London tour was presented in Cambridge, Newcastle and Brighton in September. Maggie was cast as Kathy Dawson, a politician’s mistress sheltering from an imminent nuclear attack in a decaying West Country folly, along with an archaeologist (played by Barrie Ingham) and a private detective (Michael Bates, who had also been in
Rhinoceros
). Beverley had inverted the Judgement of Paris myth by requiring Kathy to choose the man with whom she would begin procreation after the bombs had fallen in the first interval. For one reason or another, Maggie spent much of the play wearing very few clothes.
Maggie’s decorative qualities were politely referred to on the road, but
The Times
, venturing forth to the Hippodrome at Golders Green, last stop before the West End, ran a review under the unpromising headline ‘Britain Wiped Out in Comedy’s First Act’, while the
Daily Telegraph
killed kindly, but killed nonetheless, with ‘Horror Comedy a Bit Flat’. Beverley wrote his personal tribute to Maggie in the form of a stage direction at Kathy’s entrance: ‘She is about twenty-five and very beautiful. As elegant and sophisticated as a top international model. A great sense of fun. A marvellous girl.’ Binkie Beaumont of H. M. Tennent, who had gone to Golders Green at Beverley’s invitation, told him that the West End did not like ironic comedy but that ‘the girl is very, very good’. So good, in fact, that he started planning her West End career while putting a stop, for the moment, to Beverley’s:
Strip the Willow
never made it onto Shaftesbury Avenue.
Also in the cast was a young Australian actor, Michael Blakemore, who, thirty years later, would direct Maggie in
Lettice and Lovage
. He played an American soldier on security patrol after the fall-out.
It was an odd play, derived from
Similar Books
