(born Montagu Emmanuel Krautenfeld)

By Kevin Crawford

My father Montagu Crawford was born in the East End of London in the mid 1920s to a Jewish family, although he never actively practised that faith as far as I knew. He left school early and started working as an accountant, relying on a natural talent for numbers and a flair for business opportunities. After the war he travelled, working his passage to New York on a ship, before settling back in London, where he met and married my mother Christina, who hailed from Kinsale in West Cork. Together they had three children, Cathy, Hugh and myself.

For the next fifteen years he got involved in a string of business ventures:  he drove every week up to Manchester with a vanload of dresses and smart clothes, that he sold with his brother Sydney in the local market there; he worked as an accountant in South Africa; he helped my mother set up a Nursing Agency, and then he started ‘property development’, first on  a small scale and then on bigger projects. He was making money and living well. Finally he bought a three story house over a basement in Knightsbridge, and seemed destined to carve out a small fortune. But life decided otherwise. My parents split up and he met Jacqueline, a beautiful younger woman with Indian and British parents. During this period he disappeared to some degree from my life. Monty and Jacqueline separated a few years later, soon after the birth of a son, whom my father never acknowledged officially. Jacqueline remarried and the child was brought up by her husband.

Then one day we met up again. He told me he was singing with a man in Golders Green. I couldn’t believe my ears. Here he was, the self-made business man telling me he was singing. He asked me if I would like to meet this man. Apparently he was a very good squash player and I could come to the Lansdowne Club, a very ‘posh’ club to play with him. I said yes. I had played a lot of tennis and other handball games called Eton and Rugby fives, so I thought I might be able to play squash too.

I turned up at this exclusive club feeling rather strange, out of my depth in the velveted chairs and high-ceilinged drawing rooms, where only whispers could be heard. I changed and got onto the court with a very solid-looking man who was already warmed up from a previous encounter. He bashed the soft black ball against the wall and I endeavoured to slash it back. But a squash racket is not a tennis racket and it took a while for eye, ball and racket to make contact. We thrashed around on the court for half an hour or so. At one point I looked up. A beautiful apparition appeared on the balcony overlooking the court. She was dressed in shorts and a white top and magnetized my adolescent eye. This was my first glance of Kiki, whom we know more as Kaya.

Afterwards we gathered in a comfortable bar. An armchair was placed at one corner of the table, otherwise there were chairs. Everyone sat down in chairs, the armchair was left empty. I wondered why. I understood a moment later. It was reserved for the man with whom I had played squash: Roy Hart.

My father had already been having singing lessons with Roy Hart for a couple of years and this was turning his life around. In Roy he had met a kind of brother: someone who challenged him daily in his most profound assumptions about life. Monty had never expressed a wish to be an artist, an actor, a singer, but Roy Hart was awakening in him feelings and insights that would continue to inform him for the rest of his life. It was at this point that Roy re-named him as Davide to reflect this deep change. He was now exploring himself in a completely new way and he couldn’t return to his former business activities. Roy and Monty became very close friends, and Monty – with Louis Frenkel – became one of the patrons of Hart’s work, affording him some financial support in what was always a delicate balancing act for Hart, who relied only on payments for lessons as an income. All three came from Jewish backgrounds and although they were not practising there was a common cultural and spiritual ground.

In their talks it became clear that the current size of ‘The Studio’, as it was known then for the group of twenty-five or so people following Hart at the time, was far too small. The studio was in Dorothy Hart’s house and Roy realised his work needed to expand in order to realise its potential. This expansion implied having a bigger space to develop, where his work could achieve an artistic flowering in a social and communal environment.

A rather run-down old squash club in Belsize Park was for sale. It was a traditional focal point for a small number of regular players but the club was in desperate need of renovation. It was the perfect occasion to marry a business venture with an opportunity to open up a new space for Roy’s work and those engaged with him. Monty and Louis, as business partners, with Roy as the spiritual chairman took on the project. The squash club was bought and totally renovated. My father liked nothing so much as building walls up, then taking them down and building them somewhere else. But he had a vision and was fired by his association with Roy. Within a few years we had not only a thriving squash club (now with a balcony on two of the four courts) but also a restaurant and bar, a hairdresser, an osteopath, a masseur, a dance studio, a professional squash coach, the sound-proofed studio on the top floor plus an office for Roy Hart, and soon enough a much vaster rehearsal space. It was not surprising that the production of The Bacchae was first witnessed in that studio in 1968 before it went to the Festival of Nancy in 1969. It took a little longer for  the name of the company to emerge but it was already there by December of that same year: Roy Hart Theatre.

The club too was re-named The Abraxas Club and Paul Silber created a stunning mosaic covering the whole front wall of the club figuring the god, Abraxas. Members of Roy Hart’s group began to take roles in running the club: manning the front desk, managing the bar and restaurant, giving dance and movement classes, and teaching squash. In the evenings and at weekends those same people – joined by others whose lives were not yet involved in the daily life of the Abraxas Club – would ascend the stairs to the sound-proofed studio where lengthy meetings and intense rehearsal or group improvisations were held. The Abraxas Club seemed to be achieving its potential. Performances and cabarets sometimes took place in the Restaurant/Bar area, and guests were often invited to events in the large rehearsal space or the top floor studio.

But the desire for new shores (Roy Hart Theatre and Roy Hart as soloist were very well received in Europe but isolated in the British theatre scene) and a more supportive artistic environment were calling, and Monty found himself embarked on this venture too, finally stumbling upon Malérargues with Lucienne and Vivienne. Monty’s French was virtually non-existent, but he teamed up with Lucienne and Gabriel in negotiating the purchase of Malérargues. However by this time his finances were not so rosy: he had lost money in an aborted property development in Knightsbridge and an investment he had made in Switzerland did not materialise. Louis Frenkel was no longer an active partner, so Monty was relatively alone in striking a deal and making a down payment to secure the purchase. He had the foresight to tie in a clause in the contract that protected the buyer if there was a change in property law in Switzerland for non-nationals. At this point several members of the company and my mother Christina, stepped in to help with funds both for the deposit and subsistence for the company, as it gradually installed itself in Malérargues. However, the monies required for completing the transaction and securing  Malérargues were no longer available (in part owing to the change in property law in Switzerland), so when legal proceedings were instituted this clause was crucial.

Thanks to the diligence and perspicacity of Gabriel, Lucienne, and Maitre Quiminal, the lawsuit was dropped and the thirty odd shareholders were able to raise a fifteen year mortgage to pay off the balance of the purchase price. My father remained closely involved in this aspect of Malérargues, but he was gradually withdrawing from the increasingly intensive rehearsal and performance commitments upon which the company had now embarked.

The Abraxas Club, which he had rather neglected, was now in a parlous position financially. Monty’s commitment and deep loyalty to Roy Hart was more of spiritual one: a certain kind of brotherhood. Without his presence the life of a professional theatre company was not for him, although I will take the opportunity to tell one story of him that I think points up his chutzpah and his imaginative bluffing in the face of challenge.

If I remember correctly, we had a performance to give in San Sebastian, in the Basque country, Spain. For this performance Roy had included Monty in a role where he appeared to play a fake violin onstage as, around him, Roy Hart and Roy Hart Theatre improvised to a recording of Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King. The main cast arrived by train from London. My father was travelling by plane as he had business matters he needed to attend to. The flight was due to arrive at Bilbao but, owing to bad weather, it landed in Bordeaux, several hundred kilometers away from San Sebastian. It was already mid-afternoon, and the performance was in the evening. How was he to get there? Well, he held up the violin case and asserted he was a world famous violinist expected for a recital in San Sebastian that evening and the airport needed to get him to the concert in time. Sure enough a car and driver materialised and he was driven at no further cost to San Sebastian, much to the delight of the awaiting cast.

So, he left Malérargues to look after the Abraxas Club and reassess his future. A difficult period ensued but finally, thanks to the assistance of my mother, the club was sold and he started a new life. But he couldn’t return to property development. His experiences with Roy and, to a lesser extent, with the group around him, led him to investigate other pathways to physical and psychic well-being. The Alexander Technique came his way and he engaged in a two-year training in London, before becoming an accredited Alexander Technique practitioner. But his searching didn’t stop here. He investigated various alternative therapies while he lived in Paris and the Cote d’Azur for several years before relocating to Dublin, where my mother now lived.

In Dublin he found the perfect environment to practice the Alexander technique, at Bull Alley, a state funded theatre school, where he worked regularly with the actors and staff.  This was a good period in his life, passing on his life experience through the subtle moulding of his fingers.

One day I realised he was going out every evening. Something was going on… We discovered he was following a group of Hare Krishna devotees in Dublin. He seemed to have found a new spiritual path. This led him to live on a a small island on a lake in the Midlands of Ireland. The only form of locomotion was a rowing boat. By this time Monty had exchanged his handmade shirts and shoes for much simpler ware; his only possessions more or less amounted to a sleeping bag and what he could carry in a small case. Yet he seemed very happy. He was never someone who wished to accumulate wealth. He was more of a poet or a visionary who saw money and projects as pathways to achieve something else. Finally he moved into a Krishna Ashram in Belfast. By this time my mother too had become involved with the Krishna movement and they shared this together. But already the illness that was to beset his final years was making itself known. My mother had to take him in to her own house as the community could no longer manage his memory and behavioural lapses. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

He lived with this debilitating disease for five years before succumbing. He would still sing the Hare Krishna refrain with a recording long after he had lost the ability to recall who I was. He was cremated and I travelled to the sacred Yamuna river in India with my mother to spread his ashes in a traditional ceremony. In some ways Monty’s character was that of ‘The Wandering Jew’, someone on a journey that twists and turns and doubles back on itself, a part of him always dissatisfied. He was animated, I believe, like Roy Hart, by a spirit of adventure. However he does leave a legacy of houses for Hart’s work and his involvement with the Krishna movement opened the door for my mother, Christina, to find her own deep spiritual pathway in the final chapter of her life.

– Kevin Crawford