by “I think you have a great talent for love, and you want to refrigerate it and spread it… because it was stuck before. And if you go on like that, you will kill him. And… I think that’s one talent worth dying to hide.”
So says a character in The Voice of the Turtle, a 1943 play by John Van Druten, which I am currently directing for Jermyn Street Theater in London. This is a rare revival by one of the theatre’s forgotten voices, but his name may be familiar. That’s because he wrote the 1951 play I Am A Camera – based on Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye To Berlin – which was the basis of the book for the musical Cabaret, which is a huge success in the West End and on Broadway. present.
Most people, however, would be hard-pressed to name any other work of his. But from the 1930s to the 1950s, he was a renowned playwright. Highlights include the San Francisco immigrant family saga I Remember Mama (1944) in which Marlon Brando made his Broadway debut; and the contemporary magic comedy Bell, Book and Candle (1950), later filmed with James Stewart and Kim Novak.
And then there’s The Voice of the Turtle. Set in New York in 1943, it focuses on Sally Middleton – a brilliant young actress turned Broadway producer married to an older Broadway producer – who has successfully given up sex and vowed to focus on her career. When Sally’s friend and fellow actress Olive Lashbrooke discovers that an old flame is home on vacation, she ditches her current beau, Sergeant Bill Page, and leaves him in Sally’s company. Over a weekend, Sally has to choose between staying cool and detached, or allowing herself to be vulnerable again.
The original production ran for 1,557 performances – making it one of the longest-running plays in Broadway history – before being adapted into a film starring Ronald Reagan. But now it, and Van Druten’s other work, are essentially unknown. so, what happened?
Although often thought of as an American writer, Van Druten was born in London in June 1901. His father, Wilhelmus – a Dutch banker with an English wife, Eva – wanted his son to study law, so John qualified as solicitor in 1923 and, for the next three years, lectured on legal history at the University of Wales.
While in Aberystwyth, however, Van Druten drew on his time as a teacher to write Young Woodley (aged 24) – which tells the story of a teenage rector at a boarding school who falls in love with his headmaster’s wife, with human life. variable consequences. This idea was so controversial that although the play was performed in New York in 1925, it was banned by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office (which censored plays in this country until 1968). But when it was staged privately in London, the production was so enthusiastically received that it was accepted by the Lord Chamberlain and the play ran in the West End at the Savoy Theater in the late 1920s.
Meanwhile, Van Druten abandoned the law and achieved considerable success in New York and London. He was also an acclaimed director who staged the original Broadway production of The King and I, among other shows.
But then came the decline. His work was seen as too light, and his work became, for many, the dramatic New York Times critic Walter Kerr of I Am A Camera: “Me no Leica”.
Van Druten himself anticipated this fall from grace: in his Playwright At Work (1955), he admits that “theatre is short-lived, and plays are a perishable commodity”. And that’s what happened: his success was fleeting. Along with Noël Coward, Terence Rattigan and Somerset Maugham, his work was sidelined by the “Angry Young Men” theater revolution at the Royal Court led by John Osborne. But as with the work of Coward, Rattigan and Maugham, Van Druten’s work is well worth reassessing.
I first came across The Voice of the Turtle about 15 years ago. Reading about the play’s Broadway success, I was expecting light comedy and a well-made classic drama. And while it is yes well done – beautifully constructed, in fact – I was surprised to find how new the dialogue is, for example in this exchange about bumping into an old:
SALLY: Was it terrible… see her again?
BILL: No. Not after the first minute. And that was funny, because… last night in the restaurant he put me down, remembering it all. And then the moment we said hello, the corner of my mouth suddenly stopped turning, and I found myself looking at her and wondering what it was all about. I do not know When I stopped loving her – I didn’t stop thinking about her, I guess, and I didn’t realize that … until tonight.
Under the surface of the bright humor is the tug of sadness and journal; and a simple layout is developed in such a beautiful, cheerful and, above all, sincere way. Although the context is wartime America, this theme transcends time. It’s still a comedy, but one steeped in emotion, nostalgia and loss, with a woman at the center. In other plays too, Van Druten revealed a contemporary stance – such as London Wall (1931), focusing on sexual harassment in the workplace, and Flowers of the Forest (1934), a love story with time slips similar to JB Priestley.
The Turtle’s Voice also represents love in wartime, adding an extra layer of vulnerability and “seize the moment”, perhaps best expressed in that celebrated line from WH Auden’s poem, September 1, 1939 (written in New York) : “We must love each other or die.”
Love is of course a common theme, but for Van Druten it had a special meaning. Like Coward and Rattigan and Maugham, Van Druten was a gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal. Each of them hid their own experiences in their work under the veneer of acceptable, heterosexual love. Just think, for example, of Rattigan drawing on his doomed relationship with actor Kenny Morgan for Hester Collyer’s mock distress in The Deep Blue Sea.
Similarly, Van Druten juxtaposes his experiences with the tentative explorations of Sally and Bill in The Voice of the Turtle. The result is that there is something codified in the sensitivity, the reluctance with which these two characters express each other’s feelings. But also something bold in the way Sally, in particular, invites Bill to stay; and something very passionate in the way she and Bill express their wishes.
As for finding love for himself, in the late 1930s and early 1940s Van Druten was in a relationship with Carter Lodge, the manager of the AJC Ranch that the British actor Auriol Lee, the playwright and Lodge bought together in the Coachella Valley, Southern California and named. in their wake – with Lee’s involvement undoubtedly enabling the two men to live together without issue. When that relationship ended, Lodge continued to look after Van Druten’s finances and, when the writer died of heart failure in 1957 aged 56, he left the ranch and the rights to his work, Among them The Voice of the Turtle, to Lodge.
This act of generosity shows how much Lodge meant to Van Druten. And yet it is difficult to know if the writer ever found love in the way he wanted – secrecy was required due to the attitude of society at the time, and, unlike Isherwood, Van Druten’s diaries were never published. Furthermore, in Playwright at Work, he notes the restrictions under which he lived and writes: “A play that praises homosexuality, or would take a tolerant view of it (not accepting it as a form of illness). That might not last forever.” But it is clear that Van Druten, in his work, explored the search for love with a sensitivity that, 80 years later, makes a play like The Voice of the Turtle worth revisiting.
The Voice of the Turtle runs at the Jermyn Street Theater from June 27-July 20, jermynstreettheatre.com
