Putting on an act
A post-war visit to NZ by two British theatre stars is a prime set-up for Graeme Lay’s latest.
LARRY AND VIV, by Graeme Lay (Renaissance Publishing, $35)
‘You should be tryin’ to write some historical stuff,” the marvellous and muchmissed John McIntyre of Kilbirnie’s Children’s Bookshop told me a couple of decades ago.
When I protested that I knew nothing about 19th-century New Zealand, John grunted (he had a great grunt). “Far as kids are concerned, history started 20 years back.”
Make that 70-80 years for adult readers and you get to the era of Graeme Lay’s new novel. The Auckland author has been writing such fiction for years. Most of it has been set around the era of Cook’s explorations, but now he skips ahead to the decade just after World War II.
It’s one of those plot lines so instantly fruitful that you wonder why nobody else seems to have tried it. In 1948, the UK government decided to reward faithful Australasian colonials for their war efforts by sending out some theatrical luminaries on a tour. Said colonials might have hoped for Gracie Fields. Instead, they got Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, the world’s most famous husband and wife stars of stage and screen.
Young but bruised Jed Winscombe, ex-conscientious objector and wannabe playwright, gets a stagehand’s job with the Old Vic Company and follows them through seven months of Shakespeare, Sheridan and Thornton Wilder in theatres across Australia and Aotearoa, watching the Oliviers’ on-stage presence dazzle and their off-stage relationship dim. Sir L clenches his teeth and fist at Lady O’s incorrigible lateness and refusal to go on stage without her red shoes. She fancies a younger actor, an ex-rugger player no less. She’s notably unsympathetic when Larry stuffs up his knee.
In New Zealand, local luminaries nudge into the plot. Sir L receives stories from waspish Frank Sargeson and poems from Rex Fairburn. Sargeson also critiques Jed’s plays. Beer baron and former Auckland mayor Ernest Davis poses pompously.
Young Jed is the plot’s real engine. He’s vulnerable, eager, realistically ambitious, entertainingly hormonal – as willing Janice of Brisbane and sweet Natalia of the North Shore can attest. You’ll be pleased to see him end on an upbeat.
Research has always been a strong point of Lay’s historical fiction.
It’s the hidden dovetail type: holds things together, hardly ever lets them jam. Just a few times here, there’s a whiff of lecture notes, but mostly it’s informative without being too overt. I never knew that “ingratiating little” Danny Kaye had a crush on Sir L, or that Clark Gable had dreadful dentures and matching body odour.
Lay is a steady, succinct stylist, even if some of his people do speak in impeccably modulated cadences. Maybe that’s the theatre world coming through. He gathers and controls a big cast with some memorable secondary roles. Don’t miss Obergruppenführer Elsie Beyer, the stage manager.
The epilogue tells us that Jed became “a leading light during the golden age of radio drama in NZ, the 1950s and 60s”. I searched for the guy online and couldn’t find a trace. Is he concealed somewhere, or is Lay carrying his fiction through to the very end? Whatever, I believed completely in the young chap, and that’s another tribute to the author. ▮
Sir L clenches his teeth and fist at Lady O’s incorrigible lateness and refusal to go on stage without her red shoes.