Mr. Michael Flanders
The Times (London), 1975
Obituary
Michael Flanders, the actor
and lyric-writer, who has died at the age of 53, was long familiar on the
London stage, particularly in the two-man entertainment with Donald Swann
where he described himself as "the big one with the beard who writes all
the words and does most of the talking" (both of them, he said, "for want
of a better word", sang). Since a severe attack of Poliomyelitis while
serving in the RNVR during 1943 he had been confined permanently to a
wheelchair.
Born in London, in March, 1922 and educated at Westminster
School and Christ Church, Oxford, (where he read History), he directed and
acted for University societies and began as a professional at the Oxford
Playhouse in l941 as Valentine in You Never Can Tell. Later he
served as an able seaman in a destroyer on convoys to Russia and Malta,
and after his ship was torpedoed during the African landings as an officer
in Coastal Forces. Now, he contracted polio; at last, when out of
hospital, he became a writer, and later a broadcaster.
Donald Swann, a
light composer and accompanist, had been with Flanders at Westminster
(they put on a revue there in 1940) and the pair started a professional
collaboration with material for various intimate revues, particularly for
three devised by Laurier Lister - Penny Plain, (St. Martin's,
1951), to which, among other things, they contributed "Surly Girls" with
decor by Ronald Searle, and "Prehistoric Complaint"; Airs on a
Shoestring (Royal Court, 1953) for which they were the principal
writers (and in which Max Adrian sang " Excelsior" and the company joined
in "Guide To Britten "); and Fresh Airs (Comedy, 1956) where again,
most of the work was their own. Presently - and this was the zenith of
their association - they became performers themselves. On New Year's Eve,
1956, they put on a new show At The Drop of a Hat, described as an
" after-dinner farrago", and modestly-presented and wittily filled out; it
opened on the bare stage of the little New Lindsey Theatre at Notting Hill
Gate but went on at once to the West End and a run of 759 performances. It
was then that London heard "Tried bv the Centre Court", "The Hippopotamus"
("Mud, mud, glorious mud"), and "The Honeysuckle and Bindweed",
"Misalliance", and other songs that enabled Flanders and Swann to hold a
theatre on their own.
They would sustain the entertainment, in various
forms and in many places. Thus, they played, for example, throughout the
United States (New York, 1959) and in Australia and New Zealand (1964);
Flanders was married in New York to an American girl, Claudia Davis. The
show developed into its second programme At The Drop of Another Hat
in 1963; this had two London scenes - at the Haymarket and the Globe - and
from it came such things as "Slow Train", "Armadillo Idyll", and what a
critic called the celebration of old brass bedsteads in any normal English
pond.
Flanders, in his difficult circumstances, kept an unchallenged
warmth and urbanity. During his career he made innumerable broadcasts of
all kinds on radio and television; at one stage he was chairman of The
Brains Trust. He wrote the libretti of two operas; translated (with Kitty
Black) Stravinskv's The Soldier's Tale - and in 1962 appeared as
The Storyteller in the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Brecht's
The Caucasian Chalk Circle at the Aldwych, London. In 1964 he
received the OBE.
Time for a chorus of glorious mud
The Daily Telegraph, 19th June 1993
The Peterborough column
By
Quentin Letts
DEATH stares Donald Swann in the eye. Swann,
composer, pianist and former partner of the late Michael Flanders, has
been struck by cancer. With typical self-effacement he has decided to go
public with his condition. He tells the story well, so well that one
curses the disease that has put this peaceful, thoughtful man on a life
expectancy of weeks. 'It is rather haunting,' admits Swann, in the Sixties
half of one of the best-known comic turns in the world. 'The idea that you
do not know how much time is left gives life a new intensity, so I have a
feeling that, as well as sleeping and resting a lot, I am also racing
around.'
Swann, 69, first noticed something was wrong last year on a
trip to Russia, where he had terrible backache. Tests found cancer of the
prostate gland, spine and pancreas. He describes his battle since then in
a coda to a new edition of his autobiography, Swann's Way, to be published
later this month by Arthur James.
There came, first, a spell in a
hospice, where one day he performed a concert with one of the nursing
staff. Within minutes everyone was joining in a chorus of 'Mud, Mud,
Glorious Mud'. Slowly he learned to face up to his disease, and to 'riding
downhill' to the next world.
Despite the sensation of 'letting go,
letting go', he has already lived beyond his doctors' prediction of three
months. He felt well enough to travel to the tiny Greek island of Kasos.
At the airport he used a wheelchair, just like his old partner Flanders.
Swann recalls: 'I thought 'from this position he wrote all the lyrics
which enabled me to pay for this holiday'. It heartened me to think that
again he had touched my life. Once more, Flanders, I tip my cap to
you'
Donald Swann
He could play the fool at the drop of a hat - Composer whose famous
partnership with Michael Flanders put the melody into mud, mud glorious
mud
The Daily Telegraph, 25th March 1994
Obituary
DONALD
SWANN, the composer and entertainer who has died aged 70, was the musical
and comedy partner of the late Michael Flanders; in their revues they
epitomised English nonsense humour in the good-natured tradition of
Punch.
Flanders's lyrics - whether about London omnibuses, gasmen or
animals - were usually satirical but never bitter or heavy-handed. Swann's
sprightly melodies, which he played with an admirable touch on the piano,
were larded with musical jokes.
The Hippopotamus Song, with its chorus
'Mud, mud, glorious mud', was their most celebrated number and was
translated into 18 languages; Swann himself sometimes sang the chorus in
Russian.
Two of their revues - At the Drop of a Hat (from 1957) and At
the Drop of Another Hat (from 1963) - enjoyed long runs in the West End
and New York and toured around the world. Flanders's confinement to a
wheelchair meant that the whole performance was delivered from a sitting
position; there were no special effects, and nothing but Swann's piano and
a lamp-stand for props. The entertainment rested on the songs, Flanders's
monologues and the comic rapport between the pair. Swann appeared as the
boyish subordinate who would listen with lively interest while his partner
conversed with the audience, and then occasionally go 'slightly berserk'
as he tried to hog the stage with a turn at the piano.
'It is an
astonishing entertainment,' commented the late W A Darlington in The Daily
Telegraph. 'When the curtain rises, your natural reaction is to wonder how
they will keep things going for the whole evening. But once their
insidious brand of lunacy gets hold of you, you believe they might easily
keep things going for a week if they wanted.'
Swann was not only
musically inventive and dexterous but also accomplished the rare feat of
listening in an entertaining fashion.
'Sometimes,' Darlington noted,
'he will sit quiet with quick darts of head and eyes which remind me of a
big bird on a perch. Sometimes he will give a sudden plunge of restrained
ecstasy as one of his partner's shafts strikes home. Sometimes he merely
looks interested, but he never goes out of the picture or fails to
contribute to it.'
Though Swann collaborated with a number of other
artistes, the music he wrote without Flanders never enjoyed the same
popular acclaim. Many of his compositions reflected both his Christian
beliefs and his desire to modernise church music. These included an opera,
Perelandra (after C S Lewis's allegorical story Festival Matins) and three
books of new carols. But Swann's serious work was criticised for lacking
'musical personality' and 'initiative'.
His sincerity was not in doubt,
though. Swann was a lively participant in Church affairs, and in 1964
delivered a sermon in St Paul's Cathedral in which he claimed that satire
and song could cleanse the soul from the dreariness of ordinary
living.
He also participated in religious programmes on radio and
television. Towards the end of his life he joined the Society of Friends.
Donald Ibrahim Swann was born at Llanelli on Sept 30, 1923. The family
history was exotic. Donald's great-grandfather, Alfred Trout Swan, a
draper from Lincolnshire, emigrated to Russia in 1840 and married the
daughter of the horologer to the Tsars.
At some point the Swans
acquired a second 'n' in their name. The family, though resolutely
English, was deeply involved in St Petersburg musical circles.
Alfred's
son became a manager in the Russo-American India Rubber company; his son,
Herbert (Donald's father), was a medical student at the time of the
Russian Revolution and married a Muslim nurse from Ashkahabad. Recruited
into the Red Army, at the end of 1919 he escaped with his wife to Britain,
where he found a job as an assistant to a doctor in Llanelli.
He then
acquired a practice in the Walworth Road in London, so young Donald was
raised in the Elephant and Castle. His mother died when he was 11, but he
could remember her singing Russian gipsy songs and accompanying herself on
the guitar, while his father played the piano. The boy learned both
instruments.
He was educated at Westminster, where he met Michael
Flanders and first performed in a revue with him; he also studied piano
and composition as a special student at the Royal College of Music. Swann
went on to read Russian and Modern Greek at Christ Church, Oxford - though
his university career was interrupted by the Second World War.
In 1942
he registered as a conscientious objector and joined the Friends'
Ambulance Unit. Later he transferred to the Friends' Relief Service and
did three years refugee work in Greece and the Middle East.
After the
war he returned to Christ Church and took part in revues and dramatic
productions. Shortly before coming down in 1948 he had a song accepted by
the director and producer Laurier Lister. Thus encouraged, he decided to
try to earn a living as a composer and accompanist.
Michael Flanders
was then freelancing as a lyric writer, and together they began to
contribute songs to London revues - among them Airs on a Shoestring (1953)
and Fresh Airs (1956), which won an Ivor Novello award.
Swann did not
work exclusively with Flanders, though. He wrote the music for the revue
Pay The Piper (1954) and collaborated with Philip Guard for the musical
play Wild Thyme (1955).
His first joint performance with Flanders was
in a show at Whistler's Ballroom in Cheyne Walk in 1950. At the Drop of a
Hat opened at the small New Lindsey Theatre Club in 1956, and Flanders and
Swann were amazed at its success.
At first they shunned the offer of
transferring to the larger Fortune Theatre, being more concerned with
their burgeoning careers in broadcasting and composing. But after 'some 48
to 72 hours of no sleep' they accepted. At The Drop Of A Hat opened at the
Fortune in January 1957 and ran for two years. It then transferred briefly
to the Edinburgh Festival (under the title At The Drop Of A Kilt) before
opening in October 1959 in New York, where it ran for seven months. It
also toured America from 1960 to 1961, and Britain and Ireland from 1962
to 1963.
At The Drop Of Another Hat opened at the Haymarket in 1963 and
later toured Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong before returning to the
Globe in 1965. After taking the show to New York from 1966 to 1967
Flanders and Swann ended their stage partnership - although they remained
friends until Flanders's death in 1975.
Even during the Hat years Swann
never excluded other ventures. In 1958 he set music to some poems by
Sebastian Shaw, and performed and recorded them with Shaw in London
Sketches. He later composed music to the poems of other writers including
J R R Tolkien, C Day Lewis, and John Betjeman.
Under the pseudonym
Hilda Tablet he wrote satirical music for the poet Henry Reed for BBC
Radio. In addition to church music, his other work included a number of
songs and operas written in collaboration with Arthur Scholey. His concert
entertainments after 1967 included An Evening in Crete, Between The Bars,
A Late Night, Swann With Topping and Swann Con Moto.
Swann was a
quondam president of the Fellowship Party, a pacifist political
organisation, and belonged to a number of other humanitarian and pacifist
societies.
He published an autobiography, Swann's Way, in 1991.
He
married, in 1955 (dissolved 1983), Janet Oxborrow; they had two
daughters.
In 1992, already ill with cancer (though the disease was
still undiagnosed), he revisited Russia. Early in 1993 he went to the
Greek island of Kasos. Confined in a wheelchair at the airport, he
remembered his old friend Flanders.
'From this position,' Swann
reflected, 'he wrote all the lyrics which enabled me to pay for this
holiday. It heartened me,' he concluded, 'to think that again he had
touched my life. Once more, Flanders, I tip my cap to you.'
PATRIOTIC
PREJUDICE by Flanders and Swann
And crossing the Channel one cannot say
much
For the French or the Spanish, the Danish or Dutch;
The Germans
are Germans, the Russians are Red
And the Greeks and Italians eat
garlic in bed.
The English are moral, the English are good
And
clever and modest and misunderstood
And all the world over each
nation's the same -
They've simply no notion of Playing the
Game;
They argue with Umpires, they cheer when they've won,
And they
practice beforehand, which ruins the fun
The English, the English, the
English are best
So up with the English and down with the rest
It's
not that they're wicked or naturally bad:
It's knowing they're foreign
that makes them so mad
Obituary: Donald Swann
The Indenpendent, 25th March 1994
By John Amis
Donald Ibrahim
Swann, composer and entertainer: born Llanelli 30 September 1923; married
1955 Janet Oxborrow (two daughters; marriage dissolved 1983), 1993 Alison
Smith; died London 23 March 1994.
DONALD SWANN, composer of Youth of
the Heart, a bestiary of ditties about armadilloes, gnus, rhinos and
hippos as well as songs about gasmen, London buses, even honeysuckle and
bindweed, will no longer be seen, bespectacled and touchingly manic, at
the keyboard as he was before, after and during the world-wide fame of the
various Drop of a Hat revues, with his bearded, wheelchair partner Michael
Flanders.
Swann was born in 1923 at Llanelli in Wales, of a father who
spoke English always with a strong Russian accent and a mother who came
from Transcaspia, speaking very little English at all. Donald's great-
grandfather was a draper rejoicing in the name of Alfred Trout Swan (the
second 'n' comes and goes in the family like a Cheshire cat). He left
Lincolnshire to settle in St Petersburg in 1840 and it was not until the
Revolution that Donald's father decided to return to the land of his
ancestors. Herbert was a doctor who had married a Muslim nurse called
Naguime and brought her to England; he qualified again in the UK and by
the time Donald's sister Marion was two Herbert was a glorified locum
tenens in Wales.
When Donald was three Herbert Swann bought a practice
in the Walworth Road, Elephant and Castle, and there the two children grew
up, Donald at first going to Dulwich College Preparatory School and then
to Westminster School as a King's Scholar. The family was hard up and it
was some time before a good upright piano was installed above the surgery
at No 92. Herbert and his brothers were all keen one-piano-four-hands
duettists (a Russian speciality) and they had a large collection of the
classics and the Russian repertoire which Donald and his family used to
play; and myself, too, for I had become friends with Donald at the Prep
during our last year there, 1935. By this time Naguime had died and
English became the language of the household. Although Donald never spoke
to me about his mother, I think he felt her loss very deeply; his sister
was at school, his father was busy with his patients, and Ada, the
wall-eyed daily, was handy with the macaroni but not motherly.
Donald
Swann was assiduous in the classroom but wild in the playground, pitting
himself in the 'break' against a line of boys before collapsing into
protracted fits of giggling. His table manners were grotesquely awful. At
the annual hobbies exhibition he showed manuscripts of little piano pieces
penned in his spidery, almost unreadable writing - alas, it got worse over
the years. A letter from him took longer to read than it took him to
write. At this time Swann's musical interests were entirely classical with
strong leanings towards Rachmaninov - he could give a nifty reading of the
fearsome E flat minor Etude Tableau, opus 39, also of pieces by Scriabin
(Donald's uncle Alfred had written the first biography of this composer in
the English language) and Nicolai Medtner (with whom the family was on
visiting terms in his Golders Green exile).
Swann would occasionally
regale me with details of life at Westminster: how the Scholars had been
punished because at a rehearsal for the Coronation they had spoonerised
the cry of 'Vivat Regina'; of playing tennis with a certain Ustinov; of a
politically minded Tony Benn already distributing socialist leaflets; of
the young Von Ribbentrop putting the weight; of beach games with Peter
Brook, and of his lessons as an external student at the Royal College of
Music, studying piano with Angus Morrison and composition with Hugo Anson.
During his later years at school he had come into contact with a boy 18
months his senior, a budding actor called Michael Flanders. After the
Second World War started the boys were evacuated first to Lancing, in
Sussex, and then to Exeter University, where Michael and Donald wrote a
few funny songs together. The war took over before long.
After a year
at Oxford Swann had a tribunal, where he was registered as a conscientious
objector; he joined the Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU) and slogged away with
the Quakers, whose thinking he found congenial even though his duties
included operating a mortuary trolley, digging latrines, cleaning out
operating theatres and even shaving the pubic hairs of high-ranking
military personnel.
Then came service in Egypt, Palestine and Greece.
Swann fell in love with Greece, the people, the language and, above all,
the music, which entered his soul and left there for the rest of his life
those quirky rhythms and exotic turns of decoration and melody. One day,
near the Albanian border, he flung his arms wide 'embracing the
countryside around me which had been home to so many different races -
Albanians, Greeks, Turks, Bulgars, Romanians, Vlachs - and exclaimed:
'What a beautiful thing it would be if this were all one country] Surely
we are all one]' ' His remarks were taken down by a Greek soldier, he was
branded as a corrupting influence and relieved of his post. He came home
in 1946.
Back at Oxford Swann added modern Greek to his Russian
studies. Musically he had gone 'light' by now. He still listened,
nostalgically perhaps, to pieces like Rachmaninov's Third Symphony, but a
disastrous school performance of a Beethoven concerto, the early numbers
with Flanders, and revues in the FAU had shown him the way his life was to
go. 'Dreaming spires, my foot] I played the piano for Sandy Wilson's
revues.' But for his songs he needed a writer, and fate saw to it that he
met Michael Flanders again, the budding young actor now crippled by polio,
stuck in a chair for life, denied his livelihood and even refused re-entry
into his old college.
At this stage both of them had several small
irons in the fire; Flanders was working in radio, Swann was discovering
and setting Betjeman and dishing up some numbers inspired by Greece. The
impresario Laurier Lister accepted some of these for his revue Oranges and
Lemons. This type of sophisticated revue was popular at the time and
others followed: Penny Plain and The Lyric Revue in 1951 (the latter
included one of Swann's best-known songs 'The Youth of the Heart', lyric
by Sydney Carter), Airs on a Shoestring, Pay the Piper and Fresh Airs
(1956). The stars of these shows were the likes of Joyce Grenfell (some of
whose lyrics Swann set), Max Adrian, Elizabeth Welch and Ian Wallace.
Wallace had such a success with Flanders and Swann's 'The Hippopotamus'
('Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud . . .') that a bestiary evolved around him and
his fruity bass-baritone voice: 'Elephant', 'Warthog', 'Whale' and
'Rhinoceros'. Recordings, song-publishing and performing rights began to
provide a living.
Up to this point the general public heard only others
performing the Flanders-Swann material; but in private the pair had built
up a performing technique, either demonstrating to the stage performers or
doing turns at parties. Hitting the West End gave Swann ideas of
expansion: 'I was going to write the next Oklahoma.' Maybe because
Flanders had no taste for writing musicals, this never happened. But Swann
tried, with various other writers. The centenary of the 1851 Exhibition
gave birth to The Bright Arcade, but no backers were found for this
delightful and ambitious score that included a massive multi-faceted aria
sung by Jennifer Vyvyan at parties to great effect. 'Angels' were found,
in the shape and bank balance of Joyce and Reggie Grenfell no less, for a
fantasy called Wild Thyme, but it came and went during a summer heatwave
in 1955. Similarly, a charming dream-piece written with Sydney Carter
called Lucy and the Hunter also bit the dust. A romance that lasted longer
than either was licensed in 1955, during the run of Thyme, when Swann
married one of his favourite English roses, Janet Oxborrow, whom he had
met at the Dartington Music Summer Schools.
Swann came to help me run
the Dartington summer sessions and one year Flanders came too and they
performed a little cabaret one night to their largest audience yet. Their
rapturous reception, plus the loan of our mailing list, led the pair to
chance their arm at a little theatre in Notting Hill Gate, west London.
They called their 'after-dinner farrago' At the Drop of a Hat. More
rapture; and full houses.
From the New Lindsey the show moved into the
Fortune Theatre in the West End and stayed there for two years and a bit.
The Royal Family came en masse, the Cabinet portfolio by portfolio; the
pair were applauded, recorded and, eventually, transferred to New York,
where the show took so well that the years lengthened and the tours spread
throughout the United States and Canada. At the Drop of Another Hat was
equally popular and long-running at the Haymarket in London, in Australia,
New Zealand, Hong Kong, London again and the US again. The last Hat was
dropped in New York on New Year's Day 1967, having begun to drop on the
same day of 1956.
Since 1991, anybody too young to have enjoyed the
show has had a chance to catch up with the experience, since the Hats are
available on three CDs and a video. Flanders resisted television until the
show's very last night. The video was lost until recently, but one can now
see as well as hear replays of this enchanting show. What made that
enchantment? To talk about good lyrics and tunes, wit and imagination is
to scratch the surface. Flanders was one of the great lyric writers of the
century, Swann a genius of a tune-smith with the rare gift of writing
memorable, warm melodies arranged with elegance and consummate
craftsmanship. There is no suspicion of cliche except in conscious parody.
Nothing in Swann is contrived; the music flows naturally,
spontaneously.
After much deliberation, Swann broke up the partnership.
Long stays on long tours did not suit him or his way of life, and he felt
that there were other things he wanted to write. Post-Hat he never enjoyed
the same success but he composed a lot of music and performed it, alone or
with partners, sometimes with a religious group, sometimes secular. He
enjoyed performing and audiences. He turned to opera with Perelandra (CS
Lewis), The Visitors (Tolstoy) and The Man With a Thousand Faces (Colin
Wilson); there is a 'Te Deum' and a 'Requiem for the Living'; for the old
Third Programme he had collaborated with Henry Reed in some delightful
features about Hilda Tablet, a butch atonal composer. Except for the last
named there is nothing in the music that would have frightened Mendelssohn
or Sullivan; the Russian heritage is there but discernible more in the cut
of the melodies than in the harmony. That is, until the last five years or
so. I remember him ringing me up one day to say: 'My dear chap, I've
written some dissonances, may I come round and play some new settings of
Clare and Blake?' Sometimes I couldn't help reflecting that Swann's
passionate and expert piano-playing - what a tenor thumb he had - seemed
an integral part, not to mention his clear and telling non-singing voice,
of the success of these non-Flanders compositions. Scoring was not one of
his gifts and too often, it seemed to me, dramatic situations relied on
pianistic tremolando effects (what Grainger called 'woggle-notes'). But
there is much to explore and once the so-called 'classical' performers
dare to sing Swann's music we shall see that he was a great deal more than
'the chap at the piano' in Drop of a Hat that Flanders, some of us felt,
somewhat denigrated; although it must be admitted that Swann went along
with this, giving the impression of a manic curate.
I have never met
anybody who knew Donald Swann who did not like him; his friends positively
adored him. And he seemed to inspire love because love was what he was
about; it came out in his life and his music. Like any (other) saint he
could mildly infuriate from time to time with his absent-mindedness and
with his seeming inability to see things, sometimes literally, sometimes
metaphorically. But one came to realise that these minor failings came
through his single- mindedness or loyalty or the depressions that he
suffered from. So were they failings? By the time that his daughters
Rachel and Natasha were grown- ups he and his wife separated. Latterly he
found deep happiness with Alison Smith, an art historian, who had
beautifully illustrated his autobiography Swann's Way (1991), and it was a
fearful blow to them that cancer interrupted their lives and put an end to
one of the great melodists of our time. They were married at St Thomas's
Hospital in August last year. Fortunately Swann latterly recorded nearly a
hundred of his songs at home on his own Bluthner. Included are religious
songs like the touching setting of Quoist's 'Lord, Why did you tell me to
love all men, my brothers?'; settings of Tennyson, Hesse and Rossetti; a
Tchaikovsky-like winner called 'Long Lonely Year' and 'Hat'; favourites
like the tender 'Armadillo' and 'The Honeysuckle and the Bindweed
(Misalliance)', 'Gnu' and many others, including some of the Tolkien
settings.
Swann singled out 'Bilbo's Last Song' as one of his own
favourites:
Day is ended, dim my eyes, but journey long before me lies
. . .
Shadows long before me lie, beneath the ever-bending sky,
But
islands lie behind the sun that I shall raise ere all is done;
Lands
there are to west of West, where night is quiet and sleep is rest.
JOHN
AMIS
Donald Ibrahim Swann, composer and entertainer: born Llanelli 30
September 1923; married 1955 Janet Oxborrow (two daughters; marriage
dissolved 1983), 1993 Alison Smith; died London 23 March 1994.
Donald Swann
Obituary
The Times, London, 25th March 1994
Donald Swann,
composer and pianist, died on March 23 aged 70. He was born on September
30, 1923.
DONALD SWANN was the piano-playing half of the double-act
Flanders and Swann, which was formed in 1956 and which thrived for the
next decade or so on a witty repertoire of songs and monologues about
gnus, hippopotami, wart hogs and gasmen. On stage, Swann provided the
perfect foil to the large and genial Michael Flanders, who was always
sophisticated and professionally assured despite being confined to a
wheelchair. Swann, on the other hand, played the willing stooge and the
complete amateur peering through his National Health Service spectacles,
revelling in his rare moments in the limelight and, for much of the time,
being forced to listen in rapt silence to Flanders's ingenious monologues.
The songs they performed ``I'm a Gnu,'' ``The Gas Man Cometh,'' ``The
Hippopotamus Song,'' ``Have Some Madeira, M'Dear'' typified a certain
strand of gently satirical English humour. Flanders's lyrics, though
sharp, were never bitter or heavy-handed, Swann's sprightly tunes were
larded with musical jokes. They needed no other props than a standard lamp
and a grand piano. ``Everything in the programme is as well made as a
piece of carpentry, and this includes the ensemble balance between the two
partners, '' wrote The Times's drama critic of their first musical revue,
At the Drop of a Hat, in 1957, ``Mr Swann, boyishly subordinate, uttering
inaudible protests and hogging the stage whenever he gets a solo; Mr
Flanders urbanely conversing with the audience and keeping his colleague
(`the Enid Blyton of light music') firmly in his place.''
Although he
always seemed to be the quintessential Englishman, Donald Ibrahim Swann
was actually born in Llanelli to Russian parents who had fled the
revolution, and grew up speaking Russian as his first language. The family
moved to London when he was three. His father was a doctor, his mother a
Muslim nurse from the Caucasus.
Swann was hence exposed to exotically
foreign musical influences from an early age. His mother sang Russian
gypsy songs and accompanied herself on the guitar, a paternal uncle was a
composer and a maternal uncle played the balalaika. Swann was never far
from a piano and composed his first piece at the age of 13 on the day his
mother died, as an antidote to grief. Like Flanders he was educated at
Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford. The two became friends and
first collaborated when Swann was 14 on a school revue. Flanders recalled
him then as ``small and beetly'', but said he was the best pianist in
school.
Swann went up to Christ Church in 1941 to read languages, but
the war interrupted his studies. Although he had been brought up as an
Anglican, he had by then become a Quaker and felt obliged to register as a
conscientious objector. But he still saw an active war in the Friends
Ambulance Unit, working with refugees in Greece and the Middle East.
Afterwards he returned to Christ Church to read Russian and Modern Greek,
and became president of the Oxford University Russian Club. Sandy Wilson
and Kenneth Tynan both used him as a pianist in their undergraduate revues
and, not long before graduating in 1948, he had a song accepted by the
director Laurier Lister. Encouraged by this professional endorsement, he
decided to set himself up as a freelance composer and accompanist.
Flanders, who had by this time been stricken with polio and was
confined to a wheelchair, was also freelancing as a lyric writer. The two
teamed up again and contributed songs to revues and shows: Penny Plain
(1951), Airs on a Shoestring (1953) and Fresh Airs (1956). Swann wrote the
music for Pay the Piper (1954) and Wild Thyme (1955). The BBC played his
music on both the Light and Third programmes.
Up until this point,
performances of their own comic songs had been limited to enthusiastically
amateurish private shows for friends. Gradually news of their double-act
spread, and they were encouraged to assemble the best parts into a
two-hour revue for which they obtained a short booking at the small New
Lindsey Theatre Club, opening on December 31, 1956. Against all their
gloomy predictions, At the Drop of a Hat received ecstatic notices and by
the end of the month had been forced to transfer to the more spacious
Fortune Theatre. There it clocked up 808 performances and played to
everyone including the royal family and Harold Macmillan, then Prime
Minister, who went twice.
The show ran for three years and transferred
to the Edinburgh Festival in September 1959, where it was known as At the
Drop of a Kilt, before crossing to New York. American audiences, when they
first encountered the pair in 1959, hardly knew what to make of them: ``An
over-age altar boy who is losing his hair,'' began the Herald Tribune's
bewildered critic on Swann. ``Sometimes his head would fly higher than his
hands while he was attacking the piano. In one number he began to cackle
noticeably. After a while, he stopped everything to do a song entirely in
Greek.'' But, despite the self-conscious Englishness of their humour,
Flanders and Swann quickly won over American audiences in the same way
they had the British, and after 215 performances on Broadway the revue
went on the road for a coast-to-coast tour of America and Canada.
They
returned to the West End in 1963 with a sequel At the Drop of Another Hat
which successfully repeated the winning formula. This time, the show
included an ominous song about nuclear explosives, ``Twenty Tons of TNT,''
which contrasted starkly with the overall geniality of their other
offerings.
Through all this Swann had continued to work on other
material. In 1958 he performed London Sketches with Sebastian Shaw and in
1961 wrote an opera, with a libretto by an old Oxford friend, David Marsh,
based on C.S.Lewis's Christian allegory Perelandra. By 1967 he had begun
to feel artistically strait-jacketed by the Flanders and Swann format.
Amicably enough in the circumstances, he and Flanders went their separate
ways, Swann turning his attention full-time to more serious musical
pursuits.
He set poetry to music, including Greek narrative verse and
works by Tolkien, Betjeman, Cecil Day Lewis and Sydney Carter. He was an
active churchgoer and, at the 1975 meeting of the World Council of
Churches in Nairobi, collaborated with Dr Donald Coggan, then Archbishop
of Canterbury, to present a new musical version of the Parable of the
Prodigal Son. If none of these later works had the hummability or
popularity of earlier tunes, then Swann expressed no regrets about moving
on, and accepted the predictable requests for ``The Hippopotamus Song'' at
concerts with great good humour. Last year his portrait, painted by Binny
Mathews, took its place in the National Portrait Gallery.
Swann's
reflections on Christianity were contained in The Space Between the Bars
(1968). Other books of his were Swann's Way Out (1975) and the
autobiographical Swann's Way: A Life in Song (1991).
Michael Flanders
died in 1975. Swann was divorced from his first wife Janet in 1983. He had
been suffering from cancer for the past two years and is survived by their
two daughters, and by his second wife, Alison.
Revue revival gives witty Swann songs a new voice
The Sunday Telegraph, 27th March 1994
By Christy Campbell
THE
obituaries of Donald Swann, exemplar of the gentleman comic songster, last
week evoked another age, one of white tie and tails, of elegance and wit,
of cleverness. It all seemed so long ago. Surely no one was still
interested in all that whimsical stuff about gnus and hippopotami?
But,
as alternative comics rise unchecked and crudity becomes essential,
musical revue is back. Kit and the Widow, Flanders and Swann's spiritual
heirs in the two-men-and-a-grand-piano tradition, have just finished a
10-week residency in London's West End.
And last week the three women
who comprise Fascinating Aida opened their act at the Lyric, Hammersmith,
also offering an evening of comic songs. Wit is back and making
money.
'Lyrics you can hear - with the entertainment in the words, not
all that pop stuff,' is the secret of success according to Kit
Hesketh-Harvey, half of Kit and the Widow, who was smitten by the gnu song
as a schoolboy. Flanders and Swann classics concerned big-game animals,
gasmen, iron bedsteads, libidinous Madeira-drinkers and omnibuses. They
celebrated the eccentric furniture of English life. Kit and the Widow
cover similar ground but make modern concessions with topics such as
doubting bishops and Aids. Fascinating Aida are up to date too, their
elegant veneer giving a gloss to adultery, political correctness and
supermodels - 'any subject except paedophilia,' according to their
lyricist, Dillie Keane.
The point is that both acts present themselves
in the tradition of revue. Kit and the Widow acknowledge their creative
debt - last Thursday they interrupted their sell-out show with a moment's
silence on the news of Swann's death. 'The teenagers in our audience
looked terribly sad,' said Mr Hesketh-Harvey. At their height in 1959-60,
Flanders and Swann were one of the biggest comedy acts in the world. At
the Drop of a Hat ran in New York for more than 1,000
performances.
Swann, the Welsh-born composer, and Flanders, the
nautically bearded lyricist confined to a wheelchair by polio contracted
during the war, seamlessly picked up the salon-entertainment tradition of
Noel Coward. The entire Royal Family turned up one night in 1957 to sing
the gnu song in chorus from the Dress Circle. The Queen Mother loved
it.
Then along came the satire boom and protest singers to make it all
look terribly old-fashioned. The pair drifted apart. Flanders died in
1975. But the formula is working for Kit and the Widow. 'We can be as
smutty and political as any so called alternative comedian,' says Mr
Hesketh-Harvey. 'It's amazing what you can get away with when your
material is delivered in a clipped accent.'
The Widow (his nickname -
his real name is Richard Sissons) exudes a bashful diffidence from the
piano as the show progresses through witty dissections of government
policy and modern manners.
Princess Margaret is a fan, just as she was
of Flanders and Swann - and the pair are available for engagements at
grand country-house weekends. They were booked for last year's
Conservative Party Conference - but turned the offer down. 'We have an
anti-fox-hunting song - 'Nobility and vermin at the ditch - and it's hard
to know exactly which is which',' Mr Hesketh-Harvey says. 'But we've done
that number at hunt balls and got way with it.'
Flanders and Swann also
delivered more than English whimsy. The night after their royal patronage,
Harold Macmillan visited the show. He was observed to smoke a large cigar,
sing along to the hippopotamus song with Lady Macmillan and laugh at an
improvised lyric called There's a Hole in My Budget. The Prime Minister
was applauded as he walked to his car.
Times have changed. Kit and the
Widow's and Fascinating Aida's material is rougher and their lyrics are
tougher than the gentler wit of Flanders and Swann. But the charm is the
same. 'And,' confides Mr Hesketh-Harvey, 'we're dead suave as well.'
Follow me, follow down to the hollow
The Times, London, 10 August 1994
Theatre review
by Kate Bassett
Under Their Hats, King's Head, N1
"MUD, mud, glorious mud."
Many's the time I merrily fudged my way through those immortal lines when
scarcely more than a burble in my baby bath. Not until now, naive as I am,
did I know who was responsible: the musical double act of Michael Flanders
and Donald Swann. Taking off in the mid-1950s, they lightly entertained
Broadway and West End audiences both satirising and epitomising postwar
Britishness until they parted in 1965 as the wackier Beyond The Fringe
comedy boom boomed.
Under Their Hats is a retrospective revue of their
numbers with comic monologues and the history of their careers
intertwined. Performed by a black-tie cast of six, that distinguished old
warhorse Moray Watson among them, the show pays tribute to the talent of
this singing and piano-playing team. ``I'm a gnu. How do you do?'' runs
one of their greatest hits. I have to say I ceased to find this sort of
nonsense enormously amusing soon after casting my nappies aside. However,
some of the audience attending press night, definitely not born yesterday,
were guffawing and singing ``Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood''
(from the classic ``Hippopotamus Song'') as if they were having the time
of their lives. I felt a certain sang-froid.
You probably had to be
there in the 1950s if you are fully to appreciate this calibre of humour
restaged. Although they were more decorous than contemporary
``rock'n'roll'' stand-up, Flanders and Swann were not consistently
sophisticated intellectually and artistically. Some of the numbers, like
the ``Song Of The Weather'' are not worth preserving. The basic jokes,
repeated choruses included, seem slow-moving today.
On the other hand,
Flanders's lyrics, hoarding great lists of adjectives, are crammed into
Swann's helter-skelter pastiche scores. Such innocent fun can be
heartening. The numbers get bogged down in insincerity when the cast put
on their serious faces and sing about TNT. Louise Tomkins, required to
play the dolly girl parts, looks as if she may break out in a simper. But
overall this is a spry production with several zippy performers. Most
notable are Duncan Wisbey and Stefan Bednarczyk (with a touch of Richard
Stilgoe and an operatic voice): both dexterous pianists with acting
ability, a fine sense of the silly and an assured stage charm. Meanwhile,
Susie Blake makes a pleasing sloth singing upside down, and Watson is in
fine fettle in his loopy monologue about man pitted against the olive.
American producer who took Beyond the Fringe to Broadway
Alexander H Cohen
The Times, London
24th April
2000
Alexander H. Cohen, Broadway producer, was born on July 24,
1920. He died on April 22 aged 79
ALEXANDER H. COHEN achieved his
greatest successes as the American producer of a series of small, intimate
entertainments such as At the Drop of a Hat with Michael Flanders and
Donald Swann, Beyond the Fringe with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, and An
Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May.
On a different scale, he was
responsible for a series of epic New York stage productions including the
1964 Hamlet with Richard Burton, The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, and
Peter Shaffer's Black Comedy with Geraldine Page, Michael Crawford and
Lynn Redgrave. Broadway, however, will best remember him as the impresario
who brought the Tony Awards to national television and invented the Nights
of 100 Stars.
Amid all this he also produced seemingly endless revues,
starring the likes of Yves Montand, Maurice Chevalier and Marlene
Dietrich.
A colourful and prolific showman, Cohen was a product of the
golden age of Broadway, when one man could afford to put on a play or a
musical. His second production, Patrick Hamilton's Victorian thriller
Angel Street, proved to be one of his biggest hits, running for 1,295
performances. It was later made into the film Gaslight with Charles Boyer
and Ingrid Bergman.
But, along with other theatrical producers, he
found it increasingly difficult to draw a scream from his audience: "What
TV has done is usurp our place," he told an interviewer. "If you spin your
dial after 11pm, you will find five or six things that will scare you to
death." Increasingly he found himself immersed in comedy and musicals.
Cohen was quick to spot the New World's love affair with the British
stage, and during the 1950s he was a regular visitor to London scouting
for productions to import to New York. After his Flanders and Swann
success of 1959, he transported the complete London Coliseum production of
Aladdin, with its cast of 75, to Broadway. And in 1965 he cajoled the
London County Council into parting with a supply of London street signs,
which he erected on Broadway to publicise the Sherlock Holmes musical
Baker Street.
By this time he was producing shows on both sides of the
Atlantic, having launched himself in the West End with The Doctor's
Dilemma in 1963, a collaboration with the London production office of H.
M. Tennent. He opened his own business in London six years later and soon
had four shows running simultaneously.
But Cohen was persistently
involved in squabbles of one sort or another. He railed against the
"atrocious manners" of London theatre critics who accepted two tickets but
used only one, keeping the spare seat as a place to park their coats. And
after Marlene Dietrich gave an interview in 1973 about his management of
her television show, he issued a writ for libel.
The Tony Awards began
in New York in 1947, but when he took over as producer in 1967 Cohen
expanded the format to include numbers from the best musical nominees and
sold the concept to the ABC television network. The Tony Award broadcast
often revolved around a theme such as the renaming of a theatre or a
tribute to a Broadway composer. Cohen drove the operation for 20 years
until a disagreement with the American Theatre Wing. He also produced
other television extravaganzas, including the Emmy Awards.
Alexander
Cohen was educated at New York and Columbia Universities but dropped out
in order to make some money. He began his career producing Ghost for Sale
at Daly's Theatre, New York, in September 1941. It failed spectacularly.
Nor was it his only flop: other expensive failures included Jerry Herman's
Dear World with Angela Lansbury, and Richard Rogers's last musical, I
Remember Mama.
In 1998 Cohen took to the stage himself in a one-man
revue called Star Billing at the Douglas Fairbanks Theatre, in which he
reminisced with self-deprecating humour about his long and eventful career
as well as offering pearls of wisdom for the future of the theatre.
His last show, Noël Coward's Waiting in the Wings, starring Lauren
Bacall and Rosemary Harris, is currently playing on Broadway.
Cohen
married Jocelyn Newmark in 1942. His second wife was Hildy Parks, whom he
married in 1956. She survives him, as do their two sons and a daughter.
