“I think you have a great talent for love, and you’re trying to waste it and scatter it… because it’s been violated before. And if you continue like this, you’ll kill it. And… I think it’s a talent that would be death to hide.”
So says a character in John Van Druten’s 1943 play The Voice of the Turtle, which I am currently directing for the Jermyn Street Theater in London. It’s a rare revival of one of theatre’s forgotten voices, but the name may sound familiar. This is because in 1951 he wrote the play I Am A Camera, based on Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye To Berlin; this play formed the basis for the book musical Cabaret, which is now a huge success in the West End and on Broadway.
But most people have a hard time naming his other works. But he was a celebrated playwright from the 1930s to the 1950s. Highlights include the San Francisco-set immigrant family saga I Remember Mama (1944), which made Marlon Brando’s Broadway debut; and later the contemporary witchcraft comedy Bell, Book and Candle (1950), starring James Stewart and Kim Novak.
And then there’s The Turtle’s Voice. Set in New York in 1943, the film follows Sally Middleton, a young aspiring actress who has recently been dumped by an older, married Broadway producer, as she vows to give up sex and focus on her career instead. When Sally’s more worldly friend and fellow actress Olive Lashbrooke learns that her ex is in town on leave, she dumps her current lover, Sergeant Bill Page, and leaves him with Sally. Over the course of a weekend, Sally must choose whether to remain cool and independent or allow herself to become vulnerable again.
The original production ran for 1,557 performances before being adapted into a film starring Ronald Reagan; which still makes it one of the longest-running plays in Broadway history. But now it and Van Druten’s other works 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 by his English wife Eva), wanted his son to study law, so John qualified as a barrister in 1923 and taught legal history at the University of Wales for the next three years.
While at Aberystwyth, Van Druten wrote Young Woodley (aged 24), using his time as a teacher; This book tells the story of a teenage class president at a boarding school who falls in love with his principal’s wife and life. varying results. The idea was so controversial that, although the play was produced in New York in 1925, it was banned by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office (which censored plays in that country until 1968). However, when it was staged privately in London, the production was met with such enthusiasm that the Lord Chamberlain relented and the play had an extended run in the West End at the Savoy Theater in the late 1920s.
Meanwhile, Van Druten had left the law and had numerous successes in New York and London. He was also a distinguished director who staged the original Broadway production of The King and I, among other shows.
But then came the decline. His work came to be seen as too light, and his epitaph became for many New York Times drama critic Walter Kerr’s harsh, pithy review of I Am A Camera: “Me no Leica.”
Van Druten himself foresaw this fall from grace: in The Playwright at Work (1955), he acknowledges that “theater is ephemeral and plays are a perishable commodity.” That’s what happened: His success was temporary. His work with Noël Coward, Terence Rattigan and Somerset Maugham was pushed aside by the theatrical revolution of “Angry Young Men” at the Royal Court led by John Osborne. But like the work of Coward, Rattigan, and Maugham, Van Druten’s work is worth re-evaluating.
I first encountered The Voice of the Turtle about 15 years ago. Reading about the play’s Broadway success, I was expecting a light comedy and a well-made classic play. And yet is Well-constructed – well-constructed, in fact – I was surprised to see how nuanced the dialogue was, such as this exchange about running into an ex:
Sally: Was it? wretched…did you see him again?
BILL: No. Not after the first moment. And it was funny, because… remembering everything at the restaurant last night made me feel depressed. And the moment we said hello, the corner of my mouth suddenly stopped twitching and I found myself staring at him and wondering what this was all about. I don’t know When I stopped loving him; I think I stopped thinking about him, and I didn’t realize I had done so until tonight.
There is a sadness and longing beneath the surface of the brilliant comedy; and a simple installation turns out to be very beautiful, touching and, above all, sincere. Although the context is clearly wartime America, this theme transcends time. It’s still a comedy, but a comedy full of emotion, longing and loss, with a woman at its center. Van Druten also displayed a contemporary stance in his other plays; for example, London Wall (1931), which focuses on sexual harassment in the workplace, and Flowers of the Forest (1934), a love story with JB Priestley-like time shifts.
The Turtle’s Voice also shows love in wartime; this adds an extra layer of vulnerability and “seize the moment” is perhaps best expressed in the famous line from WH Auden’s poem dated September 1, 1939 (written in New York). : “We must love each other or die.”
Love is a common theme, of course, but for Van Druten it carried a special poignancy. Like Coward, Rattigan, and Maugham, Van Druten was a gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal. In their work, each hid their own experiences under the mask of acceptable, heterosexual love. One only has to think, for example, that Rattigan draws on her inescapable relationship with actor Kenny Morgan for the fragile suffering of Hester Collyer in The Deep Blue Sea.
Likewise, Van Druten transforms his experiences in The Turtle’s Voice into the temporary discoveries of Sally and Bill. As a result, there is something encoded in the subtlety and hesitation with which these two characters express each other’s feelings. But there is also something especially daring about Sally inviting Bill to stay; and there is something deeply passionate about the way she expresses both her and Bill’s desires.
As for finding love herself, in the late 1930s and early 1940s Van Druten dated English actress Auriol Lee, playwright, and Carter Lodge, manager of the AJC Ranch, which Lodge purchased and named after her in Southern California’s Coachella Valley. was in a relationship. With Lee’s participation, he ensures that the two men live together without question. When that relationship ended, Lodge remained involved in Van Druten’s financial affairs, and when the author died of heart failure in 1957 at the age of 56, he left his farm and the rights to his works, including The Voice of the Turtle, to Lodge.
This act of generosity shows how important the Lodge was to Van Druten. Yet it is difficult to know whether the author truly found love the way he wanted – society’s attitudes at the time required secrecy, and unlike Isherwood, Van Druten’s diaries were never published. Moreover, he notes the limitations he experienced and wrote about in Playwright at Work: “A play that suggested homosexuality or approached it from a tolerant perspective (not viewing it as a form of disease) would be difficult to accept. This may not last forever.” But what is clear is that Van Druten has handled the search for love in his work with a subtlety that makes a play like The Voice of the Turtle worth revisiting, even 80 years later.
The Turtle’s Voice runs at Jermyn Street Theater from 27 June to 20 July. jermynstreetheatre.com