British Theatre and Performance 1900-1950

Rebecca D'Monte

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781408166017
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Histoire et critique du théâtre

British theatre from 1900 to 1950 has been subject to radical re-evaluation with plays from the period setting theatres alight and gaining critical acclaim once again; this book explains why, presenting a comprehensive survey of the theatre and how it shaped the work that followed. Rebecca D'Monte examines how the emphasis upon the working class, 'angry' drama from the 1950s has led to the neglect of much of the century's earlier drama, positioning the book as part of the current debate about the relationship between war and culture, the middlebrow, and historiography. In a comprehensive survey of the period, the book considers: - the Edwardian theatre; - the theatre of the First World War, including propaganda and musicals; -the interwar years, the rise of commercial theatre and influence of Modernism; - the theatre of the Second World War and post-war period. Essays from leading scholars Penny Farfan, Steve Nicholson and Claire Cochrane give further critical perspectives on the period's theatre and demonstrate its relevance to the drama of today. For anyone studying 20th-century British Drama this will prove one of the foundational texts.

CHAPTER 1

THE EDWARDIAN THEATRE

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Introduction

Queen Victoria’s death just after the turn of the twentieth century in 1901 provoked widespread mourning. During her long reign she had presided over a remarkable process of industrial, scientific and cultural change which resulted in Britain becoming the largest trading nation in the world. As successor Edward VII continued to celebrate and strengthen British power through a series of exhibitions. This culminated sixty years after the Great Exhibition in the Festival of Empire, held at London’s Crystal Palace in 1911. The solid Victorian values of diligence and thrift had led to an age of considerable material prosperity, where education was now available at a primary level to the whole population and there was an increased concern with humanitarianism and social welfare. It is not surprising, therefore, that in retrospect the period has been viewed with nostalgia, a world shattered by the brutality of the First World War.

This nostalgia did not reflect the true situation, though, as throughout the period there were simmering tensions that threatened the stable façade: militant demand for rights for women, clashes between the unions and management, and the vexed Irish question all brought into play key political issues to do with imperialism, nationalism and liberalism. The Fabian Society grew rapidly during this period. This was a socialist organisation founded in 1884 by George Bernard Shaw, and Beatrice and Sidney Webb, and went on to include many of the most influential thinkers of the time, such as Leonard and Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells, Emmeline Pankhurst and – briefly – Bertrand Russell. The movement was named after the Roman politician Fabius the Delayer and endorsed egalitarianism through the gradual reform of injustice. The Labour Party grew out of socialist groups such as the Fabian Society and trade unions. Started in 1900 and led by Keir Hardie, it was created to support the working classes, and betokened a profound concern with the iniquitous situation where the vast majority of wealth was owned by one per cent of the population.¹ The Tories as well as the Liberal Government which came to power in 1906 saw these groups as a threat to the family and to the class hierarchy, but were unable to stop a series of devastating strikes taking place by coal, rail and port workers, among others. In the run-up to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 there was serious talk of revolution or civil war. This pull between the old and new has occasioned Samuel Hynes to liken the Edwardian age to ‘a narrow place made turbulent by the thrust and tumble of two powerful opposing tides’.²

In the Arts rapid changes in areas such as physics, psychology, technology and industry, led to the development of modernism. The work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Arnold Schoenberg and others, redefined the nature of reality. The Manet and the Post-Impressionists Exhibition at the Grafton Gallery in London prompted Virginia Woolf to write ‘On or about December 1910 human character changed’.³ Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories about the influence of childhood also began to filter through to Britain, provoking a considered debate about male and female sexuality.

The Edwardian theatre

During the Victorian era the rapid expansion of the population, economic migration, the growth of London as the largest city in the world, and the change from a basically agricultural and rural life to one that was industrial- and city-based had a concomitant effect on the theatre industry. Claire Cochrane notes its swift commercial development, especially in London, where

there had developed a large number of play/musical comedy producing theatres in very close proximity in an example of what Max Weber called ‘agglomeration.’ Manufacturing firms, i.e. theatres, could cluster together to achieve economies of scale by concentrating production at one point – again benefiting from the pool of skilled services.⁴

Audiences were larger, more mobile, and increasingly middle class and female. Even the monarch gave her seal of approval, visiting the theatre over 800 times in her lifetime. The many new playhouses of the second half of the nineteenth century appealed to this new spectatorship, while also promulgating a vision of imperialist power through motifs from the Dominions. C. J. Phipps and Frank Matcham were two of the most important architects of civic buildings of the time; the first specialised in large auditoria and classical architecture; the latter redesigned interiors to improve stage sightlines which allowed the audience to see and be seen.⁵ The classes were segregated, often with different entrances and bar areas, but allowing the less-well-off to ‘appreciate’ the display of wealth from a distance.

In London, theatre became part of ‘the Season’, a series of social events that those visiting the city from their country estates should be seen to attend. The advance of the dinner hour in polite society to 7 o’clock brought a change to theatre programmes. Instead of performances starting at 6.30 p.m. and a bill of fare continuing until midnight, new patrons came to theatre at 8 o’clock and were content to see a single play, or at most a play and a curtain-raiser. Matinees were introduced to cater for a more leisured and refined audience, with female audiences deliberately courted as a means to raise the tone. Tie-ins with fashion and beauty houses and other commercial enterprises enabled managers to maximise profits. As part of the leisure industry, the expansion of theatres had a concomitant effect on transport, hotels and restaurants, especially in tourist destinations like London’s West End, with contemporary commentators such as George R. Sims observing the larger crowds swarming around the playhouses after dark.⁶ This impacted upon stage works which, whether musical comedies or social dramas, began to focus more on recognisable, public spheres of work, politics and leisure.

Because of the rise of middle-class theatre, it has been suggested that the nineteenth century saw the theatre informally separate into two different kinds. The ‘illegitimate’ theatre consisted of music hall, burlesque, farce and melodrama, and was mainly for the working classes. Elsewhere the rowdy and sometimes violent audiences of the early nineteenth century were replaced by a more sophisticated clientele, and this new ‘legitimate’ theatre was almost entirely middle class in tone, setting and point of view. In London, these two types of theatre were demarcated by location: the working-class East End and the fashionable West End. However, the situation was more fluid than this with audiences attending both forms of theatre regardless of class. It is also important to note that, while the working classes were deemed to be in need of the morally edifying plays of the West End, transfers could also sometimes go in the opposite direction as well, as with the plays of Arthur Shirley and Benjamin Landeck.⁷ Improved transport meant a greater ease of movement between geographical areas so that audiences could travel to a wider variety of theatres, although community theatre was still important. The Pavilion in the East End of London, for example, specialised in Yiddish Theatre, as did the East London Palace.⁸ Jewish playwrights including Alfred Sutro and Israel Zangwill also crossed over into the mainstream.

One of the most important changes in theatre in early twentieth century was its division into commercial and artistic companies, with ‘theatre ownership and management’ passing ‘from limited liability partnerships to large publicly owned corporations’.⁹ The former theatre was dominated by impresarios. Frank Curzon leased a number of London theatres, at one point having nine under his management. Alfred Butt, whose career as a theatre impresario lasted from 1904 to 1931, built an empire in the metropolis, which included the Palace, the Victoria Palace, the Adelphi, the Empire, the Gaiety and Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, as well as others across the country, such as the Alhambra Theatre in Glasgow. These powerful figures controlled all aspects of their theatres that were mainly run for financial rather than artistic reasons. This meant that difficult or challenging drama was eschewed for entertainment and spectacle, and long runs encouraged so as to maximise profits.

As Claire Cochrane points out in this book, actor-managers had held sway throughout the Victorian period, with material devised around their ‘star’ quality. This not only led to a limited repertoire and an attrition of other acting talent, but they also ensured the profitability of the theatre, increased its reputation and even toyed with new forms of drama. The system followed Victorian ideologies of economic practicality and patriarchy, and would continue until the 1920s. While there were several female theatre managers at this time, it was rare that they were actresses as well; Lena Ashwell is a notable exception, and Lillah McCarthy ran a series of theatres alongside her husband, Granville Barker.¹⁰ The main male figures included Charles Wyndham who managed three London theatres: the eponymous Wyndham’s, the Criterion and the New Theatre. George Alexander was lessee of St James’s, which he ran with benevolent autocracy, specialising in the drawing room comedies of Oscar Wilde and Arthur Wing Pinero. Herbert Beerbohm Tree was an actor, director and manager of various West End theatres, most notably His Majesty’s. His hallmark was lavish productions of Shakespeare, historical drama and the classics in which he tended to take the central role. Like Henry Irving, the pre-eminent Victorian actor-manager, his intention was to stir the audience’s imagination through extravagant and quasi-realistic settings and costumes, even if this meant being historically inaccurate.

Tree took over from Irving as the main proponent of Shakespeare’s work, a role eventually taken on by Lilian Baylis at the Old Vic. He built an international reputation for his Shakespeare productions, staging unusual plays such as King John and Henry VIII, and mounting an annual festival from 1905 to 1913. While his dramatic style quickly went out of fashion with the rise of playwrights such as George Bernard Shaw and Granville Barker, Tree also helped to promote the work of Ibsen, Maurice Maeterlinck and W. Somerset Maugham. He was also quick to see the possibilities of technology; his 1899 production of King John is the first-recorded film of a Shakespeare play and he went on to complete several others.

The other great actor-manager of the time was Gerald du Maurier. Well-connected, he was the son of George du Maurier, author of Trilby (1894) and brother of Sylvia Llewelyn Davies whose children inspired J. M. Barrie to write Peter Pan (1904). He took the dual role of George Darling and Captain Hook in this, as well as Ernest in Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton (1902). As co-manager, with Curzon, of Wyndham’s Theatre from 1910 to 1925 he held a position of power, enhanced by his considerable stage presence.

Fourteen new theatres were opened in London’s West End between 1880 and 1900 and these, combined with the reconditioning of old buildings, provided greater comfort and ceremony. New names were introduced to match the increasing wealth and grading of middle class and lower-middle-class groupings: orchestra stalls, pit stalls and pit; dress circle and family circle; upper circle, amphitheatre and gallery. Foyers, saloons, smoking rooms and buffets were added to the front of house to make more of an all-round experience designed to replicate the home.

This verisimilitude helped audiences feel at ease in the theatre. It also educated them about correct social behaviour. This was popularised through the trend for drawing room comedies, also known as ‘cup and saucer’ plays, thereby reinforcing their sense of privilege and power. The box set allowed actors to play inside the scenery rather than in front of it, and the proscenium arch – now with an elaborate wide border – completed the full ‘picture stage’ frame; this fourth wall effect gave the audience the impression that they were watching a moving picture, while at the same time becoming part of it. Realistic scenery and props used to create replicas of drawing rooms that were furnished and designed by leading interior designers.

Paradoxically, technical advances both increased the sense of realism on stage and created the opposite as theatre managers vied with one another to provide the greatest spectacle. New machinery included pulleys capable of hauling actors up to the ‘sky’, trap doors, lifts, revolving stages and various smoke effects. Real horses were used for racing scenes in Ben Hur (1902) and The Whip (1909), the latter also including a dramatic train crash. In 1908 a tidal wave was recreated in a play of the same name.

Technological advances – the telephone, photography, cinema, radio – also had an impact on the connection between visual and oral modes of communication. Theatre buildings started to be fitted with electric lights after 1880, and once the front of house could be darkened, the relationship between audience and performer became more intimate. This meant that there was less of a focus on theatre as part of a social ritual where people went to see and be seen, and more on what was being presented on stage. Bruce McConachie argues that ‘Many of the tensions in modern theatrical practice after 1900 can be traced to conflicts between the kinds of realities induced by photographic and audiophonic modes of communication’.¹¹ Photography suggested that objective reality only existed through the visual; the telephone and phonograph separated the voice from the body. We can see this with the emphasis placed upon the spoken word in plays by George Bernard Shaw and Granville Barker, for example, and the visual-driven modernistic theatre of Edward Gordon Craig. Moreover, the separation between the ‘real’ and the facsimile of the ‘real’, as with photography, led to an increased appetite for staging the body and for reinterpretations of reality, as well as a rise in celebrity.

Although acting was still on the whole considered an undesirable occupation, especially for women, the latter part of the nineteenth century and first decade of the twentieth century saw the gradual transformation of the acting profession, in terms of respectability, craft and actor training. George Bernard Shaw demanded a new form of acting in his preface to the second volume of Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898). This rejected the bombastic and romantic gestural style of actors such as Charles Kean, William Macready, Irving and Ellen Terry, for one more suited to the new drama of the time. Because this was written to have a socially transformat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Introduction
• 1  The Edwardian Theatre
• 2  First World War Theatre
• 3  Interwar Theatre
• 4  Second World War Theatre and After
• 5  ‘Producing the Scene’: The Evolution of the Director in British Theatre 1900–50 by Claire Cochrane
• 6  ‘Masculine Women and Effeminate Men’: Gender and Sexuality on the Modernist Stage by Penny Farfan
• 7  Staging Hitler, Not Staging Hitler by Steve Nicholson
• Conclusion
• Chronology
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index