Carol Bishop-Gwyn - The Pursuit of Perfection: A Life of Celia Franca

THREE

Dancing in the Dark

CELIA WAS OUT OF work and vacationing on the beach in Brighton when war was declared on September 3, 1939. She 1939 to return had left the Ballet Rambert at the beginning of to Londons West End stage as a chorus girl. She, along with the financial backers and the rest of the cast, had gambled that J.B. Priestleys new musical Johnson over Jordan would have a long, successful run. The impressive production team of Priestley as playwright, Benjamin Britten as composer, and Antony Tudor as choreographer made it appear a sure bet.

But audiences stayed away from this morality play, much of it taking place in a hallucinatory state between life and death. It was a challenging expressionistic play with the use of grotesque masks. Tudor ran into difficulties when the Lord Chamberlain censored a nightclub scene in which an elderly woman dances suggestively with an attractive young girl. Theres no record of who this young girl was in the expurgated scene, but Celia Franks, with her dramatic flair, would have been a natural choice for the role. She definitely was part of that particular scene as her name was listed in the program in a variety of roles from stenographer in the first act to one of the people in the night club in the final act. The Daily Telegraph, March 4, described Johnson over Jordan as the most spectacular failure in the theatre for a long time.24 It closed on May 6.

Celia managed to get another job that May in a BBC Television drama called the Insect Play by Karel Capek, the story of a tramp who shrinks to the size of an ant. Celia performed amidst the butterflies and the moths.

AFTER THE DECLARATION OF war, all performers were out of work. The government, in anticipation of air attacks, ordered the immediate closure of London theatres. Marie Rambert moved her school to Newbury, Berkshire, while the Sadlers Wells Ballet Company evacuated further afield to Cardiff in Wales. When the bombings did not happen, Ballet Rambert returned in November and presented a West End season. The Sadlers Wells returned to its Islington theatre on Boxing Day, 1940.

No group of dancers could have been more detached from reality than Ninette de Valois and the Sadlers Wells company, who agreed to do a tour of the Netherlands in May 1940. Shortly after the companys arrival the Germans began the invasion of Holland. After a dramatic retreat, which included a bus ride and midnight walk through thick woods, the dancers were put on a cargo ship. They made it back home to London on May 14. Although there were no casualties among the dancers, the company lost all its sets, costumes, and music for six ballets.

In September 1940 when the Blitz began, the Sadlers Wells Theatre in Islington was shut down for the rest of the war and turned into a rest centre for air-raid victims. Administrator Tyrone Guthrie (later to play a key role in establishing Ontarios Stratford Festival) made sure the ballet school remained in the building, though, as Leo Kersley remembers; Guthrie made quite sure that us horrible whippersnappers [were] upstairs making sure that the inhabitants of Islington didnt wander out of where they should be.25

In the confusion of the closings and openings of the established ballet companies, several ragtag troupes were formed to provide dancers with employment and Londoners with light entertainment. Celia and Leo joined Les Ballets Trois Arts, which had been formed by John Regan,26 an eccentric Irishman who pulled together a bakers dozen dancers, young experimental designers, and a small orchestra made up of young musicians from the Royal College of Music. Regan could only pay his dancers their transportation costs, but if performances earned any profit, they were commonly split. Many of the dancers were on the dole and slipped out of rehearsals on the day they had to register at the Labour Exchange.

While all of England was now consumed with war, Celia remained consumed with ballet. She seized upon an opportunity to create her own choreography.27 On December 6, 1939, Celia presented Midas with music composed by Elizabeth Lutyens, a daughter of the famed architect Edwin Lutyens. Toni Del Renzio, then the enfant terrible of the English surrealist artists, designed the sets and costumes with the dancers in blue unitards painted all over with veins. The simple set included an umbrella hanging upside down from the stage flies. Franca later admitted she had little idea why the umbrella was there. God knows what that symbolized. I do remember that I danced the role of the Freudian subconscious of King Midas. And John Regan played King Midas sitting downstage left at a table counting all his money.

THE NAME CELIA FRANKS did not appear on Les Ballet Trois Arts cast list. Sometime between appearing in Johnson over Jordan in 1939 and joining the new ballet company, she had gone to considerable trouble to change her name to Franca. She herself explained that she didnt like the look of her surname in print, so she had it changed to Franca at the National Registration office. With that name and her dark black hair, people thought she was Italian. It was a common practice for dancers to choose more exotic names to enhance their career prospects. Ninette de Valois had started life as Edris Stannus and Margot Fonteyn as Peggy Hookham.

The inevitable question arises whether Celia changed her name in an attempt to disguise her Jewish heritage. Official records would have quickly established her origins. Even before the threat of possible invasion by Germany, anti-Semitic events had been occurring in England. The government had limited Jewish immigration in the late 1930s until the brink of war when unaccompanied Jewish children were hurriedly brought over. British black-shirt fascists fronted by the loathsome Sir Oswald Mosley painted anti-Semitic slogans on buildings in Londons East End and occasionally resorted to attacking Jews. It is certainly odd that she had not made the name change at the beginning of her professional dance career in 1937. Perhaps Celia suddenly took a look at the wider world and confronted her potential vulnerability as a Jew. Certainly, forever afterward, she downplayed her Jewish heritage in public.

HAROLD RUBIN, MANAGER OF the Arts Theatre Club in Leicester Square, realized once the Blitz began that the public craved diversion from the horrors. He launched daily ballet performances beginning with lunchtime ballets and progressing to after-lunch, tea-time ballets (3:30 to 4:30 p.m.) and then sherry-time ballets (6 to 7 p.m.), the early shows allowing people to get home before the blackout and falling bombs. These daytime ballet performances proved to be so popular that Rubin leased another theatre, the Ambassador, and produced three separate ballet companies for the two venues: Ballet Rambert, London Ballet, and the Arts Theatre Ballet. Celia, having rejoined Ballet Rambert, shared top billing along with Sally Gilmour and Lisa Serova; she danced up to four or five performances a day. Servicemen on leave, along with London office workers wanting to forget the war, flocked to the theatres to spend a carefree hour being entertained while drinking tea or sherry. The theatre became thick with cigarette smoke. At the end of the day, Celia, scurrying home under the threats of bombings was, like many others, constantly frightened. [B]ut life goes on, she said. You do your job.

When the Blitz began, both the Kersley and Franks families moved out of London. On nights when it was too dangerous to travel by tube or train, Leo and Celia would remain in town, staying with their friend Bill Meadmore in his Chelsea home. A popular joke at the time went, Im not that type of a girl; besides, where could we go? But Leo and Celia had solved that problem.

On February 27, 1941, Leo and Celia married in a registry office in Watford, Hertfordshire, near to where their families had evacuated. She became Mrs. Celia Kersley, taking a solid Anglo-Saxon name traceable back to the thirteenth century. The Franks had been against the marriage, and Solomon refused to attend. Celias father was still reeling from the very recent the death of his brother-in-law (Annies husband), a victim of the bombings. This was followed a week later by the death of his mother, Rebecca. Gertrude gave in and was a witness at the registry office.