Paul Cornwell

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Biographical note:  Paul Cornwell taught in primary education for almost forty years. His book Creative Playmaking in the Primary School was published by Chatto and Windus in 1970 and he wrote a chapter for Drama in Education 2 (Pitman, 1973). Articles on English teaching and reviews have appeared in The Use of English, Language for Learning (Exeter), Pirandello Studies and Teachers World. A recent book on Britten and the Cambridge Connection is in the Britten-Pears Library. Educated at the Perse School, Cambridge, he has a Diploma (Cambridge) and M.Ed (Leicester).

BIC Basic

EAN13:  1844710041
ISBN:  1844710041
Author:  Paul Cornwell
Title:  Only by Failure
Series:  Salt Modern Lives
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CVC
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Nov-04
Extent:  448pp
Height:  228 mm
Width:  152 mm
Thickness:  25 mm
Weight:  672 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 19.99
Price:  USD 27.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Only by creativity and the risk of failure can one succeed. This book is the first attempt to trace the life of Terence Gray, a man who always wanted to hide behind masks and pseudonyms, whose death, in 1987 at the age of 93, was (therefore) not noted despite a life of great variety and achievement. He is only known today by brief references in theatre books and under his pseudonym of Wei Wu Wei. The son of Irish aristocrats, Gray was born in Suffolk and came to Wandlebury near Cambridge before leaving for short spells at Eton and Magdalene College, Cambridge. He was a Red Cross ambulance-driver in France and Italy and an air-mechanic for the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War. He became an Egyptologist, historian and author of plays during the Twenties before opening the Festival Theatre in Cambridge in 1926 with a sensational production of the Oresteia in Egyptian-style on a redesigned open stage and with the new electric lighting from Germany and with choreography by Ninette de Valois. The Royal Ballet of today has its roots in performances of the de Valois school and her arrangement of movement for plays at the Festival Theatre. Over seven years Gray achieved an international reputation, until eventually his little empire crumbled, culminating with the conflict between his own views and those of the student critics of the Cambridge Review. At just thirty-eight his creative life seemed to come to an end and, humiliated by a satirical revue put on by the Cambridge Footlights, he departed for the South of France to run the family vineyard and the racehorses which were kept in England and Ireland. His horse Zarathrustra won the Ascot Gold Cup in 1956 and the following year he married a Russian princess from Georgia. His new life really began in 1958 when he looked up at the stars and decided to become a mystic. Under the name of Wei Wu Wei, Gray published the first of eight books in his own personal style of Zen Buddhism.

Table of contents:
List of Works Published by Terence Gray
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Preface
Chronology
Mask One: The Growing Child
Beginning a New Life in England
Mask Two: The Student
Like Father, Like Son, at Magdalene College, Cambridge
Mask Three: Red Cross and Royal Flying Corps
War Service in France, Italy and Egypt
Mask Four: Writer and Budding Egyptologist
Nine Years: From War to Theatre
Mask Five: Irish Son and Son of the Theatre
A Return to Irish Roots and into the Art of the Theatre
Mask Six: Theatre manager, director and host.
The Opening of the Cambridge Festival Theatre
Mask Seven: Theatre Supremo
Seven Years at the Festival Theatre
Mask Eight: The Retired Irishman in his Vineyard
Gray’s Search for Peace of Mind in France is Disturbed by War
Mask Nine: The Married Mystic
Gray Transforms Himself into Wei Wu Wei
Mask Ten: The Retired Sage in a life of inaction
A Quiet Death in Monte Carlo
A Mask for the Future: Gray the Educator
The Art of the Theatre and Educational Drama
Appendix One
Post-1933 comments on Terence Gray and the Festival Theatre
Appendix Two
Those involved in the creativity of the seven years of the Festival Theatre 1926 to 1933
Appendix Three
The Impact of the Festival Theatre on Theatre, Ballet and Cinema.
Appendix Four
Productions by Terence Gray/Quetzalcoatl
Appendix Five
The Actors of the Festival Theatre
Bibliography
Index

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From the Preface

I hear the two worn and broken doors being unbolted and I enter through a narrow slit between them, leaving behind the sunshine of a fine sunny day in May. I walk across the empty foyer, my footsteps echoing on the bare concrete floor where once the walls and floor had been covered with carpet, and then through two doors into the semi-dark auditorium of the disused Regency theatre, the bustling Theatre Royal as it once was before being renamed the Festival Theatre in the nineteen-twenties and now standing silent and forgotten on the edge of a noisy Newmarket Road in Cambridge.

In one glance, I take in my view of the empty sunken pit edged in red brick, below the level where I stand, and look across to the worn frontages of the two circles and then, above, up to the vast space of the gods, stretching up high into the darkness towards the ceiling, now full of holes from the theatre's many neglected years. As my guide and I walk on, round the back of the musty theatre, along the narrow corridors past series of doors which had once been the entrances to the boxes and I imagine the noise and the excitement of the evenings of the performances at the theatre, with the applause and the laughter. After a steep climb, we reach the highest level and stand on the dusty floor-boards of the large open space which we call the gods, where today there is ample room for at least a hundred or more others, and we look back, down towards the stage. I see the Greek trapezium above what was once a proscenium opening and, at the rear of the widened stage, the vast curving cyclorama, one of the first in England. Atmosphere seems to simply drip from the walls and the ghosts of actors past are almost to be heard, the voices of a century or more ago and others of more recent times; even the chanting of the congregations during the days when the theatre was used as a mission hall seems to be there in my mind's ears.

Enid Collett, one-time secretary to Terence Gray and who died at the age of over ninety a year ago, told me that when she was taken back to the theatre, shortly before my own first visit, she had been reduced to tears when she saw the deterioration. She had known the building when it was furnished with plush chairs and the paint was new and bright and colourful and there was always the smell in the air of fine wine and the best gourmet food.

The building, which had once been the Festival Theatre and before that the Theatre Royal, was recently purchased by the Windhorse Trust on behalf of the Buddhists of the Cambridge Buddhist Centre, the previous owners being the Cambridge Arts Theatre who bought the theatre from Gray’s father. The Trustees of the Arts Theatre had used the building for over fifty years as a space for storage and scene-construction, lacking the resources and the will to promote a revival of the theatre, which would have made a second professional theatre in the city and Cambridge knows too well the implications of that kind of competition. The New Theatre in Cambridge, once a rival to the Festival Theatre, had been forced through falling audiences to become a cinema and, when demolished, an office block.

Since my first visit, the Cambridge Buddhists have renovated the building, being able to inherit a new roof raised by courtesy of the National Lottery, and they now show their total commitment to the preservation of the theatre and the adjoining house. Their first "open day", when they displayed their new carpets and their bright new paint, was also the beginning of the new millennium, and the preservers of the ancient theatre even managed to recreate the exact entrance doors as they were when the Festival Theatre opened in 1926. They now use the theatre for meditation and for the presentation of their Buddhist festivals. On my second visit, I was able to see a large golden Buddha floodlit in the centre of the stage, looking so theatrical, and I realised that they had given the old theatre, in their own particular and special way, a new lease of life. The Cambridge Buddhists had welcomed me, a total stranger on the day that I first knocked on their door, and given me every possible help and had showed immense patience as I wandered from room to room and wondered at the old stage-turntable under the floor of the stage and at the dressing rooms where the back-stage Gray would have once roamed. My new friends at the Buddhist Centre were genuinely excited when I returned for a third time, to tell them of my latest discovery, that Terence Gray, in the last part of his long life, had published a series of eight books which, although passionately private to the man, had leanings and sympathies towards the world of Zen Buddhism.

Review quote:  Absolutely invaluable for anyone interested in theatre of the inter-war period. The family background and detailing of Gray's struggles at school, and his sudden prowess as an Egyptologist, are not without interest or relevance, and nor is his transformation in later life into Wei Wu Wei, a distinguished Zen Buddhist.

Steve Nicholson
English Studies XIV Modern Literature

Review quote:  Paul Cornwell's full-length and readable biography is a very welcome arrival.

Steve Nicholson
English Studies XIV Modern Literature

Review quote:  Anglo-Irish plutocrat, the owner of Zarathustra, the horse that won the Gold Cup at Ascot in 1956, a recognized yet mysterious figure on that account in the Kildare Club and the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, a sage who now has international fame under the name Wei Wu Wei, one of the leading lights of the theatre over in Britain under the name Terence Gray, a person who was half-forgotten in Ireland and in Britain until a biography was published last year under the marvellous title Only by Failure: the Many Faces of the Impossible Life of Terence Gray.

Gabriel Rosenstock
The Irish Times