Scenes from a marriage

NZ playwright Brian McNeill wrote a hugely successful play about the relationship between Katherine Mansfield and her husband. He recalls how it came about.

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On March 6, 1972, I found myself driving down to Norfolk. It was early spring in the Northern Hemisphere. “Come to lunch,” the invitation said. This was joyful news, for Mary Middleton Murry would have had every right to refuse me the time of day after the way I’d portrayed her late husband. But then Mary was John’s fourth wife. And the John Middleton Murry I had put in the script of my play, The Two Tigers, was a much younger and more vacillating figure than the conservative-leaning family man with a passion for farming and breeding bulls that Mary had come to know.

John had married Mary Gamble in 1954. He had married Katherine Mansfield back in 1918. And there had been two other wives in between. John died in 1957. So, I was visiting his widow some 15 years on. The idea of writing a stage play on Katherine Mansfi eld had occurred to me a year or so before. I’d been in Britain 12 years: a young actor and writer. And one afternoon, when passing New Zealand House, I saw in the window a photograph of Katherine Mansfi eld.

Might the Arts Council back home give me a grant? After all, I was a Kiwi. Margaret Scott from the Alexander Turnbull Library just happened to be at New Zealand House that same day. Engaged at the time in the editing of Mansfi eld’s notebooks and journals she, if anyone, would be the person to ask.

I’d read Mansfi eld at school and knew she’d died in France in the care of the Armenian mystic George Gurdjieff. But otherwise I knew very little about her. Scott still saw fit to offer her encouragement, and it was through her that I later gained the introduction to Mary Middleton Murry. No grant in the offing, though.