ARTS
Driven by a tortured imagination
Roy Strong believes that the stage designer Leslie Hurry deserves reappraisal Iwas unable to go to Leslie Hurry's memorial service at St Paul's, Covent Gar- den. My wife, a fellow designer, described to me the scattered, desultory gathering which in fact told all. In a way the event should never have been held, for by that date Hurry was a long-forgotten figure from an era of stage design which had gone 20 years before. Unlike the gathering for Oliver Messel, a parallel phenomenon, which was packed, Hurry had no social side. There was no circle of friends or cult following. He was reclusive and moody, shunning society. Indeed, the woman we knew, who attempted to 'look after' him, was as often as not thrown out of his Suf- folk cottage.
I met him only once, when his burly ungracious figure barged its way into an exhibition of his abstract paintings at the Mercury Gallery in the mid-1970s. In one corner there was a folder into which a bun- dle of his theatre designs had been, I feel, reluctantly thrust. And this was the clue to the man for, like Nicholas Georgiadis, his wish was to be recognised as a painter but his working career and income was to lie in theatre. A year after his death in 1978 the National Theatre staged an exhibition of his designs and I purchased one, a costume for the 1961 Old Vic production of Hamlet. It hangs in my writing-room, the walls of which are adorned with images that mean much to me, for Hurry was part of my youthful pantheon. Hurry is a forgotten artist, an oblivion to which his own nature contributed. My ear- liest memories of theatre design after the last war were of his work, known first of all through photographs of his swan-bedecked surreal Swan Lake (1943) for our future Royal Ballet and the extraordinary setting for Helpmann's mime-drama Hamlet (1942). The latter epitomised his stage style, its vast painted backcloth having a gigantic avenging figure advancing across it, shades of Picasso's `Guernica' muddled up with debts to Monsu Desiderio, William Blake and the English Romantics, the French Symbolists along with a touch of Salvador Dali and de Chirico. I eventually saw this decades after, when it was resur- rected as a vehicle for Nureyev whose per- sonality was such that it could overcome the set, for that in respect of ballet was Hurry's weakness, his designs overwhelmed the dancers. Cyril Beaumont expressed that view of his Swan Lake in 1943 and one must confess that he was right.
Hurry's main work was to reside not there but in drama, becoming the first name to spring to mind for any production which demanded sinister fantasy and blood-letting. I recall his Tamberlaine with Costume designs for Ophelia (Margot Fonteyn) and for Hamlet (Sir Robert Helpmann) in the 1942 ballet, now in the James Gordon Collection Donald Wolfit whipping the backs of sub- missive kings drawing a nightmarish chari- ot, a luminous staging of the Cenci in which the actors moved in and out of a paranoid gloom, a haunting Tempest with Gielgud as Prospero waving his wand as tendrils descended like snakes to conceal the per- manent proscenium for the season, an act of obliteration ensuring that the audience would be visually assailed only by Hurry's tortured imagination.
And tortured it always was. He was not a designer who could turn his hand to draw- ing-room comedy or musical. His range was conditioned by the parameters of a fantasy essentially formed during the second world war. He did not serve in the war, exempt presumably on health grounds, but its effect on him was profound, compounding his overwhelming introspectiveness. The books of drawings which he published then look like the products of a diseased mind eating away at itself as horror piles on horror. But he was a superb draughtsman. Even the slightest costume sketch shows a firm con- trol of his sinuous twisting line.
As I write I am turning the pages of Paintings and Drawings by Leslie Hurry pub- lished in 1950. This was in fact his apogee. His last work I recall on stage was the dis- astrous opera Hamlet by Humphrey Searle in 1971. It was a low-budget production and the designs seemed aberrations from a world that had gone over a decade before. Hurry fell from favour along with Messel, John Piper, Cecil Beaton and Tanya Moi- sewitch in the face of a new generation of directors led by Peter Hall and Trevor Nunn who took on board the revolutionary approach to design of Karl van Appen for the Berliner Ensemble. The old painterly visions of these Forties and Fifties design- ers looked papery and antiquated. Hurry survived by working for Tyrone Guthrie at Stratford, Ontario.
I believe that he is an artist worthy of reappraisal. Like John Piper perhaps it is still too early to judge his true worth. Here is a painter who has not as far as I know been accorded a serious study let alone a retrospective exhibition. He belongs to that mid-20th-century line of hallucinatory English romantics, a lonely figure who, unlike Piper, lost his hold on the public imagination. Perhaps someone of a younger generation will discover him and accord him a niche, however modest, in the pantheon of British 20th-century art and design.
An exhibition of Leslie Huny's designs is being held at the Marina Henderson Gallery, 11 Langton Street, London SW10 and runs until 26 Oct (Tues to Sat 11- 6); and there is a model for the set of Hamlet, plus several other designs, at the Theatre Museum, Russell Street, Covent Garden, WC1, on display for six months.
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