Interviews

Dancer and Choreographer. Frederick Ashton; Lilian Baylis; Benjamin Britten; The Cherry Orchard; Joan Cross; Sid Field; Margot Fonteyn; John Gielgud; Robert Helpmann; Vivien Leigh; Music Hall; Nadia Nerina; Laurence Olivier; Ballet Rambert; Maria Rambert; Sadlers Wells Ballet; Antony Tudor; Ninette de Valois; Ralph Vaughan Williams's works.

Conducted by Thomas Dymond on 17/07/06

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Interview continued...

TD: You’re also a choreographer and things like that, are there any other choreographers you remember working with who had a large influence on you, or do you remember the contemporaries of yourself?

LK: Oh choreographers! [laughs]  I suppose it’s my favourite subject because like Shakespeare you have to have playwrights with plays, and ballets you have to have choreographers.  The first lesson I ever did, on the 26 - I think it was, or a day before or a day after – of November 1954, I saw Tudor’s ballet called The Planets, and this was the one that really set him off, it set the town on fire.  I saw the first performance, it was absolutely fabulous, and the next day I did my first lesson with Anthony Tudor and he was a fascinating teacher. Then, when you were at Rambert, you graduated, but if you were a boy you didn’t graduate, you went straight into Rambert’s class because boys were at a premium, you see.  So my first day I had Tudor in the morning, Rambert in the late morning, so I had marvellous teachers! But Tudor, he was a great choreographer because he always had something different to say.  He wasn’t doing the same thing twice - except he did a few ballets that were about dancing, they were separate, they were sort of textbook studies but such a textbook: if you want to know about the Italian, French and Russian methods of ballet dancing, go and see Gala Performance, you can see it all, there it is, you don't have to read any words.  And so I had Tudor, and as a choreographer he was fascinating to work with, he was always going this way and that way and the other way, he could never get it right, you know, even when he did get it right he was always monkeying.  And of course he was the sort of stage manager at Rambert, so when scenery had to be painted, he’d say, ‘Sunday, we’ll paint the backcloths’, you see, so it was a seven day week with Ballet Rambert, none of which I would have had at Sadler’s Wells, so I was very lucky.

TD: Where was the Ballet Rambert based?

LK: In the Mercury Theatre in Ladbroke Road and it was a lovely little theatre, I think it sat something like 100 people but marvellous things were done, some of the masterpieces of the thirties were done there, Lilac Garden, Dark Elegies, we were actually doing A London Scene, The Planets, and de Valois’ Bar aux Folies Bergère, and so of course I worked with de Valois at the Rambert and Andre Howard - lovely choreographer, whose Fête étrange has just been revived at Covent Garden - Walter Gore, Frank Star, that’s the only names - oh, Wendy Toy of course did ballets for them.

TD: So was that quite a nice space to work in?

LK: Oh it was lovely, you can imagine, we went there in morning and we left late at night and you were never allowed to do nothing, you know, so I would be music man, I was put in charge of the records and the sheet music, that was one of my jobs, but you were always asked, go and take over in the box office for half an hour.  One thing that amused me no end was – well, amused me thinking about it after! - was when plays were on, because Ashley Dukes was a playwright and he had plays for poets going at the Mercury Theatre so it had plays and ballet and plays and ballet, so even if there was a play on it didn’t appear on Thursday because that was the ballet night and Sundays of course it was always ballet, and so you were always doing something. And one of the things I noticed, being Kersley - working class Kersley: you always have to remember when you’re considering me that I was conceived, born and bred on the dole and therefore I was quite a different kettle of fish to all the other middle class people around and they treated me as such - but it had benefits, like when they were doing plays and they had a break in the morning, then someone had to dish them out, look after them, and we’d go into the lovely bar that had wonderful ballet pictures and marvellous drink - Ashley was a great man for drink you see - and the boys would go and discuss how the rehearsal was going and it was so strange - because as I say the boys would discuss how the rehearsal was going - I didn’t twig what the difference was at the time, but if you were a man then you went out with the other men into the bar and you had drinks, you see.  If you were a girl or sort of… then you sat at the bottom of the stairs and made your own tea and coffee and chatted. And the funny thing was that the men were… when Ben Britten was doing music, he would go with the men because he was a man, but Rupert Doon, who was producing the whole play, would sit and chatter with the boys drinking coffee because he was a girl, or an honorary girl, as you might say; and when Auden and Ishell were doing a play there Auden would go and drink with the boys but Ishell would go and tell stories about his Sally Bowles - or whatever her real name was - and that was quite a lesson in the modes of people before the war.  Now there is all sorts of men’s lib and it’s different but in those days you were a man, you could have had a girlfriend or a boyfriend, or you were a girl and you had a boyfriend or a husband, who did as a husband.  It was interesting.  Of course, I used to go between the two, I’d go and serve the drinks out and get whatever Ashley Dukes wanted, and then I’d go and take nibbles to the boys who the caretaker’s wife adored, so I served them, and they were there making up their camp coffee – have you ever seen that?

TD: Yes. I have.

LK: [laughs] It was lovely and very entertaining.

TD: It was quite interesting... in what you were saying about working the ticket… doing ticket office and things like that. If you’re part of the company are you involved in actually just running the theatre as well as dancing?

LK: Oh no, doing whatever came, it was like that, we were just asked, like… One day I was sent, ‘Kersley, go and take some tea up for the guests’.  So I went down to the caretaker and got tea and so on, on a tray and came upstairs for two guests and Rambert - Russian tea for Rambert of course, but ordinary tea for the guests and biscuits and so on.  I came through the door and who should be sitting there waiting to discuss terms with Rambert but Lilian Baylis and Ninette de Valois, and as I came through the door Baylis said, ‘What are you doing here, boy?’, you see.  So I said, ‘Well, I came here because Miss de Valois has no facilities for boys at the Wells so Fred Ashton said I’d better come here, so I came.’  Baylis immediately turned around to de Valois and said, ‘Is that true you’ve no facilities for boys?’.  And so de Valois said yes.  ‘Well, we must alter that.’  And a few months later Michael Soames went to the Wells, and became their leading man eventually, of course.

TD: Lilian Baylis, she sounds quite formidable, was she?

LK: Oh, she was lovely.  She was a real mum.  She ran the theatre, the only thing she did was she ran the theatre to keep people away from pubs and wife beating, and the demon drink - you could never get drink in her theatres (alcoholic drink, that is).  What she did was she ran the theatre so that to keep the working class off the streets, they could pay sixpence or fourpence and go up in the gallery and be entertained, and that was one of the reasons why she was delighted when she got ballet, because she’d come up in one interval or the other, depending on when the intervals were at the Vic and at the Wells, she’d come and ‘her people’, she used to call them, would come and chat to her, and that’s all she was interested in, keeping them off the roads, fetching their wives, arranging babysitters, all that sort of thing, but making sure that they never had time to go to a pub and had no inclination to beat their wives up because they were also human beings, which wives weren’t generally then, but Miss Baylis, of course we used to crowd around her and chatter and we always knew which interval she was coming and so we used to crowd around her.  One night, the best show they ever did at the Wells was Vaughan Williams’ Hugh the Drover and Vaughan Williams’ ballet Job was fabulous you see.  Anyway, Miss Baylis came up the stairs and looked and said, ‘Where’s my people?’, because there couldn’t have been as much as 20 people were crowding around, that’s all that was left of ‘my people’, and one of the clowns [laughs] said, ‘Don’t worry, Miss Baylis, it’s full downstairs.’  So she charged down the steps at the side of the amphitheatre, looked over, she turned around, marched up the stairs and as she turned the corner she said, ‘We’re not having this.’  And the only seven performances of that fabulous programme which would have filled the house time and time again downstairs, that’s all, it was taken off, ‘my people don’t like it’.  But that was Baylis. She was lovely.

Interview continued...

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