British Theatre and the Great War, 1914–1919
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Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Andrew Maunder 2015 Individual chapters © Contributors 2015 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identifi ed as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. 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Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Contents List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgements xi Notes on the Contributors xii Select Chronology xv 1 Introduction: Rediscovering First World War Theatre 1 Andrew Maunder Part I Mobilization and Propaganda 2 ‘This Unhappy Nation’: War on the Stage in 1914 43 Steve Nicholson 3 Reclaiming Shakespeare 1914–1918 65 Anselm Heinrich 4 On the Edge of Town: Melodrama and Suburban Theatre in Brixton, 1915 81 Andrew Maunder Part II Women and War 5 From Sex-war to Factory Floor: Theatrical Depictions of Women’s Work during the First World War 103 Sos Eltis 6 Edith Craig and the Pioneer Players: London’s International Art Theatre in a ‘Khaki-clad and Khaki-minded World’ 121 Katharine Cockin 7 ‘A Sweet Tribute to Her Memory’: War-time Edith Cavell Plays and Films 140 Veronica Kelly Part III Popular Theatre 8 The Theatre of the Flappers?: Gender, Spectatorship and the ‘Womanisation’ of Theatre 1914–1918 161 Viv Gardner vii Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 viii Contents 9 The Epitome of National Life: Metropolitan Music Hall and Variety Theatre, 1913–1919 179 Simon Featherstone 10 British Cinema, Regulation and the War Effort, 1914–1918 195 Emma Hanna Part IV Alternative Spaces 11 A City’s Toys: Theatre in Birmingham 1914–1918 215 Claire Cochrane 12 Entertaining the Anzacs: Performances for Australian and New Zealand Troops on Leave in London, 1916–1919 234 Ailsa Grant Ferguson 13 Lena Ashwell: Touring Concert Parties and Arts Advocacy, 1914–1919 251 Margaret Leask 14 Palliative Pantomimes: Entertainments in Prisoner-of-War Camps 269 Victor Emeljanow Select Bibliography 287 Index 294 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 1 Introduction: Rediscovering First World War Theatre Andrew Maunder Throughout the dreadful years of the War, I continued my theatrical activities incessantly. (Albert de Courville1) The rise, fall and resurgence of interest in the theatre of the First World War represents many of the changes in approaches to the conflict that have taken place over the last one hundred years, and which the cen- tenary commemorations beginning in 2014 have thrown into sharp relief. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the theatre industry was heralded as an integral part of the war effort, an example of the way Britain and her empire had pulled together. Through its various activities, the theatre was seen to have reached new heights of social responsibility. King George V praised ‘the handsome way in which a popular entertainment industry has helped the war with great sums of money, untiring service, and many sad sacrifices’.2 Yet in the years that followed, attacks on work that came to be seen as jingoistic and self-serving rapidly displaced war-time theatre as a something worthy of admiration, and its entertainments were re-cast as shallow and mean- ingless, ‘childish antics’ as George Bernard Shaw labelled them in 1919.3 The publication, in the 1920s and 1930s, of a series of memoirs by prominent elderly actors and music-hall entertainers, some of whom had been given official honours, helped intensify an emerging pic- ture of a self-satisfied body of people who, despite the upheavals and devastations of war, had continued to rule over the realm of British theatreland as majestically as King George did his own dominions. With a careful elaboration of their war service, which in some cases seemed mostly to involve touring creaky old productions up and down the country or making high-minded recruitment speeches about glory from 1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 2 Rediscovering First World War Theatre the front of the stage, it became easy to see the theatrical profession – or at least its most distinguished representatives – as too out of date and too pompous to speak meaningfully to a modern sensibility. In one (in) famous example, the celebrated male-impersonator, Vesta Tilley, now transmogrified into Lady de Frece, boasted of having recruited 300 men at a single performance in 1916, many of whom, readers could only assume, were later killed.4 In 1933 Gilbert Wakefield referred to the ‘bombast’ inherent in the reflections of this older generation of skilful self-advancers.5 Later, in 1941, James Hilton in his best-selling novel, Random Harvest, recalled another kind of entertainment. The novel’s hero, Smith, a traumatized First World War soldier, is shown going to the theatre: [H]e sat in the third row at the first house of the Selchester Hippodrome that night and looked upon a show called Salute the Flag, described on the programme as ‘a stirring heart-gripping drama, pulsating with patriotism and lit by flashes of sparkling comedy’ [. .] In the final scene in the last act [. .] the heroine, a nurse, unfolded a huge and rather dirty flag in front of her, and with the words ‘You kennot fahr on helpless womankind’ defied the villain, who wore the uniform of a German army officer [. .] until such time as the rest of the company rushed on to the stage to hustle him off under arrest and to bring down the curtain with the singing of a patriotic chorus. [. .] This was designed to bring a round of applause.6 Although one wonders how exaggerated Hilton’s descriptions are, his intentions seem clear enough. He sought to make war-time theatre look grubby and grotesque, and did so by making fun of its transgression of two boundaries: good taste and veracity. Hilton thus singles out the unnatural accent of the actress playing the nurse which, when amal- gamated with the play’s dialogue, points to one of the main criticisms made of war-time theatre, namely its failure to tell it like it was – its unre- ality. By emphasizing the company’s old-fashioned acting, Hilton, like Gilbert Wakefield, encourages an idea of war-time theatre as something stuck in an earlier age, its productions dictated by vulgar showmanship and newspaper stories about German villainy. As a collection of people far from the Front none of these performers, nor the playwright whose silly spy drama they are staging, have any interest in the real horrors of war which Smith and his comrades have encountered. In contrast, and while renowned for his own fastidiousness, another soldier, Wilfred Owen, was able to appreciate war-time theatre’s activities Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Andrew Maunder 3 without dwelling on its failures. Owen’s war-time letters show him eagerly attending West End productions of several middlebrow plays including, in 1915, Fred Terry’s production of The Scarlet Pimpernel (Figure 1.1) and Horace Annesley Vachell’s ‘excellent’ comedy Quinneys (1914–15) – but he also saw Shakespeare, including John Martin Harvey being romantic and hysterical in Hamlet (His Majesty’s, 1916) and Frank Benson’s tour- ing company in The Merry Wives of Windsor (Garrison Theatre, Ripon, 1918). While at stationed at Ripon, Owen also saw two (unnamed) melo- dramas by Hall Caine. ‘How badly written they were!’ he commented. ‘I can’t stand Hall Cain [sic].’ Owen was more impressed by the work of two professional actors, John Leslie Isaacson and J. G. Pockett who, with their wives, organized amateur dramatics at Craiglockhart hospital in Glasgow, partly as recreation but also as therapy. During his own hospitalization for shell-shock, Owen, whose post-war dreams included Figure 1.1 Poster advertising Fred Terry in The Scarlet Pimpernel Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 4 Rediscovering First World War Theatre becoming an actor, was chuffed to be cast in a small role in the trial scene from The Merchant of Venice, and later on in a bigger part in Wilson Barrett’s 1905 melodrama Lucky Durham.