Tortured and forgotten: the tragic story of John Van Druten

“I think you’ve a great talent for love, and that you’re trying to fritter it and dissipate it… because it’s been trodden on before. And if you go on like that, you’ll kill it. And… I think that’s one talent that is death to hide.”

So says a character in The Voice of the Turtle, a play from 1943 by John Van Druten, which I am currently directing for Jermyn Street Theatre in London. This is a rare revival by one of theatre’s forgotten voices, yet his name may sound familiar. That is because he wrote the 1951 play I Am A Camera – based on Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye To Berlin – which formed the basis of the book for the musical Cabaret, currently enjoying great success in the West End and on Broadway.

Most people, though, would be hard-pressed to name any of his other work. Yet from the 1930s to the 1950s, he was a celebrated playwright. Highlights include the San Francisco-set immigrant family saga I Remember Mama (1944) which saw Marlon Brando’s Broadway debut; and the contemporary witchcraft comedy Bell, Book and Candle (1950), later filmed starring James Stewart and Kim Novak.

And then there’s The Voice of the Turtle. Set in New York in 1943, it centres on Sally Middleton – a young aspiring actress recently dumped by an older, married Broadway producer – who has renounced sex and vowed to focus on her career instead. When Sally’s more worldly friend and fellow actress Olive Lashbrooke discovers that an old flame is in town on leave, she abandons her current beau, Sergeant Bill Page, and leaves him in Sally’s company. Over the course of a weekend, Sally must choose whether to remain cool and unattached, or to allow herself to become vulnerable again.

The original production ran for 1,557 performances – which still makes it one of the longest-running plays in Broadway history – before being adapted into a film starring Ronald Reagan. But now it, and Van Druten’s other work, is essentially unknown. So what happened?

Although often thought of as an American writer, Van Druten was born in London in June 1901. His father, Wilhelmus – a Dutch banker with an English wife, Eva – wanted his son to study law, so John qualified as a solicitor in 1923 and, for the next three years, lectured on legal history at the University of Wales.

While he was in Aberystwyth, though, Van Druten drew on his time as a teacher to write (aged 24) Young Woodley – which tells the story of an adolescent prefect at a boarding school who falls in love with his headmaster’s wife, with life-changing consequences. So controversial was this idea that although the play was produced in New York in 1925, it was banned by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office (which censored plays in this country until 1968). But when privately staged in London, the production had such an overwhelmingly enthusiastic reception that the Lord Chamberlain relented and the play had an extended run in the West End at the Savoy Theatre in the late 1920s.

Van Druten, meanwhile, abandoned the law and enjoyed numerous successes in New York and in London. He was also an eminent director who staged, among other shows, the original Broadway production of The King and I.

But then came the decline. His work came to be seen as too light, and his epitaph became, for many, the New York Times’ drama critic Walter Kerr’s scathing, epigrammatical review of I Am A Camera: “Me no Leica”.

Van Druten himself foresaw this fall from grace: in his Playwright At Work (1955), he acknowledges that “the theatre is ephemeral, and plays are a perishable commodity”. And that’s what happened: his success was fleeting. Along with Noël Coward, Terence Rattigan and Somerset Maugham, his work was swept aside by the theatrical revolution of the “Angry Young Men” at the Royal Court led by John Osborne. But as with the work of Coward, Rattigan and Maugham, Van Druten’s work is well worth reevaluating.

I first came across The Voice of the Turtle about 15 years ago. Reading of the play’s Broadway success, I expected a light comedy and a classic well-made play. And although it is well-made – beautifully constructed, in fact – I was startled to find how nuanced the dialogue is, such as in this exchange about bumping in to an ex:

There is a tug of sadness and yearning under the surface of the bright comedy; and a simple set-up unfolds in such a beautiful, touching and, above all, heartfelt fashion. Though the context is unmistakably wartime America, this theme transcends time. It is still a comedy, but one infused with emotion, longing and loss, and with a woman at its centre. In other plays too, Van Druten revealed a contemporary stance – such as London Wall (1931), focusing on workplace sexual harassment, and Flowers of the Forest (1934), a love story with JB Priestley-like timeslips.

The Voice of the Turtle also shows love in the time of war, which adds an extra layer of fragility and “seize the moment”, perhaps best expressed in that celebrated line from WH Auden’s poem, September 1, 1939 (written in New York): “We must love one another or die.”

Love is of course a common theme, but for Van Druten it held particular poignancy. Like Coward and Rattigan and Maugham, Van Druten was a gay man in a time when homosexuality was illegal. Each hid their own experiences in their work beneath a veneer of acceptable, heterosexual love. One only has to think, for example, of Rattigan drawing on his doomed dalliance with the actor Kenny Morgan for the brittle anguish of Hester Collyer in The Deep Blue Sea.

In the same way, Van Druten sublimates his experiences into Sally and Bill’s tentative explorations in The Voice of the Turtle. The result is that there is something coded in the delicacy, the hesitancy with which these two characters sound out each other’s feelings. But also something daring in the way that Sally, in particular, invites Bill to stay; and something deeply passionate in how both she and Bill express their desires.

As for finding love himself, in the late 1930s and early 1940s Van Druten was in a relationship with Carter Lodge, the manager of the AJC Ranch that the British actress Auriol Lee, the playwright and Lodge bought together in Coachella Valley, Southern California and named after themselves – with Lee’s involvement no doubt enabling the two men to live together without question. When that relationship ended, Lodge continued to look after Van Druten’s financial affairs and, when the writer died of heart failure in 1957 aged 56, he left the ranch and the rights in his work, including The Voice of the Turtle, to Lodge.

This act of generosity suggests how much Lodge meant to Van Druten. And yet it is hard to know whether the writer ever really found love in the way that he wanted – society’s attitudes of the time necessitated secrecy, and, unlike Isherwood, Van Druten’s diaries have never been published. Moreover, in Playwright at Work, he notes the constraints under which he lived and wrote: “A play recommending homosexuality, or taking a tolerant view of it (not regarding it as a form of sickness), would be hard of acceptance. That may not last forever.” But what is clear is that in his work, Van Druten explored the search for love with a delicacy that, 80 years on, makes a play like The Voice of the Turtle well worth revisiting.

The Voice of the Turtle runs at Jermyn Street Theatre from June 27-July 20, jermynstreettheatre.com