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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, 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. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in , company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–1–137–40199–1 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

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Contents

List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgements xi Notes on the Contributors xii Select Chronology xv

1 Introduction: Rediscovering First World War 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 , 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

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9 The Epitome of National Life: Metropolitan 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 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 : Entertainments in Prisoner-of-War Camps 269 Victor Emeljanow

Select Bibliography 287 Index 294

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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 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 labelled them in 1919.3 The publication, in the 1920s and 1930s, of a series of memoirs by prominent elderly 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

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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 (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 , 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 , 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. ‘I shall know what it really feels like to be on the stage’ he told his mother. It was at Craiglockhart, too, that in August 1917 Owen saw the Scottish singer-comedian give a private performance for the inmates. Lauder’s son, John, had been killed at the Somme in December 1916 and Owen was touched by the gusto with which the grieving father carried on doing his patriotic songs, although he admitted not finding him especially funny. By this time Owen also had dramatic ambitions and wrote a play about the conflict, Two Thousand. Its aim, he declared, was ‘to expose war to the criticism of reason’, but he admitted taking a lead from the convoluted espionage dramas of the time, locating the play’s sensational second act in a secret bunker beneath the Atlantic. Owen’s last recorded theatre trip in June 1918 before being sent back to France for the final time before his death, was to the long-running London revue, The Bing Boys on Broadway. He felt he ought to go to see more Shakespeare but drew him in.7 It is interesting to speculate why the war-time theatre industry came to be so little regarded in the years that followed. In a very obvious sense, the decline and subsequent revival of interest is indicative of the kinds of shifts and changes in taste and understanding that Hans Robert Jauss details in his important Towards an Aesthetic of Reception (1982). Jauss would argue that the lack of interest can be attributed to a change in the ‘horizon of expectations’ and an ‘altered aesthetic norm’ that causes ‘the audience [to] experience formerly successful works as outmoded and [to] withdraw its appreciation’.8 Many of the plays of 1914–1919 were topical – and thus ephemeral. Some of the most successful – The Man Who Stayed at Home (1914), Seven Days Leave (1917), The Female Hun (1918) – had their origins in melodrama, a genre invari- ably given the label ‘bad drama’,9 whose characteristic excess would come to stand in opposition to realism and modernism – the dominant modes of aesthetic expression in the modern twentieth century.10 Moreover, in a country left reeling from the unprecedented slaughter, there was less inclination for theatrical flag-waving. By the late 1920s, a play like R. C. Sheriff’s Journey’s End (1928), while not pacifist in inten- tion, seemed more ‘real’ and less irresponsible than the plays written during the war itself, particularly in the way it conveyed what the war had been ‘like’ for those who fought, the ‘lost generation’ of young men.11 Sneering at the war-time dramatists thus became something of a habit, a first step towards extolling the new and making oneself

Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Andrew Maunder 5 seem more sensitive. Among other observers there was resentment at what was perceived as war-time theatre’s tendency to shirk its cultural responsibilities but to profiteer nonetheless. George Bernard Shaw described the ‘higher drama’ as being ‘put out of action’ by silly enter- tainments expressly designed to exploit vulnerable soldiers on leave; ‘smiling men’ who because they ‘were no longer under fire’ were ready to be pleased by anything.12 Shaw’s reference to ‘higher things’ was partly directed at himself but he sounded a common theme. People remembered that before 1914 the London stage was a place of lively cultural cross fertilization and exchange, commercial and populist but also energized by imports from Ireland, France, Germany, the United States, and Norway among others.13 1911, for example, had seen the arrival of a new and potent influence: ‘Les Ballets Russes de Diaghilev’ and its charismatic star, Vaslav Nijinsky. In 1912, Harley Granville Barker’s stagings of The Winter’s Tale and were also held up by some as having begun to modernize the British stage for the better. But there came to be a feeling that the war had stopped this. The radical ‘New Drama’, adventurously ‘speeding along in the van of progress’, as J. T. Grein, one of its champions put it, had shuddered to a halt.14 A sense of war-time audiences ‘disinclined for any [. . .] food for thought’,15 also helped build up this picture of artistic vacuity, encouraged by the popularity of the packaged exoticism of musicals such as (1916; 2,238 performances) and The Maid of the Mountains (1917; 1,352 performances) not to mention the enthusiasm for revues: Shell Out! (1915; 315 performances), (1916; 378 performances), Zig Zag! (1917; 648 performances), Bubbly (1917; 429 performances). For the succeeding generation of critics and theatre practitioners in the 1950s and 1960s, the theatre of the First World War was likewise seen to fall too short of their own radical gestures. Such impatience is most famously demonstrated in Theatre Workshop’s Oh What A Lovely War! (1963; film 1969) where theatre’s ‘complicity’ (to use the language of new historicism) in the horrors of the conflict, its deceit towards the men who enlisted, is conveyed via recreations of music hall turns and pierrot shows. Elsewhere, the association of war-time theatre with the falsehoods of propaganda, combined with the importance ascribed to the trench poets’ versions of what the war was really ‘like’ also lay behind a good many reactions and to this day proves remarkably dif- ficult to shake off. Siegfried Sassoon’s poem ‘Blighters’ (1917), Richard Aldington’s ‘Concert’ (1918) and Wilfred Gibson’s ‘Ragtime’ (1919), the latter directed at the swaggering, cross-dressing female artiste who,

Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 6 Rediscovering First World War Theatre moustachioed and uniformed, ‘strains to squirt her squeaky notes and thin / Spirtle of sniggering lascivious patter’ at the same time as real soldiers ‘crouch and shiver’ in ‘dark trenches’ before being destroyed, are notable examples of this tendency.16 Widely anthologized, these accounts have become fixtures of the canon of First World War litera- ture but also part of what Nicholas Saunders terms our ‘memory bridge’, powerfully persistent ‘truths’ which connect successive generations to the war-time past.17 At the same time, it is possible to argue that the sheer scope of war-time theatrical activity and its inconsistencies have simply proved too awkward for it to be slotted in neatly to chronologi- cal histories of British theatre.18 Indeed, like the war itself, the theatre industry of 1914–1919 can seem to exist between two worlds; a fusion of the old and the new which somehow creates a monster, one that is impossible to forget but hard to describe. This difficulty in categorizing it is perhaps why Wilfred Owen felt it was such an intriguing proposi- tion and why he was enthusiastic about its possibilities. In spite of Owen’s admiration, it was Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), who made the most passionate response to the ‘theater of war’ and convinced of its importance to war-time discourse began the project of rehabilitation.19 While Fussell was not concerned with the theatre industry as such, his exhaustive use of dia- ries, letters and memoirs registered its importance in soldiers’ lives, a theme also taken up in important studies by L. J. Collins (1998), Gordon Williams (2003) and Heinz Kosok (2007). The potential for recovery work is encapsulated in the latter’s The Theatre of War in which he draws attention to over 200 plays dealing with the conflict, some writ- ten in its aftermath but the majority written at the time. Since then new interpretations have resulted from a range of critical develop- ments: feminist history as a mode of intellectual enquiry and a revived interest in female theatre professionals’ war-time careers; cinema his- tory and a combined focus on textual criticism, hermeneutics and the re-interpretation of silent films which has also encouraged a re-thinking of war-time cultural conditions. The resurgence of Marxist criticism as a mode of intellectual enquiry, taking its cue from the theories of Antonio Gramsci, has prompted discussions of theatre’s potentially hegemonic function, its role in shaping the value and attitudes of sections of war- time society. The ideological frameworks and emotional cues behind musicals and revues, for example, have formed the basis for studies by Brian Singleton and James Ross Moore, while John Mullen has analysed the potentially subversive meanings carried by music hall songs.20 The idea that theatre is a ‘socio-cultural phenomenon’ and that ‘its study is

Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Andrew Maunder 7 in some major aspects a branch of social history’, has also led to other genres such as melodrama being mined for evidence of areas of concern to contemporary audiences.21 More recently the emergence, in antici- pation of the war’s centenary, of historians interested in the so-called ‘Home Front’ experience has also added to the number of critical posi- tions.22 So, too, has the recognition that reviving some of the plays of 1914–1918 need not be an irrelevance but can increase our knowledge of war-time culture and attitudes, as evidenced by Two’s Company’s recent triple-bill What the Women Did at London’s Southwark Playhouse (2014), and the work of the World War I Theatre Project based at the University of Hertfordshire (2011– ).23 Notwithstanding the lengthy spell in which theatre all but vanished from histories of war-time culture, a closer look reveals a bustling, vibrant, popular and profitable industry. In 1914, there were 53 in greater London and 51 music halls and variety theatres.24 Significant activities included the work of the Edwardian actor-managers (Sir , Sir George Alexander, John Martin Harvey, Frank Benson); the continuation of energetic experimental groups such as the Pioneer Players and also female management of commer- cial theatres. The diverse work of leading playwrights included George Bernard Shaw’s O’Flaherty, V.C. (1915), Augustus does his Bit (1916) and Heartbreak House (1916–17; performed 1919), while J. M. Barrie’s output included Rosy Rapture (1915), a much-derided revue created for the French dancer Gaby Deslys (shown on this book’s front cover), but also encompassed The New Word (1915), The Old Lady Shows her Medals (1917) and A Well-Remembered Voice (1918), powerful studies of bereave- ment and loneliness. There was the 1914 premiere of Thomas Hardy’s supposedly un-stageable verse drama, The Dynasts, under the direction of Granville Barker, and in 1916 Harold Brighouse’s Hobson’s Choice was produced under the auspices of Annie Horniman’s ground-breaking repertory company. The list of notable events might also include the arrival of French and Belgian companies, including in 1915, Sarah Bernhardt at the , having had her right leg amputated but playing the part of Strasbourg Cathedral in Eugène Morand’s les Cathédrales, an event so unlikely it had the critics turning out in droves. Meanwhile, as Philip Hoare has shown in Wilde’s Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy and the First World War (1997),25 Bernhardt’s carefully-honed image of decadent malaise was nothing compared to the revelations which emerged during Maud Allan’s 1918 libel suit against Noel Pemberton Billing MP, and his counter-charge that the dancer, famous for her erotic performances as Salome, was part of a

Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 8 Rediscovering First World War Theatre vast subversive sexual ‘counter culture’ of famous people (performers included) destroying Britain’s morale.26 The Billing case hinted at Britain’s moral degeneracy, something social purity campaigners liked to lay at the doors of theatres and music halls, as well as pubs and night clubs. Such surveillance was an aspect of war-time life from which no performance venue was immune, running as it did with in tandem with the official work carried out by Lord Chamberlain’s Office. This was the senior representative in the Royal Household who, under the Stage Licensing Act, had the duty of approving new scripts before they could be licensed for public performance. Yet some restrictions were relaxed: 1917 saw the long-awaited licensing of two banned plays which featured discussion of sexual disease, Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts and Eugène Brieux’s Damaged Goods. Audiences were attracted by the ‘for adults only’ tag and were ‘rushing to see them both’ as one newspaper noted.27 But we should note, too, the concurrent appeal of lavishly-costumed historical dramas including Sweet Nell of Old Drury (1911), Peg o’ My Heart (1912), Romance (1915) and The Aristocrat (1917), backward-looking perhaps but powerful examples, along with the flood of spectacular musicals and revues of the material aspects of war-time theatre. Meanwhile the continuance of the star system – Gerald du Maurier as Raffles (1915) (Figure 1.2), Dennis Eadie in Disraeli (1916), Mrs Patrick Campbell’s

Figure 1.2 Raffles (Gerald Du Maurier) enters through the clock door, Wyndham’s Theatre, London, December 1914 (private collection)

Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Andrew Maunder 9 turn as a medium in the thriller The Thirteenth Chair (1917) and Kyrle Bellew as the drugged girl in The Knife (1918) – points to a loyal but under-researched audience for the middlebrow. This is only the top of a very long list, one which should also include the dynamic network of writers, producers, performers and managers working beyond London’s West End. When taken together, the diversity of these activities is a reminder that First World War theatre is a subject which cannot be con- veniently classified with a single label. Like the list of theatrical activities given above, the essays in this book serve as a reminder of some of the dimensions of war-time theatre and the complex and often open-ended questions the topic can elicit. How did the theatre industry in its various forms adapt itself to the new conditions of 1914–1919? How did it represent the conflict and its chal- lenges? The First World War has come to be perceived through its poetry but what impression do we get if we do look at it through its theatre? The appeal of theatrical entertainment to the war-time population is not hard to fathom but what meanings might audiences have given the entertainments they saw?28 That there has always been a difficulty in ‘pinning’ down the theatre of 1914–1919 owes much to the confusions and tensions which its roles as cheerleader, propagandist and profiteer provoke. It also has a great deal to do with the complexity and scale of the field, its broad co-ordinates and different stages. As L. J. Collins has pointed out, to study war-time theatre is to be faced with ‘a myriad of over-lapping and different types of theatre provision’ – plays, musicals, revues, music hall ‘turns’, concerts – amateur as well as professional, with ‘a multiplicity of inter-related functions’.29 The capaciousness that Collins identifies is formulated in many ways in the essays offered here. They exemplify the tensions between theatre’s reputation for unor- thodoxy and its often reactionary, or seemingly limited, portrayals of ‘authentic’ war-time experience; the schism between an industry with a nostalgic longing for an Edwardian ‘golden age’ but which was also gearing itself firmly towards the future; and a profession of people still caught between the clashing forces of respectability together with the need to do their ‘bit’, and a turmoil stemming from their own funda- mental unconventionality. Contributors to this book thus draw on a range of archival and neglected source materials to show the different kinds of theatrical provision on offer between 1914 and 1919 and some of the social and economic contexts out of which it emerged and was watched. By its very nature, any collection dealing with such a complicated and

Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 10 Rediscovering First World War Theatre multivalent political and cultural moment can only offer a slice of the many different types of theatre provision. This collection is no exception and the various discussions of theatrical activity offered here are intended to whet the reader’s appetite and to suggest areas where future research might go. There are four broad sections: Part I: Mobilization and Propaganda, interrogates the extent to which thea- tres sought to encourage what many people since 1919 have rejected: patriotic certainties, glory, euphemisms about battle and the ‘hallowed dead’.30 Contributors explore the different dramatic genres employed and uncover plays which have long been neglected. Part II: Women and War, revisits a context which has come increasingly to the fore in discussions of the war-time experience and points to ways in which the theatre both liberated and constrained women while also offering them models by which to regulate their behaviour. Part III: Popular Theatre, focuses on popular entertainment. We could say, of course, that most theatre of the time was ‘popular’ in the sense that large sections of the urban population attended regularly. The focus of this section, how- ever, is on those forms of entertainment associated with having mass appeal: musical halls, variety theatres, and cinema. Part IV: Alternative Spaces, seeks to correct the tendency to discuss war-time theatre only in terms of London’s commercial West End and reminds us that histo- ries, whatever we know of one event or topic, are depicted differently by any number of observers. War-time theatre is no exception. Thus this section offers case studies of theatrical activity in a provincial city (Birmingham), the charitable enterprises entered into by theatre profes- sionals, the activities of touring concert parties at the Front and the work done in prisoner of war camps where the palliative and emotional benefits of theatre are most obvious.

We are all in it together: mobilization and propaganda

The First World War, or the Great War as it was called, has always provoked strong and mixed emotions. When Britain declared war on Germany on the evening of 4 August 1914 – ostensibly because of her obligation to uphold Belgian neutrality – the playwright Horace Annesley Vachell admitted having ‘no realisation of the immense gravity of the situation’ as he took tea with Mrs Patrick Campbell at the Savoy Hotel. He had heard, however, that Portsmouth `was full of spies’.31 On holiday in Scotland with some of the Llewelyn Davies boys (models for the lost boys in Peter Pan), J. M. Barrie likewise confessed to being ‘ignorant that Europe was in a blaze’. ‘I don’t see myself how

Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Andrew Maunder 11 we can keep out of it long [. . .]’, he added, ‘and if so, the sooner the better [. . .] all the world is spate and bog.’32 Back in London, despite the militaristic atmosphere and ‘vast jostling crowds in the streets’, Arnold Bennett was struck by ‘the feel of a tremendous city in the dark’.33 The theatre critic Desmond MacCarthy was also filled with a sense of foreboding despite – or because of – the cheering people ‘waving flags’ as they ‘whizzed by’ in motor cars. He reacted to the news with the comment, ‘The worst year of their lives is coming for most people.’34 Yet, other members of the theatre industry expressed optimism at the prospect and the benefits it would bring Britain, a country sinking into degeneracy. The actress expressed the thoughts of many when she told a reporter: ‘We are now having the great purge. Things will be much saner after this [. . .] Nothing better for us all has ever hap- pened. We will lose so much of our selfishness, of our extravagance.’35 Another representative of theatre’s hard-won respectability, actor-man- ager Frank Benson (knighted in 1916), also expressed his support for the cause. After a performance as at the , the actor came out in front of the curtain dressed in costume wearing a red rose – the red rose of St George but also of the City of London regi- ment the Royal Fusiliers. Benson dedicated his performance to soldiers, saying the war was a call to arms to which all sons of the motherland and colonies would respond, ‘writing a new and magnificent history in their life’s blood’.36 Benson’s passionate appeal was shared by Sir William Hull, MP for Hammersmith who, after seeing Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s production of Drake on tour, made a speech about the value of plays as recruiting agents.37 Later, in 1916, J. T. Grein, founder of the Independent Theatre Society, stressed the importance of theatrical entertainment as propa- ganda, explaining how ‘the Drama is the Marconigram that will lead to understanding’.38 Undoubtedly it was the belief in theatre’s capacity to depict living, breathing examples of ‘glorious deeds’ which would ‘beget imagination’ (to quote Grein) and thus inspire audiences, which enabled senior representatives like Benson and Beerbohm Tree to pro- nounce on war-time topics with such confidence. The ‘best’ war-time theatre would seemingly exhibit a transcendent appeal that would align with an audience’s sense of national selfhood. Patriotism, propaganda and the deeply held interest in the relations between drama and other forms of war-time discourse are some of the themes underlying the discussions of theatrical activity offered in Part I of this book. One of the supposed ‘truths’ about the First World War is, as Adrian Gregory has noted, ‘that the war begins with illusion

Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 12 Rediscovering First World War Theatre and enthusiasm’.39 This is the starting point for the first essay, ‘“This Unhappy Nation”: War on the Stage in 1914’ by Steve Nicholson who surveys playwrights’ early reactions to the conflict. As Nicholson dem- onstrates, even when Britain was supposed to be in the grip of ‘war fever’ busily recruiting a new ‘citizen army’,40 the reality was more fluid, complex and varied than familiar images suggest. Horace Annesley Vachell may have been ‘seized’, as he put it, by ‘[t]he lust for writing’,41 producing ‘khaki sketches’ and a hit play Searchlights in less than two weeks but, as Nicholson explains, the outbreak of war took much of the theatre industry by surprise. British playwrights had often represented the wars in which their country was engaged, but this was different.42 The idea of the English Channel as a ‘screen’ between Britain and Europe began to disintegrate.43 The fighting seemed closer than before, less easy to ignore; few were able to escape its effects. The war quickly became a new and different kind of monster showing terrors never seen before and it seemed impossible to say what it really meant despite the directives of government or press. Commentators at the time began to speak of the emerging conflict as ‘nothing less than an onslaught on civilization’,44 a view shaped by a new technology of weaponry that seemed beyond description to those who saw it: bigger shells, machine guns, tanks, airships, aeroplanes. The first months of the war thus offered several challenges to play- wrights. Partly these were artistic – confusion about what meanings the war held – but they were also practical, partly because of the need to have new plays licensed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office before they could be publicly performed. Nicholson has discussed this subject in the first volume of his The Censorship of British Drama 1900–1968 (2003). As he notes in his essay here, by 1914 some sections of the theatre industry saw the Lord Chamberlain and his staff as being hopelessly behind the times. ‘When the Censor gets hold of a good new play’, noted a writer for the New Statesman, ‘he behaves like a girl who drops a beetle with a cry of “Ugh! Horrid thing; it’s alive!”’45 The censor’s squeamishness regarding sexual topics would relax slightly during the war but the watchfulness regarding the political situation would not. It was obviously no longer strictly necessary to worry about offending Germany but the Lord Chamberlain’s Office was steadfast in its determi- nation that the armed services should not be made to look foolish and that works which seemed likely to disturb public order or undermine morale would receive short shrift. While few plays were banned outright it was quite common for the censor to demand changes in the national interest. For example, in John Brandon’s There was a King in Flanders

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( Hippodrome, 1915), an English nurse marooned in a farmhouse in Belgium cuts the telephone as a way of hindering communications between advancing Germans. She also comforts a wounded Belgian soldier who has killed a German soldier who had raped his sweetheart. When news arrives that the Belgian troops have rallied, the soldier dies happy, knowing that he has been of service to his country. The censor was adamant that ‘physical agony & the appearance of wounds’ should not be ‘exploited on the stage’ while admitting the play’s ‘obvious devo- tion to King Albert’ to be ‘touching’.46 Such comments highlight some of the ideological frameworks within which playwrights were expected to operate, and which persisted throughout the war. There was a King in Flanders was not Brandon’s sole attempt to dramatize the events of the war but the play is typical of a good deal of war-time drama in its message of national – even inter- national – unity. As Nicholson notes ‘whatever internal disagreements might have existed before August 1914 were now irrelevant, because we were all in it together’ (p. 51 this volume). The play also becomes an expression of what Bruce McConachie has termed the ‘hegemonic “we”’, a kind of ‘“common ground” strategy’ whereby audiences identify with the actions of certain characters on the basis of certain ‘taken-for-granted values’. 47 Traditional expressions of honour, duty, chivalry, self-sacrifice, were much to the fore and would persist, a reminder, perhaps, that the First World War has a claim to be consid- ered ‘in cultural terms, the last nineteenth-century war’, as Jay Winter has pointed out.48 However, as Nicholson notes here, it was not always the case that the war’s early plays were attempting to sell the glamour of combat or lead the public mood with jingoistic fanfare. In Edmund Goulding’s God Save the King (1914) and Kenelm Foss’s The Hem of the Flag (1914), the stance is more consensual than enthusiastic. Playwrights picked up the government’s propaganda agenda (including the need to be vigilant against enemy spies), but also conveyed a sense of unease, of dislocation and an acute awareness of the personal costs which would be involved. On the one hand, war-time drama acted as a code-giver, offering the audience member examples by which s/he should behave. On the other hand, the same plays were also born out of a sense of anxiety and one of the tasks which Nicholson sets himself is to locate the kinds of discontinuities involved and which are often overlooked. In Chapter 2, Anselm Heinrich picks up on the question of theatre’s role in delivering patriotic entertainment by reappraising the ways in which theatre companies resuscitated existing plays, particularly Shakespeare. In the early months of the war, the reappearance of older

Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 14 Rediscovering First World War Theatre works had a lot to do with the fact that not much topical material had been written. ‘Revivals lead the way’, was thus the proclamation in The Era on 2 September 1914.49 But there was also a feeling that it was easier for audiences to digest these familiar works. Certainly some of them seemed irresistible: Paul Potter’s The Conquerors (1898), Freeman Wills’s The Only Way (1899; based on A Tale of Two Cities); Arthur Collins’s spy play The Price of Peace (1900), Cecil Raleigh’s The Best of Friends (1902), Emma Orczy and Montague Barstow’s The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905), W. P. Drury and Leo Trevor’s The Flag Lieutenant (1908), Guy Du Maurier’s An Englishman’s Home (1909), Arnold Bennett and Edward Knoblauch’s Milestones (1912) and the light opera Florodora (1899), replete with its famous song ‘I want to be a Military man!’ All of them reappeared, both in London or on the touring circuits. But it was not simply a case of laziness or lack of material. These revivals permitted a celebration of ‘Heritage’ and ‘History’, together with the ability, as The Graphic noted, ‘to remind us what the world was like before the war’; they served as a kind of dramatic ‘comfort food’ as well as showing the civilized values being fought for, and in the case of soldiers the land to which they would return.50 Shakespeare, of course, represented the best part of Britain’s cultural heritage and, as Anselm Heinrich shows in his chapter, it was also pos- sible to locate within him a contemporary relevance. This, at least, was the strategy adopted in revivals by the older actor-managers – Herbert Beerbohm Tree, John Martin Harvey and Frank Benson – who recruited themselves and their majestic – some said, bombastic – productions to the war effort. In another speech, this time in Stratford-upon-Avon in August 1914, Benson, a keen sportsman, urged his audience to ‘take consolation in the fact that England would play a man’s part [in the conflict], a part which that great genius Shakespeare would have them play’.51 The preoccupations of Henry IV Part 1, staged by Beerbohm Tree at His Majesty’s Theatre in autumn 1914 (the warring family, the con- version of Prince Hal from pleasure to duty, the display of resourceful leaders, the plea for unity) likewise seemed to connect with political events by embedding modern concerns within a longer perspective of British history. The Era wrote of it as a production which ‘voices the national spirit of the times, and makes its appeal to chivalry and patri- otism’,52 while for the Standard it was an ‘“allegory” of the change that has come over our own “slackers” of today’.53 Combining the dramatic and the political, Shakespeare remained an important tool of ‘English- speaking’ patriotism and if sometimes his work seemed to provoke a kind of sprawling narcissism amongst the actor-managers it offered

Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Andrew Maunder 15 proof nonetheless of the existing repertoire’s usefulness. As Heinrich notes, the celebrations surrounding the Shakespeare Tercentenary of 1916 reinforced this sense of a national treasure and secret weapon, as did Lilian Baylis’s work running London’s Old-Vic, a theatre which would be instrumental in carrying Shakespeare into the post-war years and towards World War II. One commonly perceived problem of dramatic writing between 1914 and 1919 is not a lack of plots but in the apparent inability of play- wrights to capture what we now know to be the horrors of war and, in particular, the war as experienced by combatants. During the war, it was often suggested that the British were ‘afraid of khaki on the stage – properly handled’, that they repressed the dark ideas of death that it carried, and that this, linked with audiences’ preference for light-hearted entertainment together with the censor’s reluctance to allow the depic- tion of wounded or dying soldiers – or indeed any kind of soldier unless he was a stiff-lipped officer or cheerful cockney Tommy – was leaving a strange, unnatural shadow on theatre’s war-time output.54 In the spring of 1915, Derek Ross lamented how ‘we are still without a war play of any merit’ and how the plays given this label fell short. ‘We cannot take The Flag Lieutenant seriously – West-End drawing-room stuff dished up with a naval sauce and some fuzzy wuzzy shooting [. . .] The Man who Stayed at Home [the most popular spy play of the 1914–1915 season] is the ordinary stage detective story cast in a war setting to fit the moment’ (see Figure 1.3). In June 1915 Stephen Phillips’s portentous, plotless Armageddon, replete with John Martin Harvey as Lucifer, clad incon- gruously in flesh-coloured body suit, was judged embarrassing and prompted claims that the Germans would be ‘chuckling’ at the crudity of it all.55 As Ross saw it, only Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts (1914), set during the Napoleonic wars, came anywhere near what was needed, but it was scarcely about current events or the experiences of modern soldiers.56 Despite its distinguished pedigree, it was difficult to view it with any great confidence for insights into the relationship between battle experience and creativity or the effects of combat on the indi- vidual. Moreover, the plays that did try to do this – Ernest Temple Thurston’s The Cost (1914), Horace Vachell’s Searchlights (1915), ’s Black ‘Ell (1916), all of them giving radical expression to one of the war’s lasting legacies, shell shock, proved uncomfortable viewing at the time. People were moved by the low-key presentation of young Harry Blaine’s experiences in Searchlights (‘The gunning got on my nerves’57) and the play enjoyed a London run of 105 performances. Temple Thurston’s play, however, closed after twenty, while Malleson’s

Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 16 Rediscovering First World War Theatre was prosecuted under the 1914 Defence of the Realm Act, being liable, in the words of the act, to ‘cause disaffection’. (The authorities viewed plays about the Russian Revolution with equal suspicion.) In the end, it would be another, much cruder, play, The Better ‘Ole (1917) based on Captain Bruce Bairnsfather’s cartoons of the soldier ‘Old Bill’, which would gain iconic status. As Simon Featherstone shows in his essay in this book (Chapter 9), The Better’Ole was an enormous hit, taking £2,500 in its first week; the London production ran for 811 performances and was supplemented by several touring versions. Part of The Better ‘Ole’s success was due to the fact that it seemed to articulate, in plain speech, some of the experiences of the ‘common man’ at war. ‘I’m sick of this ’ere War’ and ‘We wish we were in Blighty’ were two of the show’s most popular songs. When one combatant, P. H. Pilditch, saw the play it unnerved him and he seemed to see his own grim experiences refracted

Figure 1.3 Miriam (Ruth Mackay): Whatever have you found? Brent (Dennis Eadie): A wireless up the chimney. The Man Who Stayed at Home, Royalty Theatre London, December 1914 (private collection)

Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Andrew Maunder 17 back but loved it all the same: ‘The play was full of the dirty, noisy scenes I know so well and hate so heartily.’58 In the next essay in this collection ‘On the Edge of Town: Melodrama and Suburban Theatre in Brixton, 1915’ (Chapter 4), Andrew Maunder notes that while playwrights continued to struggle to write the war, certain styles did appear financially appealing but also more suited for conveying what was at stake for Britain and her peoples. Thus for every writer who wrote in the naturalistic mode, there were three times as many channelling the crisis through the melodramatic. In developing this line of enquiry we might consider Elaine Hadley’s suggestion made in Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace 1800–1885 that ‘a version of the “melodramatic” seems to have served as a behavioural and expressive model for several generations of English people’. As a space for articulating moments of crisis it ‘emerged in the early and mid-nineteenth century as a polemical response to the social, economic and epistemological changes that characterised the consolidation of market society in the nineteenth century’ and `as a reaction to social change’.59 Melodrama had remained an integral part of British theatre but its eruption with a vengeance in 1914 is not really surprising, especially when we consider the ways in which events were often represented in the press: good versus evil. Defenceless Belgium was often seen to have been ‘wantonly violated’ rather like a victim- ized stage heroine at the mercy of a rapacious squire.60 In September 1914, reviewing the revival of Henry Arthur Jones’s The Silver King (1882), a writer for Tatler noted how ‘when the world outside is like a Lyceum melodrama there is a certain consolation in watching a faint replica of it on the stage. For the sure and certain happy ending of the one makes one hope that there will be a sure and certain happy end- ing to the other, and the result is full of the heart throbs of hope.’61 In his essay Maunder offers a case study of one of these war-time plays: A. Myddleton Myles’s War, Red War (1915). This was staged outside the West End in the south London suburb of Brixton by one of the Edwardian period’s most successful (and financially astute) producers of melodrama, Frederick Melville. As Maunder shows, the play embodies some of the ferocious ways in which melodrama was used to deal with a range of Home Front fears: the spy threat, the ‘enemy within’, ‘fallen’ women’s war-time activities, the birth rate, illegitimacy, drug addicts, soldiers’ grievances, as well as a more regular menu of German war crimes. But despite the genre’s brutalist war-time aesthetic, Maunder explains how melodrama could allow audiences to renegotiate their vision of the war-time world. The genre was sometimes able to produce

Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 18 Rediscovering First World War Theatre a more complicated, pluralistic and even subversive, engagement with, for example, the topic of illicit sex (much discussed in 1915) and other concerns relating to motherhood, social purity and the treatment of soldiers’ dependents. In focusing specifically on the Brixton Theatre Maunder also follows a number of recent historians by noting a concern for a separate (local) war-time experience and emphasizes the crucial role of suburban theatres in serving their communities.62

Women and the war

The complex cultural shifts which the war threw up are also the focus of the chapters which make up Part II of this book ‘Women and War’. The three essays by Sos Eltis (Chapter 5), Katharine Cockin (Chapter 6) and Veronica Kelly (Chapter 7) apply the context of gender to war- time theatre and cinema, and point to ways in which dramaturgy and subjects might be embedded within wider conversations about contested models of femininity arising out of the times. In 1917 Neville Chamberlain, the Government’s Director of National Service, summed up the mood of many when he suggested that ‘Among the changes to our social fabric which have been brought by the war [. . .] none is more remarkable than the development of women’s activities.’ Women had ‘invaded the spheres hitherto considered sacred to men . . . They had become postmen, policemen and agricultural labourers and they had done all those things with an efficiency which had surprised and delighted the whole nation.’63 Others did not share Chamberlain’s enthusiasm, partly because of their fears about the harmful effects of work on women’s physical health, their roles as wives and mothers, and the possible consequences for the well-being of the British race. In 1915, a socialist paper the Woman’s Dreadnought, expressed this side of the popular mood when it explained that ‘The present time is a period of awakening national needs and national welfare, and with the flower of our youth perishing and worse than perishing on the battlefields, we must save every saveable child.’64 The Daily News, meanwhile, took the middle ground in 1917 in a discussion of women’s role in the muni- tions’ industry: ‘Women have done some wonderful work but a baby is more wonderful than a machine gun.’65 As in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, the theatre was one arena where women remained employed in all aspects of its work, as performers, a category which covered the lowly chorus girl and the eco- nomically powerful star, and also as musicians and managers.66 During the war, the activities undertaken by women also included managing

Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Andrew Maunder 19 touring companies and theatres both in London and the provinces, as well as working as technicians. In this sense the theatre industry con- solidated its reputation for giving women opportunities not found in other professions even taking into account the special circumstances of war-time. ‘Women [. . .] are inclined to affect to despise the women of the theatre and music hall’ announced Gaby Deslys in October 1914, and this, she claimed, was because they were reminded of ‘their own subjection, our liberty; they envy it us’.67 This may have been the case but these feelings are not massively documented. More apparent at the time, as Sos Eltis shows in her essay ‘“From Sex-War to Factory Floor”: Theatrical Depictions of Women’s Work during the First World War’, was theatre’s odd rhetoric of doubleness and equivocation when it came to representing women on stage. In particular there was an apparent disconnect between the new opportunities which the war was seen to open up and the reluctance by playwrights to acknowledge this with any seriousness on the commercial stage. In a much quoted essay on feminist approaches to theatre history, Tracy C. Davis has written of theatre’s ‘cultural role as image-relayer and image-definer’, a process often ‘tied to the dominant culture’s ideol- ogy and particularly liable to reinforce it’.68 And certainly it is the case, as Eltis shows here, that the images of women in war-time drama can often seem curiously backward looking, involuted rather than progres- sive, putting paid to the politically engaged dramas which had begun to emerge in the years immediately before the conflict. As Eltis notes ‘older plays and the handful of new plays reassuringly presented women’s work as essentially domestic’ while ‘the problems and tensions surrounding women’s employment were shelved’ (p. 116 this volume). But, this is not to say that there was not some subversive or proto-feminist work. Harold Brighouse and John Galsworthy wrote plays showing women who are refreshing challenges to dramatic stereotypes. Another of the plays which Eltis discusses is Gwen John’s Luck of War (1917) staged by the Pioneer Players, the group which is the subject of Katharine Cockin’s essay (Chapter 6). Luck of War itself portrays the effects on a northern working-class household of a returning ‘Tommy’. The soldier, George Hemmingway, has been presumed dead though in reality has been in a hospital where part of his leg has been amputated. He finds that his wife, Ann, has remarried and has a child with her new husband. The soldier is a brute; the new husband is a decent, Christian man. The play is about the damaged bodies and families created by the war. While Luck of War portrays Ann’s behaviour as disloyal, and as some critics in 1917 saw it, sexually immoral, the play also presents her as a victim.

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She is a young woman on her own, facing poverty, in a male-dominated environment. The two men who surround Ann regard her merely as a trophy to be fought over and the play implies that for all the talk of the war bringing female emancipation, Ann’s existence, like that of all other women, cannot be separated from the two men who lay claim to her. In her essay ‘Edith Craig and the Pioneer Players: London’s International Art Theatre in a “Khaki-clad and Khaki-minded World”’ (Chapter 6), Katherine Cockin explains that the right to show an appar- ently subversive play like Luck of War had its origins in the fact that like other subscription-based drama societies and private clubs, the Pioneer Players were able to ‘dodge’ (Arnold Bennett’s term) the Lord Chamberlain’s licensing regulations.69 One outcome of this, as Cockin explains, was that the society was able to introduce audiences to avant- garde plays about subjects often deemed ‘improper’, together with international drama at time when anything ‘foreign’ was regarded with suspicion. Led by Edith Craig, the free-thinking daughter of , the Pioneers staged experimental plays of ‘ideas’ in an attempt to carry on the modernizing cultural trajectory which had begun in the years immediately before 1914. After war was declared the result was not so much a process of blatantly performing against British war-time hegem- onic discourse (as represented by the propaganda plays highlighted by Steve Nicholson in Chapter 2 in this book), as much as taking audi- ences on journeys into unfamiliar social, psychological or sexual ter- rains. For example, in 1918 after attending a performance of La Femme et le Pantin (The Woman and the Puppet), Arnold Bennett recorded how ‘the huge theatre was packed’, audiences clearly attracted by the naked female dancer (‘very well managed with a screen’70) but, as Cockin also explains, another part of the appeal lay in a form of theatre willing to challenge the order of things and offering visions of an alternative (underground) world. In their essays, Eltis and Cockin, together with Maunder, independently make the point that the limitations placed on women and their modes of representation on stage were difficult to jet- tison and these tensions, especially when linked with fears about female sexuality on the Home Front, formed a popular backdrop against which war-time theatre was often played out. They show how it is possible to feel caught between two worlds, one of safety and nostalgia; one of impatience for the onward march of progress. In ‘“A Sweet Tribute to Her Memory”: War-time Edith Cavell Plays and Films’ (Chapter 7), Veronica Kelly continues the examination of women and theatre by considering some of the theatrical and cine- matic depictions in Britain and Australia of a war-time icon: Edith

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Cavell. At first viewed as a devout English spinster, selflessly nursing the wounded in Brussels, Cavell’s arrest and execution by the Germans on 12 October 1915 on charges of spying, saw her installed in large sections of the British Empire as a heroine and also as a martyr. Cavell’s story strikingly encapsulates the competing narratives relating to women’s wartime activities and might usefully be read alongside the essays in this book by Eltis, Cockin and Leask. However, Kelly also demonstrates how Cavell’s history was redeployed as part of the propaganda agenda, staged by dramatists and film-makers as another example of ‘Hun frightfulness’ (along with the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, the occupation of Belgium and the 1916 execution of the British merchant seaman Captain Fryatt). The resulting Cavell plays and films can also be viewed as representative of a certain brand of adaptive propaganda, a ‘recycling of a key moment from the national past as inspiration for the nation in the present’, as Andrew Higson puts it. In these kinds of narratives which, unsurprisingly, were seen by government and censors to have a good deal to offer the war effort, there tends to be focus on what Higson calls ‘the remarkable individual’ and ‘idealised type’ who offers ‘an acceptable national identity’.71 Higson’s comments are made in relation to ’s 1918 film Nelson but the mobilization of national heroes in grand narratives was something which also occurred in live theatre. As has been noted, in London, Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s 1914–1915 season began with a revival of the interminable, but also spectacular and ideologically potent, pageant play by Louis Napoleon Parker: Drake. In 1915, another historical drama by Parker, Disraeli, which depicted the Anglo-Jewish Prime Minister as a kind of Victorian spy-master-patriot-imperialist, also had a successful London run. John Forman’s To Arms (1914) featured the ghosts of the Duke of Wellington and Napoleon appearing to Belgian refugees fleeing across the plains of Waterloo. Another potent ghostly encounter took place in Cecil B. De Mille’s American film Joan the Woman (1916) and like St Joan of Arc, Edith Cavell could be revisioned as both selfless and strong, a woman whose famous last words – ‘patriotism is not enough. We must have no hatred and no bitterness towards any one’ – spoke for Britain, and whose fate had the power to inspire men and women to action. These sentiments would make Cavell a national icon – even now she remains a potent symbol of feminism and patriotism72 – yet as Kelly argues in her essay, two years into the conflict this did not seem to be the case in theatres. These kinds of narratives were beginning to lose some of their ability to attract audiences whose ‘short war illusion’ was beginning to fade.73 Thus one question Kelly asks is whether something happened to change

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British and Australian perceptions of the war around mid-1915–1916? Was it the disastrous Gallipoli campaign? Perhaps parts of the entertain- ment industry were slow to recognize this.

Listening to the customer: popular entertainment

‘In the present struggle the British public seems unable to shake off a strange incurable frivolity’, announced the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News in August 1915 and, indeed, its writer’s observation was echoed many times during the war and after. On the one hand, as we have seen, many twentieth-century critics held up the commercial thea- tre’s focus on ‘light’ entertainment as a sign of its lack of engagement with the conflict. Thus J. C. Trewin wrote disparagingly in 1964 of how ‘the metropolitan theatre depended mainly upon the skimpier comedy, on farce and melodrama, on musical plays and revues’, all produced with the regularity of a ‘conveyer belt’, few of which ‘would live beyond a mayfly span’.74 On the other hand, James Ross Moore has more recently viewed the war’s many musicals, including, among others, To-night’s the Night (1915), Tina (1915), Chu Chin Chow (1916), The Boy (1917), together with its even longer list of revues, including Odds and Ends (1914), The Passing Show of 1915 (1915), Shell Out! (1915) (see Figure 1.4),

Figure 1.4 Shell Out! Chorus and Song: ‘Flag Day’ (July 1915) (private collection) ‘Stand and deliver the modern brigands shout / Get your purses ready boys, Shell out, Shell out!’

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Now’s the Time (1915), Pell Mell (1916), The Bing Boys are Here (1916) as theatrical forms which were ‘vital, influential and innovative’.75 When observers at the time noticed how unstoppable musicals and revues seemed – ‘positively pouring on’, as the Bystander noted in March 1915, ‘without even a particle of a pretence of seriousness of purpose about them’ – some also saw it as proof of commercialism and extravagance gone rampant, theatre was being underwritten by greedy businessmen out to make a quick buck, and an irresponsible public happy to ignore the suffering of soldiers on the other side of the English Channel.76 Revues are no longer the theatrical mainstays they were but these collections of comic sketches, sentimental songs and energetic displays of dancing drew large crowds. ‘Practically every music hall in London is now presenting one of these shows [. . .]’, noted the Sketch in 1914, ‘the type has really come to stay. Some of them, indeed, possess a certain amount of underlying plot, but, roughly speaking, this is not a thing to be adhered to. The chief object of these entertainments is to make a portion of the evening pass with a swing and a certain amount of melody.’77 As Gordon Williams has argued, it is no surprise that revues – formless, noisy, chaotic, apparently nonsensical – came into their own. Between 1915 and 1916, a year of attrition on the Western Front, they staked out a kind of theatrical no-man’s land and seemed right for the times. According to Williams, revues ‘broke away from the rigidities of the well-made play with its fraudulent implications of an ordered world’, made people question ‘reality’ itself and accidentally became the most obvious examples of war-time theatre’s modernity, part of a ‘fragmented modernist consciousness’ whose associations with disorder captured the turmoil engulfing Europe.78 When it premiered in 1916, Chu Chin Chow was one show which suggested that war-time theatre had reached new heights of extrava- gance. Created by , who billed it as ‘an Eastern revue’ after the fashion of an earlier musical Kismet (1911) and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Chu Chin Chow’s blend of the exotic and the modern – its bejewelled but scanty costumes, live camel, donkey and snakes, the ‘rhythmical’ and ‘sugary’ tunes – made it an instant hit and it ran for 2,238 performances until 1921. The Times praised its ‘kaleidoscope series of scenes now romantic, now realistic, now Futurist or Vorticist, but always beautiful [. . .] A gorgeous heap of coloured stuffs.’79 It was fortunate too, that unlike other revues, the ‘gyrating’ slave girls survived the Lord Chamberlain’s scrutiny, despite outrage from social purity campaigners.80 Supporters argued that suggestions that such displays were a sign of degeneracy or ‘decadence’ was ‘nonsense’. It was, theatre

Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 24 Rediscovering First World War Theatre producer Edward Laurillaud explained, ‘only natural’ that the public wanted ‘something light and amusing which would provide them with a good laugh’.81 In this sense, as Brian Singleton has noted, Chu Chin Chow is a very clear example of how , escapist and therapeutic, could become ‘a cultural drug, fully licensed, for England’s fighting men, deprived of female company, and traumatized by the hor- rors of battlefield slaughter’.82 By this time London had become what Clive Barker calls the ‘clearing house for the Western Front’ and in the absence of any organized activities to cover the ten-day leave period, it was left to the theatres, along with the city’s pubs and prostitutes, to keep the troops amused (see Figure 1.5).83 In 1917 revue producer Albert de Courville reported that 75 per cent of the audiences were soldiers.84 While we can no longer resort to a simple dismissal of shows like Chu Chin Chow, or its successor, The Maid of the Mountains (1917), critics have traditionally found such approaches difficult to avoid. Viv Gardner opens her essay, ‘The Theatre of the Flappers?: Gender, Spectatorship and the “Womanisation” of Theatre 1914–1918’ (Chapter 8) with extracts from Frank Vernon’s Twentieth Century Theatre, a book which contains violent attacks on this kind of entertainment. Taking up Vernon’s pejorative discussion of the ‘uneducated’ theatregoers who enabled musicals and revues to flourish,85 the story of war-time theatre, as Gardner sees it, becomes one about audiences, a subject which received a good deal of comment at the time. Gardner’s essay

Figure 1.5 Australian soldiers about to enter His Majesty’s Theatre for a performance of Chu Chin Chow, 1917

Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Andrew Maunder 25 is a pertinent example of the way in which critics have engaged with war-time theatre partly because of what it can reveal about social anxieties but also because of its apparent importance in the lives of the war-time population. However, like Sos Eltis (Chapter 5), Gardner is also interested in the obstructions placed before women in their involvement with the theatre industry, but where Eltis is interested in the skewed representation of women onstage, Gardner focuses on their participation as patrons. In particular she examines the widespread feel- ing amongst purists that the circumstances of war were causing theatre to become too ‘feminized’, that is, shaped by the frivolous tastes of women – the emphasis on spectacle in Chu Chin Chow being only the most notorious example. This focus on the form of the female theatre- goer was not entirely new. In the years leading up to 1914, women had already begun to be singled out for special treatment, often in ways involving unflattering characteristics, and critics like Frank Vernon con- tinued it after 1918. Gardner sees the ‘tension’ as stemming in part from the times: ‘women’s growing social, political and sexual autonomy, and their infiltration of the workplace [which] characterised much of the pre-war period and grew exponentially as the war progressed’ (p. 165 this volume). The history of the female theatregoer, which like that of female performers, is characterised by suspicion, was Gardner suggests, particularly relevant when groups of wage-earning women had more of their own money to spend on leisure activities. Other women were seen to be reluctant to pay for themselves and instead preyed on unsuspect- ing soldiers, making them take them. Like other contributors to this book, Gardner’s discussion reminds us that 1914–1919 was a society in transition, whose changes were deeply unsettling to traditionalists. She highlights, too, the extent to which a good deal of war-time writing about the theatre interwove dramatic anxieties with social ones. The extravagant world of musicals and spectacular reviews which Gardner describes was heavily influenced (naturally enough) by the competing pulls of patriotism and profit, a recurrent topic of discus- sion in newspapers at the time. Star performers were regularly accused of being overpaid; Phyllis Dare and Gaby Deslys were both said to earn more than the Prime Minister. Theatre owners also risked being seen as profiteers, something which also emerges in retrospectives of the period.86 One way in which the theatre industry sought to combat this was via the adoption of what film historian Leslie Midkiff DeBauche has termed ‘practical patriotism’. Under this policy it was seen to be ‘appropriate and reasonable’ for managers and producers ‘to com- bine allegiance to country and to business’.87 The idea was tied up with

Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 26 Rediscovering First World War Theatre the economic philosophy of Herbert Asquith’s Liberal government and its doctrines of free trade. People could contribute to the country’s war effort by continuing to buy British and ‘carrying on’ as normal – or at least as far as possible. The catchphrase ‘business as usual’, gener- ally attributed to when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, was also used a good deal. He had coined it in August 1914 in a speech to businessmen as a part of a plan to reduce the effect of the war on the economy. People needed to avoid panicking. If they continued to spend rather than hoarding, all would be well. The big shopkeepers took up the slogan, as did the theatres and cinemas. Accordingly, in August 1914 a group of musical hall owners, led by Walter De Freece and wrote the first of several open letters to the newspa- pers in which they argued that ‘it is for the good of all that the public should, as far as possible, continue patronise places of amusement’. They explained that this request was not made in order that they as proprietors could grab more profit ‘but in order that the very large num- ber of people in humble positions who are dependent on this business for their livelihood should not be thrown out of employment’ – and also because it was ‘for the good morale of the people that “business as usual” should be maintained throughout the country’.88 In the subse- quent four years, the industry’s supporters sought to carry this idea a step further. In an article published in Tatler in April 1915, Gaby Deslys explained ‘why we are wanted in war time’ and her argument was the same as that of De Frece and Butt: her continuing presence on stage in elaborate costumes kept humbler people in employment.89 By this time the mere act of braving the blackout and the was also being championed as patriotic; an opportunity to show a kind of devil-may-care attitude. ‘Frivolity as usual?’ asked the Bystander after a visit to a music hall in October 1914, ‘and why not? Those of us who stay behind would do a sorry service to our country by moping all day and all night [. . .] The love of fun is eternal and it will take a bigger beast than the Prussian to bully us out of it.’90 The next essay in this collection, Simon Featherstone’s ‘The Epitome of National Life: Metropolitan Music Hall and Variety Theatre’ (Chapter 9) takes up these ideas in order to trace some of the routes taken by these venues. Music halls and variety theatres are spaces which have long been associated in the popular imagination with the war effort, not least as ‘arenas of recruiting’, as Adrian Gregory puts it.91 Many had loyal followings: the , for example, staged 1,043 perfor- mances in 1916 seen by three million people.92 Moreover, on the out- break of war, the War Office had recognized their influence by writing

Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Andrew Maunder 27 to the managers of the major variety theatres, asking them to add songs like ‘Fall In’ and ‘We Don’t Want to Lose You (but We Think You Ought to Go)’ to their repertoires.93 Yet while music halls and variety theatres began the war in a position of strength, they ended it in danger of look- ing old-fashioned and of being swept aside. Some performers – Harry Lauder, , ‘Little Tich’ (Harry Relph), George Robey – had become national institutions and would remain so. But by 1914, new cultural influences – American-influenced jazz, ragtime and spectacular revues were taking hold. Although, as Featherstone shows, it was the case that music halls and variety theatres tried to adapt, making much of their ‘authenticity’, it was during the war that their terminal ‘decline’ began (p. 180 this volume). In his essay Featherstone also explains that it was to combat these new threats that some theatres, notably ’s London Coliseum, tried to become ‘gentrified’ and appeal to wider and more ‘respectable’ family audiences.94 Fired by vanity, a talent for self-promotion, and a prodigious work ethic, Stoll in the 1900s, had become the central figure of the Stoll Moss Theatre Group, owning Empires and Coliseums up and down Britain. By 1912 he also added the Royal Variety Performance to his portfolio of responsibilities. During the war, Stoll made his mark again as a committed supporter of war charities while the flagship Coliseum began to be spoken of as the place to go for slick, patriotic, light entertainment. Rather surprisingly, this is something which the war-time diaries of Virginia Woolf convey very strikingly. She records her (again rather surprising) liking for variety theatre ‘turns’, her favour- ites being comic singers, tenors and acrobats, but she also captures something of the weird war-time mixture characteristic of these venues. In 1918, visiting the Coliseum, Woolf saw the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova in Carnaval (a piece based on Robert Schumann’s piano suite and associated with Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes). This was followed by the comedian Will Evans in a slapstick sketch ‘Laying the Carpet’. Woolf’s response to her fellow audience members ‘bellowing like bulls’95 makes her seem remote but at the same theatre she delighted in Arturo Spizzi’s singing of national anthems and a new patriotic revue featuring jaunty sea shanties and excerpts from Elgar. Where Woolf does appear a dissenting, almost condescending figure, is in her bored reactions to the one-act plays on the programme (another part of the theatre’s efforts to attract a better clientele).96 In early 1915, these included Fred Rowe’s comedy Longshoreman Bill and J. M. Barrie’s Der Tag, an allegori- cal two-hander about a bombastic Emperor being taken to task by the Spirit of Culture. This, Woolf decided, was ‘sheer balderdash of the

Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 28 Rediscovering First World War Theatre thinnest kind’. ‘We left’, she wrote with some disappointment, ‘just as an Eastern jar, coloured grey & violet shot up in the middle of the stage’ signalling the arrival of the Ko-Ten-Ichi troupe of oriental entertainers.97 Characteristically, Woolf adopts a carefully considered position which is very much her own but her comments clearly draw attention to the richness of this aspect of war-time theatre, and in particular the merging of different branches. As Featherstone argues, it was a situation which involved clashes between ‘a mature mass cultural industry and threat- ened and actual government restrictions’, particularly as this related to prostitutes using music halls to pick up men (and vice versa), but also ‘changing patterns of spectatorship and intense questioning of the role of popular performance in national life’ (p. 179 this volume) If Simon Featherstone shows one aspect of mass entertainment hav- ing to reposition itself in order to survive, Emma Hanna’s essay, ‘British Cinema, Regulation and the War Effort, 1914–1918’ (Chapter 10), is a telling reminder of one of its greatest threats. By 1914 the ‘shakings and shudderings of the picture house’, as the elderly actor-manager labelled them, could no longer be seen as mere adjuncts to live theatre.98 There were 5,000 venues in Britain in 1914 and the medium was racking up customers, although these were seen to be mostly members of the working classes.99 Indeed, one middle- class film-maker – echoing Compton’s distaste – explained in 1914 that ‘[t]he cinemas are not for people like ourselves, we do not go to them: the poor people go to them’.100 The central argument of Hanna’s essay is that the war proved a turning point for the fortunes of cinema in Britain. The spark was not the arrival of Mary Pickford or , nor D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), which proved a dud in Britain because of its pacifist premise, but an official war film The Battle of the Somme. In 1916 audi- ences were, if not entranced, at least gripped by the opportunity to see images from the Front where loved ones had fought and in some cases died, and some people found it comforting.101 Part of the significance was, as Gerald De Groot notes, that ‘somewhat late in the day, the gov- ernment discovered that it was actually a good thing for the public to be given controlled doses of the war’s horror’.102 Such films made difficult viewing but did suggest the medium’s power to hold audiences and its ability to serve as another platform for propaganda. And yet many people continued to be repelled by picture houses. In her discussion Hanna explains that one cause of contention was the per- ceived link between cinema and immorality, a link which had continued to plague music halls, but with cinema was compounded by fears about

Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Andrew Maunder 29 the medium’s effects on children. In this sense Hanna’s reading of cinema continues the construction of populist war-time entertainment begun by Viv Gardner and Simon Featherstone as something requiring surveil- lance by the nation’s self-appointed cultural policemen. In her essay, Hanna singles out Arthur Winnington-Ingram, the pronouncing Bishop of London and Chairman of the London Council for the Promotion of Public Morality as a key figure, although members of the military and newspaper proprietors also involved themselves.103 For war-time cinema the way forward was to submit to stringent regulation while also seeking to emphasize a commitment to social welfare. As Hanna explains, this partly came via the work of charitable organizations such as the YMCA through whose efforts mobile projection units were taken to bases near the Front. It was here in this different environment that the power of comedians like Chaplin in The Tramp (1915) or Shoulder Arms (1918) was admitted; the on-screen Chaplin wore his patriotism ‘lightly’ and soldiers responded to his indefatigable ‘tramp’ character as the great survivor.104

Alternative spaces

As will be apparent, many of the essays included in this book refer to, or are informed by, a sense of London as the hub of the commercial thea- tre. This is inevitable. As Jerry White notes in Nights: London in the First World War (2014), the capital ‘occupied a far more dominating place in both nation and empire in 1914 than it even did twenty-five years later’. It was the ‘centre’ from which the war effort was directed.105 However, the theatre industry clearly included practitioners beyond the West End and not everyone lived in London. Writing just prior to 1914, P. P. Howe argued that ‘the proud predominance of London itself’ had already ‘been rudely shaken by a growing disposition on the part of the provincial capitals to provide a drama for themselves’.106 Certainly, one of the things registered by the theatre magazines of the time – The Era, The Stage, The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News – is the sheer scope of the theatrical activity taking place beyond the capital and any sense of a continuity of identity established in London is immediately disrupted by supplementary, competing or alternative war-time enter- tainments taking place outside it. Although it is true, as Viv Gardner has shown, that many of the Edwardian actor-managers whose livelihoods were based on a loyal provincial fan base – John Martin Harvey, Fred Terry, Frank Benson, Edward Compton – continued to tour widely with their large companies and have ‘expansionist designs’ outside London, they were not the only choices for provincial theatregoers.107

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Claire Cochrane’s essay ‘A City’s Toys: Theatre in Birmingham 1914–1918’ (Chapter 11), discusses these issues via an examination of ways in which theatres in Birmingham sought to establish roles for themselves as part of the war effort. As Cochrane shows, this city offers an illuminating case study because its theatres reflect many of the strands of activity encompassed by the war-time entertainment industry more widely: not only the continuance of large-scale touring by actor managers but the impact of a new Entertainment Tax in 1916, the competition between different groups, as well as the importance of genres such as . However, part of Cochrane’s argument is also that Birmingham is sig- nificant because of its links with one of the radical changes seen in pre- 1914 theatre: the emergence of the repertory movement, a form of civic theatre which stood, claimed (one of its early exponents), ‘for the new order of things’.108 When the war broke out most of the theatres based on this new organizational model failed to sustain themselves. Even Annie Horniman, whose Manchester company, founded in 1907 and subsequently based at the Gaiety Theatre, had emerged as the most committed, found it hard to compete against the escapist entertainments offered by the larger commercial managements. Despite her new policy of putting on ‘cheery plays’ to suit the mood of the times,109 Horniman was forced to disband her company in 1917 and let the Gaiety become a venue for touring shows.110 In contrast, Birmingham’s repertory theatre survived under the leadership of Barry Jackson and John Drinkwater, despite – or perhaps because of – their pacifist inclinations. As Cochrane notes, much of the company’s programme including Bernard Shaw’s The Inca of Perusalem (1915) and Drinkwater’s Trojan War drama X=O (1917) ‘appeared to meditate more overtly on both the inevitability and the human cost of war’ than was the case in the majority of Britain’s theatres (p. 229 this volume). Appropriately perhaps, Birmingham Repertory Theatre’s war culminated with the triumphant premiere of another historical drama by Drinkwater, Abraham Lincoln, in 1918, which subsequently transferred to London. It is not difficult to under- stand why this play would strike a chord with war-weary audiences in the months surrounding the 11 November armistice. Drinkwater’s Lincoln was not exactly Thomas Woodrow Wilson but it was not too difficult to link Drinkwater’s study of a man of peace shown conducting a long war with the current United States President whose own fourteen point plan for peace the British government was being forced to accept. In this sense, Birmingham’s was no longer an alternative vision. Cochrane’s essay also reminds us that what counted in the theatre industry’s war was what it did off-stage, especially given the tendency to

Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Andrew Maunder 31 see theatrical types as ‘shirkers’ and ‘slackers’.111 The next two essays in this book are by Alisa Grant-Ferguson (Chapter 12) and Margaret Leask (Chapter 13) who develop this theme by shifting focus onto theatre’s extra-curricular war-work. Some of this activity is well known: theatre managers allowed their theatres to be used as venues for recruitment; large numbers of male actors and entertainers volunteered for military service even if they were no one’s idea of soldierly material. Those who remained were the target for snide comments.112 ‘The theatre’s no place [for a man] now’ Rupert Brooke told John Drinkwater in January 1915. ‘If you stay there you’ll not be able to start afresh with us when we all come back.’113 The same sentiments came out in an equally pompous letter from Brooke to one of his many girlfriends, the actress Cathleen Nesbitt: ‘If you were a man there’d be no excuse for you to go on acting’ he informed her. ‘You’d be despicable.’114 Brooke, of course, was not alone in thinking this. In May 1915, one London theatre-goer reported of the revue Watch Your Step that ‘the only discordant note that was apparent in this lively entertainment [was] the number of simpering young men in evening dress, all seemingly of military age, who made up the usual chorus’.115 In another much-reported incident, matinee idol Godfrey Tearle was harangued in the middle of a performance of The Flag Lieutenant by a woman brandishing a white feather who tried to draw attention to the seeming gap between the heroic roles he played on stage and his refusal to do so in real life. By way of retaliation, The Era started a weekly column ‘The Profession with the Colours’ which listed those who had signed up and those who had been killed. In London in 1914, an Actors’ Corps of Special Constables was set up under the leadership of Cyril Maude.116 Elsewhere, recruitment, which included public speaking, phonograph recordings and post-curtain appeals, was an activity in which older male actors in particular sought to make an impact, adding this work to the patriotic plays they were putting on. Meanwhile, J. M. Barrie, Arnold Bennett, Henry Arthur Jones, Jerome K. Jerome, Thomas Hardy and were all too old to fight but allowed themselves to be recruited to the British government’s War Propaganda Bureau estab- lished in September 1914 where their talents for writing could be put to good use. Women, often the more subordinate members of theatre companies, also organized and took part in different kinds of patriotically- inspired womanly activities – charity bazaars, matinee performances and Sunday concerts for wounded soldiers, recitations, running canteens and clubs, factory and hospital visiting, selling war bonds, raffles, flag-selling. All cast themselves as ‘useful’, to use Ellen Terry’s favourite word for her- self, patriotic Britons and charitable colleagues.117

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In ‘Entertaining the Anzacs: Performances for Australian and New Zealand Troops on Leave in London, 1916–1919’ (Chapter 12), Ailsa Grant Ferguson takes up these ideas in her discussion of the ‘YMCA huts’, the recreational and recuperative buildings constructed in central London to keep soldiers amused. Prominent ‘nuts’ of the theatrical profession (including Gertrude Elliott, John Martin Harvey and Ellen Terry) were involved in these projects which were lauded as examples of high-minded communal enterprise, not least in the determination to perform classical works including music under any circumstances. Building on Anselm Heinrich’s discussion in Chapter 3, Grant Ferguson explains how the persistent belief in the benefits of Shakespeare’s plays were used to create a sense of inclusivity and a shared heritage that spoke to visiting Australian and New Zealand soldiers (and colonial sub- jects) who found themselves exiled far from home. Some of the British performers who organized the activities at the Shakespeare Hut seem to have seen themselves as being both of the Australasians and above them – but the latter feeling also prompted a sense of obligation to care for, and protect, the visitors. Although participants wanted to encour- age a sensibility for Shakespeare without preaching, another ambition was to keep the soldiers off the streets and, in particular, away from the massed ranks of prostitutes – professional and amateur – seen to be stalking the streets, spreading venereal disease and thus ruining the moral and physical fibre of fighting men. In 1917 Arthur Conan Doyle wrote to The Times warning of these women who ‘prey upon and poison our soldiers in London’ but innocent Anzacs and later, Americans, were seen to be particularly vulnerable.118 The persistent sense of theatre as something uplifting and even mor- ally improving is expanded in Margaret Leask’s essay ‘Lena Ashwell: Touring Concert Parties and Arts Advocacy, 1914–1919’ (Chapter 13). As has been noted, for theatre professionals touring was a key part of their accumulated experience and Leask shows how this long-established tradition was adapted as male and female performers engaged in work outside Britain, recruited for the concert parties visiting military camps in Belgium, France and Egypt. This was notably so in the case of Lena Ashwell, well known as a pioneering manager and leading actress. She was not, of course, the only representative of this brand of war work. Gladys Cooper’s autobiography gives very precise details of her own experiences as part of a concert party taken to Rouen in 1914 under the leadership of actor-manager .119 Basil Dean became the director of the entertainment branch of the Army and Navy Canteen Board with supervision of fifteen garrison theatres and ten touring

Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Andrew Maunder 33 companies.120 What makes Ashwell significant is the way in which her story draws together different strands of thought about theatre’s war-time function. The first is the belief in its restorative properties; the second is the exploration of the themes of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture; and the third is Ashwell’s sex. Thus whereas Grant Ferguson’s essay also highlights the importance of theatre networks, Leask’s posits that there was something almost prophet-like in Ashwell’s behaviour, a mixture of the patriotic and the obsessional, her task made the harder by the fact that she was a woman. It seems appropriate that the multiplicity of discourses existing within war-time theatre come together in the final essay in this book, ‘Palliative Pantomimes: Entertainments in Prisoner-of-war Camps’ by Victor Emeljanow (Chapter 14). His discussion underlines a good deal of what is often noted but not much explored: the participation of serving soldiers and prisoners-of-war in theatrical activity and how it came to be integrated into their lives. Obviously the professional theatre industry and its representatives such as Lena Ashwell or Seymour Hicks made a claim to knowing and recording the impact of their own war-works and dealings with combatants. But combatants also recorded their own experiences albeit in varying degrees of detail, as several of the essays in this book also show. An Anzac soldier, Edward White Moncrieff of the 45th Infantry Battalion, Australian Imperial Forces, documented his responses by writing on the theatre programmes of the shows he went to see. These included Chu Chin Chow but also an , The Lilac Domino, a revue, To-Night’s the Night!, musicals Theodore & Co. and Going Up!, and the plays General Post, Nurse Benson and The End of the Trail.121 One of the letters of Jack Duffell, another Australian soldier on leave in Britain, describes a visit to a (unnamed) play at a theatre near Salisbury Plain in March 1918, in which a group of drunken ‘one star’ Tommies in the front row heckled the actors, reducing one young woman to break down and leave the stage. Appeals for order from the stage manager prompted more insults and when the soldiers refused to leave it was left to the Australian troops to pitch in and throw them out, much to the delight of the rest of the audience.122 These, of course, are just two examples. The reactions of soldiers to the entertainments they encountered in theatres remain underexplored and obscure but their participation is indisputable. Emeljanow’s essay thus examines the different patterns of this activity culminating in a discussion of soldiers as stage performers. He begins by noting how when soldiers were sent to Front they took with them ‘a tradition of self-generated entertainment’. This was supplemented by

Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 34 Rediscovering First World War Theatre visits from concert parties and variety shows which helped ‘offset the monotony of training and the periods of inaction that would be perpetu- ated at the front’ (p. 270 this volume). The crux of Emeljanow’s argument, however, is the way in which this theatrical activity began to take on new dimensions, the importance of which can be situated on a number of fronts. Jay Winter has written of how ‘[a] civilian army brought its civilian entertainments with it’ stressing the communality of feeling which was encouraged by soldiers devising their own entertainments.123 Emeljanow develops this idea showing how soldiers drew on popular songs, titles, plotlines and genres with which they had become familiar during periods of leave. Chu Chin Chow was one such show, performed not only at His Majesty’s Theatre in London’s West End but by soldiers themselves far away from the metropolitan centre at the Freiburg Prisoner of War camp in Germany in 1918. Inevitably these troops would adapt the original material to suit their new (all-male) surroundings and did so in ambi- tious ways. However, what Emeljanow is also at pains to point out that such undertakings should also be seen as instances of the ways in which theatre was used to combat confinement psychosis, or ‘barbed wire dis- ease’. Re-visioning popular plays and writing new ones provided inmates with links to a shared cultural heritage and a sense of their homeland. It was an activity which provided reinforcement and acted as a palliative strategy for maintaining the equilibrium needed for survival. In this way theatre really was being ‘useful’, as its supporters had always maintained.

The activities discussed in these chapters reveal that a number of very different theatre practices existed and co-existed during the years 1914–1919. Each contributor suggests another piece of a much bigger jigsaw, helping us put together the larger picture while recognizing that any effort to reconstruct the full history will always be incomplete. As the stories emerging from the First World War Centenary continue to demonstrate, this was an event with as many different experiences as there were people and while contributors have attempted to tell some of the stories about war-time theatre which have not been heard there is still much more to uncover. Playwrights we tend to regard as canoni- cal: George Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy, J. M. Barrie and Harold Brighouse, are present in several of the discussions. But by acknowledg- ing the work of their less well-known colleagues and by situating the work of this large group of forgotten writers within some of the contexts of war-time life, we gain some important new perspectives. For example,

Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40199–1 Andrew Maunder 35 contributors are not solely concerned with the propagandist function of different species of entertainment as they might have been in the past and they are more alert to theatre’s involvement in the creation of social discourse and to the anxieties which entertainment may manipulate or conceal. They are conscious, too, of the different environments in which members of the theatre industry worked during the war and the restrictions involved. The acknowledgment of local as opposed to com- mercial West End spaces as an entry point for thinking about war-time theatre is another development, even there is a still a good deal of work left to do. Likewise, as the work of several contributors to this collec- tion indicates, First World War theatre is a topic which can also extend far beyond the British Isles. Links with North America were strong and some of the plays seen by British audiences were imports. British influence extended to Australia and other parts of the empire, and the relationship was two-way. This book has not attempted a detailed explo- ration of all these aspects, nor has it attempted a comparative analysis of theatrical activity in , for example – though British newspapers did sometimes report on this. Nonetheless what this collection hopefully conveys is that theatrical activity as it existed during the war cannot simply be read as ‘tabloid’ output but as a dynamic network of writ- ers, producers, performers and managers whose cultural importance is worth recognizing and deserves remembering.124

Notes

1. Albert De Courville, I Tell You (London: Chapman and Hall, 1928), 131. 2. Quoted in Terry Charman, The First World War on the Home Front (London: Andre Deutsch, 2014), 237. 3. George Bernard Shaw, Preface, Heartbreak House (London: Longmans, 1961), 30. 4. Lady De Frece, Recollections of Vesta Tilley (London: Hutchinson, 1934), 143. 5. Gilbert Wakefield, ‘The Autobiography of Sir John Martin Harvey’, Saturday Review, 7 October 1933, 374. 6. James Hilton, Random Harvest (1941; London: Pan, 1948), 139–40. 7. Wilfred Owen, Collected Letters. Eds. Harold Owen and John Bell (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 364; 535; 393; 538; 550; 479; 481; 487; 481; 559. 8. Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (: Minnesota University Press: 1982), 27. 9. Jacky Bratton, New Readings in Theatre History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 12. 10. Peter Brook, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, , Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Press, 1976), 199. 11. Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: Bodley Head, 1990), 439.

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12. Shaw, Preface, Heartbreak House, 32; 30. 13. Margaret D. Stetz, Gender and the London Theatre 1880–1920 (High Wycombe: Riverdale Press, 2004), 128. 14. Sunday Times, 29 December 1912, 6. 15. Michael Orme [Alice Greeven], J .T. Grein. The Story of a Pioneer 1862–1935 (London: John Murray, 1936), 253. 16. Wilfred Gibson, ‘Ragtime’, in Voices of Silence: The Alternative Book of First World War Poetry, ed. Vivian Noakes (Stroud: Sutton, 2006), 257. 17. N. J. Saunders, ‘Apprehending memory: Material Culture and the War, 1919–1939’, in The Great World War, 1914–1945, eds. J. Bourne, P. H. Liddle and H. Whitehead (London: Harper Collins, 2001), 476–88. 18. Allardyce Nicoll, English Drama 1900–1930: The Beginnings of the Modern Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 3. 19. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). 20. Brian Singleton, Oscar Asche, Orientalism, and British Musical Comedy (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004); James Ross Moore, André Charlot: The Genius of Intimate Musical Revue (Jefferson: McFarland, 2005); John Mullen, The Show must go on: La Chanson populaire en Grande-Bretagne pendant la Grande Guerre 1914–1918 (: L’Harmattan, 2012). 21. R. W. Vince, ‘Theatre History as an Academic Discipline’, in Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance, eds. Thomas Postlewait and Bruce A. McConachie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), 14. 22. See, for example, Jerry White, Zeppelin Nights: London in the First World War (London: Bodley Head, 2014); Mark Bostridge, The Fateful Year: England 1914 (London: Viking, 2014). 23. ‘What the Women Did’ (Southwark Playhouse, 2014) http://southwarkplay house.co.uk/archives/what-the-women-did/. Accessed 20 February 2015. World War I Theatre Project, http://www.herts.ac.uk/heritage-hub/heritage- and-history-projects/world-war-i-theatre. Accessed 21 February 2015. 24. White, Zeppelin Nights, 7. 25. Philip Hoare, Wilde’s Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy and the First World War (London: Duckworth, 1997). 26. Alex Feldman, ‘All Wilde on the Western Front: Alan Bennett, Tom Stoppard, and the Theatre of War, Modern Drama 54:4 (2001), 455–78 (456). 27. Tatler, 13 June 1917, 332. 28. See Christopher M. Blaine, Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 113. 29. Lewis J. Collins, Theatre at War 1914–1918 (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 219. 30. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 2. 31. Horace Annesley Vachell, Distant Fields (London: Cassell, 1937), 213. 32. Quoted in Lisa Chaney, Hide-and-Seek with Angels: A Life of J. M. Barrie (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 304. 33. Arnold Bennett, The Journals of Arnold Bennett, ed. Newman Flower (London: Cassell, 1932), 416.

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34. Quoted in Hugh and Mirabel Cecil, Clever Hearts: Desmond and Molly MacCarthy (London: Gollancz, 1990), 142; 141. 35. Quoted in Hector Bolitho, Marie Tempest (London: Cobden 1936), 166. 36. Sunday Times, 17 January 1915, 4. 37. Sunday Times, 21 February 1915, 4. 38. Sunday Times, 7 , 4. 39. Adrian Gregory, A War of Peoples, 1914–1919 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) 3. 40. Raymond Radclyffe, ‘Corrupting an Empire’, English Review 22 (February 1916), 199. 41. Vachell, Distant Fields, 226. 42. ‘War Plays and the Public’, The Era, 26 August 1914, 9. 43. Bystander, 23 June 1915, 451 44. ‘The Task of the Allies’, English Review 18, September 1914, 256. 45. New Statesman, 25 July 1914, 501. 46. John G. Brandon, There was a King in Flanders. British Library. Lord Chamberlain’s Office Stage Plays. 1915/11, 3 May 1915. 47. Bruce A. McConachie, ‘Using the Concept of Cultural Hegemony to Write Theatre History’, in Interpreting the Theatrical Past, 47. 48. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, 178. 49. The Era, 2 September 1914, 11. 50. The Graphic, 2 January 1916, 25. 51. The Era 12 August 914, 9. 52. The Era, 18 November 1914, 5. 53. Standard, 16 November 1914, 6. 54. The Referee, 24 June 1917, 2. 55. Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 12 June 1915, 419. 56. Derek Ross, ‘The Theatre’, Herald, 22 May 1915, 11. 57. Horace Annesley Vachell, Searchlights (London: John Murray, 1915), 111. 58. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 194. 59. Elaine Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800–1885 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 3–4 60. Leon van der Lessen, ‘Germany’s Latest Crime’, Fortnightly Review 101 (February 1917), 189–204 (189). 61. Tatler, 16 September 1914, 314. 62. See Nick Mansfield and Craig Horner, eds. The Great War: Localities and Regional Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2014). 63. ‘National Work for Women’, National News, 18 March 1917, quoted in Gail Braybon, Women Workers and the First World War (London: Routledge, 1981), 156. 64. ‘The Baby Saving Crusade’, Woman’s Dreadnought, 17 April 1915, quoted in Brayborn, Ibid., 113. 65. ‘Women in Industry’, Daily News, 15 August 1917, quoted in Brayborn, ibid., 149. 66. See Tracy C. Davis, Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (London: Routledge, 1991). 67. Gaby Deslys, ‘Some Random Recollections and Reflections’, Tatler, 7 October 1914, 14.

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68. Tracy C. Davis, ‘Questions for a Feminist Methodology in Theatre History’, in Interpreting the Theatrical Past, 71. 69. White, Zeppelin Nights, 197. 70. Ibid. 71. Andrew Higson, ‘The Victorious Re-Cycling of National History: Nelson’, in Film and the First World War, eds. Karel Dibbets and Bert Hogenkamp (Amsterdam University Press, 1995), 108–15 (108; 111; 110). 72. See Gregory, A War of Peoples, 16. 73. Ibid., 22. 74. J. C. Trewin, Shakespeare on the English Stage 1900–1964: A Survey of Productions (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1964), 77. 75. James Ross Moore, ‘Girl crazy: Revue and variety in interwar theatre’, in British Theatre Between the Wars, eds. Clive Barker and Maggie Gale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 88–112 (89). 76. Bystander, 10 March 1915, 327. 77. Sketch, 22 April 1914, 90. 78. Gordon Williams, British Theatre in the Great War: a Re-evaluation (London: Continuum, 2003), 24; 51–2; 22. 79. The Times, 1 September 1916, 9. 80. Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 8 September 1917, 44. 81. ‘Our Drama is not Decadent’, Reynolds’ Newspaper, 8 June 1919, 2. 82. Singleton, Oscar Asche, 130. 83. Clive Barker, ‘Theatre and Society: The Edwardian Legacy’, in British Theatre Between the Wars, 1918–1939, eds. Clive Barker and Maggie Gale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 4–37 (11). 84. The Era, 7 March 1917, 14. 85. Frank Vernon, Twentieth Century Theatre (London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1924), 118–19. 86. See Norman Marshall, The Other Theatre (London: John Lehmann, 1946), 16. 87. Leslie Midkiff DeBauche Reel Patriotism: The Movies and World War I (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), xvi. See Michael Hammond and Michael Williams, eds, British Silent Cinema and the Great War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 4–5, for further discussion of this policy as it was deployed in Britain. 88. ‘A Call to the Public’, The Era, 19 August, 9, 89. ‘Why we are wanted in war time’, Tatler, 28 April 1915, 106. 90. ‘At the Music Halls’, Bystander, 14 October 1914, 57. 91. Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 72. 92. Cited in Gerald De Groot, Back in Blighty: The British at Home in World War One (London: Vintage, 2014), 311. 93. See Bostridge, 1914, 132. 94. See Dennis Kennedy, ‘British Theatre 1895–1946: Art, Entertainment, Audiences – an Introduction’, in The Cambridge History of British Theatre, ed. Baz Kershaw, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), III, 21. 95. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Volume 1: 1915–1919, ed. Anne Oliver Bell (London Hogarth Press, 1977), 222. 96. Stephen Murray, ‘A Clean and Wholesome Entertainment: The One Act Play and the Variety Stage’, Theatre Notebook 48:2 (1994), 77–84.

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97. Woolf, Diary, 20. 98. Irish Times, 23 March 1914, 10. 99. Nicholas Hiley, ‘The British Cinema Auditorium’, in Film and the First World War, 160. 100. Ibid., 161. 101. See Hammond and Williams, British Silent Cinema and the Great War, 6. 102. De Groot, Back in Blighty, 309. 103. ‘Sir H. Smith-Dorrien on War and Morals: The Tone of the Stage’, The Times, 9 October 1916, 5. 104. Jay Winter, ‘Popular Culture in War-time Britain’, in European Culture in the Great War The Arts, Entertainment and Propaganda, 1914–1918, eds. Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 330–98 (343). 105. White, Zeppelin Nights, i. 106. P. P. Howe, The Repertory Theatre: A Record and a Criticism (London: Martin Secker, 1910), 12. 107. Viv Gardner, ‘Provincial Stages, 1900–1934’, in Cambridge History of British Theatre, 60–85 (62). 108. Basil Dean, The Repertory Theatre (: Philip, Son & Nephew, 1911), 22. 109. Quoted in Sheila Goodie, Annie Horniman (London: Methuen, 1990), 178 110. See George Rowell and Anthony Jackson, The Repertory Movement: a History of Regional Theatres in London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 42–52. 111. ‘In England Now’, Bystander, 26 June 1918, 539. 112. Gregory, The Last Great War, 73. 113. Quoted in Nigel Jones, Rupert Brooke (London: Richard Cohen, 1999), 401. 114. Ibid., 479. 115. ‘Sentiment and Syncopation’, Bystander, 26 May 1915, 310. 116. The Era, 12 August 1914, 9. 117. Ellen Terry, The Story of My Life (London: Hutchinson, 1908), quoted in Thomas Postlewait, `Autobiography and Theatre History’, in Essays in the Historiography of Performance, 266. 118. Quoted in Jeremy Paxman, Great Britain’s Great War (London: Penguin, 2013), 251. 119. Gladys Cooper, Gladys Cooper (London: Hutchinson, 1931), 100–2. 120. James Roose Evans, ‘Basil Dean’, New Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), Vol. 15, 626. 121. See Souvenirs 2, Concert and Theatre Programs Collection – First World War 1914–1918 Australian War Memorial, http://www.awm.gov.au/collection/ PUBS002/. Accessed 1/01/2015. 122. Gilbert Mant, ed. Soldier Boy: the Letters of Gunner W. J. Duffell, 1915–18 (Stevenage: Spa Books, 1992), 130–1. 123. Jay Winter, ‘Popular Culture in War-time Britain’, 332. 124. H. B. Irving, The Amusement of the People (London: Arthur Humphreys, 1916), 18.

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Index

Abbott, Ada, The Love Child, 93–4 Barker, Clive, 24 Abercrombie, Lascelles, 221 Barker, Elizabeth, 221, Partnership, actors, enlisting, 270, seen as shirkers, 115–16 31, war work, 70, 73–4, 230 Barrett, Wilson, 4, 83 Aldington, Richard, ‘Concert’, 5 Barrie, J. M., 10, Der Tag, 7, 27, 60–1, Aldwych Hut, performances for 184, The Old Lady Shows her troops, 238 Medals, 113–14, 118, The Real Aldwych Theatre, 245–6 Thing at Last, 259, response to Alexander, George, 7 war, 27, 31, A Strange Play, 113, Allan, Maud, libel case, 7 The Twelve Pound Look, 258 Andreyev, Leonid, and Pioneer Baylis, Lilian, and , 15, Players, 122, 132–3 75–6 Archer, William, 70 Bedford, Madeleine, ‘Munition Asche, Oscar, Chu Chin Chow, 23, 69, Wages’, 173–4 170, 171, 243 Beecham, Thomas, 237, war-time Ashwell, Lena, 32, 33, 70, 71, 251–67, repertoire, 245–6 acting, 258–9, 262, champions Beerbohm Tree, Herbert, 7, 239, 243, ‘high’ culture’, 255–6, 266, Drake, 11, 21, in films, 83, 195, charitable appeals, 251–2, 259–60, Henry IV, Part 1 14, 66, Oliver 26, the Chelsea Revue, 260, as Twist, 95, makes appeals to the female manager, 253, fundraising, United States, 73–4, 75 257, 261, helps establish British Beerbohm, Max, on suburban theatres Drama League, 265, post-war arts and melodrama, 83–4, 85 advocacy, 264–7, sends out concert Bell, May, Britannia Goes to War, 105–6 party, 255, including Shakespeare, Bellew, Kyrle, in The Knife, 9 263, and Three Arts Club, 253 Bennett, Arnold, Milestones, 14, sees Asquith, Herbert, 26, 74, 90 Pioneer Players, 20, reaction to Australia, attitudes to war, 143–4, war, 11 British theatrical tours of, 243, Benson, Constance, war work, 66, 70 film 149–54, theatre, 145–9 Benson, Frank, 7, 14, 29, 75, 243, in Australian troops, Aldwych Theatre, film, 195, recruiting, 11, 71, 72, 245–6, in London, 24, 234–49, war work, 66–7 seen in need of protection from Bensusan, Inez, The Apple, 104, Votes ‘loose’ women, 247–8, responses, for Women, 248 239, 242, offered Shakespeare, Bernhardt, Sarah, in film, 195, at 240–5, YMCA builds recreational London Coliseum, 7, in Une huts for, 234–7, see also Jack Duffell D’Elles, 183, 184 Birmingham, theatres in, 216–17, Badsey, Stephen, 215 effect of war on, 218–19, Bairnsfather, Bruce, The Better ’Ole, 220–1, fund-raising, 223–4, 16, 187 manufacturing industry during ballet, 27, 126–7 the war, 215–16, melodramas Ballets Russe de Diaghilev, 5, 126–7 shown, 219–20, 224, music, 225,

294

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pacifist groups, 228, pantomimes, Brooke, Rupert, condemns ‘shirkers’, 222–3, part of touring circuit, 31, death, 123 216–17, Philip Rodway, manager, Bryce Report, The, 89 219, 220, 224, repertory Bulwer Lytton, Edward, 147 movement, 217–18, Theatre Burke, Thomas, 192, concert-goer, Royal, 216, university as hospital, 245–6 223, variety theatre, 219 Buss, Harry, 207 Birmingham Repertory theatre, 218, Butt, Alfred, producer, 26, 183 Barry Jackson, as founder, 226, Indian plays, 228, international Caine, Hall, plays, 3 repertoire, 228–9, Irish plays, Campbell, Mrs Patrick, 10, at London 229, John Drinkwater, his Coliseum in Pro Patria, 183, The war service, 226, 230, pacifist Thirteenth Chair, 8, sees wounded inclinations of the company, soldiers, 167 228, 231, premiere of Abraham Cannan, Gilbert, Everybody’s Husband, Lincoln, 231, premiere of X=0, 229 230, programmes 220–2, 225–6, Carney, Kate, 189 Russian plays, 228 Carter, Huntly, on changing Booth, J. B., nostalgia for pre-war audiences, 166–7 entertainment, 179, 190 Cavell, Edith, biographies about 143, Borsa, Mario, and audiences, 164–5, 172 as patriot and icon, 20–1, on Bottomley, Horatio, 90 stage and in film, 140–54, as tool Bouhélier, Saint-Georges de, The for recruitment, 143 Children’s Carnival, 133–5, ‘À Nos censorship, 12 (see also Lord Amis Des États-Unis’, 133, and Chamberlain’s Office), 20, 28–9, Pioneer Players, 122 44, 170–1 Bourchier, Arthur, 266, as ‘Old Bill’, 188 Chamberlain, Neville, 18, 224, mixed Box, Muriel, Angels of War, 118 feelings about amusements, 227 Brandon, John, There was a King in Chaplin, Charlie, popularity of, 28–9, Flanders and objections raised by 187, 196–7, 200, 205, 209 censor, 12–13 charity performances, 73, 257–8, 259, Brayton, Lily, 69 260–1, 261, 262 Bridie, James 65–6 Charlot, André, producer, 130 Brieux, Eugène, Damaged Goods Chekhov, Anton, and Birmingham licensed, 8, 108, 162 Rep, 228, and Pioneer Players, Brighouse, Harold, Hobson’s Choice, 122, 129 19, 115 Chevalier, Albert, ‘The Marseillaise’, 181 British Drama League, 264–6 children’s theatre, 261–2 Brittain, Vera, theatre trips, 83, Chirgwin, George, and music hall, 189 comments on ‘war babies’, 92 Chu Chin Chow, appeal of, 171, fears Brixton Theatre, 81–97, built 83–4, about, 170, performances, 5, compared to , performed by prisoners of war, 95, 97, and Frederick Melville, 277, popularity, 22–5, 33, 34, 162 85–6, and London’s suburban Churchill, Lady Randolph, organizes theatres, 81–2, programming and charity performances, 125, 130–1 audiences, 85–7, theatre’s role in Churchill, Winston, 269, opposes war-time Brixton, 86, topicality, attempts to drive out prostitutes 89–93, War, Red War staged, from music halls, 186, praises 87–97 Beerbohm Tree, 73

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Commission of Inquiry, 203–5, Greet, Ben, and Old Vic, 75, 77, 237 effects on public morality of, 29, Grein, J. T., 5, 11, 123–4 and propaganda, 21, 28, 199–200 Gregory, Adrian, 11–12, 26 films, The Battle of the Somme, 28, Griffith, D. W. Intolerance, 28 Intolerance, 28, Joan the Woman, Grundy, , The New Woman, 110 21, La revanche, 152–3, literary Gulliver, Charles, 184 adaptations, 198, , 73, The Martyrdom of Nurse Cavell, Hadley, Elaine, 17 150, Nurse Cavell, England’s Joan Haig, Douglas, 261 of Arc, 152, Nurse and Martyr, Hamilton, Cecily, 104 149, Nelson, 21 Hankin, St. John, The Last of the De Fitzgerald, Stephen, 146, 148 Mullins, 117 Fogerty, Elsie, 265 Hardy, Thomas, The Dynasts, 7, 15, 31 Forbes-Robertson, Johnston, 74, at Hare, David, Plenty, 118 Shakespeare Hut, 237 Hari, Mata, 142 Formby Sr, George, 219 Harrison, Austin, and ‘war babies’, 93 Foss Kenelm, The Hem of the Flag, 13, Hastings Walton, Gladys, A Woman in 46–7 Khaki, 109–10 Foulkes, Richard, 65 Hestor, George, ‘Oh What a Lovely Fry, Roger, 265 War’, 187 Fussell, Paul, 6 Hibbert, Henry, and changing audience composition, 66, 184 Galsworthy, John, 19, The Eldest Son at Hicks, Seymour, and concert party Birmingham, 221, The Foundations, tour, 32, 33, 70, 224, 271, England 114–15, at Ruhleben, 279, Strife, at Expects, 50 Birmingham Rep, 221 Higson, Andrew, 21 Garbo, Greta, 142 Hiley, Nicholas, 189–90 Gardner, Viv, 74–5 Hill, William Arthur, 145, 147 Gavin, Agnes, 149 Hilton, James, Random Harvest, 2 Gavin, John, 149 Hollingshead, John, 72 George V, 1, 69 Holme, Vera, 133 Germany, accused of atrocities, 140–1, Hoare, Philip, 7 bombardment of British towns, Horniman, Annie, and Manchester 222, and Bryce Report, 88, claims Rep, 30, 69, 225, 279 on Shakespeare, 70–1, German Houghton, Stanley, performed at plays performed, 222, spies, Ruhleben, 279, Hindle Wakes, 115 depicted on stage 44–5, 92, 142–1, Howard, Arthur, The Story of the against women’s rights, 105–6 Rosary, 85 Gibson, Wilfred, ‘Ragtime’, 5 Howard, Walter, Seven Days Leave, 4, , 225, 282 85, 109, Two Little Drummer Boys, Glaspell, Susan, 125 86 Gollancz, Israel, and Shakespeare, 72, Hughes, Morris, and Australian 77, 235–6 conscription, 143 Goulding, Edmund, God Save the King, 13, 44–6 Ibsen, Henrik, 221, 280, Ghosts, 8, Gramsci, Antonio, 6 123, The Wild Duck, 221 Granville Barker, Harley, 5, 75, 279, Indian plays, 228 The Madras House, 104 international theatre, in Birmingham, Grayzell, Susan R., 92 228–9, and Pioneer Players, 124–5

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Irish plays, 229 London Council for the Promotion of Irving, Henry, 72, 83 Public Morality, 202 Irving, Henry B., 69, 76 London theatres, Aldwych, 237–9, Isaacson, John Leslie, and 245–6, Brixton Theatre, 82–4, Craiglockhart, 3 their centrality in the country’s theatre industry, 29, Empire, Jackson, Barry, and Birmingham Rep, Leicester Square, and regulation 30, 69, 218, 226 of prostitution, 185–6, London Japanese drama, 229 Coliseum, and gentrification of, Jauss, Hans Robert, 4 183–5, London at night, 165–7, Jennings, Gertrude, Poached Eggs and numbers of theatres and music Pearls, 111 halls 7, , John, Gwen, Luck of War, 19, 108–9, staging of The Better ’Ole, 187–8, 121 suburban theatres, 81–4 Jones, Henry Arthur, 17, 31, 70, 110, Lopokova, Lydia, at London 265 Coliseum, 27 Lord Chamberlain, see Mansfield, Killeen, Martin, 215 William King, Hetty, 245 Lord Chamberlain’s Office, 8, anxieties Kitchener, Horatio, 48, 49, 123, 172, 20, 23, on Chu Chin Cow, 170–1, counsels self-restraint, 91 175, extension of powers into Knoblauch, Edward, 124, 171, England music hall and variety, 185, on Expects, 50, Milestones, 14, A War The Maid of the Mountains, 162, Committee, 110 remit of 44, 55, 57–8, 60–1, Kosok, Heinz, 6 89–91, 93, 109–10, 144, role of 12, see also censorship Lang, Cosmo Gordon, Archbishop of York, on social purity, 92 Macarthur, Mary, 161 Lang, Matheson, as Shylock, 69 MacCarthy, Desmond, response to Lashwood, George, 188–9 war, 11 Lauder, Harry, 27, 183, 279, 283, seen Macqueen-Pope, W., on audiences, by Wilfred Owen, 4 169–70 Laurillaud, Edward, on need for Malleson, Miles, The Artist, 129, Black amusement, 24 ’Ell, 15, Lawrence, D. H., 83 Maltby, H. F., Petticoats, 111 Layton, Frank G., The Black Sheep, Manchester repertory company, 225 221, The Painter and the Baby, 225 Mansfield, William, Viscount Levey, Ethel, 130 Sandhurst, Lord Chamberlain, Lincoln, William Joseph, 151–2 170, 175, 205 Linden, Margaret, 152 Martin Harvey, John, 7, 14, 29, Little Tich, 27, 189 32, 60, 165, 216, Armageddon, Liverpool Repertory Company, 222 15, Hamlet, 75, performs at Lloyd George, David, ‘business as Shakespeare Hut, 237, 239–40 usual’, 26, supports women’s Mary, Queen, attends theatres, 259, 261 right to serve, 105 Marx, Karl, 90 Lloyd, Marie, 27, death, 191, Masefield, John, The Faithful, 229, The significance of during war, 189, Sweeps of ’98, 230 191, 192, impersonated, 280, 281 Matcham, Frank, and Brixton Theatre, Löhr, Marie, 110, manager, 253 82

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Maude, Cyril, and Special Constables, National Theatre (see Shakespeare) 31 Nesbitt, Cathleen, and Pioneer Players, Maurier, Gerald du, 260, in Raffles, 8, 123, and Rupert Brooke, 31 Mayer, David, 86 Nicoll, Allardyce, 65 McCarthy, Daniel, 269 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 5, 126–7 McCarthy, Lillah, 266 McConachie, Bruce, 13 ‘Orme, Michael’, the need for McNeill, Ronald, and ‘war babies’, 92–3 amusement, 162 melodrama, 17, 86–7, 219–20, 225 Ormiston Chant, Laura, and music Melville, Frederick, 17, 84, 87, One halls, 186 Way of War, 57, 86 Outka, Elizabeth, 190 Melville Walter, 84, The Shop Soiled Owen, Wilfred, theatregoing, 2–3, 6 Girl, 104, The Female Hun, 85, On His Majesty’s Service, 85 Packington, Mary, Shakespeare for Midkiff De Bauche, Leslie, ‘practical Merrie England, 69 patriotism’, 25 pageants, 105–7 Monash, General Sir John, and troop Pankhurst, Emmeline, 93, 96, 105 concerts, 272 pantomime, 66, 222–3, staged by Monkhouse, Alan, Shamed Life, 107 soldiers, 275, 280–2 Morris, Margaret, 130 Parker, Louis Napoleon, Disraeli, 21 Mortimer, Leonard, The Glorious Day, 93 Patterson, Marjorie, Pan in Ambush, Moss, Edward, 182 127–8 motherhood, 18, 91–3, and Pearce, Vera, as Edith Cavell, 150–1 illegitimacy, 93 Pemberton Billing, Noel, libel case, 7 Music Hall, authenticity of, 188, 190, Pickford, Mary, 28, 200 The Better ’Ole staged, 187–8, Pickles Katie, 141, 143 centrality of 26–7, death of Marie Pinero, Arthur W., Trelawny of the Lloyd, and appreciation by ‘Wells’, 112 T. S. Eliot, 191–2, decline of, Pioneer Players, 7, 19, 121–36, able to 190–2, gentrification, 27, 184–5, side-step licensing requirements, military topics, 187, prostitution 124 in, 185–6, and re-emergence plays, 1914–1918, attempts to depict of older performers, 189, at shell-shock, 15–16, 7, 15–18, Ruhleben prisoner of war camp, 43–64, 103–20, 215–33, debates 279, songs and the war effort, about drama’s war-time role, 181, syndication of, 182–3, 43–4, depiction of German threatened by film, 180, 189–90 atrocities, 88, difficulty in musicals, 22–3, appeal of, 171, Betty, depicting trench scenes, 15–16, 162, Boy, The, 22, Chu Chin Chow, ideological frameworks, 13, performances, 5, fears about, 170, importance of melodrama, 17, Floradora, 14, High Jinks, 168, 85, interest in revivals, 8, 12, Little Bit of Fluff, A, 162, Maid 85, 225, pacifist plays, 230–1, of the Mountains, The, 5, 162, playwrights, as propagandists, 31, performed by prisoners of war, 43–64, public’s apparent boredom 277, popularity, 22–5, 33, 34, with war plays, 181, recruiting 162, Theodore & Co., 33, Tina, 22, function, 48–52, and tone, 62, To-Night’s the Night, 22, 33 treatment of topical issues, 17–18, Myddleton Myles, A., 17, War Red 82, 86–7, subversive plays, 89–90 War, 83, 87–97 Abraham Lincoln, 30, premiered, 231

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Sweet Nell of Old Drury, 8 Bubbly, 5, By Jingo If We Do, 48, The Theatre of the Soul, 129 57, 185, Now’s the Time, 23, Odds There was a King in Flanders, 12–13 and Ends, 22, The Passing Show of The Three Musketeers, 85 1915, 22, Pell Mell, 23, popularity The Thirteenth Chair, 9 of, 22–3, Shell Out!, 5, 22, staged To Arms, 21, 58–9 by soldiers, 275–7, Stick to Your Trelawny of the Wells, 112–13 Guns!, 185, Watch Your Step, 31, The Twelve Pound Look, 258 Zig Zag!, 5 Two Little Drummer Boys, 86 Robey, George, 4, 27, 183, 223 Up Boys and at ’Em, 225 Rodway, Philip, 219, 220, 222, 227 Under Two Flags, 86, 149, 219 Rider Haggard, Henry, 167 Une D’Elles, 183, 184 Robins, Elizabeth, 83, 84 X=O, 30, 230 Ross, Derek, on war plays, 15 A War Committee, 110–11 Rubleben, prisoner of war camp, 72, War, Red War, 17, 87–102 277–8, performances, 279–80, A Well-Remembered Voice, 7 282 What Would You Do?, 93 Ruskin, Sybil, The Three Musketeers, A Woman in Khaki, 109–10 85 The Woman and the Puppet, 20 Russell, Dave, 179 Peel, Constance. S., response to Russian playwrights, by Birmingham bombing in London, 174 Repertory Theatre, 228, Phillips, Stephen, 15 performed by Pioneer Players, 122 Platt, Len, 168 Playfair, Nigel, 260 Salberg, Leon, 219 Pockett, J. G., 3 Sassoon, Siegfried, ‘Blighters’, 5, 121, Poel, William, 75, 77 179, 192, ‘The Concert Party’, Pope, Jessie, 50 267, ‘Suicide in the Trenches’, prisoners of war, benefits of 132 theatrical entertainment, 274–5, satirical plays, 110 destinations, 277, mental illness, Saunders, Nicholas, ‘memory bridge’, 274, 283–4, numbers 269, 6 273, Ruhleben prisoner of war Sérgine, Vera, 133, 134 camp, 277–8, 283, theatrical Shakespeare, 3, 14–15, 32, 65, entertainment in, 279–81 in Australia, 240–1, 243, propaganda, use of British history construction of Shakespeare Hut, 14, death of Edith Cavell, 21, 234–7, Englishness, 77, 242–3, German atrocity stories, 21, as entertainment for soldiers, propaganda plays 43–64, 86–8, 244, 255, and German claims on, Shakespeare as propaganda, 70–1, outside London, 69, and 65–80 a National Theatre, 70–2, 234, new developments in staging, Reinhardt, Max, 75 75, and the Old Vic, 75–6, plays Relph, Harry (see Little Tich) staged in, 238–9, poetry about, repertory theatres, at Birmingham, 241, as propaganda, 66–8, 240–1 215–33, struggles of 30 244–5, staged by prisoners of revues, All Women Revue, 112, war, 279–80, Stratford-on-Avon, The Bing Boys on Broadway, 4, 242–3, Tercentenary, 70–4, and The Bing Boys are Here, 5, 23, 283, the United States, 73–4

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Shakespeare, individual plays: As You Street, George, censor, 44, 89–91 Like It, 76, 279, Comedy of Errors, Swithenbank, J. W., and concert 69, 75, Hamlet, 3, 75, Henry IV Part parties, 261 1, 14, 66, Henry V, as propaganda, Synge, J. M., The Tinker’s Wedding, 229 11, 66–7, 69, Fabia Drake as, 244, suburban theatres, 82–4, and Henry VIII, in United States, 72–3, theatregoers, 164–5 Julius Caesar, 73–4, King John, 76, 77, 242, Macbeth, 70, 72, performed Taite, Netta, as Edith Cavell, 146 for the troops, as propaganda, 245, Tearle, Godfrey, shown white feather, 31 262, Merchant of Venice, 4, 69, Merry Tempest, Marie, response to war, 11 Wives of Windsor, 3, A Midsummer Tennyson Jesse, F., and H. M. Night’s Dream, 66, 75, Much Ado Harwood, Billeted, 106 About Nothing, 70, Taming of the Terriss, Ellaline, overseas concert Shrew, 69, 70, Twelfth Night, 69, 75, party, 70, 271 The Winter’s Tale, 75 Terry, Ellen, 31, 122, 126, 237, 244, 260 Shaw, George Bernard, Androcles and Terry, Fred, 29, 216, The Scarlet the Lion, 279, on audiences, 174–5, Pimpernel, 3 Augustus does his Bit, 7, Captain Temple Thurston, Ernest, The Cost, Brassbound’s Conversion, 279, 15, 55, 108 dismissal of war time theatre, 1, 5, theatre, charities, 253 72, 104, The Doctor’s Dilemma, 221, theatre industry, ‘Business as usual’ Fanny’s First Play, 254, Heartbreak policy, 26, 181, contributions House, 7, O’Flaherty, V.C., 7 to war-effort, 1, 31, as escapism, Sheridan, Mark, ‘Belgium Put the 23, initial responses to war, Kibosh on the Kaiser’, 181 10–11, labour unrest in, 181, Sherriff, R. C., Journey’s End, 4 part of local communities, Shields, Ella, ‘I’m 49 and in the 82, 97, perceived importance Army’, 187 of amusement, 182, plays Singleton, Brian, 24 about theatre, 112–13, role Sitwell, Edith, ‘The Dancers’, 131 in recruiting, 11–12, scope of Smith-Dorrien, Horace, objects to Chu entertainments, 7, touring 29–30 Chin Chow, 170 Thomas, A. E., Her Husband’s Wife, 106 Speight, Robert, 66 Thompson, E. P., 90 soldiers, as cinema-goers, 207–8, Thorndike, Sybil, and Pioneer Players, classical concerts for, 246, 256, 134 depictions of German soldiers, Tilley, Vesta, 2, 219, 247, ‘Blighty 57, 88, depictions of on-stage, One’, 187 15–6, fears about sexual activities Torahiko, Kori, 122 of, 24, 91–3, 172, overseas Trewin, J. C., dismissal of war-time entertainments for 263–4, as drama, 22 performers, 33–4, 270–1, 274–5, Tuohy, Ferdinand, 166 279, prisoners of war, 34, 273, 277–8, at Ruhleben, 277–9, as Vachell, Horace Annesley, Quinneys, 3, theatre-goers, 24, 33, 168–70, response to outbreak of war, 10, 172, wounded soldiers, 55–6 12, Searchlights, 15 St. John, Christopher, 125, 128, 129 Variety Theatres, see Music Halls Stoll, Oswald, 27, and London Vernon, Frank, dislike of popular Coliseum, 181, 190, 191, 216, theatre, 24, and female 235, power of, 182–5, 186 spectators, 161–2

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Waldron, Arthur, What Would You 19–20, 46–7, 51, 54, 87–8, Do?, 93, 99 93–4, 104–5, with disposable Waller, Lewis, 165 income, 172–3, as ‘flappers’, 161, Wallis, Whitworth, 220 fundraising, 131, the modern Walsh, Sheila, 225 woman as a flâneuse, 163, as Ward, Genevieve, 112 mothers, 108–9, as munitions War Propaganda Bureau, and workers, 116–17, needing playwrights, 31, 104 surveillance, 172, 203, part of war-time theatre, changing reputation labour market, 103, as sexual of, 1–7, 65–6, 161–2, fictional threat to soldiers, 92–3, 247–8, treatment of, 2 shown as recruiters, 107–9, as Waugh, Alec, and prison camps, 273–4 spies, 109–10, suffrage theatre, Wharncliff, Joseph, 224 104, 131–2, 248, as theatregoers, White, Jerry, 29 25, 162–5, 172–3, as unmarried White-Montcrieff, Edward, 33 mothers, 92–4, war-time activities Wilhelm II, in Der Tag, 60, 62, 184. mocked, 110–12 depicted on stage, 48 Women’s Social and Political Union Williams, Bransby, 219 (WSPU), 105 Williams, Gordon, 6, 23, 61, 271 Woolf, Virginia, 134, at the London Willis, Frederick, 84 Coliseum, 27–8 Wilson, A. E., and London night-life, Woottwell, Tom, The Better ’Ole, 188 168 Worrall, Lechmere, and J. E. Harold Wilson, Thomas Woodrow, 30 Terry, The Man Who Stayed at Winnington-Ingram, Arthur, Bishop Home, 4, 15, 106, 107, 109 of London and public morality, 29, 202 Yeats, W. B, The Hour Glass, 229 Winter, Jay, 13 YMCA, Aldywch Hut, 237 and women and the war, 18, careers in cinemas at the Front, 208–9, 270, theatre, 19, depiction on stage, builds Shakespeare Hut, 235–7

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