TO LAURENCE POLLINGER

Graham returned to England at the beginning of March 1943 and was faced with an array of uncertainties concerning Vivien, Dorothy and his future as a writer. After a visit to his mother at Crowborough, his first order of business was to make sense of the stage production of Brighton Rock. Despite the presence of a young Richard Attenborough, whom he admired greatly, Graham found that Hermione Baddeley (1906–86), now best remembered as Mrs Cratchit in Scrooge! (1951), was eating up the scenery in the role of Ida. Worse still, the final script had omitted the key phrase in the novel.

C/O President’s Lodging,| Trinity College, | Oxford. |
March 4 [1943]

Dear Laurence,

Apropos of our telephone conversation this morning. I went to see Brighton Rock at Oxford on Tuesday & was horrified by certain changes: these seemed to me to ruin the play for the sake of allowing Hermione Baddeley to fling a heart throb to the back of the gallery. She is a very bad piece of miscasting: her performance is on the overacted level of a revue sketch & her grotesqueness is all wrong for the part – but that is beside the point. These are my quarrels with the production & unless Linnit¹⁴will agree to meet our wishes over (1) & (2) I must insist that my name be removed from all programmes & posters, & that no reference to me or my book be made in any publicity put out by the firm.

1. Certain passages have been added to Hermione Baddeley’s part to enable her to pull out an emotional stop – which she does with grotesque inefficiency. Not having the script, & my memory of so ineffective a production being a bit dim, I find it hard to particularise. To anyone visiting the production they are made obvious by a preliminary break in Miss Baddeley’s voice which sounds rather like a gargle & can obviously be heard at the back of the gallery. The passages generally refer to her desire to be a mother to Rose. One such heart throb occurs in Act. 2 Scene 2: the worst in Act 3 Scene 2. Here lines are spoken which destroy the whole point of the play. Presumably Linnit has never spotted the point, but the dramatist in his original version certainly did.¹⁵The idea is that Pinkie and Rose belong to a real world in which good & evil exist but that the interfering Ida belongs to a kind, artificial surface world in which there is no such thing as good & evil but only right & wrong. The dramatist brings this out several times in the attitude of Rose to Ida – though I suspect certain lines of importance have been cut. Now new lines have been inserted in Ida’s mouth in Act 3 Scene 2, when she tells Pinkie that he belongs to a small crooked perverted world which can’t hurt her – she belongs to the real world. The result is to give Hermione Baddeley another chance to gargle to the gallery, but makes the poor audience wonder what in hell the play’s about then. If they have any sense they won’t wonder for more than 50 nights.

2. The removal of the last scene – & the priest’s speech about – ‘the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God’ – makes the play more than ever pointless. Has this been removed in order to shorten the play – a case of Hamlet being shorter without the Prince of Denmark? We must have an explanation about this – I made an explicit condition of approving the script that the ending should be unchanged – & I am quite prepared to seek an injunction if I am not satisfied with Linnit’s explanation.

[…]

Changes were made to the script to meet Greene’s criticisms, and even though he was never happy with the production, he made sure that his royalties were paid and that his relatives had complimentary tickets.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 624