The Biograph Girl Looks Back With Affection at The Early Days of the Movies

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Bill Hagerty enjoys the Finborough's play about the 20th century's first superstars

Lillian Gish? Who she? D W Griffiths, Mack Sennett, Mary Pickford?  You have to be of a certain, vintage age or a dedicated movie buff to identify them as top drawer and, mostly, top-draw, talent during 16 golden years early in the last century, when the fledgling movie industry gripped the imagination of the world.

I qualify on both counts and also had the rare experience of speaking on an in-house telephone to Pickford one sunny Californian afternoon not long before she died at the age of 87 in 1979 – she had in her dotage rejected face-to-face conversation, but was pleased to chat amiably from her bedroom to guests seated from the floor below in Pickfair, the Beverly Hills mansion once almost as famous as she was.

Pickford was a megastar in the cinema’s silent era, a stage actress and shrewd businesswoman who made millions of dollars while promoting her image of golden-curled innocence – ‘America’s sweetheart’. Her friend Gish rivalled her for popularity and both at some time worked for Griffiths, a visionary whose epic A Birth of a Nation, starring Gish, has survived the passing of over a century more successfully than the memory of its director.

The story of those 16 years, when ‘the flickers’ stopped flickering and gained artistic maturity before the advent of ‘talking pictures’ closed their chapter in the history books, is told in The Biograph Girl with deep affection by writer Warner Brown and composer the late David Heneker. It is a simple piece, fictionalised all over the place, but it abundantly justifies the faith shown by the director Jenny Eastop and the enterprising Finborough in giving a revised version its first outing in London since being warmly received here in the 1980s.

Played in a room bare but for occasional illustrative posters and with music provided solely by the keyboard of Harry Haden-Brown, it is a production that is the antithesis of the dream factories that grew as fast as Topsy in Southern California. Four chairs and a movie camera that looks as if made from hastily glued-together cardboard must have exhausted the props budget. The girls’ costumes mostly pass the period test, but poor Griffiths would have sweltered to death if he’d continued to wear a formal business suit after moving to the sun-soaked coast.

But the cast makes up for any such deficiencies. Emily Langham employs her considerable vocal range while portraying Gish as a demure trouper, anxious to please and encourage a egocentric boss, and Sophie Linder-Lee basks in the international acclaim Pickford enjoyed, although I’m not too convinced about Mary’s immaterial solo tap-dance that suddenly interrupts the tender telling of a sweet story.

As Griffiths, Jonathan Leinmuller is in fine voice and movingly captures the distress of the master movie-maker as his dreams-blanket begins to unravel.

Best of all is Matthew Cavendish, who as Mack – himself the subject of Jerry Harman’s much more expansive 1974 show, Mack and Mabel – tumbles, stumbles, trips and pratfalls, just like the Keystone Cops did, and displays the vocal and comic skills of a young Donald O’Connor.

Donald O’Connor? Don’t ask.

Back row - Lauren Chinery. Nova Skipp. Emily Langham. Joshua C Jackson. Front row - Matthew Cavendish. Charlie Ryall. Jason Morell.

The Biograph Girl plays at the Finborough Theatre in Finborough Road, SW10 until 9 June. For tickets, call the box office on 01223 357851or book online at the theatre's website.

May 31, 2018