HAS Interview

The Hampstead Authors' Society

Zsuzsanna Ardó: Plucking Music from Hills, Clouds, and Women –

In conversation with Peter Sutton about his play, Elgar and Alice.

Zsuzsanna Ardó: What triggered Malvern painter Catherine Moody and the actor Edward Hardwicke’s request that you write a play about Elgar, the composer? How detailed was the brief?

Peter Sutton: 2007 is the 150th Anniversary of Elgar’s birth. Catherine Moody had in mind a more biographical approach, containing insights into his life in Malvern. She and Edward Hardwicke gave me anecdotal information, and well-researched evidence, but left it to me to create a play.

ZA: How did then the idea for a play turn into the writing process itself? How did you set about writing the play in practical terms?

PS: I began with a vast amount of factual detail, drawn from Catherine Moody and Edward Hardwicke, as well as from published biographies and information from the Norbury family. Early drafts were overloaded as a result. But it became apparent that there were several strands that might provide the core of a play: Elgar’s relationships with women, his religious beliefs, the origins of his genius, artistic rivalry with his wife Alice, who was a published novelist and poet, their social differences, and his relations with his father.

ZA: How long did it take from the idea to the final product – the premier – and how many re-writes were there along the way?

PS: I was asked to write the play a year ago. What the audience saw at the opening was the seventh version, not counting minor changes.

This means that there were six major rewrites, some from my own initiative, and the final two as the result of discussions with the cast and director, and following a reading at Actors and Writers London (a group of professional actors and writers who meet regularly in Hammersmith to read new work).

An earlier version had been read aloud privately by Katrina Norbury and fellow actors, which also helped greatly to show how much detail could safely be included.

ZA: To what degree was the writing a collaborative effort with Katrina Norbury, the actress, whose relative, Winifred Norbury, was the subject of Enigma Variation No.8, and lives in the house Elgar often visited?

PS: Katrina gave me sound advice about the possible content, and access to family records, but left the writing to me. Without her help as co-producer, however, the project would never have got off the ground.

ZA: Could you tell us about the nitty-gritty details of the writing process? How do you structure your days?

PS: I write when I can, as I am also earning a living as a translator and editor for other people. A looming deadline is a wonderful stimulus. I write directly on computer, but often edit by printing out, laying out sheets on the floor, cutting them into sections and taping them together. This makes it easier to see what belongs together, and what belongs nowhere.

ZA: To what degree do you as the author participate in the casting and staging process?

PS: The casting, yes. Katrina and I selected a variety of actors who might have been suitable as Elgar. I rang their agents, and we were delighted when Gerald Harper agreed to play the part. Once we had engaged the director, Gene David Kirk, the casting was largely in his hands. I quickly came to have absolute confidence in his judgment, and the staging was entirely in his hands, although he consulted me regularly, to ensure that I was content. I was, and am.

ZA: On the poster of Elgar and Alice, two female faces hover around Elgar’s – the two Alices: his wife, Lady Alice Elgar, and his friend (muse/lover?), Lady Alice Stuart of Wortley. The latter is more pivotal in the first act – but she disappears by the second act, only to resurface by her phone call delivered by the Maid. Could you elaborate on why you chose to include her character as well in the play.

PM: Because the play came to centre on Elgar’s relations with other women. Alice Stuart of Wortley represents his other female muses, and more broadly his need for constant stimulation from outside his marriage. Suggestions were made by readers and listeners that she should return in the second act, but I resisted these.

The overall intention was that the audience should see the strength of the bond between Elgar and Alice Stuart of Wortley (his “Windflower”) in the first act, and should suspect Elgar of neglecting his wife emotionally, but should realise by the end of the second act that the relationship with her was the more durable and important.

ZA: The Maid also makes a few appearances but it does not seem to be clear in what way she contributes to the drama. How did she feature in the previous versions of the text? What is her dramatic function, as you see it?

PS: In early versions, she was less prominent. Her scenes with both Alice Elgar in Act I and with Elgar in Act II now give us a glimpse of an intimate observer’s view of the marriage.

ZA: During the several rewrites, what were the major shifts in characters and action, and why? Were the changes created in a collaborative process with actors?

P: Many minor incidents were stripped away, as well as references to names and places from the Elgar’s life hat mean little to anyone not familiar with them. The characters remained fairly constant, but became stronger.

Let me give a few specific examples.

In the opening of Act II, when Alice is lying in bed, she once reminisced more fully about her youth, the garden parties and the society of rural Worcestershire and Gloucestershire. But it became apparent that this material did not contribute to the tension between husband and wife. In fact, it diluted it. The reference to garden parties is now reduced to a waspish one line from Elgar.

Then there was the remarkable story that Florence Norbury, who was a leading member of the Worcester Philharmonic Society, met the German conductor Richter at a dinner in Germany. He remarked that England had no great contemporary composers, whereupon she caught the next train back home, persuaded Elgar to give her all the music he could, and returned at once to Richter to lay it before him. (The more prosaic version of the initial contact with Richter was that he was contacted through Elgar’s publishers. Both stories may be true.) How could this story be told in the play? I could not see a way to do it except as reminiscence. And since the play had to live in the moment, nearly all the lines which began “Do you remember…” were eventually cut.

A few such recollections remain at the end of the play, when we see Elgar and his wife coming closer. They do remember visits to Garmisch and Capri, and the time when he was asked to be mayor of Hereford, but as brief allusions demonstrating the wealth of memory in a marriage, not as the full stories that they were in early versions, the purpose of which was less clear.

As for the characters, Elgar has retained most of his self-deprecating facetiousness and awful verbal jokes, although these are now hinted at rather than shouted aloud. When playing the record of Pomp and Circumstance No. 1, for instance, he once had many more joky lines, whereas now he is caught up in the music, only undermining the mood right at the end in a silly couplet.

The character that changed the most is that of the maid, Sarah Allen. She was to begin with nothing but a maid, but she now has some astute observations: “We all see our parents looking back in the end” or, in response to Alice Elgar’s praise of her as loyal and kind, “Someone has to be.”

ZA: How long was the research process compared with the writing? What did you enjoy (or did not enjoy) about each respectively?

PS: The initial burst of intensive research took about three months, so that there was a first draft script by September of 2006, followed by six months of rewriting. The research was largely a mechanical process, compiling possible events. I certainly enjoyed the reading, including a certain amount of music theory, as it is fascinating to try to see behind other people’s public façades.

What was more interesting, however, was when I identified areas of possible conflict that might make a play.

The key moments were the decision to focus essentially on the marriage and Elgar’s relations with women, to set the play in 1920, in the last days of Alice’s life, and to devote Act II to Elgar and his wife alone, without the need for Windflower to return. These decisions grew out of the material that I was collecting, and built on each other.

The only aspect that I did not enjoy was discarding many of the details, such as the moment when the young Elgar resigned as conductor of an amateur group in Worcester, only to be persuaded back. Or the lively description that I gave him of His Majesty’s Mediterranean cruise, when he was a guest of honour. But these did not fit the final shape of the play: they did not add to the tension.

ZA: Parts of the dialogue seem closely based on reality as we know it from documents from the time. Tell us about your sources, how you used them creatively, how closely you stuck to them.

PS: The main sources were the general biographies of Elgar by Jerrold Northrop Moore and Michael Kennedy, the published Windflower letters, the reminiscences of Rosa Burley and Dora Penny, half a dozen other books on more specific aspects of Elgar’s life, articles in the Cambridge Companion to Elgar, and from the internet, family archives and recollections. I also read the biography of Alice Elgar by Percy Young.

Alice is invariably recorded as courteous and gently spoken, but I wanted to show her underlying feelings, and biographies do not tell us what husband and wife said when on their own. Knowing about the difficulties of their social differences, Alice’s early promise as a writer, and the selfless way in which she supported her husband, and sensing areas of possible resentment, I allowed my imagination free rein.

I also had to take decisions about the nature of Rosa and Dora, more particularly the former, and hope I have not traduced them. The same could be said for Charles Stuart of Wortley, Windlower’s husband.

In respect of Elgar, whose words are of course recorded more widely than those of the other characters, I generally paraphrased, as I do not think that he would have said the same thing twice in the same way. The play takes off in the sections where Elgar explains how he used the inspiration of trees and the objects around him. These are not drawn from any published sources, but from what I know and feel about him.

Another key moment, of course, was the realisation that the solution to the enigma behind the Enigma Variations might be verbal rather than musical. I simply woke up early one morning with the answer.

ZA: From the play, for example, Elgar emerges as having many muses, many lady-friends and/or lovers. Alice Elgar, his wife, comes across as not a particularly prominent muse of his – more like a nagger, making demands on him. To what degree is this particular take on their relationship merely a creative device of the writer?

PS: I am convinced that it represents the truth. Alice admired his music enormously, but uncritically, despite her musical training as an amateur pianist. For the purposes of the play, I have merely built on this situation.

ZA: Did you intend composing music and the composer’s mind to be the focus of the play?

PS: No. The mind of a man, and the mind of a woman