I look back to the year of 1958 with nostalgia and delight. I was in my second year as an undergraduate in Cambridge, living a life of hitherto unimagined privilege and freedom, surrounded by new friends, new ideas and beautiful buildings – buildings to which I gave scant attention, regarding some of the most celebrated architectural views in Europe merely as a short cut to a college rehearsal room. My social life centred on the Amateur Dramatic Club. I was in love with Cambridge theatre. I loved my studies, but I loved the theatre more.
Cambridge was at that time a hothouse of dramatic activity and talent. The literary scene was still transfixed by the inhibiting spell of the great Dr Leavis, but the ADC Theatre and the Marlowe Society had recently been revitalised by Peter Hall and John Barton , two lastingly influential directors, and my contemporaries included Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi, Eleanor Bron, Corin Redgrave and Clive Swift. I fell in love with Clive in my first year while I was playing an Ibsen ingénue and he a pompous vicar in Pillars of the Community. His part was unsympathetic, his performance brilliant. I watched everything he did with amazement and admiration.
In the following year, the highlight of my brief theatrical career, Clive invited me to play Electra in his production of Sartre's The Flies. This was his first (and last) attempt to take on the role of director. I agreed at once, of course, as Electra is a showy and heavily tragic part with lots of lines and some dancing about in a white dress. But in my arrogant youth I took against the authorised translation, which was indeed full of unplayable phrases like, "Well I never" and, "The devil take you," and offered to re-translate it myself, which I did. It wasn't difficult, but I can't now say whether it was any good. We had to get permission from Sartre's agent to use it, and he didn't veto our efforts. Samuel Beckett (whose Waiting for Godot had just been introduced to English audiences by Peter Hall) was much trickier about amateur and indeed professional productions of his work. Sartre clearly didn't care.
Sartre's play reworks the Electra myth from Aeschylus and Euripides, but we knew, or thought we knew, that it was based on the activities of the French resistance in Paris during the war. We also knew that it was existential. Existentialism was fashionable in England in the 1950s, and we all read Sartre and parroted the view that "Existence precedes essence." Dadie Rylands, the ageing but still cherubic protégé of Bloomsbury and the guru of Shakespeare verse speaking, could be heard to mutter, "Existence precedes essence? Nonsense, dear boy. Love precedes hate, love precedes hate."
We quoted Sartre and Camus, and more visibly we adopted the fashions of the Parisian Left Bank, where some of us used to hang about in the sidewalk cafés in the vacation, hoping to glimpse Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir. The men smoked Gauloises, the women sported Juliette Gréco hairstyles, and we all wore the cheap and becoming uniform of black sweaters with polo necks.
We were fortunate, in our 1959 production of The Flies, to have as our leading man an outstanding embodiment of existential style in the person of the extremely handsome Richard Marquand, son of Labour MP Hilary Marquand. Richard looked the part to perfection – rugged, slightly scowling, charming, romantic, a touch of the James Dean or Marlon Brando. He was also a fine performer. He gave an excellent Orestes, and I rejoiced as his incestuously inclined sister Electra, intent on murdering our stepfather Aegisthus, played with gloomy panache by Tom Rosenthal. Tom was a great thespian in his early days. I never saw his Jew of Malta, which was a year before my time, but it is still spoken of with reverence by those who did. He later became the successful managing director of Thames & Hudson, Secker & Warburg and other eminent publishing companies.
Read Margaret Drabble's full piece at The Observer.
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