POLLY SAMSON A Theatre for Dreamers. Reviewed by Ann Skea

Polly Samson’s novel imagines life in the artists’ colony on the Greek island of Hydra with Leonard Cohen, George Johnston and Charmian Clift.

The boat turned, and there it was! Hey presto, the sudden flourish, conjured from bare rock by the gods and lit by the sun. A theatre for dreamers. The trick worked every time.

Hydra in the 1960s: a tiny Greek island unknown except to the rich and famous who moored their yachts in the harbour or were invited to live in the 40-roomed ancestral home owned by the prominent Greek artist Nikos Ghikas; and to a small international community of artists and writers who went there to live cheaply in order to paint and write. Polly Samson writes of the island and island life so vividly that its charm is clear.

Erica, who tells this story, was living in London with her increasingly depressive and violent father, and caring for her terminally ill mother. Her mother, just before her death, gave Erica and her brother two small packages: ‘They’re for later,’ she had said; and to Erica: ‘Have some adventures… Dare to dream.’ Erica’s brother’s package contained the keys to a car, ‘porcelain green, a convertible’, which no-one had known her mother owned. Erica’s contained ‘one thousand unexplained pounds in a Post-Office savings account’.

Shortly after her mother’s death a book addressed to her arrives in the post. Erica opens the parcel and reads the book, Peel Me a Lotus, by Charmian Clift. She reads of Hydra and ‘a life of risk and adventure, of a family swimming from rocks in crystal clear waters, of mountain flowers, of artists and poseurs quietly ridiculed – of poverty and making-do and local oddballs and saints’, and she longs to go there. There is a note to her mother inside the parcel:

Darling Connie, I wrote this book about our family’s first year here on the island and it’s at last been published in Great Britain. Spread the word in any way you can and most importantly don’t let what I’ve written put you off coming. There’s always a warm welcome for you here.

Erica remembers meeting Charmian when she was a child, so she writes to her asking if she will find a house on Hydra that she and her brother can rent, and as soon as she turns 18 and her father can no longer stop her, she and her boyfriend Jimmy, her brother and his girlfriend and her best friend drive off to Greece to go and live on Hydra.

Looking back years later, Erica remembers the sixties as a time when young backpackers ‘took the hippy trail’, experimented with drugs and were ‘craving languor and sex and mind alteration’ after wartime austerities. ‘Ha! To my dad I was a bloody beatnik’, she writes, but ‘we were heady with ideals, drunk with hopes’.

On Hydra, Erica lives briefly with Charmian and her husband, George Johnston, who likes to refer to her ironically as ‘Little Ricky from Bermondsey’. She helps to look after their three children, who are ‘pretty free-range’, cleans, collects and prepares food, carries water from the well, and, at the same time, does all she can to keep Jimmy happy while he paints. She meets the artists and writers who surround Charmian and George, and shares their music, the cheap wine, the hashish, the local dishes, the news and the gossip. And she sees Leonard Cohen arrive and watches his growing care for Marianne, whose Norwegian husband, the very successful writer Axel Jensen, ultimately abandons her and their small son.

Reading the Acknowledgements, it is clear that Polly Samson researched this book thoroughly. Many of the well-known people mentioned in the book did live on or visit Hydra in the 1960s. Leonard Cohen and Marianne will be known to most people, and Cohen bought a small house and wrote his first novel while living there. Charmian Clift and George Johnston are well-known in Australia but perhaps less well-known elsewhere. Both were Australian writers and journalists. George had become famous as a war correspondent in World War II, both he and Charmian had published a number of books, and both were successful journalists before they moved to Hydra with their children in 1954. They intended to live by their writing, and they became the centre of the artists’ community there. Later, they returned to Australia. George went on to win the Miles Franklin Award for his novels My Brother Jack (1964) and Clean Straw for Nothing (1969), and Charmian was well known for her outspoken essays published each week in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Herald. Charmian’s suicide in 1969, on the eve of publication of Clean Straw for Nothing, was reportedly attributed to the novel’s revelations about their life on Hydra, and her reasons for disputing George’s version of events are part of Erica’s discoveries in A Theatre for Dreamers.

A Theatre for Dreamers is a delightful novel, full of the beauty and the harshness of the island; glimpses of the lives of poor local people; the bohemian freedom of the artists’ community; and, as George puts it, the ‘bludgers lured by our fantastically blue water and cheap rent to live out their carefree immorality away from prying city eyes’. Erica, understandably, learns much about life, the disadvantages of being a ‘muse’, and the fickleness of men. George is a typical gruff, outspoken Aussie bloke, and he and Charmian fight, and drink and live life to the full. Charmian becomes a caring motherly friend to Erica; Leonard is young and serious; and Marianne is beautiful, and happily dedicated to looking after the men in her life and creating attractive and comfortable homes for them to work in.

There is little comment about the role of women in these men’s lives except for Charmian’s complaints that while supporting George through the aftermath of the horrors he experienced in the war, horrors he is now describing in his book, she is not getting on with her own work at all, and her advice to Erica is:

… if you’ve got things to do it’s better to get on with them, it’s not enough to simply enable some bloke to do his thing. Don’t let the buggers clip your wings just as you’re learning to fly.

Samson’s descriptions of the island are often idyllic, and the life of freedom, good friends, music, poetry, art, fresh local foods, cheap drinks and nude bathing in clear blue waters, is the stuff of dreams. A Theatre for Dreamers is a book for dreamers, too.

Polly Samson A Theatre for Dreamers Bloomsbury 2020 PB 368pp $29.99

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (//ann.skea.com/) are archived by the British Library.

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Tags: Charmian | Clift, Clean Straw for Nothing, George | Johnston, Greek islands, Hydra, Leonard | Cohen, My Brother Jack, Polly | Samson