West End Women

Women and the London Stage 1918 - 1962

Maggie Gale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134886722
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Maggie Gale's West End Women uncovers groundbreaking material about women playwrights and the staging of their performances between the years 1918 and 1962.
It documents a dynamic era of social and theatrical history, analysing the transformations that occurred in the theatre and the lives of British women in relation to specific plays of the period. Focusing on the work of playwrights such as Dodie Smith, Clemence Dane, Gordon Daviot and Bridget Boland, Maggie Gale examines the cultural and political context within which they enjoyed commercial success and great notoriety.

1
INTRODUCTION

West End women, a force to be reckoned with

Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman’s dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter ‘repented’, changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again.

(Hellman 1974: 1)

Women playwrights who wrote for the London stage between 1918 – the point at which some women were granted the vote – and 1962 – the year which saw the publication of Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (Lessing 1962a), which many feel paved a way for a renewed radicalism within the women’s movement – have made vital, witty and various contributions to the British theatre which should no longer be ignored. During the 1980s and 1990s there were a number of London revivals of both British and American plays by women playwrights of the mid-twentieth century. The Royal National theatre’s productions of Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal and Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour received great critical acclaim, and these followed in the wake of other successful British revivals of plays such as Susan Glaspell’s Alison’s House and Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden as well as the star-studded production of Clare Boothe-Luce’s The Women at the London Old Vic. These plays represent only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the number of successful plays by women that were originally produced on the London stage during the years which span the end of the First World War to the early 1960s. However, in both feminist and non-feminist histories of British theatre, the inter-war years and those leading into the early 1960s are usually presented as being less than fruitful for women playwrights. Brief acknowledgements of the fact that women were writing for the theatre are followed by comments on their lack of a feminist perspective or innovative strategy–in other words, there is an assumption that their work does not warrant serious examination. Their work is often dismissed because they were middle class, writing for a commercially oriented theatre.

In a recent anthology of plays written by women and produced on the London stage between 1900 and 1950, the editor frames her choice of included texts with the following statement:

There were… scores of women playwrights during this period… most of them… fall outside of the mainstream of the theatrical movement…. I started my search for plays by reading everything that had been put on in London, hoping that I would stumble across a lost masterpiece. It didn’t take long to realise that the likelihood of this was slim, and the task would take a lifetime.

(F. Morgan 1994: xv)

Indeed there were ‘scores of women’ writing for the theatre between 1918 and 1962, most of whose work existed inside the mainstream. These mid-twentieth-century women playwrights, who at one time were household names and popular public figures, have largely been allowed to disappear from conscious historical-theatrical memory. It would probably take a lifetime to analyse all of the plays written and performed, but to use the search for a masterpiece as a working criterion is rather short-sighted and in many ways irrelevant; this search depends on such outmoded agendas that it is hardly worthwhile. Morgan falls into a trap of censoring as identified by Davis, whose antidote is that the ‘feminist historian’s task is to address the censoring impulse, to validate the experience, and to connect the woman with the work and the work with the world at large’ (Davis 1989: 66–69). Morgan gives too much credibility to the comments which male historians of the past have made about the women writing for the theatre of the period under discussion, whereby prolific and successful women playwrights like Clemence Dane and Dodie Smith are discussed in the following terms:

Briefly, in Clemence Dane and Dodie Smith we have the tempest and the teacup-storm. Each, in its way, has been felt in the theatre. Yet I think Aphra Behn, turning the play-bills of nearly three hundred years, would have to shake her head. Women’s Hour upon the stage is sparsely filled indeed.

(Trewin 1953: 132)

This book aims to challenge such notions and provide a starting point for those interested in the work of ‘West End women’, female playwrights who wrote for the London stage between 1918 and 1962.

Texts have been selected and examined both in the context of the theatre of the time and of the changing society in which women lived and worked. Although there is no immediate common political thread which binds the plays together, many of the texts shared certain key thematic preoccupations which shaped the way in which woman and the feminine were inscribed within narrative. Questions around women and work, the family, mothering and the ‘female condition’ in general are dramatically foregrounded. The playwrights took into conscious and active consideration the discrepancies between the social expectations and the lived experiences of women. Discussions around women’s role in both postwar economies and in the ‘making of Britain’, marriage, family life and women’s social status were frequent and, at times, explicit. These were the same issues which both fuelled public discussions and created debate within the women’s movement and the popular press of the time.

It’s a curious thing that nobody ever has a good word for the modern girl. Nevertheless, she is more useful than the weather as a subject of conversation. She is always the centre of interest and always in disgrace. When she wears long skirts men rail upon her for her unsanitary ways: when she shortens them they tell her that she is immodest…. When she sits at home and takes no interest in public life she is told that she is a doll in a doll’s house; when she beats the Senior Wrangler they exclaim indignantly that a woman’s place is in the home…. It is a fact, I’m afraid, that she is less reverent than once she was…. She is too busy keeping fit: educating herself: playing games: running a business: running a home: flying an airplane, or looking after a baby…. Seeing her thus healthy, able to be wealthy by her own exertions, and much wiser than most of the ‘modern girls’ who have preceded her, the critic has only one weapon of offence left: so nowadays he tells her that in becoming what she is she is losing her femininity, that she may become a female magnate, but that she will never again be a Helen of Troy!

(Clemence Dane, ‘Modern beauty has nothing to fear’, Evening Standard, 27 March 1930)

Over the forty or so years covered here, debate and theorising on what it meant to be a woman was fervent. The debate often presented a woman’s life choices as being polarised – she should choose between a career or a family, marriage or work and so on. The plays examined in this book are viewed in the context of this debate.

This book provides a ‘re-charting of an historical canon of plays by women’ which, as Aston has observed, ‘does not engage in a more radical re-thinking of what constitutes theatre history’ (Aston 1995: 28). However, documentation, description and analysis are combined with questions around how the work was perceived and whether it reflected women’s lives and experiences of what it meant to be a woman. The impact and variety of the wealth of plays is only indicated here. This book represents the beginnings of research which needs to be carried out, first, by a number of researchers and, second, from a number of ideological positions. My own position of analysis was influenced by a desire to transgress the boundaries of research on the history of women’s play-writing which were already in position. The formation of these boundaries itself reflects the many assumptions which have been made by some feminist theatre historians who have been eager to ‘challenge the canon’. The limitation of the male-dominated canon was integral to the research, but the danger of re-marginalising women’s playwriting through an attempt to insert it into a purely feminist framework was also a concern. The purpose here has been to examine the way in which women, as a social and cultural ‘out-group’ – lacking real power in criticism, management, programming and so on – infiltrated and integrated with a dominant form of theatre. Similarly the investigation of ‘out-group’ contributions to legitimate or dominant forms of theatre is bound to reveal information about less visible, less legitimate theatre activity and possibly invite re-thinking of theatre history itself. Klein suggests that when we look at the role of an ‘out-group’ within any given society, we learn much about the social structure of that society itself (Klein 1989: 4). Certainly, the results of this research should encourage a questioning of the way in which histories of playwriting for the London stage have thus far been constructed. Re-charting the work of women playwrights is not only a ‘useful and necessary part of challenging the male canon’, it is also a continuing process, the results of which need constant expansion and analysis (Davis 1989).

PERIODISATION

In general, twentieth-century theatre in Britain has been periodised according to either social or economic events such as the First and Second World Wars, or ‘theatre events’ such as the now almost mythologised introduction of the ‘angry young man’ in 1956.¹ Equally, there is a temptation for theatre historians to use the inauguration of the new state-funded theatres as some kind of measuring stick for turning or even starting points and new theatrical eras, carrying with it the assumption that a new era in terms of structure and economics brings with it a new kind of play. The political events of 1968 in Western Europe are pinpointed as the context for the fruition of the Fringe and later the ‘alternative’ theatre for which the ideological position was that of left or socialist politics and a desire to re-invest theatre with the ‘popular’ simultaneous to finding new audiences. Although these events have a great significance for theatre history, there has been a tendency to see them as fixed points, each one inspiring a completely new direction in the making of theatre. Thomas Postlewait stresses that this kind of agenda frames the way in which history is re-created and received. As he points out:

The concept of periodization, in its normative if somewhat misleading usage, delineates one aspect of history, the condition of stability (or identity), in relation to another aspect, the process of change (or difference)…. The continuous flow of time is organised into heuristic categories, episodes of our creation. As such, periods are interpretative ideas of order that regulate meaning.

(Postlewait 1988: 299–320)

In truth, the ‘well-made play’ still dominates the component of mainstream British theatre which produces plays. Equally, Findlater’s observation in 1952 that, ‘Going to the theatre is still for most Englishmen (sic)… a holiday treat. The Englishman, whatever his income, does not visit the play for week-to-week entertainment’ (Findlater 1952: 194) would arguably be just as applicable today. Play-going is still, it would seem, a predominantly upper- and middle-class habit.

The years 1918–1962 have hitherto been largely neglected in terms of a re-assessment of women playwrights in particular. Thus taking 1918–1962 as a phase in women’s playwriting cuts across traditionally accepted periods of theatre history. Michelène Wandor states:

During the 1920s and 1930s organised feminism was far less visible; struggles to improve the position of women within society continued less publicly. Organisations continued to argue and work around specific issues, such as contraception and child care, and within working-class organisations… feminism still found a presence. But theatre work controlled by women, and linking feminism and aesthetics, ceased to command its own space. There were a number of women who were active within the Unity Theatre Movement… and there was the occasional play about the ‘women question’ – equal rights for women, equal educational opportunities, abortion. But it was only well after the Second World War that feminism and theatre again came together; this time in a greatly changed social and political situation in which radical postwar changes to the family had produced intense and contradictory pressures on women.

(Wandor 1981: 10)

Wandor is writing about a specific historical period, but in general terms. There was apparently no centralised theatre organisation similar to the Actresses Franchise League during the period under examination here (see Chapter 3). However, there were many women managing small companies or theatres, directing and producing or writing plays. The criterion for the inclusion of plays here is simply that the play was performed, not necessarily professionally, and that it is available in print. The framework within which the plays are examined is the social, historical and theatrical context in which they were performed. Although on one level Wandor’s statement about the linking of ‘feminism and aesthetics’ in theatre can be taken as true, it is based on a simplified notion of what happened to the feminist or women’s movement during the period in question. It also negates the existence of many plays written by women that, in effect, centred their narratives on the ‘woman question’, and the intense and contradictory pressures on women which were felt, developed and grew in intensity continuously between the two world wars, up until the early 1960s and beyond.

THE LONDON STAGE 1918–1962

A history of the London stage during the first half of the twentieth century is characterised by complaint, disorder, difference, indifference, innovation, financial crisis, elitism, populism and competition. The plays written by women or male/female teams, moreover, represent approximately one-sixth of the total number of new plays which were previewed and produced during the period. The drama, as exemplified by the ‘well-made play’, is only a proportion of that which made up the dramatic and theatrical content of the London stage as a whole. This book examines the context, content and reception of plays written by women in the commercially oriented theatre. Here, a distinction must be made between the commercial drama – produced by commercial managements – and the commercial theatre.

During the late nineteenth century the belief that theatre as art could exist for art’s sake gained popularity alongside a belief in the educational potential of theatre. That drama could be educational as well as entertaining created an environment in which plays could focus on social and political/moral issues – but these plays would not necessarily draw the large audiences needed for theatre to be profitable. Arguments for a non-profit-oriented theatre plagued the minds of critics and theatre historians of the inter-war and post-Second World War theatre. Similarly, the search for a drama which contained the means to interest and represent an audience beyond the social elite inspired the work of many playwrights and a number of producers. Some, however, were concerned that the drama maintain its interest for the minority, as an art form that should not pander to the needs of the ‘masses’, lest it be contaminated by the trivial concerns of their lives. The identification of ‘trivial’ concerns in the drama has had a significant influence on the way in which the work of the women playwrights in question has been historically and critically positioned. Domestic stage spaces are regularly assumed to be the place where the ‘trivial’ concerns of women’s lives, of interest to a ‘minority’, are played out. Thus many of the plays by women, because they take ‘domestic life’ as a starting point, have been considered unworthy of critical analysis.

Numerous critics and historians in the 1950s hailed the Royal Court and the writers whose work it promoted as a new departure point for the drama. Through the Royal Court a new generation of writers emerged in London, playwrights whose interest lay in an ‘other’ class, and an ‘other’ perception of playwriting and the power of the drama as an art form. In the early days, the Royal Court may have reached out to different audiences, but certainly not larger ones. The plays may have reflected more honestly the lives of the ‘masses’, but this does not mean that the masses flocked to see them. New playwrights may have borrowed from the popular but it would be difficult to prove that their work re-popularised drama and play-going as a leisure activity.

A history of the drama during the period in question is not only plagued by the frequent questioning of purpose and form, but also by a number of assumptions about the desired effect of theatre, both as a culture-producing and culture-reflective institution. Many critics questioned the idea that drama should entertain, finding it hard to accept that for some the theatre represented a social event more than anything else. In their eyes, entertainment was the job of the entertainment industry, not the serious playwright. That a play should contain a serious and discernible social or moral message was primary, ent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: West End women, a force to be reckoned with
• 2. Women in Society 1918–1962: An overview
• 3. The London Stage 1918–1962: An historical context for women in theatre
• 4. To Work or Not to Work: Representations of working women
• 5. Motherhood and the Family: From matriarchs to refusing mothers
• 6. Dramatising History: The search for national heroines
• 7. Spinsters and Widows: Women without men
• 8. Postscript
• Appendix. Table of plays by women on the London stage 1917–1959
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index