A Ghost in the Green Room

The subtitle of J. B. Priestley’s Jenny Villiers – ‘A Story of the Theatre’ – was what caught my attention when I came across it in a dilapidated barn in West Sussex, where the cooing of pigeons accompanied my search round the freezing and guano-spattered interior. It turned out to be an enchanting read, depicting a vanished world of call boys, live orchestras and tea matinées, when acting was honed as a craft, actors were respected for their talent, and theatres large and small flourished in virtually every town in Britain.

I already knew that theatre had featured in two of Priestley’s novels – The Good Companions (1929) and Lost Empires (1965) – and that many of his stage plays were still performed – the National Theatre’s production of An Inspector Calls toured the world and has since been remounted at regular intervals. It was intriguing, then, to discover that Jenny Villiers had been written both as a novel and as a play. The play was put on at the Bristol Old Vic in 1946. The following year it was published as a novel. J. B. Priestley’s long, prolific and successful career spanned the twentieth century. Born in Bradford in 1894, he wavered in his teens between ‘vague careers in music and acting’, until he ‘switched to [his] writing self’ and found his métier. During the 1920s he moved to London. ‘It was easier for a young writer in the early Twenties to earn a living than it is today,’ and throughout this decade and the following one, he reviewed and wrote critical articles for the London Mercury, Spectator, Saturday Review, Bookman, Daily News and Daily Chronicle. During the Second World War, he wrote and presented fondly remembered broadcasts on England and English life for the BBC, given in his distinctive Northern tones, which ran until ‘a legend grew that as a broadcaster I was “difficult”’ and he was taken off the air. As a playwright his output was extraordinary, and he wrote fast: ‘the serious efforts in ten days. Comedies actually took more time and gave me the most trouble.’ In a wonderful vignette of his fellow Northerners, he compared them to Southern audiences: ‘In London especially people giggle and guffaw too easily . . . I always preferred to open plays in the North, where they sat with tightened lips and narrowed eyes grimly awaiting their money’s worth.’ While he may have disliked his audiences, Priestley adored the theatre and its performers. He used to queue outside the gallery door of the Theatre Royal Bradford and watch the actors on their way to the stage door (this in 1911 when he was 17), and gaze in awe at the ‘symbolic figure of our species, creatures who dream like demi-gods but know that they must soon die and be forgotten’. By the early 1970s he had written his last play, in collaboration with his wife, Jacquetta Hawkes, and, in one of  his last non-fiction books, noted that ‘the Theatre had gone into a decline as widely popular entertainment’: with the loss of ‘the old circuits’ huge numbers of theatres had literally vanished. Jenny Villiers is a gentle ghost story, and not of the clanking chains and screaming nun variety. It moves in time between 1946 and 1846, the conduit being Martin Cheveril, a middle-aged writer disillusioned with the theatre. In both time-frames, a play is about to open. Most of the action takes place in the Green Room of the Theatre Royal, Barton Spa, a theatre on the Northern circuit, where Martin’s new play, significantly named The Glass Door – ‘a serious attempt to write about the world as it is’ – will open prior to a London run. Martin is reluctant to rewrite the third act, which to members of his company is too ‘cynical and bitter’, and will almost certainly alienate their audiences. His stubbornness upsets his ex-lover Pauline, particularly when he tells her that he doesn’t ‘think the Theatre, as we know it, will last much longer. The old witchcraft’s just about worn out.’ However, his curiosity is piqued by the possessions of a young actress, a member in 1846 of Mr Ludlow’s stock company, whose gloves, a ‘little watercolour sketch of her as Viola’ and an account of her short life are displayed in a glass case in the Green Room. The lassitude Martin feels and the medication given to this ‘tired, sick man’ by his concerned doctor cause what he at first believes are ‘hallucinations’, brought on by a glove having ‘jumped out of the case by itself’ – a literal throwing down of the gauntlet. As these continue Martin, in his fugue state in a Green Room which changes and yet remains the same, comes to realize that he is seeing exactly what happened to the promising and lovely Jenny Villiers. It would be unfair to spoil things by giving away too much, but suffice to say the 1846 tale which unfolds before Martin’s wondering eye takes place in ‘that queer, remote, old Theatre of the Forties’ and ends in a double tragedy. The ‘thick curtain of a hundred years’ rises and falls upon scenes in the life and death of Jenny and afterwards, with Martin observing it all from his armchair, as if watching a film. It intrigues and sometimes frightens him, and he falls in love with the shadowy Jenny but is powerless to change her fate. Separated by a century, the Cheveril and Ludlow companies contain similar characters and counterparts. In each there is a kindly theatre manager and an elderly actor who has played with the best – the earlier one with Kean, Kemble and Mrs Glover, the later with Irving, Ellen Terry and Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Both are in the twilight of their careers, with ‘the same battered humorous look and the same fruity accent’. Both have the same concerns: in 1846, ‘the Theatre’s dying . . . the old spirit’s gone’; in 1946, ‘the Theatre’s finished and we might as well admit it’. The only remotely macabre figure in all this is Walter Kettle, the stage manager in 1846, ‘a thin grotesque-looking fellow’, whose unrequited love for Miss Villiers is more convincing than the love scenes between the male and female juvenile leads. The novel closes with Martin falling in love once again with the Theatre’s ability to live ‘as humanity lives . . . because it’s for ever dying and being born’. There is a postscript to the ghostly goings-on in Jenny Villiers. When I looked at the other Priestley books I’d bought from the barn that day I discovered, tucked between the pages of one of them, an order of service for the funeral of Robert Lynd, Priestley’s editor and one of his dearest friends. The eulogy was given by J. B. Priestley. Coincidence?  I like to think not.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 52 © Sarah Crowden 2016