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Introduction The great photographer Angus McBean has stage performers of this era an enduring power been celebrated over the past fifty years chiefly that carried far beyond the confines of their for his romantic portraiture and playful use of playhouses. surrealism. There is some reason. He iconised Certainly, in a single session with a Yankee Vivien Leigh fully three years before she became Cleopatra in 1945, he transformed the image of Scarlett O’Hara and his most breathtaking image Stratford overnight, conjuring from the Prospero’s was adapted for her first appearance in Gone cell of his small Covent Garden studio the dazzle with the Wind. He lit the touchpaper for Audrey of the West End into the West Midlands. (It is Hepburn’s career when he picked her out of a significant that the then Shakespeare Memorial chorus line and half-buried her in a fake desert Theatre began transferring its productions to advertise sun-lotion. Moreover he so pleased to London shortly afterwards.) In succeeding The Beatles when they came to his studio that seasons, acknowledged since as the Stratford he went on to immortalise them on their first stage’s ‘renaissance’, his black-and-white magic LP cover as four mop-top gods smiling down continued to endow this rebirth with a glamour from a glass Olympus that was actually just a that was crucial in its further rise to not just stairwell in Soho. national but international pre-eminence. However, McBean (the name is pronounced Even as his photographs were created, to rhyme with thane) also revolutionised British McBean’s Shakespeare became ubiquitous. theatre photography in the late 1930s. He himself Large display prints of his lustrous close- thought that his greatest achievement lay in his ups of the heroes and heroines crowded the photographs of Shakespeare productions, most foyers and stairwells of the Stratford theatre; particularly those created during his 17-year their smaller versions, along with his almost association with the company at Stratford from cinemascopic stage panoramas, filled weighty 1945. He was right. Festival programmes, which could now be billed As a recorder of Shakespeare Angus McBean as souvenirs; dozens of different McBean images is simply unequalled. He photographed every were sold as postcards by the thousand to be play in the canon, the most popular ones so dispersed over the world; periodicals and annuals many times that his final Bardic tally topped stuffed with his Stratford photographs jostled 160 productions. The 90 of these he shot at each other wherever books were sold; even the Stratford by themselves yielded nearly 3,500 restaurant overlooking the Avon had its adverts images. Nevertheless there is far more than sheer shot by him. Most spectacularly of all he created numbers to his Shakespearean pre-eminence. for one SMT ‘centenary’ a photographic mural McBean’s ‘genius’ – the word applied to him by running round the theatre’s circle foyer which his admirer Lord Snowdon, who, ironically, had measured 140 feet long and 8 feet high. usurped his position as the most fashionable Now, almost six decades on from his last theatre photographer just before marrying into commissions for the then newly retitled Royal royalty – was to endow the hitherto staid portrayal Shakespeare Company, the postwar years of its of Shakespearean acting with an immediacy and predecessor at Stratford simply have to be viewed excitement that can only be called sex-appeal. through the camera eye of Angus McBean. At It helped that McBean, a devourer of theatre last, his glorious mid-1950s addition of colour to from boyhood onwards, could never tire of his sessions at Stratford can be fully appreciated Shakespeare: the romance of kings and queens, for the first time: the poor quality of newsprint heroes and villains, magicians and clowns colour reproduction had inhibited wider perfectly suited a man who practised his own circulation of his vivid images when they were form of parade and sorcery. He was also fortunate being created. indeed that he fell into theatre photography How fortuitous it was, therefore, that such a by accident just as a seemingly golden age of perfect match of theatre and photographer began Angus McBean’s self-portrait British acting was beginning. However his just as each needed a lifeline. Christmas card, 1954 own contribution was to give the outstanding 3 INTRODUCTION prologue understandably given competing distractions of the celebration of victory in Europe and the By the time the Second World War was ending in calling of a General Election. So in late June John Europe, Stratford appeared a drab backwater to Goodwin, young assistant to the theatre’s ‘press the mainstream of Shakespearean productions. representative’, Tom English, suggested to his For all the SMT’s brave new building, opened in boss that they might just have Miss Luce specially 1932 to the modernist design of Elisabeth Scott, photographed by Angus McBean. When English and its employment of radical director/designer contacted the studio, which McBean had set up Theodore Komisarjevsky, it was clear that the only a few months previously in Endell Street just greatest Shakespeare performances of the 1930s and off Covent Garden Market, the photographer could early 1940s were taking place beside the Thames not believe his luck. He certainly needed some: in or on film sets. Talents honed in the redoubtable the previous decade McBean, bald but impressively Lilian Baylis’s Old Vic – Edith Evans, John Gielgud, russet-bearded and who still spoke (belying Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Peggy Ashcroft, the patronym of his only Scottish grandparent) Michael Redgrave, Alec Guinness and Anthony with the slight Welsh accent of his native Quayle – found ready outlet thereafter in the West Monmouthshire, had experienced extraordinary End for roles by the Bard without any need to tread professional triumph followed by devastating the boards beside the Avon. While Olivier had not personal humiliation. only transferred his Old Vic Henry V of seven years After moving to London aged 20 in 1924 before magnificently to the screen in 1944 but also, McBean had gradually become known in during his own co-directorship with Richardson of theatrical circles for his two ways of making faces: the Old Vic company, had just given his famously dramatically posed and lit portrait photographs, corvine Richard III which would eventually follow which initially he took in the front room of his Henry V and his 1937 Hamlet on to film. family’s suburban bungalow and printed in its Accordingly the Stratford theatre administration bathroom, and magnificent masks constructed decided to appoint Sir Barry Jackson, adventurous of papier mâché or plaster. John Gielgud, just a founder of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre few months his senior, could still recall fifty years three decades before and founder with Bernard later the sensations that McBean caused with his Shaw of the Malvern Festival, as next artistic elaborate costumes and masks at riotous Old Vic director of its own annual season. However his Balls at the Albert Hall which raised money for the predecessor, the actor-manager Robert Atkins, Baylis classical repertoires – and that McBean, who had already had the inspiration to engage Claire seemed to be able to make anything, had had his Luce, the blonde American film star and sometime first paid theatre job in Gielgud’s 1932/3 West End dance partner of Fred Astaire who had become hit Richard of Bordeaux crafting two intricate metal a wartime Forces’ Favourite after she chose to dioramas of a Gothic townscape and the cast’s remain performing in England, as lead actress for ‘medieval’ shoes. the 1945 season. Her performances as Beatrice, Over the next few years commissions for masks Cleopatra, Viola and Mistress Ford were well and props for various West End shows followed received and the US picture weekly Life even ran a which earned McBean considerable praise. spread on her residency in Stratford complete with Actors, dancers and debutantes also trekked in some production photographs and the convenient increasing numbers for portraits to his West Acton fiction that she was staying in the town’s venerable bungalow, among them Stratford’s 1932 Prince Shrieve’s House. The production pictures had been Hal, Gyles Isham, Diana Gould and Guinevere taken, following the theatre’s policy of favouring Grant who became respectively baronet Sir Gyles the home-grown, by the Stratford photographer of Lamport Hall, Lady Menuhin, wife to the Tom Holte, whose chief trade otherwise was great violinist, and Lady Tilney, Mrs Thatcher’s snapping tourist views and old buildings. ‘wardrobe mistress’. (Piquantly, Isham embarked The publicity surrounding Luce nevertheless on a necessarily discreet 12-year relationship with did not fill the Memorial Theatre, perhaps a young designer, John Lear, who was a lodger 4 SHAKESPEARE BY McBEAN in the McBean bungalow.) The reason was clear composer Ivor Novello asked McBean to make for those whose faces were their fortune. This him some technically rather taxing masks for photographer, who had a mantra ‘Everyone wants a Regency-set frivol, The Happy Hypocrite, for to be beautiful’, delivered exactly that: his mask- which the star had chosen as his onstage love maker’s understanding of physiognomy made interest 22-year-old Vivien Leigh, whose beauty him able to sculpt his sitters’ faces with light and had a few months previously caused a sensation shade to glorious effect when his portraits were when she made her West End debut. Novello was developed on silver-coated photographic paper. so much struck with the reference photographs McBean images began to appear in the ‘shinies’ which McBean made, along with a usual life (as the weekly society picture magazines were cast, in order to model the masks that he invited then known) after The Sketch used as a full-page their creator to take production shots at the frontispiece his self-portrait posed with his own traditional photo-call a few days before opening articulated puppet of Mae West in her Diamond night alongside the long-established Stage Photo Lil costume.

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