Dame Maggie Smith: The Univ Connection

Just a few days ago, the world of theatre mourned the death of Dame Maggie Smith, star of theatre, film and television. Dame Maggie’s career covered seven decades, culminating for many people in her roles in the Harry Potter films and the television series Downton Abbey. At the very start of her career, however, Dame Maggie’s path briefly crossed that of the Univ Players, and we commemorate her passing with this unexpected meeting.

In the early 1950s, Dame Maggie was a pupil at the Theatre School attached to the Oxford Playhouse, where she learned her craft. She also involved herself regularly in student drama productions. Writing to the Archivist in 1998, the late John Rushton (matr. 1952) remembered that Dame Maggie “if she could, liked to play female parts in all male College productions for acting experience.” (UC:P86/C1/1).

One such “all male College production” was the Univ Players’ production of the play, He Who Gets Slapped by Leonid Andreyev, performed in Hilary Term 1953. First produced in Moscow in 1915, the play is set in a circus and tells a story of love and intrigue with a mysterious leading character, only named as “He”, and a tragic ending.

Univ Players He Who Gets Slapped programme cover

A copy of the programme survives in the archives (UC:P182/X1/1), giving details of the cast.

Dame Maggie (who at this stage appeared as “Margaret Smith”, having later to change her name to avoid confusion with another actor) was given the part of the heroine Consuela. She was still in her late teens at this time.

The producer of the play was our then English Fellow Peter Bayley. Peter had founded the Univ Players in 1940 when he was a student at Univ, and, when he came back to the College, was a great supporter of the society. One of the other parts was taken by Patrick Dromgoole (matr. 1951), the future film and theatre director. Unfortunately no photographs of the production showing Dame Maggie have yet been found.

Univ Players He Who Gets Slapped programme (inside pages)

Two reviews of the production are preserved in the archives, from unnamed papers (UC:P414/7/X1/). One review, somewhat pretentiously, writes: “Margaret Smith has the attraction of youth and assured technique, but makes too much of a gamine of Consuela, whose doomed innocence, the play makes clear, should be of the kind that trails clouds of glory and rouses thoughts too deep for tears.” The other, more positively, says: “To this part [of Consuela] Margaret Smith of the Playhouse Theatre School brings both vernal freshness and a never self-conscious humour.” Years later, writing in the University College Record of 2000, Peter Bayley remembered Dame Maggie’s performance as “striking”.

Just sixteen years after her performance in He Who Gets Slapped, Dame Maggie won her first Oscar for her performance in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. We at Univ, then, can celebrate that the Univ Players was among the student groups which gave her the experience to help her later career.

Dr Robin Darwall-Smith (1982, Classics), Archivist

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