A Social History of British Performance Cultures 1900-1939: Citizenship, Surveillance and the Body 2019033573, 2019033574, 9781138304376, 9781138304383, 9780203730201

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A SOCIAL HISTORY OF BRITISH PERFORMANCE CULTURES 1900–1939

This book provides a new social history of British performance cultures in the early decades of the twentieth century, where performance across stage and screen was generated by dynamic and transformational industries. Exploring an era book-ended by wars and troubled by social unrest and political uncertainty, A Social History of British Performance Cultures 1900–1939 makes use of the popular material cultures produced by and for the industries – autobiographies, fan magazines and trade journals, as well as archival holdings, popular sketches, plays and performances. Maggie B. Gale looks at how the performance industries operated, circulated their products and self-regulated their professional activities, in a period where enfranchisement, democratization, technological development and legislation shaped the experience of citizenship. Through close examination of material evidence and a theoretical underpinning, this book shows how performance industries reflected and challenged this experience, and explored the ways in which we construct our ‘performance’ as participants in the public realm. Suited not only to scholars and students of British theatre and theatre history, but to general readers as well, A Social History of British Performance Cultures 1900– 1939 offers an original intervention into the construction of British theatre and performance histories, offering new readings of the relationship between the material cultures of performance, the social, professional and civic contexts from which they arise, and on which they reflect. Maggie B. Gale is Chair in Drama at the University of Manchester, UK. Coeditor of the Women, Theatre and Performance series, her recent publications include: Vivien Leigh: Actress and Icon (2018) with Kate Dorney (eds), and The Routledge Drama Anthology and Sourcebook: From Modernism to Contemporary Performance (2nd edition, 2016) with John F. Deeney.

A SOCIAL HISTORY OF BRITISH PERFORMANCE CULTURES 1900–1939 Citizenship, surveillance and the body

Maggie B. Gale

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Maggie B. Gale The right of Maggie B. Gale to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gale, Maggie B. (Maggie Barbara), 1963- author. Title: A social history of British performance cultures 1900-39 : citizenship, surveillance and the body / Maggie B. Gale. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019033573 (print) | LCCN 2019033574 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138304376 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138304383 (paperback) | ISBN 9780203730201 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Theater and society--Great Britain--History--20th century. | Theater--Great Britain--History--20th century. | Popular culture--Great Britain--History--20th century. Classification: LCC PN2595 .G35 2020 (print) | LCC PN2595 (ebook) | DDC 792.0941--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033573 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033574 ISBN: 978-1-138-30437-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-30438-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-73020-1 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books

The research for this book was made possible through a Major Research Fellowship awarded by the Leverhulme Trust from 2014 to 2017.

CONTENTS

List of figures Acknowledgements Introduction 1 2 3 4

Performance cultures and the expansion, operation and circulation of the performance industries

viii xi 1 9

Legislating citizenship: regulating publics, regulating performance

42

Strangers and cultural transgressors on stage and screen: representing the outsider, the foreigner and the poor

80

Performing espionage: surveillance, the uncanny and theatrical spies

109

5

Performing conflict: beyond the First World War

139

6

Corporeality and the body in performance: agency and degeneration

173

Bibliography Index

214 238

FIGURES

1.1

1.2 1.3

2.1 2.2 2.3

3.1 3.2 4.1 4.2 5.1 5.2

A drawing of the inside of Oswald Stoll’s Cricklewood film studio (from Oswald Stoll Calendar, 1982, Oswald Stoll Biographical File, V & A Theatre and Performance Collection) ‘Gallery First Night’, 1931 (author’s own collection) ‘The Metropolitan Cabaret Scene’, in André Charlot’s production, ‘Kill That Fly!’, 1912 (V & A Theatre and Performance Collection) From How to Run a Picture Theatre, 1910 ‘The Swiss Family Whittlebot’, from Nöel Coward and André Charlot’s London Calling, 1923 (author unknown) Programme for The London Revue, with guest appearance by Pearl White, 1925 (V & A Theatre and Performance Collection) ‘The Bazaar’ from Kismet, 1911 (author’s own collection) Matheson Lang and Lillian Braithwaite in the death scene from Mr Wu, 1914 (author’s own collection) Discovering the enemy signalling machine in The Man Who Stayed at Home, 1915 (author’s own collection) Mata Hari, c. 1910s (Popperfoto: Getty Images) An Englishman’s Home after the enemy invasion, 1909 (author’s own collection) Scene 1 of Poached Eggs and Pearls, Apollo Theatre, 1916 (author’s own collection)

15 25

31 65 71

73 88 102 124 128 142 144

List of figures ix

5.3 5.4a 5.5 5.6 5.7

5.8

5.9 6.1

6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6

6.7

6.8 6.9 6.10 6.11

Five Birds in a Cage, Haymarket Theatre, 1915 (author’s own collection) and 5.4b A First World War mobile cinema unit (author unknown) Interior of a shop pre-war and post-war in Cochran’s £150 Revue, 1917 (author’s own collection) ‘Some of our Mothers’ from the Women’s League of Service, c. 1916 (author unknown) Act II of The Silver Tassie, as designed by Augustus John at the Apollo theatre, London, 1929. Gladys Calthrop was also a designer on the production (author unknown) From R. C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End, January 21, 1929 (Robert Speaight as 2nd Lieutenant Hibbert and Colin Clive as Captain Stanhope. Originally produced at the Savoy Theatre by Maurice Browne, Apollo Theatre, London. ARP1329354 University of Bristol/ArenaPAL) Leon M. Lion as the ‘Communist’ in The Right to Strike, 1920 (author’s own collection) Advert for ‘Vulcana – The Most Beautiful, Symmetrical and Physically Perfect Woman on Earth’, the Performer (author’s own collection) ‘The Edivicta Troupe of Six Charming English Cyclists’, December 1914 (author unknown) Beatrice Lillie from Cheep, 1916 (author unknown) Beatrice Lillie in Now’s the Time, 1915 (author unknown) Phyllis Dare in a domestic scene for the fans (author unknown) Gladys Cooper in a domestic scene with children (Gladys Cooper 1888–1971, English actress with children Joan and John Buckmaster, signed photograph, 1915. ARP1285560, Ronald Grant Archive/ArenaPAL) Gladys Cooper, offering fans a chance to see her ‘other’ professional life as the sponsor of skincare products (author’s own collection) Ada Reeve, in a domestic scene, back at home after her tour of the colonies, c. 1913 (author unknown) Maud Allan dancing (author’s own collection) Maud Allan as Salome from her Vision of Salome, 1908 (author’s own collection) Salome impersonators: Malcolm Scott as ‘Salome’ (author unknown)

145 151 155 159

163

164 168

176 177 178 179 180

181

181 182 183 184 186

x List of figures

6.12 6.13

6.14

6.15

6.16

6.17 6.18

6.19 6.20

6.21

Salome impersonators: H. G. Pelissier as Maud Allan (author’s own collection) ‘“Dressed in a Chic Ventilation”: Miniature Salomes’, Phyllis Dare and the ‘tiny Maud Allans’ child chorus parody of the rage of the moment in The Dairymaids at the Queens, the Sketch, June, 1908 (author unknown) The Prime Minister has been kidnapped and given a woman’s dressing gown to wear in Netta Syrett’s Might is Right, from the Sketch, December 1, 1909, p. 234 (author unknown) Iris Hoey as the professional version of Robina Fleming in Emily Morse Symond’s (George Paston’s) Clothes and the Woman, 1922 (author unknown) Iris Hoey as the ‘feminised’ version of Robina Fleming in Emily Morse Symond’s (George Paston’s) Clothes and the Woman, 1922 (author unknown) Edna Best and Tallulah Bankhead in Fallen Angels, 1925 (author unknown) Ivor Novello and Einar Nerman standing by Nerman’s mural of London celebrities at Novello’s Fifty-Fifty Club (Photo: Sasha/Hulton Archives/Getty Images) Elsa Lanchester, proprietor of the Cave of Harmony, in role, c. 1927 (Photo: Sasha/Hulton Archives/Getty Images) Ivor Novello in the White Coffin nightclub, from David L’Estrange (Novello and Constance Collier), The Rat, Prince of Wales theatre, London, 1924 (author unknown) Gerald du Maurier as Tony Chievely discovering Una after she has taken an overdose in The Dancers, 1923 (author unknown)

187

188

194

197

198 199

203 205

207

208

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The research for this book would not have been possible without the financial support of the Leverhulme Trust, and I will be forever grateful for their Major Research Fellowship awarded from 2014 to 2017. I am also grateful to the University of Manchester, for providing both sabbatical leave and a research environment which still accommodates the long-haul research project. No extended research activity is ever possible without such support or the help, advice and intellectual stimulation provided by colleagues and friends. Particular thanks are due to Ben Piggott at Routledge who is an ‘editor to die for’: witty, imaginative and genuinely interested in academic exploration. Huge thanks are due to Hayley Jayne Bradley and to Naomi Paxton who, while researching their own PhDs, both worked as extremely thoughtful and competent research assistants on this project. Equally, colleagues and friends Gilli Adams, Geddy Aniksdal, Gilli Bush-Bailey and Jacky Bratton, Steve Bottoms, David Calder, Rachel Clements, John F. Deeney, Viv Gardner, Dee Flemming, Matthew Frost, Alison Jeffers, Bryce Lease, Helen Day Mayer and David Mayer, Simon Shepherd, Brian Singleton, Lucy Stone, James Thompson, Janine Waters, Charlotte Wildman, and Julia Varley have all been supportive, interested or curious. I already greatly miss the long tea breaks and gossip with John Stokes at the British Library while working on this book. He is a wise and willing listener, as well as a great scholar and friend. My co-series and journal editor Maria M. Delgado has always championed my work and provided much needed intellectual intervention, good humour and perspective as has Kate Dorney, my other series co-editor. Her insightful comments and brilliant advice on untapped archives all the way through the project have been invaluable: she even tried to mask her yawning when I became too boring. My mother, Liz Gale, has also patiently listened to my rambling research stories as have my two lovely boys, Oscar and Sol, who still ask what my book is actually about. Lastly but never least, my partner, Jenny Hughes, has been unjustifiably diligent and patient in her endless

xii Acknowledgements

support. Jenny, thanks for pushing me to do this project in the first place all that time ago: I owe you one. Notes on archives: Many archives were consulted during this project and details are given in footnotes where materials have been referenced. Unpublished plays and sketches were accessed via the Lord Chamberlain’s Play Collection at the British Library. Many thanks are due to those curators and assistants who offered advice at the British Library; Bristol Theatre Collection; London Metropolitan Archives; Public Records Office; V & A Theatre and Performance Collection; the Westminster Library and the Yale Theatre Collection. Many of the books used in this research became available on archive.org during the process of writing: this is an invaluable and ever-expanding resource which reflects the best of the internet as a cultural tool.

INTRODUCTION

When I began the research for this book a colleague asked if I was working on the ‘barren years’, a comment which reiterated the myth that theatre and performance during this period were somehow an historical hinterland of obsolete forms of entertainment for conservative audiences. The premise of the research, however, was that in fact theatre and cinema of the era were part of a wider realm of emerging performance cultures within modernity, the interconnections between which offer a rich seam of potential in terms of our understanding of the relationship between the material cultures of performance, and the social, professional and civic contexts from which they arise, and on which they reflect. Many of the plays and performances written about here were predicated on an audience’s sophisticated ability to look, to read the complexity of the visual field in the products of performance cultures, not just the textual. These products were created for audiences – from those of Variety theatres and Revue, to the Galleryites of the West End, to those of political independent theatres, to cinema audiences in the late 1920s who, their producers understood, could read performance as layered and dynamic. In reference to the alienating qualities of modern urban life, early sociologist Georg Simmel suggested the ‘modern city is supplied almost exclusively by production for the market, that is, for entirely unknown purchasers who never appear in the actual field of vision of the producers themselves’ (Simmel, 2000 [1903]: 63). Live and recorded performances of the era might be viewed as part of a different market however. Here products were created for purchasers who did in fact appear in the ‘field of vision’ of the producers and makers themselves. For example, Alfred Butt, producer of popular Variety shows, certainly did know his audiences when he brought Maud Allan to the Palace in 1908, with her ‘new’ dancing for a new modern city. Equally, sketch writers whose works filled the Music-Halls, were both familiar with, and adept at shaping, their customers’ tastes. Other plays such as The Rat (see Chapter 6) were conceived by performers and writers who understood the visual and visceral appeal for

2 Introduction

their audiences of ‘forbidden’ and ‘spectacular’ bodies performing in shadowy spaces. These makers of performance were working at a moment when the idea of performance – whether mediated through theatre, cinema, or the legal frameworks shaping public behaviour – was both embedded in and crucial to processes of cultural, social and self-formation. This book then, offers a new social history of British performance cultures. It sees them as generated by dynamic, reactive and transformational industries which helped shape, and indeed were shaped by, new propositions for participation in the public realm during the early decades of the twentieth century. Here the performance industries are considered as both far more interdependent than traditional histories allow, and in relation to the performative frameworks which characterized much contemporary legislation and social theory of the period: theatre and early film were components of much broader cultures of performance. A Social History of British Performance Cultures explores the anxieties of modernity – motifs of estrangement, fear of the ‘other’ and transformations in the experience of identity, agency and citizenship – through a social history of cultural production. The period is marked by the ways in which enfranchisement, democratization, technological development and legislation shaped the experience of citizenship. The performance industries of the time both reflected and challenged this experience, and were being formed around more sophisticated understandings of how language and visual culture construct our ‘performance’ as participants in the public realm. The aim here is to offer an original intervention into the construction of British theatre and performance histories – traversing forms and practices – as well as offering new readings of cultural production in relation to social class, identity and citizenship. The book is built on a refusal to dismiss this period of performance history as somehow lesser – commercial, conservative, superficial. Instead it offers an integrated social history of British theatre and performance cultures between 1900 and 1939, repositioning them as operating within an expansionist social and performance economy. Whilst Tracy C. Davis persuasively argues that the theatre and film industries in the early part of the twentieth century were driven by trade strategies and tactics (Davis, 2000a), more recent histories tend still to foreground the products of performance culture as somewhat detached from the processes and networks through which they were created and consumed. In this book, however, I suggest the need for a re-examination of the relationship between the different economies of the performance industries, the professional lives of those who worked within them, the cultural products they created and the ways these both fed from and critically re-configured the key social debates and anxieties of the day. During the early decades of the twentieth century, the performance industries experienced an increased level of participation by the lower middle classes and especially by women. For some critics this was problematic and the aesthetic taste of these ‘new’ audiences was asserted as the root cause of theatre’s contemporary challenges (see Chapters 1 and 2), and indeed, the explicit ‘problem’ of cinema. However, as a number of current histories testify, the performance industries were a ‘bustling, optimistic’ phenomena in the early 1900s (see Cochrane, 2012: 20; Donohue, 1996; Eltis,

Introduction 3

2013; Singleton, 2004; and Walkowitz, 2012). They also held increased levels of attraction for both investors and the designers of city landscapes; theatre and later cinema shaped the city as well as being shaped by it. This book sets out in part then, to ensure that the subjects and material objects of study are understood by means of a detailed social and historical contextualization of the networks and collaborations through which they were generated. Bringing together new and extant archival research, my intention has been to broaden our terms of reference so as to better explore the social, economic and artistic forces at play in the processes of cultural production during this tumultuous period of British history. The seminal histories of late nineteenth-century performance acknowledge both its transitional nature and its fluid identity, as Peter Bailey reminds us. The popular stage of twenty of so years prior to 1914 had become incorporated into a modern mass entertainment industry answering to the imperatives of large scale capitalism in its norms of efficient production and relentless stimulation of popular demand. Aesthetic or intellectual modernism from the same period provided a fierce critique of this ‘false’ or bourgeois modernity, whose superficial pursuit of the new and the now was said to conceal an unchanging continuity in its reproduction of structures of subordination, manipulation and evasion, a charge that still carries weight (Bailey, 1998: 5) Peter Bailey noted some thirty years ago, that the accusation of commercial superficiality, as applied to the significant transition of the performance industries into a model of ‘mass modern entertainment’ in the late nineteenth century, still held sway amongst many cultural historians. He argued that, ‘popular modernism’, less embraced by the intellectual elite then as now, ‘is more difficult to locate’. Its makers and their audiences were often of a more seemingly conservative mindset. its ‘authors’ were to be found in a diverse army of showpeople, journalists and admen, variously writing, staging, performing, puffing and dissecting a hybrid and multiple text. Charged with selling fun and fashionability to the broadest possible public, they were servants of a modernizing agenda […] while greatly compromised, these authors had to engage with the world of popular experience, acknowledging anxieties and aspirations which they may often have shared. (Bailey, 1998: 5) Beyond this performance industry context with its ‘anxieties and aspirations’, the period explored here is bookended on either side by armed conflict – the second Boer War of 1899–1902 and the Second World War (1939–1945). In addition these four decades saw unprecedented levels of social, cultural and technological transformation, the flow and speed of which is key to understanding performance cultures and their role in the formation of modernity, the definition and experience of which varies according to the conversation and the art form. Thus, reading performance as a ‘hybrid

4 Introduction

and multiple text’, as Bailey suggests, is crucial to understanding performance as integral to the ‘making of modern popular consciousness’ (ibid.: 19). In contemporary histories of the period, the ‘high brow/low brow’ or modernist/popular modernist cultural divide arguably remains as much of a central reference point for discussion about the products and practices of theatre and cinema as it was at the time. In contrast to approaches that sustain such divides, this book focuses more on the meeting points and fluid boundaries between the textual and the visual, between popular and elite cultures, and the people, practices and social structures which both shaped them and were shaped by them. Here I take an intertextual approach to the writing of performance history and prioritize sociality, and the networked and relational nature of the performance industries. The term ‘performance cultures’ covers a myriad of forms, events and practices, but is also used as a means of understanding the relationship between the material cultures of performance and the performative nature of the social structures in which they operate. These rely on interactive behaviours that are presented, adopted, rehearsed, contained, played out or recorded for a particular social or professional agenda, in a specific performance space, or in the wider cultural domain. The term performance cultures also allows for an exploration of the manifestations of performative theories of the self and selfhood, which underpinned a great deal of social interaction and cultural discourse during the era. Performance cultures of the time then, were a product of a society and its public attempting to redefine itself by a variety of means from the Liberal reforms of the Edwardian period, to renegotiations of the terms of Empire, class conflict and gender inequality, to legislation focused on the regulation of public behaviour. A Social History of British Performance Cultures 1900–1939 focuses on the ways in which performance cultures were constructed, connected, managed, circulated and regulated both within the industry and without, in a period that also saw a significant reshaping of the relationship between labour, leisure and the accessibility of commodity culture. The notion of accessibility is limited then as now, however, as Peter Bailey notes: many working people were ‘locked out of the new leisure world in a cultural apartheid imposed by poverty [and] unemployment’(Bailey, 1999: 139). Few histories of commercially-oriented performance industries include this demographic as audiences, although as Chapter 3 explores, they were sometimes the subject of the entertainments from which they were economically excluded. The residue operations and innovations of the late nineteenth-century performance industries underpin developments well into the early decades of the twentieth century. For historian Jane Moody, the renewed academic interest in melodrama, for example, has facilitated a repositioning of theatre at the ‘centre of contemporary academic debate about the performative character,’ of culture (Moody, 2000: 112). Along with Ben Singer in his work on melodrama and modernity (Singer, 2001), Moody stresses that Victorian theatre was not ‘rescued’ from the ‘tyranny of a popular, unthinking public’ (Moody, 2000: 114). Indeed, its forms and influences are abundant in registers of twentieth-century performance, reflecting a different confluence of genre, people, economics and geography in a particular historical moment.

Introduction 5

This book relies on the possibility of interconnected readings of the material accruals and debris of performance cultures, prioritizing the ‘intertheatrical’, in Jacky Bratton’s terms. Here, performance histories can be read as, a mesh of connections between […] texts and their creators and realisers […] a theatrical code shared by writers, performers and audience which consists not only of language but of genres, conventions and memory – shared by the audience […] a collaboration […] that creates shared meaning out of the concatenation. (Bratton, 2000: 15) Bratton’s ‘mesh of connections’ are here further extended to embrace the manner in which performance becomes embedded in cultural ways of ‘being’, and to acknowledge the relationship between the intertheatrical and what we might call the socially and culturally ‘performative’. Extant studies of the performance industries and cultures of the period have traditionally oscillated focus between the commercial and the non-commercial, populist and modernist, often sidelining any connections between the two in the process of critique or analysis. More recently, however, work on Edwardian theatre – with its ‘notable quality of leisure, paradoxically coexistent with persistent, indefatigable energy and industriousness’ (Donohue, 1996: 16) and on early cinema and film, has become unashamedly interdisciplinary in its coverage of a breadth of genres, styles, practices and evidential materials, and in its approaches to contextual analyses. Similarly, contemporary studies focused on the nineteenth century (see Davis, 2000a; Singer, 2001; and Bratton, 2011), raise equally interesting questions for the discussion of early twentieth-century performance cultures, which were also epitomized by the ‘instability and mutability’ Moody assigns to melodrama (Moody, 2000: 122). The period covered by this volume has been variously narrated, although as Brian Singleton aptly notes, histories of the theatre of the period have tended to celebrate ‘a series of high moments in modernist avant-garde achievement,’ or indeed, ‘decry’ the popular theatre for its Imperialist outlook, and even dismiss ‘almost all theatre and drama of the first half of the twentieth century’ (Singleton, 2010: 352–353). Phrases such as ‘all forgettable plays by unremembered playwrights’ or ‘forgettable […] theatrical offerings,’ have a familiar tone in critiques of the industry of the period (Weintraub, 2016: 535– 537). The assertion that the period covered here was one of low standards in a ‘largely mindless and unambitious English theatre’1 remains a fashionable strategy for reduction and dismissal, more recently undermined by histories which acknowledge the significance of, ‘the energetic ensemble of new modes of stage entertainment’, alongside the more traditional and stable forms and markets (Bailey, 1998: 5). There is far more prolific and established coverage of the period in film and cinema scholarship, especially in terms of documenting the social and transitional nature of the medium. There are multiple histories of early cinema, film theory, silent film and its crosscurrents with theatre, film performance, genres, stardom and fandom. Key scholars have etched out areas of enquiry around censorship, industrial practice, auteurship, stardom, audiences, the psychology of early film reception and so on. Early twenty-

6 Introduction

first century histories of theatre of the period can be more easily divided into critical documentation or analyses of people, buildings, forms, genres or movements. The more engaging accounts take specific forms or themes as their frame: Len Platt on transcultural musical comedy; Veronica Kelly on Australasian ‘stars’, costume drama and the interrelation of the popular and the modernist; Marlis Schweitzer on transatlantic performance cultures or Brian Singleton on orientalism and musical comedy (see Kelly, 2010; Platt et al., 2014; Schweitzer, 2015a; and Singleton, 2004 and 2010). This book shares their inclination to bridge the historiographic divide between popular and elite cultures, and invest equally in the exploration and validation of frequently neglected critical or autobiographical ‘amateur’ histories. There are a number of studies which focus on theatre culture at a specific moment during the period, or on a specific artistic movement, on censorship or on the years surrounding the First World War (see, for example, Maunder, 2015; Nicholson, 2003 and 2005). In the 1980s and 1990s both Andrew Davies’ Other Theatres and Raphael Samuel et al.’s seminal book on the worker’s theatre movements in Britain and America, shifted our focus to a leftist perspective missing from histories of theatre up until that point, despite the number of works on ‘alternative’ or independent theatres (see Samuel et al., 1985 and Davies, 1987).2 For a short while in the early 1990s they became the histories of the period; their underpinning assumptions about commercial theatre and populist audiences were left unquestioned. Their starting point was that, as producer Norman Marshall had suggested in 1947, ‘nearly everything that was most worthwhile in the English theatre in the period between the two world wars was due to the influence of […] rebel organisations’ (Marshall, 1947: 13). Marshall made money from West End productions, but was not part of the more permanent cartel of large-scale managers: he worked across the ‘alternative’ and the mainstream. Andrew Davies later separates out these locations for labour without conceding either their symbiotic relationship, or the movement of theatre workers between the mainstream commercial and independent sectors, between work as performers, writers, producers and so on across film and theatre. These histories focus on a particular mode of hitherto neglected practice, isolate it contextually or frame it only in terms of binary oppositions, drawing on what Tracy C. Davis terms ‘an ideological and strategic’ position revolving around ‘how the past is experienced as present’ (Davis, 2010: 142). More culturally nuanced histories appear from the mid-1990s and re-open our engagement with wider conceptions of the ‘political’ and the popular in performance, and with bourgeois theatre more generally (see Booth and Kaplan, 1996; Kaplan and Stowell, 1994; and Kershaw, 2004). Some of these, however, re-affirm post-Second World War critical narratives which read the pre-1939 performance industries as having been firmly divided. Critic A. E. Wilson suggested in the early 1950s, for example, that, ‘[for] […] the advanced intellectual few […] it was not sufficient […] that the theatre should exist only as a place of mere entertainment; it should be used as a platform for discussion, for the ventilation of new ideas’ (Wilson, 1951: 19). More recently, histories have reasserted existing prejudices about the literary quality of dramatic texts, the paucity of ‘good’ work and the dominance in the commercial sector of ‘middlebrow’ and ‘undemanding drama […] directed at the middle classes’

Introduction 7

(D’Monté, 2015: 4). Yet the definition of middle class at the time was by default expansive. A socio-historic approach to exploring performance cultures embraces more nuanced readings that understand performance as operating across multiple registers at any one time, as exemplified in the work of scholars who have acknowledged that practitioners from the period exploited ‘theatre’s untrustworthiness in the business of representation’ (Shepherd, 2009: 124). Where histories try to read and understand the period from a number of perspectives in one volume, performance is more aptly presented as a component of social formation, reactive to social change and in tension with its extant traditions and the contemporary, fast-moving marketplace (see Barker and Gale, 2000 and Kershaw, 2004). The cultural intervention made by cinema, the definition and impact of which was constantly debated at the time, further challenged and influenced performance cultures during the period, in terms of social function, aesthetic practice, audiences and histories. But both film and theatre mobilized debate about the nature of entertainment, the function and affects of performance, the relationship between art and entertainment, between commerce and the role of the artisan in the process of art-making. These debates reflected the shifting definitions of each industry by the industries themselves, as well as their vulnerability to variations in market demand. This was all during an historical moment in which debates on the individual, on citizenship, on class and on gender roles created tangible social and legal transformations in British society. A Social History of British Performance Cultures 1900–1939 argues for a new reading of the performance cultures of the period in which these debates shaped both practice and reception. Here, both the conservative and the radical found a place in popular culture, and often in a way in which it was not always easy to distinguish between the two. The book brings together archival and autobiographic materials, texts, photographs, ‘amateur’ histories written by performance practitioners, and ‘professional’ histories written by critics invested in particular readings of the theatre and cinema of their era. These are explored alongside social and cultural theories produced at the time, as well as those created more recently. The premise of this book is that reading the performance industries of the period, in part from the perspective of those working in them and from the ephemera left behind – the material accruals and debris of performance cultures, as suggested earlier – offer us more complex and layered histories. A period driven by so much social upheaval and technological innovation is bound to have much to offer by means of its performance cultures, beyond the plays of key modernist playwrights, practitioners or theatrical theorists. My own earlier research on commercial women playwrights of the period suggested that we needed to expand our historiographical aperture if we wanted to better understand the nature of women’s labour in the formation of theatre history (see Gale, 1996 and Gale and Bush-Bailey, 2012). This book offers a similar expansion of an historiographical aperture, to understand the interconnected character of a society in turmoil and the performance cultures it created, reflected and circulated. The book takes themes prevalent in public debate and social practice as frameworks for exploration. Thus, questions of citizenship, belonging and exclusion, surveillance, the body, social agency and degeneration,

8 Introduction

and understanding the cultural interventions created by the First World War within a wider definition of conflict, are used to group materials and analyses. The book is divided accordingly into chapters which explore the performance industries, how they were operated and by whom, and the ways in which legislation and ideas of social regulation were mirrored in professional practices. Just as the notion of citizenship was being reformed and renewed during the period, so too professionals working in the performance industries thought about their own status and their experience of belonging and of ‘citizenship’ as professionals. In a culture moving toward exclusion and surveillance, the performance industries also reflected on issues of social exclusion and poverty, explored in Chapter 3, and in Chapter 4. Here surveillance is examined as a performative social practice and as the driver for a theatrical strategy to create and serve the prevailing taste for spy and espionage dramas in and around the First World War. Chapter 5 focuses on the 1914–1918 war, but broadens its scope to look at the way in which the idea of conflict, both military, ideological and generational, was used in performance cultures. Lastly, Chapter 6 explores the bodily in performance through ideas of agency and degeneration, emphasizing both the role of photography and the centrality of the visual, in the formation of the performance cultures of the period. The book then, suggests that as well as sociality and professional networks, issues of labour, class, gender and citizenship were integral to developments in the performance industries of the period as a whole. In this context, questions of race are more nuanced and challenging: far more research needs to be carried out specifically on the relationship between race and the British performance industries during the era. Here, however, I explore the racial stereotyping that prevailed within the context of colonizers’ narratives of Empire, in relation to generic representations of ‘foreigners’ and in relation to anti-Semitism and Sinophobia, especially in Chapters 3 and 6. There is a wider spectrum of racism frequently expressed in plays and sketches of the period and reflective of a society built on division. Here, forms of citizenship and belonging are framed as much by exclusion as by inclusion in performances of modernity where the performance industries were not only, in Peter Bailey’s terms, the ‘servants of a modernizing agenda’ (Bailey, 1998: 5), but indeed the makers of that cultural agenda.

Notes 1 Richard Eyre (2004) ‘Harley Granville Barker’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/ odnb-9780198614128-e-33520 accessed March, 2019. 2 Norman Marshall (1947) and Michael Sidnell (1984) provide useful histories of independent theatres that operated largely outside the jurisdiction of state censorship between the wars.

1 PERFORMANCE CULTURES AND THE EXPANSION, OPERATION AND CIRCULATION OF THE PERFORMANCE INDUSTRIES

Focusing on issues of expansion and circulation, and examining operational practices within the performance industries, this chapter explores the spaces and processes of cultural production in a period characterized by the transformation of the geographies of performance. The metropolis reveals itself as one of those great historical formations in which opposing streams which enclose life unfold. (Frisby and Featherstone, 1997: 185) by 1939 inner London […] Central London – the City, the West End and their hinterland – had never been more prosperous, confident, thrusting and up to date. Around it most of the Victorian city was palpably in decline: […] the lifeblood of inner London seemed sapped to exhaustion by a new twentieth century London that had grown up within a generation on its outer edge. (White, 2001: 23–24) Whilst these sources are largely concerned with London as a centre for activity, many of the themes, debates and practices identified were reflected in developments in cities elsewhere. However, the increased labour force for the performance industries was largely concentrated in and around London. Touring remained standard practice both at home and abroad, and innovative repertory theatres tried out new works in the regions, although by the late 1930s the majority had not survived. Whilst some suggest that their turn to ‘radical experiment’ originated a ‘lasting change’ in theatre culture (Gardner, 2004b: 61), the repertory system ultimately had to rely on the transferability of productions to the London market. This sometimes made their offerings less distinctive, but facilitated a mutually beneficial level of interconnection.1 The repertory movement broadened the range of theatre available to a wider class of

10 The performance industries

regional audiences, but this range often mapped onto the offerings of similar existing independent or subscription theatres. The largest investments in popular theatres were aimed at the escalating London market, where the population boom coincided with the growth in audiences for performance, whether radical, popular, live or recorded. The metropolitan population grew from just over one million in the opening decade of the 1800s, reaching around six and a half million by 1901, to over seven million by 1911, and over eight and a half million by 1939. Theatres, and later permanent cinema buildings, also grew in number from the 1890s, with many theatres being converted to cinemas in the 1920s, as well as investment being made in the construction of large purpose-built cinemas. Whilst cinema originally shared performance spaces with theatres, as well as other rentable spaces, the Cinematograph Act of 1909 focused in part on the regulation of buildings in which film could be shown; in doing so cinema ‘entered a certain sphere of public regulation’, not dissimilar to that of theatre (Kuhn, 1988: 114; see also Williams, 1997 and Chapter 2 of this book). The 1909 Act also quickened the pace at which film and theatre spaces separated. Just as the regulatory frameworks for performance cultures fluctuated, so too geographies of both live and recorded performance spaces were in a constant state of flux. Whilst the ownership of the land on which new central London performance spaces were built did not change, the rising costs of building and leasing, and the growing operational distance between building owners, managers and producers, altered the landscapes of performance. London provided a physical space for speculation, but rising economic costs meant speculation was more risky. As theatre architect Ernest Runtz noted in the Era in 1912, constricting building regulations for theatres – to ensure they were safe public spaces – meant investors were beholden to landowners in ways that other commercial investors were not: the price and value of theatre property is governed alone by supply and demand; and in the West-end at least, the demand exceeds the supply […]. There are but few sites in the heart of the West-end that strictly comply with the requirements of the council, which […] demand that at least one half of the frontage of the site shall abut onto thoroughfares the least width of which shall be thirty feet […] it is today a rare thing to secure an area for theatre purposes except at a price or ground rent which, for ordinary commercial purposes, would be held absurd […] any theatre with pretensions to modern construction is snapped up when the opportunity arises, either at a fixed rent or on sharing terms with the proprietor [who] […] usually has his full rental secured out of the gross receipts.2 Runtz saw enhanced participation resulting from the fact that the ‘general public too, are taking a more intelligent interest in the theatre […] not only as a place of amusement but also as an education and intellectual centre’, and theatre he felt, ‘appeals to the millions’ (ibid.). Other commentators of the time invariably characterize the public in more oppositional terms: dividing the ‘high-brow’ from the

The performance industries 11

‘low-brow’ in the new theatre economy. The Times critic A. B. Walkley, also a civil servant by profession until 1919, suggested later for example, that the modern theatre is, but a place of entertainment, and of entertainment, for the most part, of the half-educated […] the ‘intellectuals’ in the theatre are by no means on a par with the intellectuals outside it. The majority of playgoers […] make no pretensions to intellect. (Walkley, 1923: 96–97). Turning to cinema, early speculators assumed that the new public craze for film would produce a good return on investment: they were shown initially to have a poor sense of timing. Companies were quick to invest in the latest equipment and ‘floundered in the midst of excess competition and erratic licensing practices’ (Davis, 1996: 129). Constant technological advance meant equipment soon became obsolete. Trade paper The Performer reported in 1913 that, ‘picture theatres’, were ‘springing up like mushrooms’.3 Similarly, historian Luke McKernan notes cinemas ‘appeared with startling suddenness, and in profusion’ between 1906 and 1914 (McKernan, 2007: 125). These housed continuous shows composed of a series of ‘one reelers’ of on average ten minutes length, shown over roughly an hour and a quarter. The boom in picturehouse building from 1909 created some ‘1000 cinemas facing bankruptcy’ by 1914: echoing Davis, Nicholas Hiley suggests that speculators had mis-read the market (Hiley, 2002: 125). Others argue however that contemporary media circulated myths about ‘instability and poor management’ of the economic position of cinema in this early period, creating an ‘over-representation of a very unrepresentative group’ in terms of investors and bankrupts (Burrows and Brown, 2010: 16). Later the rate of cinema building better matched growing demand and, indeed, the shift to larger purpose-built buildings evidenced an attempt to create venues, ‘more amenable to middle-class notions of spectatorship’ (Shail, 2006: 211). The challenge of balancing demand and supply dominates many of the histories of performance cultures of the period. Here the changing profile of theatre is blamed on economic speculation or on the transformation of the taste of the client base. Claire Cochrane suggests that rises in costs were responsible for a situation in theatre, where ‘time-honoured, long-term expectations associated with settled artistic management faded’ (Cochrane, 2012: 55). Her view is shared by some of those working in theatre at the time: thus, according to Cicely Hamilton many London theatres had, by the 1930s lost their ‘identity’ (Hamilton and Baylis, 1926). However, ‘settled artistic management’ did not disappear: it was seemingly more flexible in its response to fluctuating markets and changing tastes. Looking back in 1952, Richard Findlater blamed the ‘demise’ of the West End pre-1939 on the ‘speculators who milked it of its profits without worrying about the state of the drama or the welfare of the stage […] giving the public what they thought it ought to want’. Ruination was the result of, ‘reckless distribution of profits rather than reinvestment in capital equipment’ (Findlater, 1952: 35–37). Shows that converted into long production runs were seen by

12 The performance industries

critics as jeopardizing the development of drama as ‘art’. This was less of an issue for the investors in whose interest it was to gain as much return from their original speculation as possible. Market-driven speculative investment was also an issue for cinema: money was more likely to be poured into ‘populist’ films, not art films or those attracting lower audience numbers. Here, then, it is not just the ‘tasteless’ audiences obstructing the development of the ‘drama,’ but the managers, producers and speculators who want economic return on the productions in which they have invested. Many professionals involved in the performance industries of the era refer back, somewhat nostalgically, to the consolidation of investment and ‘good’ taste embodied in the work of the actor-manager model from the late nineteenth century. The artistic predilection of any actor manager could not however be disassociated from the markets over the period explored here, for which work was made. As well as trying to shape them, they had to respond to markets which were becoming far more flexible in response to the increased breadth of participation. Some proposed that London theatres were under the ‘irresponsible control’ of ‘unscrupulous profiteers and speculators’ as early as 1914 (ibid.: 35 and see Ervine, 1933 and Vernon, 1924). In reality numerous performers continued to manage or produce, but did not build their own theatres in which to do so, as had been the case with Herbert Beerbohm Tree or Seymour Hicks in the late 1890s and early 1900s, for example. Instead they leased them directly or through an established manager, adding both to potentially non-returnable cost and to the number of people with vested interests in any given production. The owner of the lease to any theatre might make more money as a silent partner than those involved in actually producing work. The imposition of the ‘middle man’ in the process of trade – most visible in the growth of agents, and producers – became increasingly significant. Middle men could make or break the outcome of exchanges of labour. As Marlis Schweitzer notes, press agents could manipulate public opinion through the fabrication of celebrity ‘news’ specifically designed to raise public interest and sell productions (Schweitzer, 2009). Strategic marketing gained momentum during the period and press agents had an essential role as ‘collaborators who helped audiences make illusions for themselves’, emphasising ‘credibility’ in their copy, as opposed to facts (Landro, 2002: 95). Whilst the processes of making performance varied and the labour market was fluid, the use of semi-permanent production teams, or the same ensemble of actors in a series of productions, was not uncommon. Theatre was a growing trade with rising numbers of annual productions, and reliable labour was important. For Thomas Postlewait, increased numbers of opening nights in theatres between 1900 and 1915 – from 240 to 337 – are indicative of the ‘successes of the commercial theatres’ (Postlewait, 2004: 40–41). They are also an indication of increased levels of participation, a taste for new work and a more frequent turnaround of productions. London saw more than double the number of productions running for 200–300 performances or more, between 1900–1909 and 1920–1929, and these increases in lengths of performance run are significant. But long running productions limited the numbers of theatres available for new productions as the period progressed.4

The performance industries 13

The labour market offered a ‘mixed economy’ for employment: it was not unusual for a performer to write and produce, or for a stage actor to work in film. The same person might seek work across forms and across independent and commercial managements, even being employed in more than one production at any one time, or working in film studio by day and theatre by night (see, for example, Nares, 1925: 139).5 By the 1920s, ‘star’ performers like Ivor Novello often wrote, performed and produced across theatre and cinema (Gledhill, 2003).6 Directors and producers predominantly worked with teams they knew they could rely on and playwrights often wrote with specific performers in mind. Professional life during the era might indeed be characterized by the tensions between stable practices, the potential for flexibility and an unstable market. Production partnerships were driven by economic as well as artistic ambitions across the industries. J. E. Vedrenne’s partnership with Harley Granville-Barker at the Royal Court from 1904 to 1907, for example, was artistically ambitious but perhaps financially disappointing.7 Their ‘modernist’ interventions, a ‘three-pronged attack on the conventional repertoire of the day’ (Postlewait, 2004: 45), were very different from Vedrenne’s far more commercial partnership with actor-producer Dennis Eadie during the 1914–1918 war. Here they produced numerous hits that were repeatedly adapted to film, such as The Man Who Stayed at Home (see Chapter 4).8 Histories of theatre tend to focus on the literary and on innovation, on theory and critical opinion, as opposed to processes and practices that might offer a different perspective. It is more Vedrenne’s association with Granville-Barker that earns him his place in standard histories, not his West End productions with their larger, more diverse audiences. Producing partnerships in theatre, and later in film were often instigated with the selling power of ‘star’ performers in mind and this continued to be the case well into the 1930s. Thus Gladys Cooper’s partnership with Frank Curzon, which facilitated her long-term management of the Playhouse theatre from 1917 to 1933, originated in part in the investment potential of her sustained marketability as a performer. Her savvy as a businesswoman extended from her experience as a performer and public figure over twenty years.9 Such localized partnerships were not unusual, but they did not have the same corporatized character as established large-scale production managements like H. M. Tennent which, by the 1930s, headed a small cartel of producers seen as dominating the West End and limiting the kinds of production that could get backing. Some playwrights like J. B. Priestley were prepared to take financial risks and produce their own work within the commercial sector, but this was relatively rare (see Gale, 2008 and Priestley, 1947). Club and subscription productions were usually low budget and relied on free or relatively low-cost labour. Independent productions were invariably created from the belief in the ‘art’ of theatre, and that the labour invested in a product should be separated from its commercial potential. Larger managements were always looking for potential transfers from the independents who bore the costs of initial ‘try-out’ productions. To some extent the theatre industry operated through a network of symbiotic relationships: here, as in the film industry, professional networks were paramount.

14 The performance industries

Most developments in the processes of theatre and film production during the first four decades of the twentieth century were shaped by the same social and economic forces that shaped the market. Entrepreneurial producers facilitated a mutually beneficial exchange between the mainstream and the experimental. For example, Charles Frohman, an American theatre impresario who died tragically during the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, underwrote experimental seasons at the Kingsway and the Duke of York’s theatres in the 1910s. Similarly, C. B. Cochran, criticized for his seemingly indiscriminate and commercially oriented choices in terms of the range of work he produced, brought the then unknown Italian modernist Luigi Pirandello and, from America, the extraordinary Blackbirds with Florence Mills to London in the mid-1920s, as well as rodeo and boxing. Such producers were as interested in testing the market as feeding it. Film making found its rhythm as the basis of a growing industry that expanded from small producers, working in a limited range of styles, to larger-scale producers working across genres for a growing market. What Laura Marcus calls the ‘literature of cinema’ began to reflect similar kinds of argument around the balance of supply and demand as theatre, between films perceived to cater to a ‘mass’ market of undiscerning viewers, and those catering for a smaller demographic interested in film as an art form. As the machinery and the labour force behind production became more sophisticated in both the theatre and film industries, so too the growth in public interest around the way the industries operated was reflected in the increased presence of leisure market publications on theatre and cinema, autobiographies of performers and producers, fan magazines and journals. These were part of the ‘mesh of connections’ which Bratton, as noted earlier, sees as defining the intertheatrical and here, performance cultures more generally (Bratton, 2000: 15). These also indicate a tacit knowledge from those working in the performance industries, of the keen public interest in the ‘how to’ of making performance as a professional practice explored later in this book. The bifurcation of the routine ‘tasks of theatre-making’ which gained momentum in the nineteenth century continued into the twentieth (Davis, 2000a: 310). In the film industry this happened much more swiftly: what began as an industry built on products made and distributed by small independents, soon transformed to a multidimensional, industrialized process. Film studios became larger, more complex, less domestic and more permanent. Purpose-built production studios opened as early as 1902 (the original Ealing studios) with some production companies headed by theatre producers such as Basil Dean (Associated Talking Pictures) or Oswald Stoll, who opened Stoll Pictures at Cricklewood Studios, London in 1920 (see Figure 1.1). Only a small number of theatres were still being built in the West End into the 1920s – the Piccadilly for example opened in 1928. With a career of over fifty years, production manager and publicist Walter MacQueen-Pope’s knowledge about who built and ran theatres, about the nearby cafes, restaurants, pubs and clubs and the shape of the public spaces shared by theatres and theatre goers, is invaluable. Written in an overly nostalgic register, there is often a tension between his assertions of theatre ‘as stable and secure as the life of its patrons […] a true microcosm of London’ (MacQueen-Pope, 1947b: 8), and his more astute analyses of the changing identity of London

The performance industries 15

FIGURE 1.1

A drawing of the inside of Oswald Stoll’s Cricklewood film studio (from Oswald Stoll Calendar, 1982, Oswald Stoll Biographical File, V & A Theatre and Performance Collection)

theatre and its audiences. The transformation of Shaftesbury Avenue to ‘London’s Street of Theatres’ between 1900 and 1911 described in his An Indiscreet Guide to Theatreland for example, plays on the symbolic metaphoric value of theatre as ghosted – by the actors who once trod ‘the boards’, and by the ‘memories’ that give theatre its ‘atmosphere’. Here he chronicles the demise of a number of theatres, and marks out the incursion of cinema, especially by the late 1920s, into the traditional geographies of theatre. He also notes the consequent downward pattern of employment epitomized in the over-population of ‘Poverty Corner’: a gathering space for unemployed performers running from the corner of Charing Cross Road to the Garrick Theatre (MacQueen-Pope, 1947a: 90). Like a number of his generation, MacQueen-Pope viewed the experience of theatre and cinema in oppositional terms, suggesting that in the cinema, ‘you have no ghosts; there nothing but shadows have ever held sway, nothing but tinned voices have ever spoken and all is operated by machinery’ (ibid.: 7–9). He also proposed that for the cinema audience, ‘ubiquity kills personal memories’, whereas the unique liveness of the theatre makes it an ‘animate part of the life of people’ (ibid.). Cinema audiences were not perhaps the ‘people’ McQueen-Pope associated with, holed up in the production office of a working theatre by day, and in theatres or clubs by night. By the late 1920s, there was a whole generation who had grown up with silent film who

16 The performance industries

adapted quickly to ‘talkies’. For actors, the coming of talkies in the late 1920s was both a threat and an opportunity. Thus, Gerald du Maurier admitted that it took him ‘ten minutes or so to adapt myself to the sound’: like producer/directors Basil Dean and Albert de Courville, he saw the employment potential of talking pictures.10 Whilst the building of new theatres slowed down by the late 1920s, constructions such as the Finsbury Park Astoria, complete with interior representing an imagined Moorish harem, epitomized the aspiration of investors to faciliate ‘ringing the capital with cinemas’, creating suburban leisure environments in which ‘local cinema culture eclipses all else’ (Weightman, 1992: 138). Having moved on from its cultural position in the 1910s as the new, populist art form epitomizing modernity – the social role and market position of which was unclear – cinema was now a dominant force in terms of its appeal to a mass audience. Rachael Low, however, points to the discrepancies in sources for the numbers of cinemas in the UK over the period. These would have declined as bigger purpose-built cinemas with increased capacity replaced older buildings. By 1934 the estimate for numbers of cinemas was some 4,305, open six days a week (Low, 1971: 47). In contrast, critic and playwright St John Ervine estimated that total numbers of theatres had dropped from around 500 in the UK in 1928 to around 250 by 1933 (Ervine, 1933: 189).

Art or entertainment/art versus commerce: extant and new performance histories The proliferation of publications on theatre and film aimed at the popular market offer an indication as to the social impact of performance cultures during the period. Critics saw themselves very much as literary commentators, engaging readers with ‘a mode of self expression’ and intellectual sensibility aimed at communicating with a reading public, not necessarily a theatre-going one (Emeljanow, 1996: 156). Rather like The Times’s A. B. Walkley, William Archer ‘had little faith in the taste or discriminative abilities of the theatregoer’ (ibid.: 157). Critics working for the public press – James Agate, St John Ervine, A. B. Walkley, W. A. Darlington and Huntly Carter – all published multiple works on theatre, drama and cinema,11 and books such Iris Barry’s Let’s Go to The Pictures spoke to a wide demographic of reading audiences (Barry, 1926). Along with other works written by those working inside the industries, these are vital to our knowledge base in the formulation of histories of performance cultures of the time. For Amalie Hastie, autobiographic texts, especially those by performers, precipitate a process of ‘displacing the emphasis’ on particular subjects of historical focus: the director in films studies, or the playwright, the play or the critic (Hastie, 2007: 17). Indeed, in film studies, scholars like Laura Marcus more readily celebrate and explore works like Iris Barry’s as ‘literatures’ of cinema, using them to help access ‘discourse about the cinema and cinema’s presence in literary texts’, about film as product, process and artwork (Marcus, 2007: 2). Theatre scholars have invested less consistently in publications of this type, and as a result, theatre histories of the period are perhaps less rich than they might otherwise be.

The performance industries 17

The marked increase in the numbers of autobiographic works, trade papers and magazines during the period, attest to a collective curiosity, and the popular appeal of performance cultures. These consumable texts open out the layers in and around performance to public scrutiny, but also indicate an appetite for a process of ‘instant memorialisation’: a need to mark immediate experience as history (de Groot, 2009: 35). They also open up the processes and products of performance for the reader: the authorial voice frequently registers as direct, and sometimes intimate, address. Access to the contextual specifics of the event, as memory, is narrativized as a shared experience. Many such publications, while subjective or self-conscious, are rich in both detail and reflection. Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow warn of the ‘imperfect recognition’ available in accounts like MacQueen-Pope’s, where ‘the past is an uncomplicated place’, but they also note the productive potential of the different intellectual, cultural and, I would add here, class agendas at play in these personalized histories (Davis and Emeljanow, 2001: 300–301).12 The register in which these historicize experience often reveals a clear understanding of the social function of performance, of cultural debates, innovations in practice, and issues such as amateur versus professional practice and ‘art’ versus entertainment: all as prevalent during the period under examination as they are today. With a shared concern for the changing contours of the landscapes of performance cultures, critical and industry concern about the imposition commercial drivers placed upon theatre and film, as ‘art’ forms, reverberates through a wide-ranging spectrum of theatre and performance histories. Cinema histories of the time move between discourse and debate on form and aesthetic and more sociological analyses. The many extant theatre histories can be divided into those which chronicle the career of practitioners and the shifting contexts of labour, the evolution of the drama as a literary form, the playwright as the primary focus and those, more sociological in approach, which understand theatre holistically as an industry – with equal weight given to different kinds of performance and productions and less attention paid to the literary (see Agate, 1926; Dickinson, 1917; Morgan, 1924; Nicoll, 1973; Trewin, 1951; Short and Rickett, 1938; and Carter, 1925). Rachael Low’s volumes on the history of British film, while critiqued by some for inaccuracies or critical prejudice, remain standard works: these are structured to facilitate exploration of the processes and products of a multi-layered and complex industry (see Low 1949 and 1971). Such histories acknowledge and explore the transformation of the performance industries where by the end of the 1930s, both theatre and film reach a kind of cultural maturity, with a body of critical and theoretical writing presenting them as much altered in comparison to the late nineteenth century. These accounts are frequently haunted by the proposition that the performance industries are, in one way or another, in crisis: this may actually be read as shorthand for an acknowledged anxiety that performance cultures do not stand still in time. In other words, critics see crisis where in fact fashion and taste mutate the product: the ‘problem’ is the audience – a point to which I return later in this chapter. Often the root of the perceived crisis is the inequity of commercial power versus the power of art: this is less about a nineteenth century issue of art for pleasure or education than it is about the impossibility of making art without money. As Sydney Blow noted in 1935:

18 The performance industries

A lot of words are spilt on Art for Art’s Sake; but that is a rosy-fingered illusion. There is no such thing; the weekly pay envelope is everything. It is the life’s blood of theatre – to dramatists, actors, producers, business managers, Press representatives, and stage hands. Without it the theatre would cease to be, and the public would be bereft of the finest mental recreation man has yet devised. (Blow, 1935: viii) Blow had a diverse career as actor, playwright, critic, screen writer and production associate to one of the most prolific theatre and film impresarios of the day, Oswald Stoll (see Barker, 1957). Similar to other ‘amateur historians’ of theatre, he was attuned to the necessity of commercial viability. Critics in the mid-1910s bemoaned the manner in which London theatres became vulnerable to commercial exploitation, yet this was not simply a result of the economic climate during and after the 1914–1918 war. As Tracy C. Davis notes, even in ‘the 1890s, Bernard Shaw accounted for the decline of legitimate theatre as a justifiable consumer choice’ (Davis, 2000a: 354): with growing leisure time in the early decades of the twentieth century, consumers developed what sociologist Chris Rojek calls different ‘leisure practices and behaviours’ (Rojek, 2005). The question of consumer choice sits at the heart of contemporaneous discussions of the state of both theatre and cinema. Here the critic is more often than not from the cultured elite and the ‘problematic consumer’, with a newly enhanced appetite and opportunity to engage in leisure culture, from an entirely different class.13 As the divide between the legitimate and non-legitimate, the literary or high-brow and low-brow or popular became less clear, so too the industries catered more for hybrid audiences: as potential consumers grew in number, so too did the range of performance cultures they could access. Mario Borsa, Italian journalist and author of the oft quoted eye-witness account of the assorted audiences who regularly attended the London theatres in 1906, drew attention to the impending crisis and decline of theatre. In London where […] the crowd is so characterless and inscrutable one of the few things which make a striking impression on the spectator is the daily spectacle afforded by the masses of playgoers on their way to and from the theatre […] trains disgorge hundreds and thousands of fair ladies elegantly attired, accompanied by their male escorts […] these are the patrons of the stalls and boxes on their way to the theatre to see and be seen […] the patrons of the pits and galleries […] shopmen, clerks, and spinsters in pince-nez; but more numerous still are the shopgirls, milliners, dressmakers, typists, stenographers, cashiers (Borsa 1908 [1906]: 4–5) Borsa concludes that the public had ‘lost its taste for the artistic and serious drama; its desires are all for the frivolous and the commonplace; authors have not the courage to resist popular tendency, and the managers take very good care not to attempt it.’ (ibid.: 9). While St John Ervine later agreed the audience were at fault, he pinpoints the First World War as the moment when ‘theatre ceased to

The performance industries 19

have an intelligent and educated audience’ (Ervine, 1933: 177). While for academic Camillo Pellizzi, it was the educated middle classes who had reinvigorated the drama as an art form from the late 1880s to the early 1910s.14 Producer Frank Vernon alerted his readers to the dominance of a commercial mindset which he felt prohibited playwrights after the First World War from finding venues and producers for their work (Vernon, 1924: 158–159). Yet the number of new productions in London rose steadily between 1900 and 1939, which would seem to undermine his assertion. In reality debates around art versus commerce were shaped by assertions about audiences, taste and the nature of the uncontrollable relationship between demand and supply, rather than by any real data-based analysis of the demise of theatre. Developments in print culture and in particular the technology to reproduce photographs at lower cost, fed the growing demand from eager consumers for the meta texts of live and recorded performance – autobiographies, ‘how-to’ books, critical works and so on. Some publications prioritized visual appeal and documentary value – with picture histories of performers, performances or theatres and cinemas. Others offered coverage of ‘key’ productions, or performers, lost theatres or forms of popular performance which ‘mark’ the era. Pictorial histories often relied on collated factual evidence, referring less to contextual factors. Others, like those of Huntly Carter, move between analyses of the industrial dynamics and circulation of the form, its function, social context and its aesthetic variations (Carter, 1925 and 1930).15 A number of critics collected their reviews into volumes, or indeed wrote longer works on aspects of theatre or cinema, some, such as James Agate, moving between the two industries (see Agate, 1945 and 1946). Few histories are without their own particular prejudices and most reveal anxieties about the re-distribution of ownership and control. The identification of a state of ‘crisis’, in theatre in particular, had perhaps as much to do with the recognition that any sense of permanency was being dislodged by new markets and audiences. Here, audiences are placed in the realm of uncontrollable ‘other’ to the intellectually stable and tasteful critic. For many, such a state of ‘crisis’ might be overcome through a self-reflexive deconstructing of the operation of the industry: the call in the early 1900s was to ‘organize’ the theatre, to secure its viability by transporting components of it into the hands of the state and the philanthropist.

Organize the theatre! The ownership of ‘good taste’ and noncompliant audiences In the early 1900s and in a direct critique of particular models of production practice, critic William Archer and playwright-director Harley Granville-Barker proposed the separation of ‘art’ from the necessity of commercial viability. On the one hand, this might be achieved through the intervention of the state in establishing a funded national theatre, and on the other, by the removal of state intervention and its process of formal censorship (see Chapter 2). The hierarchical distinction between drama as literature and theatre as entertainment was central to

20 The performance industries

the debates around the need to establish a national theatre.16 Here questions of nation or nationhood were less important than the potential an imagined national theatre had to protect the ‘the drama’, with a suggestion that the model proposed for London might be tried out through the foundation of an ‘adequate repertory theatre’ in Manchester or Birmingham, cities offering a better site for a ‘practical step in theatrical organization’ than ‘monstrous and inarticulate London’ (Archer and Barker, 1907 [1904]: xi). They wanted a theatre that was ‘based on sound artistic principles’(ibid.: xviii–xxi). The scheme was more strategic and coherent than ideas put forward, for example, by Henry Arthur Jones in his Foundations of a National Drama. They carefully detail the structure of a working organization, while Jones simply calls for safeguarding drama that will give ‘intellectual pleasure’ as opposed to that offered by ‘mere popular entertainment’ (Jones, 1913: 114). Each shared a recognition of the changing cultural economy of theatre and its relationship to citizenship framed by specific ideas of the ‘public’ and of ‘participation’: both saw a national theatre as indispensable to a process of preservation and containment. In Archer and Barker’s model, actors could expect stable and comparatively long-term contracts and the director would be paid twice as much as the business and the literary managers (Archer and Barker, 1907 [1904]: 16).17 Admirably ambitious in their projections of what might be produced in any one year, the desire to hold performers to contracts far less lucrative than those in the commercial sector, and the proposal for a pension fund, made the scheme financially unrealistic. They wanted theatre to be, ‘a free gift to the Nation […] free of rent, taxes and insurance premium’ (Archer and Barker, 1907 [1904]: 1). Despite the acquisition of donations – Granville-Barker’s theatrical partner and wife, Lillah McCarthy, raised a substantial down payment – the National Theatre remained a proposition rather than a reality until decades later.18 Archer and Barker over-estimated the potential for longterm funding commitments. In addition to tax costs, increased costs of renting and the reduced circle of owners and managers, production costs increased substantially between the time Archer and Barker wrote their first manifesto in 1904 to the point at which Barker reframed and refined some of his arguments in The Exemplary Theatre (1922) and then again in A National Theatre in (1930). The repertory theatre movement operated via seasons of plays and productions rotated in repertory, permanent or semi-permanent companies with regular audiences who identified with the production ethos of the given theatre. Established as a movement in the early decades of the twentieth century, these were economically vulnerable. As journalist and publisher Cecil Chisholm noted regretfully, in ‘the average English community, a non-subsidised theatre must produce four popular plays to one work of art’ (Chisholm, 1934: 120). In other words, ‘works of art’, it is assumed, do not pay for themselves whereas ‘popular plays’ which perhaps speak to wider audiences, do: when costs rise, this distinction becomes more significant. Independent theatres, organized around subscription membership and financial backing, provided try-out opportunities for a new generation of playwrights and plays, and employment opportunities for actors eager to work, but as costs rose into the 1930s, many of these independent organisations largely disappeared.

The performance industries 21

Industry autobiographies often express regret that the ‘new’ generation are failing in some way or another to live up to their forbears: things were invariably better in the past. They also acknowledge that careers depend on shifts in cultural fashion and, consequently, the ability to adapt to new markets with a heightened risk awareness and an aptitude for risk management. In a pre-subsidy economy, ‘Art’ theatre and commercial theatre were in fact both susceptible to the fluctuations of supply and demand. For a supposed time of ‘crisis’ there was an enormous amount of work being produced during the era however. New audiences were being drawn in to the theatre and of course, film presented a whole new proposition for drama. The public interest in theatre and cinema boomed as the products of each proliferated in the marketplace. The demographic shape of an average audience in a West End production had changed significantly from the end of the nineteenth century, yet in critiques of the audience, issues of class are less explicitly expressed than questions of taste or education. Critical observations about the audience can be contextualized in part by theories of the crowd, and by anxieties about ‘mob’ behaviour which had gathered momentum since the late nineteenth century through, in part, the ideas of Gustave Le Bon. Here, ‘a sense of crisis pervades’ (McClelland, 2011 [1989]: 199), and this is mirrored in the repeated motif amongst critics that the theatre was somehow being endangered by the unpredictable, ‘poor’ taste of the audience. Le Bon’s unease in 1895 that the ‘popular classes’ were undergoing a ‘progressive transformation into the governing classes’ (Le Bon, 2014 [1895]: 10) led to his theories of ‘mass’ behaviours, and the assertion, for example, that the ‘crowd is always intellectually inferior to the isolated individual’: the crowd has a shared unconsciousness (ibid.: 25). He even used the analogy of a theatre manager being unable to predict the success of a play, because to do so he [sic] would have to transform himself ‘into a crowd’, in order to understand the potential audience’s group mindset (ibid.: 37–38). In reality, a number of producers and entrepreneurs were rather good at this. McClelland draws our attention to Le Bon’s analysis of the crowd as a ‘group mind’, rather than being interested in ‘where it came from or what it did’ (McClelland, 2011 [1989]: 11). So too, recourse to a non-individuated, non-specific analysis of crowds is also found in the discourse about audiences over the period examined here. Borsa, for example, claimed the ‘masses of playgoers’ were indistinguishable from the ‘inscrutable London crowd’ (Borsa, 1908 [1906]: 4–5). The consistent tone of resentment also echoes John Carey’s later assertion that the modernists attempted to ‘segregate the intellectuals from the masses’ (Carey, 1992: 23). The theatre critic working for the popular press had risen to a position of power within the industry since the late nineteenth century, but was unlikely to share either the educational background or taste of the growing numbers of new audiences. We find a different approach to audiences from practitioners involved in the process of creating performance however, although some, such as MacQueen-Pope, consistently divide the ‘right’ kind of audience – dressed in evening clothes and arriving at the theatre in horse drawn carriages – from the noisy rabble. For all, however, ‘the audience’ was short hand for ‘the public’ and ‘the public’ shorthand, at times, for ‘the mob’.

22 The performance industries

Postcard beauty, stage and film favourite Gladys Cooper’s understanding of audiences came as much from her experience as a performer as it did from her professional role as producer through the late 1910s to the early 1930s: What does the public want? This is the eager cry of every manager in London […] You never can tell. It is not that the public are fickle, but they need variety. I think this has been proved in recent times by the enormous success of the talkies. But, given a really good play – how eagerly do the public flock to it? (Cooper, 1931: 206) Whilst Cooper’s public are avid consumers, she accedes that they make choices on the basis of unpredictable factors, and are also persuadable. Interventions made by the press will change the fortunes of a slow selling production by ‘nursing’ it to success (ibid.). Whilst some performers write in detail of the ways in which audiences were manipulated by rival managements,19 others write variously of their appreciation of what Marco de Marinis calls an ‘active cooperation by the spectator’ (de Marinis, 1987: 102). Performers have a clear sense of the symbiotic relationship between their professional development and their audience and reveal an understanding of the need for a ‘structuring of the spectators’ attention’ (ibid.: 106) in the registers in which they write about their professional lives. For example, actor Cedric Hardwicke talks of the ‘average theatre audience’ as operating with a ‘unanimous purpose, every unit becomes part of the whole’ (Hardwicke, 1932: 192), whereas he felt film audiences operated less as a group. He also pointed to the variation in interactive relationships between performer and spectator as depending on live or recorded performance. Theatre workers were by no means unanimously in praise of audiences, but they certainly reveal less of a sense of disconnection than the critics: a supportive public is of course a potential bargaining tool for future employment. The changing demographic composition of theatre audiences was a ‘recurring topic in the daily and weekly press’ during the First World War, but this was as true of the period as a whole (Gardner, 2015: 172). Often debate on the audience is tied in with anxious commentary on the changing demographic of London more generally. Borsa’s allusion in 1906, to an influx of ‘shopgirls, milliners, dressmakers, typists, stenographers, cashiers’ going to the theatre, was written originally for an Italian audience curious, in the opening years of a new century, about London’s vibrant city culture and perhaps more specifically its independent young working women. His comments are symptomatic of public anxiety about young professional women being far more visible in the city landscapes than they had been even ten years earlier (see Chapter 6). After the war, a similar anxiety bolsters St John Ervine and Frank Vernon’s accounts of ‘flapper’ audiences having ruined the London theatres (see Gale, 1996: 9–15; Ervine, 1933:127–128; and Vernon, 1924: 220–221). The Observer published one letter by a male theatre goer in July 1926 advising that women had outnumbered men by 2.6:1 in the stalls, 3.2:1 in the dress circle and 6.8:1 in the upper circle during his recent visit to the Gaiety: he muses as to whether women form such an

The performance industries 23

‘overwhelming majority’ in other theatres or whether this was to do with the nature of the show.20 Such observations are rarely evidenced by hard data and indeed reveal a disdain for the power of an audience to shape the products of consumable culture: thus the audience are frequently framed as noncompliant. During the period as a whole, references to the gender of audiences were often thinly disguised indications of class snobbery. John Carey points to Louis MacNeice’s notion that a ‘specifically female triviality’ attracted women to the theatre as ‘an uncritical escape from their daily lives’ (qtd in Carey, 1992: 87). The infantilization of audiences was not just aimed at women however. Thus Cecil Chisholm, documenting the birth and virtual demise of the repertory movement in the mid-1930s, felt justified in asserting, the majority of the public, having received no education in either the reading nor the production of drama, is entirely at a loss in the theatre. They simply do not know what they like or dislike. To this rule there are only three exceptions. The British playgoer likes an hilarious farce which will make him laugh all night; he loves a good thriller and she is always prepared to accept a sentimental comedy if the sentiment be treacly [sic] enough. (Chisholm, 1934: 119) Similarly, in suggesting that ‘there were two publics – the enlightened public who were interested in advanced ideas and the general public’, A. B. Walkley was notably unapologetic (qtd in Wilson, 1951: 203). Other historians of theatre offer more informed readings of the complexity of shifting audience taste. Writing in 1913 and looking to ‘The Future of the Public’ in theatre, John Palmer commented that, dramatic criticism to-day is really a part of the general conspiracy to pretend that the public is incapable of reason. It is part of the polite fiction about dramatic critics […] that they lead the public taste […] [but] the public is not led by critics and middlemen. It is led by artists. Critics, at their most useful interpret the public instinct; they do not lead it. (Palmer, 1913: 38–41) Indeed, Palmer saw dramatic critics as becoming obsolete and, radically for his day, suggested that the public of the future should ‘test everything’ and ‘hold fast that which they truly admire’ (ibid.: 42). But Palmer’s view was a minority one amongst those who wrote about audience taste and behaviour. Practitioners like A. M Thompson – one of the founding editors in 1892 of the socialist weekly journal the Clarion and also collaborator with Robert Courtneidge on the long-running musical comedies, The Dairymaids (1906) and The Arcadians (1909) – was critical of both the power of critics and the dominance of particular classes in the theatre. He proposed, The test of a play’s merit is therefore in its power to titillate the epicurean sluggishness of Park Lane and Belgravia. The actor, the author, the British Drama itself, hang upon the patronage of Property. The play is a Society toy,

24 The performance industries

the player a mere Society puppet […] Stalls and boxes come to the theatre, not to be worried but amused, not to digest thought but their dinners. (qtd in Wilson, 1951: 167–8, and see Thompson, 1937) Thompson’s later work attracted just such audiences. However, most of the disdain for both theatre and cinema audiences is aimed at those from the growing ranks of the lower middle classes – who for T.W.H. Crossland had made the British drama a ‘suburban affair’: it was ‘middling and suburban people’ for whom the British theatre catered (Crossland, 1905: 159–160). Writing in 1935, Camillo Pelizzi praised the middle classes for developing drama driven by ‘social remorse’ and self-reflection, precipitating the ‘last great phase’ of English drama (Pelizzi, 1935: 65). In a shift of focus, by the late 1920s and early 1930s, middle-brow audiences were placed in binary opposition to the modernists, and it was these now bourgeois audiences who, according to their critics, were attracted to plays of less ‘intellectual’ worth. Thus, John Palmer saw fit in 1913 to distinguish audiences who attended popular performance as disconnected with those interested in drama: he proposed that the ‘future of music halls […] variety […] picture palaces […] musical comedy […] have very little to do with the future of the theatre. There will always be a public for stage plays’ (Palmer, 1913: 2). Looking back in the late 1950s, however, Daily Telegraph critic W. A. Darlington claimed theatre audiences had by the 1930s, ‘improved’ because of cinema – that ‘the lighter elements of the public had been drawn off by the novelty of the movies’, noting also the generational difference that MacQueen-Pope refers to: the ‘public that remained consisted of genuine theatre lovers […] they lacked youth. Almost all the young people of that time thronged to the movies’ (Darlington, 1960: 171). Robert Graves and Alan Hodge condescend in 1940 that the public ‘was developing a “cinema-sense”: now that the pictures were no longer a novelty, they began to learn the difference between good and bad’ (Graves and Hodge, 1995 [1940]: 139). For MacQueen-Pope, it was the novelty and attraction of cinema that created the depletion of theatres outside London, and in turn the transformation of the culture of touring productions: fans could see celebrities on screen for far less money and with much greater ease (see MacQueen-Pope, 1961). There is little hard evidence that being a cinema-goer ruled out participation in either live performance as an audience member or indeed as an amateur. The levels of increased participation in theatre through amateur groups and playgoers’ clubs, indicated a growing active interest in performance cultures more generally: as both spectator and participant. Trade papers included letters from fans or performance enthusiasts who expressed their own sense of active participation as discerning audience members. This was an era in which likeminded groups sought affiliation and created organizational structures inside which they might network their enthusiasms, such as the London Playgoers Club founded in 1884 or the Gallery First Nighter’s Club founded in 1896.21 The growth of the amateur theatre movement (see Whitworth, 1938 [1930]) and of other associational user groups was part of a developing pattern of social leisure networks. The Gallery First Nighter’s, for example, set forth to ‘afford

The performance industries 25

its members facilities for social intercourse’, its formal members being men only until the early 1920s. The group met in a room over a pub in Great Windmill Street and grew in influence from the 1910s.22 Whilst James Roose-Evans later antagonized that its members were ‘a vociferous element of the public which continued to exercise its own censorship […] a coterie of theatre-goers’ (Roose-Evans, 2009: 119), they represented an audience demographic famously willing to wait in all kinds of conditions for un-booked gallery seats on the opening night of productions (see Figure 1.2). For Seymour Hicks, such organisations were important to the industry, with membership typified by seasoned and knowledgeable audiences (Hicks, 1943: 91). Gallery First Nighter Fred Bason, ‘cockney’ bookseller, broadcaster and author of Gallery Unreserved, reflected on how the ‘galleryite’ typically engaged in the performance: The gallery, besides being part of the theatre, is […] a sort of debating society – before the performance, in the intervals, after the performance […] We feel; we judge; we discuss, and we remember. We are not isolated from each other by punctilio […] it is we galleryites who take the drama out into the streets and into the houses. (Bason, 1931: 4–5). Curating a series of reflections on ‘galleryites’, Bason later gives a comprehensive detailing of the varying qualities of West End theatre gallery seating and audience:

FIGURE 1.2

‘Gallery First Night’, 1931 (author’s own collection)

26 The performance industries

This new kind of galleryite wants to learn – seeks knowledge not sentiment […] Enthusiastic! Many of us are. Noisy! Sometimes […] The ordinary working class theatergoer who visits the gallery simply because he or she cannot afford more expensive seats is a real lover of the theatre […] We line up anything from five to fifteen hours. We pay 2s. 4d. for a seat [… plank is the general idea of a gallery seat]. (ibid.: 15–23) These were not ‘tasteless’ or non-compliant audiences as some of the critics of the day might suggest. They were audiences seeking to actively participate in performance culture. Looking back in the 1970s, Allardyce Nicoll proposed that the proliferation of groups and associations of enthusiasts during the period could be directly linked to the work of repertory and other independent theatres (Nicoll, 1973). Such groups actively engaged in critical debates about plays, players, producers and indeed themselves as audiences. The interest in film from enthusiasts similarly generated the London-based Film Society, which ran from 1925 to 1939 and was ‘modelled on the stage society’: here films of ‘artistic and technical interest’ were put on for members on a Sunday night.23 These organisations share in common an emphasis on conscious and proactive forms of consumption and the beneficial environment of sociability which participation in performance cultures afforded.

Entrepreneurial impresarios: Revue and Variety – new forms shaping the performance industries Developments in the performance industries of the early decades of the twentieth century were often driven by a growing number of impresario producers keen to enhance audience numbers by ‘Capturing the Shy Playgoer’ as one journalist put it.24 C. B. Cochran suggested that the ‘great object of managers was to interest the 90 per cent of the public who were not confirmed playgoers’.25 Here ‘audience’ was an open proposition, with its expansion an ever-present possibility. As with other impressarios, Cochran was a risk taker focused on producing the new and the hybrid. His was an intuitive, strategic and determined approach to the composition and production of modern entertainment on an industrial scale (see Cochran 1925, 1932, 1941 and 1945). Christopher St John, writing for Time and Tide in 1925, noted for her upper middle-class readers that Cochran’s Revues ‘fused elements drawn from so many different sources into a single unit which moves with the precision of a machine.’26 He produced whatever he thought would bring him audiences, but this did not rule out innovation, or financial risk. With Odds and Ends produced at the Ambassadors in 1914, he claims to have originated the Revue format, but André Charlot, influenced by his professional engagements in Paris, had already adapted the idea of Revue for the London stage. Whilst Oswald Stoll and Alfred Butt were producing Variety at this point, Cochran’s rivals were Charlot and Albert de Courville. Each form relied to some extent on performance tropes popularized in Music-Hall culture, and often included existing Music-Hall acts or simply burlesqued them.

The performance industries 27

Revue is a concession to the impatient […] a recognition of the present call for constant change. It is as much part of a modern life as is the cinema, the motor-car, the aeroplane, or the wireless […] There is […] variety and efficiency in all these things […] Revue, most modern and specialized of theatrical conceptions […] is at the same time attractive and debasing […] almost the lowest form of stage arts ever known, yet it may contain in its parts the highest efforts of the best artists. (Carroll, 1924: 84–85) For Sydney Carroll, Variety and Revue were the defining compositional registers of the mid-1910s to the1920s.27 Their dramaturgical strategies demonstrate the imaginative puissance of producers who understood the aesthetic terms of an industrial style of ‘hybrid’ production (Bailey, 1998). Focusing on the performative intersections of text, body, current affairs and fashion, many of the early Revues set a pattern for the kinds of musical comedies made for film in the 1930s, and indeed for their performers and audiences. Tracy C. Davis notes that in historical models of impresario and entrepreneur, impresario is a term applied more readily to those bringing together ‘artists and backers’, enjoying ‘some discretionary autonomy not strictly allowed to “managers” and overseeing operations’ (Davis, 1996: 116). The performance impresarios of the early decades of the twentieth century, however, shared characteristics with the entrepreneur: they created high risk-bearing, large-scale products, which both shaped and built the market. Even though many had come from theatre backgrounds, they were almost without exception primarily businessmen, as opposed to artists (although Oswald Stoll was also a composer and an inventor of theatrical stage machinery as well as an economic theorist).28 Moreover, the performance cultures of the early 1900s, were in part a ‘consequence of entrepreneurs and backers and the communities they forged in business, leisure and politics’ (Crowhurst, 1997: 127). This is the case for cinema as much as theatre. The work of entrepreneurial manager-impresarios like Alfred Butt, André Charlot, C. B. Cochran, Oswald Stoll (who later ran his own film studio) and Albert de Courville (who became a successful film director in the 1930s), shifted the emphasis of both the type and scale of entertainments being constructed for audiences. These were both innovative and commercial producers. One of the most notable producers of Variety, Stoll was manager of Moss Empires for twelve years until 1910, but also owned and managed his own theatres. Felix Barker notes that he regularly stood watching the crowds emerge from Charing Cross station in the early 1900s to ascertain quantities of those from the provinces coming to London for a day’s shopping and sightseeing, ‘for whom a visit to a serious play might seem too ambitious and a visit to a music-hall far too racy’ (Barker, 1957: 11). Stoll’s later publications on economics evidenced his fascination with financial speculation and different economic models: he believed that credit ‘on the grand scale is vital to trade operations of great magnitude’ (Stoll, 1916: 129). Stoll thought low-interest credit should be offered in abundance in order to stimulate the market and make production more profitable with greater speed (Stoll, 1921: 55). For this he proposed using ‘productive property as capital’, effectively asking banks to lend on the basis of

28 The performance industries

unstable levels of real estate value (Barnett, 2009: 310). A manager consistently embattled with the emerging theatre unions, Stoll’s ideas on economics and on the distribution of credit were not, suggests Vincent Barnett, as ‘cranky’ as they were seen to be by his contemporary critics. He was a hugely successful businessman who believed investment in the theatre and cinema would bring long-term reward. As one of a number of what Crowhurst calls ‘corporate music-hall entrepreneurs’ (Crowhurst, 1997),29 Stoll most famously commissioned and built the Coliseum theatre on land cleared of slum housing on St Martin’s Lane, from which he developed large-scale Variety programmes, buying the theatre back from creditors at a lower value than it had been sold to them when the enterprise went bankrupt shortly after its initial opening.30 The Coliseum opened in 1904, promising 2,200 seats and four shows a day, complete with tea-rooms on every floor, three revolving stages and a separate royal entrance. This kind of expansionist vision was shared by other contemporary entrepreneurs of consumer markets such as Gordon Selfridge, also criticized for valuing marketability over originality. Known for his hard-line attitude to contracted employees, Stoll wanted Variety to be a more ‘respectable’ form of Music-Hall with increased appeal to the growing middle-class market. He provided full domestic sets creating a reassuringly middle-class visual field rather than one which was obviously make-shift (Barker, 1957: 81), and was one of the first managers to persuade theatre ‘stars’ to perform in Variety. Sarah Bernhardt famously said she did not want to perform ‘after or before acrobats, fancy dances or learned animals’,31 but came to the Coliseum in 1910. George Bernard Shaw and J. M. Barrie were amongst the first established mainstream playwrights to pen sketches for the Coliseum and high-profile performers from the ‘legitimate stage’ became regular features of programmes Stoll put together, which as early as 1905 included film. Stoll programmed in direct competition with his rival at the Palace, Alfred Butt, securing, for example, a season from Ruth St Denis with her ‘barefoot’ dancing to rival Butt’s hugely successful booking of Maud Allan and her ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ in 1908 (see Chapter 6). Alfred Butt’s war work at the Ministry of Food led to a knighthood in 1918 and a political career which ran until 1936.32 He took on management of the Gaiety, the Adelphi and the Empire theatres during the war and was joint owner and managing director of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane from the mid1920s to 1931. By this point he managed at more of an arm’s length, whereas Stoll’s career lead him in two directions. Firstly, he developed his interests in economics on which he published extensively and, secondly, he founded film production and distribution company Stoll Pictures in 1918. The company, known for its Sherlock Holmes film series and for its work with director Maurice Elvey, went into more rapid production after Sam Goldwyn defaulted on a deal to distribute US films in 1919 (Morris, 2007: 20). Complete with its own studios and an in-house magazine, Stoll Pictures operated on a similar basis to his earlier theatre enterprises. Thus, the high production values and business practices Nathalie Morris associates with Stoll borrowing from Hollywood production strategies, can in fact be more immediately linked to his work in theatre in the opening decades of the twentieth century. In the Coliseum, he created a modern theatre reflecting the latest innovations in architecture and stage

The performance industries 29

mechanisms, employing the most fashionable stars of the theatre, with eating ‘as comfortable for the patrons of the gallery as for those in the stalls’ (Croxton, 1934: 157–158). This was not the theatre ‘envisioned’ by William Archer, ‘liberated from the market place’: it was in fact the complete fiscal opposite (Davis, 2004: 42). Producer Charles Frohman’s investments in London theatre allowed for supply to smaller-scale demand. Better liked by artists than Stoll, he ‘established a whole new relation between author and producer’ (Frohman and Marcossan, 1916: 252). For Marlis Schweitzer, Frohman was influential in large part because of his ‘cosmopolitan outlook’ (Schweitzer, 2015a: 51). Each of these men epitomized the ‘impressive resilience of theatre’ at a time of increased competition and social and political transformation (Ince, 2016: 283). More, perhaps, they reflect the kinds of emerging industrial production principles propounded by Frederick Winslow Taylor in The Principles of Scientific Management (1911). Taylorist theories on the relationship between labour and capital encouraged a systemized approach to the task at hand proposing an absolute emphasis on efficiency as a means of increasing productivity (Taylor, 1911: 75). Available descriptions of the working practice of putting Variety programmes together suggest that whilst the personality of the producer came into play, their teams’ understanding of both the available field of performance and the nature of the fluid market were vital. Arthur Croxton acted as a proxy scout, for example, with a clear idea of Stoll’s taste, management style and outlook. Alfred Butt similarly employed a large team, but found it more efficient to scout and book acts himself, regularly travelling over Europe to secure acts and ‘in the search of novelty and the taking of big risks’ (Burton, 1909: 515). Such a strategy earned the Palace gross takings of £100,000 in 1908, 50 per cent of which was profit.33 In terms of form, Variety was predicated on a compositional strategy informed by a broad-based knowledge of both what was new, innovative and fashionable and what kinds of combinations of acts would work well together. Revue worked more on the basis of creating a loose narrative framework for a topical themed series of sketches, embedded in an evening that also included the kinds of acts available in Variety and Music-Hall. Both Variety and Revue were predicated on a kind of self-reflexive sense of the modern, the new and the eye catching. For Albert de Courville however, Revue was a revolutionary new form. ‘This is not a Revue, it is a Revolution’ an eminent dramatist said to me after the production of ‘Hullo Ragtime’ […] Revue […] has revolutionised the Variety stage. It has lent new scope, breadth and outlook. It has given satire a new lease of life […] some are prophesysing ‘the Revue is doomed to speedy extinction’ […] shows which are Revues only in name, a bundle of second rate jokes strung together on a string of uninspired songs will pass away […] But the real Revue […] reflects life […] illustrates fashion and phases, laws and customs, whims and errors […] It must be a commentary […] let it reflect the spirit of the times […] it may be freakish and inconsequential, for the destiny which rules our life is frequently both. But it must be lifelike.34

30 The performance industries

Revue’s alliance with high level capitalist productivity is exemplified in Charlot’s ‘Kill That Fly!’ produced at the Alhambra in 1912. It was embedded in an evening of hybrid entertainment including film in the form of bioscope shows and acts familiar in a Music-Hall environment. The evening programme began at 7.55 pm with an overture and Sandow the ‘Marvellous New Zealand Actor Pony’, followed by ‘The Two Hollanders’ (Cretienne and Louisette), the ‘Flying Banvards – America’s greatest Gymnasts’, five minutes of Bioscope film, then ‘Dio’ and ‘Terry’ in a canine comedy, ‘Stolz and King in dances of all ages’, an orchestral interlude and then the Revue ‘Kill That Fly!’. All acts were between five and fifteen minutes in length, and the Revue itself was programmed to run from 9.20 pm to 11.20 pm, followed by closing bioscope interlude reporting on the latest topical events, here the ‘The Great Dock Fire in New York’.35 The Revue itself was divided into scenes and tableaux using a sketch format. These offer satirical comment on current events and social trends – suffragettes and politicians, and a sketch in Scene I, ‘Eugenics’, featuring Professor Eugene Hicks, who along with his friend Darwin are ‘enquiring into the cause of the inferiority of the physical elite and the economic fertility of the eugenic factor’, insisting that ‘the control of development should be […] exerted over all children especially those of Actors, Clergymen and Stockbrokers’.36 Here the sketch comments on the position of the socially privileged in the exclusionary discourse of degeneration and eugenics (see Chapter 6). The children of actors and clergymen are aligned with ‘free thinkers’, and stockbroker is shorthand for Jewish investor. Critique is similarly tinged with humour in the sketch ‘The Stage of a London Theatre’, where the processes of making performance are played out in a prolonged and chaotic rehearsal scene with appearances from – in imitation – stars of the day like Lewis Waller, Gertie Millar and rival impresario producer Charles Frohman – all far less au fait with what is going on than they should be. Such sketches changed periodically, so by January 1913 there are scene replacements and additional tableaux in Scene III, ‘From Honolulu’; ‘The Postcards’ and Gabrielle Enthoven’s ‘Monmartre’.37 Careful not to overrun the legal time allowed for sketches (see Chapter 2), the script was submitted to the Lord Chamberlain as a ‘play in three acts for production at the Alhambra’ in October 1912:38 it includes lyrics for songs, indications of stage visual business and gaps where sketches are indicatory or in skeleton form. André Charlot was looking for a title for the production to ‘catch the fickle, novelty-seeking potential audience’s attention’ and capitalized on the visual familiarity of billboards carrying the slogan ‘Kill That Fly!’ warning of the fly infestation which hit London in the hot summer of 1912 (Moore, 2005: 37).39 Opening with the chorus doing a Tango Two-Step, the Sketch reported The Metropolitan Cabaret tableau as an obvious ‘Skit on the Cave of the Golden Calf’, Frida Strindberg’s London night club frequented by emerging modernists such as Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound (see Chapter 6 and Figure 1.3).40

The performance industries 31

FIGURE 1.3

‘The Metropolitan Cabaret Scene’, in André Charlot’s production, ‘Kill That Fly!’, 1912 (V & A Theatre and Performance Collection)

Without its modernist poets and artists as obvious in the script, the sketch makes visual reference in its mimicry of the club’s modernist murals, and in its suggestion that this is ‘London’s latest idea for the entertainment of its citizens and visitors […] You’ll find all you want here. Not a dry moment – and if you don’t like the entertainment, give it yourself’.41 But with its original submitted title of ‘The Cosmopolitan Cabaret’ and ‘Charles Frohman’ central stage, the sketch was originally as much focused on a self-referential satirical critique of the import of cosmopolitan culture from Europe and America. When asked in the stage sketch what he has in mind for the stage, ‘Frohman’ replies, Yes, an American Musical Comedy of real heart interests. The Company have already rehearsed it on board – there aren’t enough theatres in this little town to put all my big hits on, so I’ve put ’em all into one, and every single member of the Chorus is a star – I invented the title myself – Haddon Chambers says it’s great. Pauline Chase says it’s dandy – it’s absolutely original and yet may recall something familiar […] It’s ‘The Pink Belle of the Cabbage Farm’, or ‘If you can’t get wise, get rich’.42 The in-jokes and self-referentiality evidence what Lisa Tickner suggests is the ‘circularity of the connections between publicity, performance, the avant-garde and urban themes’ (Tickner, 2000: 95). Similarly, Erika D. Rappaport notes the tendency within the relationship of modernity to commerce, to draw on ‘a metaphorical repertoire from both urban high and low culture’ (Rappaport, 1995: 139). Revue mocks itself in a way that reinforces its aesthetic characteristics. More ‘intimate’ Revues in the 1920s

32 The performance industries

were less lavish and as the century progressed, the centrality of spectacle in Revue became more balanced with the topicality, fluidity and the self-reflexivity of content.

Theatre versus cinema: the new culture of moving pictures Variety and Revue developed the compositional practices of the earlier Music-Hall format, but were designed to appeal to a wider, more hybrid audience demographic. It was cinema, however, that captured larger and wider audiences overall, as well as providing perhaps the greater overarching debate about the form and function of performance cultures more generally between 1900 and 1939. In 1912, W. R. Titterton, writer, poet and journalist for the Daily News, and investigative journalist W. T. Stead had very different views of cinema as a new art form:43 The triumph of the cinematograph is a symbol of the weakness of the people’s desire. It is the skimmed milk of drama. It is the replacing of the hand-made by the machine-made furniture. Of course we get more chairs to sit upon, but the act of sitting is degraded. (Titterton, 1912: 69)

The attraction of the Cinema is Life. It is the living picture that appeals to the eye of living people […] this endlessly varied and constantly changing living panorama of the world […] attracts the multitude by its novelty and holds them by its interest. The cinema ‘stage’ has all the latitude of a world of imagination. No longer are the protagonists confined within a lighted box, no longer may we watch them only fixed at one point in space at a certain distance from us […] Space as a limitation is banished […] time as a limitation is destroyed too […] all the while there is something to look at (Stead, 1912: 574) Cinema was constantly expanding in terms of its potential to open out the spaces of the imagination. The art of film was established as separate from theatre, although the industries shared practices and workers in common. Professional crosscurrents ran from the venues in which early films were shown, to the social anxieties and regulations that framed practice, to the discussions in trade papers about the differences between performing for each. With the introduction of ‘talkies’ in the late 1920s, there was a deepening of the chasm between the two forms, and a strengthening of the professional divisions between the two industries. James Agate noted that whilst in pre-talkies, ‘the spectator in the theatre appears to be looking at life through a fourth wall […] the conventions of cinema have asked us to believe that we have been looking at life through a glass and sound-proof window’: the end of silent film transformed the experience of cinema both for

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those working in it and for its audiences (Agate, 1946: 27). MacQueen-Pope later noted that whilst many managers pronounced ‘this talking picture business was a passing phase’, they had said the same about silent pictures and indeed radio, all of which had changed the market for theatre (MacQueen-Pope, 1959: 198–199). During the 1910s and 1920s, numerous plays were adapted – and often more than once – from stage hits to film hits, often making use of original cast members. Some film histories have tended to misrepresent theatre professionals and their work in film. So, Matthew Sweet, for example, claims Constance Collier, with whom Ivor Novello co-authored both the stage and screen versions of The Rat and the stage play from which Alfred Hitchcock’s later Downhill (1927) was adapted, was an incidental collaborator, ‘a sickly, middle-aged actress’ (Sweet, 2005: 59). She was in fact a long-term collaborator with Novello, and an important figure in both media for over fifty years as writer, actress and voice coach in Hollywood. Typically, professional networks were often readily entwined, and as Christine Gledhill notes, we should be wary that ‘polarisation’ between forms ‘simplifies stage-screen relations’ (Gledhill, 2003: 9). Many films from the 1910s and 1920s have long since disappeared and it is difficult to compare stage and screen without equally weighted evidence for each, nor indeed to fully explore multiple screen adaptations, copies of which were made without a view to longevity or archiving. Jon Burrows notes the preponderance of stage stars being employed by British film manufacturers, but points to the complex relationship between the theatre and film industries overall (Burrows, 2003a 11), which had ‘an aesthetic dimension as well as commercial’ one (ibid.: 95). Trade journal The Performer begins to carry editorial and adverts on film-related areas not long after its first year of publication in 1906, with articles on ‘Variety Stars and Film Favourites’, the dangers of untrained film projection operators and reports on, for example, London picture theatre proprietors being refused licences as late as November 1920.44 As previously noted, many theatre workers like Gaiety Girl, Ruby Miller or playwrights like Edward Knoblock, Clemence Dane45 and Sydney Blow also had successful careers in film.46 Debates about the distinctiveness of acting methodologies and practices in the two media become more prominent as the period progressed (see Chapter 2). Here, however, I want to look briefly at the ways in which film and cinema were recognized as offering something new in terms of performance cultures, and how their cross-currents produced hybrid performance experiences. Early debates on film evidences a strong awareness of its ‘newness’ in terms of what it offered audiences, and I would also suggest here that theatre capitalized on this new aesthetic beyond merely showing film alongside live performance. Numerous sketches were submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s office for performance which played with both the performative qualities of cinema and the knowing nature of a theatre audience’s experience of it. Thus the sketch ‘Blame the Cinema’ (written under the pseudonym ‘Martin Lane’)47 has a complicated plot of mis-communication, confused identity, sophisticated burglary and misadventure played out on stage, only for it to be revealed that the protagonist was dreaming whilst asleep – her husband was not in fact a desperate villain – she had

34 The performance industries

been to the cinema and it had ‘influenced her mind’ in the most ‘pernicious’ manner. Both she and her husband ‘blame the cinema’ for its psychological power to disrupt reality.48 Similar use of the dream trope appears in other stage sketches such as The Cinema Girl where the Comedian – Binks, the props man – and the Producer are at constant loggerheads during the making of a film. Much comedy ensues as it turns out that the Comedian at some point in the proceedings slipped into a dream state where he was starring in the film being made. He wakes up to the sound of the producer shouting at him to get on with his job at the Studio S. O.S Film Co.49 The sketch makes much of the physical space of the cinema studio and the flow of action the audience might imagine would occur in such a space: all this is mixed with traditional Music-Hall comedy gagging, play with language and heavy reliance on disguise and physical comedy. Cinemania (1913), which the reader for the censor’s office called a ‘rollicking nonsense sketch of a performance at a cinema’, also makes sophisticated use of the space of cinema inside a theatre. A ‘caricature of the popular craze […] introducing a burlesque moving picture and burlesque illustrated song slides’, the sketch is peopled by a motley crew of characters – amongst whom are Farmer, Drunk, Doorkeeper, Coster and Ticket-seller. The curtain opens, ‘disclosing the front of a moving picture theatre […] a ticket booth […] billboards bearing an announcement for the feature film for the following day’. The plot is devised around the business of seeing a film: in Scene 3, we are in the interior of the ‘moving picture house’, with ‘a screen painted on each wall […] three rows of seats down each wall, facing the screen and an isle up the middle’. The theatre audience watch the acting-out on stage of a cinema audience gossiping and waiting to see a film: the everyday comical interactions in situ are structured around the attraction of folk indulging in the perceived ‘new craze’ of cinema going.50 These sketches and more substantial musical comedies such as The Girl on the Film (1913) or The Cinema Star (1914) – ‘chiefly concerned with the adventures of one Clutterbuck, a millionaire who has been prompted by his wife to agitate for the suppression of cinematograph shows’51 – used the topicality of the cinema craze, and capitalized on the relative ‘newness’ of cinema combined with the use of known stage comedy gags and character types familiar to Music-Hall and Variety audiences. Such productions offered audiences the possibility of being able to watch people ‘performing’ the viewing of cinema or shooting a film. These sketches exploited an underpinning shared complicit understanding that film was somehow doing something that theatre was not (see Burrows, 2003a).52 It was not just the case, as noted by film reviewer and theorist Oswell Blakeston in Close Up, that ‘the stage cannot show the layers upon layer of simultaneous consciousness [or] […] acquire the mobility of the subconscious’ (Blakeston, 1929: 254): producers and audiences understood that film offered something connected, but different to theatre. Writing in 1926, Virginia Woolf, suggested the ‘art of cinema’ at first seemed ‘simple, even stupid’, until she found ‘in the midst of its immense dexterity and enormous technical proficiency […] some unknown and unexpected beauty’ (Woolf, 1926: 381–383). Film offered something poetic, a new way of

The performance industries 35

representing and exploring the human condition. Theatre entrepreneurs were keen to capitalize on its potential, less perhaps for its poetic qualities than for its powers of representation. Arthur Croxton, for example, recounts with great excitement the commissioning by Oswald Stoll for the Coliseum in May 1914 of an ‘act’ which combined key elements of performed modernity – aviation and cinematography. Here, B. C. Hucks, well-known motor racer and daring aviator, was to fly the channel with a crew man working what was essentially one of the first portable hand-held cameras, in order to film George IV and the Queen as they travelled to France on the Royal Yacht. Hucks and his assistant took a film of the journey then returned it to London, handed it over to the Warwick Bioscope Chronicle Film company at 2.35 pm, where it was developed and delivered to the Coliseum at 4.45 pm for a 5.20 pm matinee showing. The audience then got to cheer Hucks as he was bought on to the stage after the film (Croxton, 1934: 170–172). Here film enabled a topical documentary on the outcome of a daring act by a man who then ‘performs’ in person as hero on stage: the ‘act’ works through its immediacy, its novelty, and its potential to ‘show’ and share: the audience are implicated as part of a unique ‘event’ in the moment. Audiences were quite capable of shifting both their perception and their attention from one medium to another, it would seem. This is epitomized in an act offered up for Variety bookings country-wide. As late as 1920, ‘The Castle Producing Company & Films, Ltd’ advertised a bookable act called ‘Movies in the Making’. Here the real, the rehearsed and the recorded are layered upon each other, again in a manner that maps onto the self-reflexive, self-conscious character of entertainments of urban modernity: MOVIES IN THE MAKING Under the personal direction of Mr Herbert Cowley, the Original ‘Producer’ in ‘Making Movies.’ This Act is fully licensed and protected. We obtain our artistes from the Audience, Rehearse, take a Picture and show same the following night THE BIGGEST RECORD BREAKER ON THE ROAD. We guarantee to take a picture each house and show same. - - - - A 45 minutes’ scream - - - MANAGERS, GET A HUSTLE ON AND BOOK THIS GREAT MONEY-MAGNET. CARY [sic] OR SHARE. VACANT OCT. 18, 25 and on.53 The bookable act had built-in capacity for the management to allow the audience to engage in structured ‘play’ – they rehearse and then are filmed – and reproduce the audience on film, and of course reproduce the cost of their tickets the following day when they return to see a film ‘rehearsed’ and ‘performed’ by themselves the previous day. An immersive practice predicated on the attraction of ‘playing out’ a role on stage

36 The performance industries

and re-playing it as recorded performance: everyone can star in a film. Equally other audience members can watch the stage work being filmed then come back to see the finished item, as if they now have an insight into how film is made: everyone is implicated in the conceit. Such staged events – neither pure cinema or pure theatre – represent the actual experience of film as a new and exciting medium. Writers and theorists debated, with different levels of fervour, the ins and outs of differentiating theatre from cinema. For George Bernard Shaw, cinema, by the early 1930s, even exposed theatre’s limitations as a form that would ultimately remain unique only in the areas where small audiences were needed to cover costs. In other words, only theatre as represented by the kinds of less popular plays embraced by independent and club theatres would survive (Shaw, 1932). Other critics focused on the psychology and phenomenological experience of watching film: thus for Iris Barry, with echoes of Virginia Woolf’s comments, film offers something less tenable than theatre. She suggested: A cinema audience is not a corporate body, like a theatre audience, but a flowing and inconstant mass […] to go to the pictures is to purchase a dream. To go to the theatre is to buy an experience, and between experience and dream there is a vast difference […] the theatre is a tonic, the cinema is a sedative. The cinema is a liberation of the ego, the theatre an enrichment of it. (Barry, 1926: 30–31) The articulation of cinema’s unique qualities becomes more forthright in the 1930s, with journals dedicated to the discussion of non-mainstream and European films, the philosophy, politics and art of cinema. The intense teasing out of the newness of film and its close relation with theatre loses both the sense of urgency and momentum by mid-century, when its mechanisms for production, circulation and consumption are established.

The other ‘texts’ of performance as modes of circulation and consumption Material circulation of performance cultures developed through an enhanced use of print culture, expanding forms of participation and the spaces of performance cultures. The ‘unprecedented proliferation of mass-market magazines and newspapers’ in the late nineteenth century also inspired the many niche arts magazines circulating in the modernist period (Morrisson, 2000: 3–9). These were both a reaction to the ‘degeneration of the public sphere’ and an opportunity for counter-public debate (ibid.: 9). The increased production of journals, magazines and weekly trade papers through the 1910s enabled the circulation and marketing of a complex set of professional engagements, networks and debates to wider audiences. Theatre trade papers provided a means of advertising and circulating information about professional opportunities and products, carrying editorials, topical items and notices on regulation and professional networks. They carried more copy on film-related areas by the late 1910s, with the Era substantially reflecting the increased place of film in the labour market by its close in 1939. Jon Burrows notes

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that ‘of the twenty or so trade papers for the film industry between 1914 and 1919, the most important of these remained the earlier established Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly (shortened to the Kinematograph Weekly by 1919), the Bioscope and the Cinema’ (Burrows, 2002: 359). In 1906, the Performer, as the trade paper of the Variety Artistes’ Federation, added to established theatre trade papers like the Era. Predicated on both the appeal of the visual and the market value of a newly identified class of enthusiasts and leisured clients, there were a remarkable number of new magazines and journals for the theatre industry and its consumers founded in the first decade of the twentieth century. Providing for those as interested in finding out about what was on in theatre as they were in buying tickets to go and see it, magazines such as the short-lived Stage Souvenir: An illustrated monthly (1903), were structured around the pleasure of looking and collecting. Advertising itself as the magazine with a ‘real photograph as supplement’, its monthly editions included a picture postcard of one of the performers featured, as well as numerous adverts for sets of postcards of performers of the day. The Play Pictorial, which ran from 1902 to 1939, was merged with The Play: An illustrated monthly (1904) in 1905. Other magazines and journals for theatre enthusiasts included The Actor Illustrated: A monthly review of the stage (1904–6); Dramatic Criticism (1899–1943); the Music Hall and Theatre Review (1889–1912); The Theatre Monthly (1904–1905); The Theatre (1909), which continued as The Playgoer and Society Illustrated until 1914; and the bi-weekly Theatreland (1912–1913). Some magazines or annuals were aimed at specialist user groups, for example The Stage Society News (1903– 1907) and The Stage Society Annual Report (1899–1921); The Prompter: The organ of the amateur stage (1910–1911); and Drama: A magazine of theatre and allied arts (1919), which became the organ of Geoffrey Whitworth’s newly formed amateur theatre network as Drama: The Journal of the British Drama League from 1920 to 1939. Annual editions, such as those of The Performer, reviewed the year’s work and offered messages of good will and appreciation from celebrity performers to their fans and producers. Some advertised opportunities for industry investment as in The Theatre, Music Hall and Cinema Blue Book for 1917: A list of public amusement companies with full financial particulars of interest to investors, which became The Theatres, Music Hall and Cinema Companies’ Blue Book and ran until 1930. Other journals, such as Theatre World and Illustrated Stage Review (1925), evidence a cross-over in readership as it merged with Theatre and Film Illustrated by 1926. A number of these magazines, such as The Weekly Playgoer (1911), lasted barely a year, in part because they catered to an already saturated market. Some, such as the Sketch (1893–1959); Tatler (1901–1940, when it became the Tatler and Bystander); The Bystander (1903); and The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (1874– 1943) – becoming Sport and Country from 1943, catered for a more select readership in terms of income bracket. Here, the visual appeal of the performing arts was embraced in full photographic magnificence, mixing editorials and visuals on high fashion, high society and celebrity performers or hit shows. Trade publications operated on the basis of a structured bricolage of materials – advertisements for acts, threatening notices about the authentic owner of a specific stage act, articles about employment regulations, contractual controversies involving managements, unionization, listings of acts for hire, listings of acts being sought, listings

38 The performance industries

of performers working abroad and their future availability, theatre and cinema gossip, articles asking Variety performers to ‘steer clear of coarseness and vulgarity, the suggestive gag’,54 as well as cartoons and adverts for ‘acts of the moment’ like ‘Daisy Squelch and Her Patriotic Band’.55 Such publications chart the performing industries’ ebb and flow of business. Concerned very much with the immediacy of the moment, they reveal much about the industrial anxieties of managers and workers in a fast flowing and often a seemingly erratic market. Later in the period, theatre programmes carried more editorial on the actors, their fashion choices, their hobbies, their home lives. They functioned beyond offering advertising aimed at a perceived clientele and information on the production. Building on the popular format of the theatre magazine or journal, the ‘Magazine Programme’ became the standard West End theatre programme by the mid-1920s, constructed for an enhanced and continued readership beyond those having bought the magazine at a specific production. Nicole N. Flynn suggests that these magazines, while often archived as the ephemera of theatre, in fact have a unique position at the ‘intersection of the social, economic and cultural registers of the theatre’, aimed at what she terms ‘broadbrow’ audiences (Flynn, 2018: 518). To appreciate this point, it is important to understand the multi-faceted function of the theatre programme more generally. Focusing on the event, its offshoots, its back-room operations, its connection to other productions – via the theatre building, the performers or even the author – the programme offers a form of re-presentation in a purchasable material object. The experience of the event reverberates not only in the memory, but can be kept, passed around and accessed as an object. Producers were fully aware of this and souvenir programmes were not unusual, sometimes marking a particular point in the history of a production, at times produced as kind of photographic story-board of a production which had already gained traction with audiences, or as a gimmick to mark the quirkiness of a production itself. Sharon Marcus notes that by the 1910s new print technology ‘made it possible for magazines to adopt layouts that liberated performers from the frame altogether and began to communicate something of the kinesis of the actors onstage’ (Marcus, 2013: 288). I would also argue here that the composition of photographs in theatre magazines such as the Play Pictorial or the Sketch mapped onto the newly familiar visual field offered by cinema and familiar to audiences through film, where, for example, the narrative is broken into key scenes through a story-boarding format. Invariably here the ‘story of the play’ is told through a sequence of photographs of scenes captioned and annotated: these substitute for a detailed description of the plot, by offering visual summary in episodic moments. For the reader this either resonates with their own memory of the performance, or connotes the play through its visual markers. Useful here, in terms of understanding the wider implications for a social history of performance via magazine, journal and theatre programme culture, is late nineteenth century philosopher Henri Bergson’s work on the relationship between memory and matter. In 1911 he called ‘matter’ an ‘aggregate of “images” ’(Bergson, 1911: vii), and suggested that the ‘past should be acted by matter, imagined by mind’ (ibid.: 298). Theatre

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programmes, then, have a far longer life and function beyond the immediacy of accompanying a performance. Such performance ephemera were addendums to performance, serving producers via their economic exchange value in re-circulating products and bringing in revenue from advertising. Objects that feed the ‘necessarily insatiable demands of nostalgia,’ these could be ‘taken away’ and used to sell the experience of performance. They provided what Susan Stewart calls the ‘nostalgic myth of contact and presence’, serving as ‘traces of authentic experience’ (Stewart, 2007: 133–135). These material objects of performance were designed to offer the consumer an opportunity to interact with and participate in a fictive, but active world. They worked to mark the consumers’ experience of performance cultures, building their knowledge base of its structures and operations and offered them, as fans and enthusiasts, the opportunity to ‘connect’ with its celebrity personnel. Material objects offered a kind of ‘in-the-know’ membership of a larger community of makers and buyers. Performance cultures, then, were transformed through urbanization and developments in technologies of communication and travel, as well as by their audiences and consumers. The following chapter explores how these transformations combined with a re-shaping of the social world as expressed in new theories of the self, nationhood and belonging, that make particular reference to the performative nature of citizenship and its relation to the state. Here the focus shifts from the structure of performance cultures of the era and the means by which they circulated and engaged with their participants, to the means through which performance cultures both shaped and were shaped by ideas of citizenship and ‘belonging’, in legislation, in regulation and in the performance of professional conduct and of city space.

Notes 1 See Rowell and Jackson (1984); Pogson (1952); Chisholm (1934); and Howe (1910) for standard histories of the UK repertory theatre movement. 2 Ernest Runtz, ‘Theatres as Investments’, The Era, July 6, 1912. 3 The Performer, December 25, 1913, p. 21. 4 Postlewait’s figures are derived from J. P. Wearing’s data collated in The London Stage series. This excludes theatres outside London. The figures can be used as indicators of a general pattern. 5 Owen Nares comments on a press campaign in the early 1920s against such multiple engagements, noting that if the work is available and logistics allow, then actors should be able to take it. 6 Christine Gledhill notes Ivor Novello’s writing partnership with Constance Collier – both had successful stage and film careers as writers and performers. 7 See Purdom (1955) and Kennedy (1985). Seasons were aimed at a niche market and were paradigm-shifting in terms originality, but they were neither representative nor financially viable as a model of production for the period as a whole. 8 This was adapted for film by Cecil M. Hepworth in 1915 and by Herbert Blaché in 1919. 9 Women were managing theatres in the early decades of the twentieth century, as they had done in the nineteenth (see Davis, 2000b). Standard histories of the ‘actor manager’ almost exclusively exclude women from this category: see, for example, Hesketh Pearson who claims the 1900–1910s was the last decade of the dominance of actor managers, and admits he excludes assessment of those whose work did not appeal to him (Pearson, 1950: vi).

40 The performance industries

10 Charles Morgan, ‘New “Talkie venture”, Sir Gerald du Maurier Heading a British Company’, The Times, April 1929, n.p. See also Anon, ‘“Talkies” and the Stage: View of Sir Gerald du Maurier’, n.d. Both from the Gerald du Maurier Biographical File, V & A. 11 A selection includes Ervine (1924); Carter (1925) and (1930); Walkley (1923) and (1925); Agate (1945); and Darlington (1960). 12 MacQueen-Pope exploited the market for popular histories of theatre from the 1940s to his death in 1960. 13 See MacQueen-Pope (1959), pp. 33–36 for a publicist’s list of critics and their behaviour. 14 Camillo Pellizzi was an Italian academic working in London who developed strong affiliations with the Italian fascist movement. 15 Huntly Carter travelled extensively through Russia in the 1920s and 1930s. The Society for Cooperation in Russian and Soviet Studies in London holds his archive of materials on Russian theatre and architecture from this era. See also Carter (1929). 16 There are numerous histories of the bid for a national theatre in the UK: see in particular Emmet (1976); Elsom and Tomalin (1978); and Goodwin (1988). 17 The suggestion was that the Director was paid an annual wage of £1,000, the equivalent to between £84,000 and £97,000 in today’s value. 18 While Granville-Barker and William Archer theorized about a ‘National Theatre’, Lillah McCarthy raised the first substantial donation of £70,000 from Carl Meyer in 1908 – worth between £6 million and £7.5 million in today’s money (see Kelly, 1985: 194). Carl Meyer was part of a consortium, which included Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Maud Tree (The Playhouse Ltd), formed in order to finance Her Majesty’s theatre in 1897 (see Cochrane, 2012: 53). 19 Managers often placed employees in the audience to disrupt a show as a means of manipulating its reception. For descriptions of this process, see Reeve (1952) and Bason (1931). 20 Alexander Raksht, ‘The Sexes in the Theatre’, The Observer, July 25, 1926. 21 See Playgoers Club Records (MS: 351) Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. See also Findon (1906). Findon was the founding editor of the hugely popular Play Pictorial magazine. 22 See Mander and Mitchenson Collection, Bristol University Theatre Collection, REF/ OR/NC/GAL/2. 23 See http://www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/downloads/bfi-the-film-socie ty-1925-1939-a-guide-to-collections.pdf. Iris Barry, then film critic for the Spectator, was a founding member of the Film Society and went on to set up the first film archive at MOMA in New York. See Sitton (2014), Hankins (2004) and Wasson (2006). 24 Anon, ‘Mr Cochran’s Secrets: Capturing the Shy Playgoer’, The Star, May 16, 1924. See Charles B. Cochran Collection (1915–1950) GB 71/THM/97/18 1919–1927, Misc., V & A. 25 Ibid. 26 Christopher St John, ‘The Theatre: Quick and Slow Motion’, Time and Tide, May 22, 1926, pp. 497–498. 27 Sydney Carroll was dramatic critic to the Sunday Times early in his career from 1918 to 1923. 28 His composition, ‘Is Marriage A Failure?’ was performed by Vesta Tilly in the 1890s. He also patented a system of stage revolves in 1903 (see US patents, US748116A ‘Stage or platform appliance for producing scenic or other displays’). From a ‘privileged social background’, Alfred Butt had worked as an accountant at Harrods before becoming assistant manager of the Palace Theatre in Cambridge Circus in 1898, then manager in 1904 (see Crowhurst, 1997: 46). 29 See also Trexler (2007) on artists’ engagement with economic ideas. 30 Barker (1957: 14) notes this area was used by Charles Dickens as the model for Bleak House. 31 ‘Madame Bernhardt: Proposed engagement in London at £1000 a week’, The Straights Times, February 14, 1910, p. 3 (this is worth between £82,000 and £117,000 in today’s money). 32 Alfred Butt was initially an MP for Balham and Tooting from 1922.

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33 This is worth some £8.4–£9.5 million in today’s terms as an historic standard of living equivalent. 34 Albert de Courville, The Performer Annual, December 25, 1913, pp. 28–30. De Courville was a producer of revue, who directed more than 20 films in the 1930s. 35 Programme for ‘Kill That Fly!’, week of January 6, 1913, Buildings File: the Alhambra, V & A. 36 ‘Kill That Fly!’, LCP1912/1031, pp. 8–9. 37 Programme for ‘Kill That Fly!’, week of January 6, 1913, Buildings File: the Alhambra, V & A. See Dorney, 2019. 38 ‘Kill That Fly!’, LCP1912/1031. 39 Lisa Tickner notes the title was reported to have come from an Americanism ‘which implies having a flip at anything that may be making a buzz’ (Tickner, 2000: 94). 40 The Sketch, October 30, 1912, p. 122. The club was set up by Frida Strindberg, ex-wife of August Strindberg, whom she left for Frank Wedekind, and who founded the first German cabaret in 1900 (see Strauss, 2000). 41 ‘Kill That Fly!’, LCP 1912/1031, p. 38. 42 Ibid., Scene IV: The Cosmopolitan Cabaret, p. 39. 43 W. T. Stead’s thoughts on early film were ahead of his time. Former editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, he died on the Titanic in 1912. 44 The Performer, November 18, 1920. 45 See Clemence Dane, playwright and novelist: papers, GB 71 THM/120/1–120/11, V & A, for film scripts and correspondence and Gale (2005). 46 See Miller (1935) and Knoblock (1939). Knoblock (also known as Knoblauch), chaperoned Charlie Chaplin on his famous return trip to England in 1922, taking him to meet J. M. Barrie amongst others (see Chaplin, 1922). 47 A. Patrick Wilson (1918) Blame the Cinema, LCP 1918/2, submitted for performance at the Coliseum in January 1918. 48 Ibid., p. 13. 49 C. Danvers (1918) The Cinema Girl, LCP 1918/5 originally submitted for performance at the Hippodrome in Margate in March 1918. 50 Peterman’s Productions Ltd (1913) Cinemania, LCP1913/38. 51 G. S. Street, LCC, for Jack Hulbert (1914) The Cinema Star, LCP 1914/20. 52 See J. Tanner (1913) The Girl on the Film, LCP 1913/11. 53 The Performer, September 30, 1920, p. 27. 54 The Performer, March 12, 1914, p. 12. 55 The Performer September 3, 1914, p. 24.

2 LEGISLATING CITIZENSHIP: REGULATING PUBLICS, REGULATING PERFORMANCE

In an era conditioned by public debates on social disruption, questions of self, selfhood and belonging, performance had a particular relationship to the changing nature of citizenship as social and professional practice. Changing ideas of citizenship were often performative in their articulation and these, along with new regulatory frameworks, impacted directly upon performance cultures of the era. The period was characterised by the intensive development of professional associations producing self-defined systems of education, welfare and the management of labour in the performance industries. Regulation involved both systematic re-framings of professional conduct, of the content and shape of works made available to audiences, and of the manner in which the public accessed them. This chapter explores the regulatory structures and associational cultures which shaped ideas of citizenship and belonging in both the professional, the private and in the ‘public sphere’ – a space in which we find a convergence between theatre, performance and citizenship. (Wiles, 2011: 208) That this was a moment of both crisis and transformation is directly reflected in the material development of performance cultures. For contemporary historian Bill Schwarz, George Dangerfield’s anecdotal account in 1935 of the death of liberalism caught something of the ‘spirit of the age’, despite its ‘overdramatized account’ of what he perceived as the ‘dangerous state of hysteria’, between 1912 and 1914 (Schwartz, 1988: 97 and see Dangerfield, 1997 [1935]: 88). With the social climate running up to the First World War being shaped by a combination of political challenges to the elite – the contestation of the People’s Budget in 1909/10 which precipitated the Parliament Act of 1911;1 the fight for Irish independence; the petition for suffrage; and more specifically the vote for women and the rise of trade unionism – Schwartz also notes the dynamic shift from the ‘laissez faire individualism of the mid-Victorian period’ to ‘new “collectivist” forms of state organization

Legislating citizenship 43

and social regulation’ (Schwartz, 1988: 95). Other historians have argued that notions of ‘citizenship’ were constructed largely by ‘urban elites’ concerned with the ‘moral and social “degeneration” of the late nineteenth-century city’ (Beaven and Griffiths, 2008: 204). Schwartz, however, identifies a ‘new idea of the social’ and a ‘new discourse of social regulation’ and in this chapter I explore how these map onto the ways in which the performance industries embraced processes of professional self-regulation and self-help (Schwartz, 1988: 107). Between 1900 and the beginning of the 1914– 1918 war, citizenship was redefined in terms of state legislative action aimed at, on the one hand, providing for those in economic need and on the other, controlling the relationship between the citizenship and the private and public domain. Many believed ‘improvements in the machinery of government’ would provide the means to precipitate better forms of self-management (Bryce, 1909: 107). This mood of ‘upheaval and discontent’ also shaped the continuation of crisis and transformation after the First World War (Hadow, 1923: 153). The provision of educative contexts for the teaching of good citizenship and related behaviours were seen, by the progressive elite, as paramount for a generation alienated by war by the early 1920s. Historian and educationalist F. R. Worts stressed the need for collective citizenship for a new generation dissociated from their parents’ generation in 1919. This required ‘agreed lines of conduct […] certain duties both toward the State and towards one another’ (Worts, 1919: 151–152). Here, good citizenship is characterized by mobility, association, shared behaviours and an invested sense of belonging. Thus, educational reformer William Hadow argued that ‘civic feeling was close-knit by personal acquaintanceship and community of interests’ even though society was deeply divided by hierarchies of power, social status and ownership (Hadow, 1923: 7): this observation directly reflects developments in the performance professions. The desire to ‘organize the theatre’ (see Chapter 1), manifested materially in the setting up of unions and associations to protect, provide and formulate boundaries for membership of the profession: organizing the theatre also meant organizing its citizens. With operations rooted in late nineteenth-century practices, these associations mirrored the social shift towards unionization, the regulation of education, of professional contracts and profession-specific welfare, creating structures within which a sense of civic status and professional belonging could be productively shaped, and regulated. Whilst state regulation impacted on the places and spaces of performance – its content, economic status, viability, organization and development – so too ideas of behaviour linked to good citizenship, both within the profession and without, were also framed in performative terms. With its comprehensive social agenda, legislative reform during the first decades of the twentieth century was often both protective and prohibitive: formulated to facilitate the running of the State as a going concern, as Worts noted: The method of governing a modern State is similar to that of running a huge business. In truth, the State is a big business which has to be ‘run’ successfully. (Worts, 1919: 17)

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The proliferation of new legislative frames for citizenship – for example, in the various Factories Acts, the National Insurance Act of 1911, the Children and Young Persons Act of 1908, the Shop Hours Act of 1904 or the Shops Act of 1911 – provided Stategenerated boundaries for both home and working lives. Other initiatives were generated by the State’s determination to manage the behaviour of its citizens in public space: for example, the Movable Dwelling Bill in 1912 proposed to manage where and how people could live2 and the reviewed Vagrancy Act of 1935 altered the terms by which a person without lodging or subsistence would be socially defined. Legislation from the period was as concerned with the where of public behaviour, as it was with the how: from the prohibition of drunk and incapable conduct in public (the Licensing Act of 1902), to the management of gambling in the Street Betting Act of 1906, of public trading in the Street Trading Regulation of 1925, to restrictions on public gatherings in the Public Meetings Act of 1908, to who could gather and how they might appear in public in the Public Order Act of 1936.3 Legislation enabled strategic control and management of physical space as the State redefined the legal boundaries of both public space and public conduct. For performance cultures, legislation was also formulated to provide protection: of authorial ownership in the 1911 Copyright Act, or of public safety in places of entertainment in the Public Health Act amendment of 1907, or the Cinematograph Act of 1909. Public and private acts of violence or cruelty toward children and animals, were prohibited, thus the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Act (1904), the Children Act (1908) and the Performing Animals (Regulation) Act (1925) are included in the various trade-oriented legal volumes consulted by theatrical managements and licensing bodies (see, for example, Settle and Baber, 1915 and Isaacs, 1927). The series of Acts passed during the First World War defined where one was permitted to loiter or wander, required travelling citizens to register or indeed to have a passport,4 defined who one could trade with – for example, the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) in 1914 or the Trading with the Enemy Act in 1939 – or even who one might marry.5 Legislation effectively shaped and managed both labouring and leisured citizens, providing new delineations of what Erving Goffman – concerned with the definition and experience of human interaction in both public and private space – would later call ‘special sets of rules’ for social interaction that become embedded as ‘situational proprieties’ (Goffman, 1963: 243). A combination of population increase and enhanced opportunities for leisure and recreation, then, created the opportunity for the enhanced commercialization of everyday life (Stevenson, 1984: 381) and regulatory frameworks built on redefining rules and ‘situational proprieties’. Processes of governing and managing citizens were reimagined on every scale. As neurosurgeon and social psychologist Wilfred Trotter noted at the time, social engineering was overwhelmingly shaped by ‘the conception that the natural environment of man must be modified if the body is to survive’ (Trotter, 1922 [1916]: 63).

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Regulating and legislating performance: censorship and the ‘sketch question’ Let any citizen who provides amusement for his fellow citizens have the right to give them whatever amusement he thinks they want, providing only that it is not dangerous, harmful or indecent. Let every citizen who wants such amusement have the right to go where it is provided. (Jones, 1913: 270) Playwright Henry Arthur Jones’s plea for a ‘free’ theatre was made in the aftermath of both the Joint Select Committee report on the censorship of plays in 1909, and the flurry of litigation between music-hall and theatre managements over the legal right to produce dramatic sketches. The renewed efforts to highlight issues of censorship built momentum after the banning of Granville-Barker’s play Waste in 1907 (Thomas et al., 2007). The Joint Select Committee, however, could not effect major reform to the system which had prevailed since the Theatres Act of 1737, giving ‘unfettered power of vito’ to the Lord Chamberlain’s office, which would refuse license if ‘of the opinion that it is fitting for the preservation of good manners, decorum, or of the public peace to do so.’6 Theatre was singled out amongst the arts as subject to a regulation that allowed for ‘the arbitrary action of a single official’.7 The Joint Select Committee did clarify the frames of reference for the Examiner of Plays – advisor to the Lord Chamberlain – and recommended opening out the process of censorship to wider advisory committees. But it maintained its anxiety about morality and the stage. Theatre deregulation was not, however, a parliamentary priority. The resistance to ending censorship by theatre managers concerned with maintaining their place in the market, combined with political reticence to act on the issue, meant that what had been a vibrant campaign for some four years, produced no real change to the law.8 Whilst the Lord Chamberlain’s office had extended its licensing power to cover sketches in music-halls from 1912, and ‘in spite of private performances by societies’, censorship carried on in very much the same way it had previously done (Knowles, 1934: 111). The war altered moral sensibilities (see Nicholson, 2003: 117–145) and there was a ‘diversity’ of localized practices in terms of licensing overall (ibid.: 302). A number of critics, including Hannen Swaffer, thought censorship worked to stop theatre managements from becoming ‘mere merchandisers of muck’.9 For historian Dorothy Knowles, working creatively around the structures of regulation might even produce positive outcomes (Knowles, 1934: 165): the productive, independent, subscription theatres could operate outside of jurisdiction because they were private organizations: indeed her point is that they may not have thrived without censorship.10 In a relatively conservative industry, many were not against censorship per se, but objected to the nature of regulation and the terms by which it was seemingly arbitrarily applied. While the Society of West End Managers felt that the ‘powers of the Lord Chamberlain […] afford the greatest protection to the public and the State’,11 regulation was also thought to be administratively complex, counter-productive and regularly contravened (Jones, 1913: 272–273). Theatre buildings might lie empty because of some obscure licensing clause,

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and there was no regulated system to check that once licensed, scripts were being performed in the shape or form for which the licence had been granted. Those in favour of censorship often assumed a position of moral authority. Home Secretary Joynson-Hicks used his political position to crusade against what he saw as the potential free rein of indecency in the mid-1920s: the moral compass needed to be steered by the ruling classes (see Nott, 2011 and Chapter 6). Admitting that censorship was often not ‘founded on any logical position’, Hicks insisted it worked ‘quite satisfactorily’ (Joynson-Hicks, 1929: 8). The State needed to provide moral guidance under ‘the Christian law and tradition of morality’ (ibid.: 23– 24): the moral frame was assumed to be universal and necessary. Coming from the same class, with a shared belief system, this was the overriding position taken by the officers responsible for the regulation of stage plays and films, and they were permitted to demand alterations to scripts or edits to film – ‘invisible’ aspects of censorship: official banning was often seen as a last resort (Nicholson, 2003: 2). Early in the period, the contemporary issue of the dramatic ‘sketch’ provided a challenge to official lines of state regulation: if a sketch was effectively a ‘drama’ or a play, then it needed to be licensed. The ‘sketch’ symbolizes a transformation of the composition of popular entertainment and its audiences. It had been assumed that popular audiences, with their supposed short attention spans,12 did not want to pay to see anything that might resemble a dramatic play. But sketches became popular and the ‘sketch question’ evidences a growing fluidity in terms of audience interest in drama – whether compacted into the form of a sketch or one-act play, or played out on screen in silent film. Under the stipulations of the 1843 Theatres Act, a stage play was defined in terms of form (Settle and Baber, 1915: 15): subsequent litigation broadened the terms of definition. The sketch caused controversy because its manifestation in performance was located at the centre of a potential shift in legal, aesthetic and commercial boundaries: it was a filter through which managers used engagement with the law to redefine their relationship to their audiences and the wider civic realm. Agreements between managements variously attempted to define the terms and conditions of sketch production. Recommendations ranged from forty minutes in length with no more than six performers, and at least thirty minutes between two sketches, with no two sketches having a connected plot, to thirty minutes in length with the recommendation that music hall managers may submit sketches for license (Mander and Mitchenson, 1974 [1965]: 149– 151). Whatever agreements had been made – and the Era noted in 1905 that numerous discussions were had in private between managements13 – under the law, drama could only be performed when licensed. Even so, Cecil Raleigh reporting in the Era in 1911, suggested that there were some ‘150, 000 sketch performances’ a year: the majority of these were not licensed.14 Accordingly, a ‘truce with partial concessions instigated by the Theatre Managers Association was agreed by 1907’, but the litigation and ensuing discussion continued (Mander and Mitchenson, 1974 [1965]: 151). Theatre managements often initiated litigation to subject their financial rivals to ‘judicial harassment based on outdated statutes’, as well as highlighting the uneven application of regulations, especially in light of the reduction in numbers of

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inspectors by London Country Council (Scheide, 1990: 124–125).15 The Theatre Managers Association, it was thought by some, was operating in a ‘spirit of contemptible treachery’.16 Under the law anyone could ‘inform’ on a production and bring it to court: some used this as a means of furthering public discourse about censorship more generally. Thus Granville-Barker, ever the antagonist, took the Tivoli to court in 1912 accusing them of producing unlicensed ‘stage plays’, which were in fact ‘turns’ by Little Titch and by ‘Mr. Johnson Clarke, a ventriloquist’. Barker proposed that the ventriloquist, in his ‘monologue […] with his dummy’, was in fact performing a ‘stage play’ (Isaacs, 1927: 21). He argued that as Mr Clarke – using scenery and ‘various properties’ – was representing the character of a sportsman carrying a gun, accompanied by a ‘figure’ (the ventriloquist’s dummy) with whom he was in dialogue, the performance constituted a duologue.17 The case was found in favour of the defendant and costs of twenty guineas awarded.18 The Lord Chamberlain’s office could not come up with a satisfactory solution. In 1912, when ‘an informer’ bought a prosecution against the Palace Theatre for producing the sketch A Man in the Case starring Arthur Bourchier and Violet Vanbrugh, the judge ruled against the theatre and imposed a heavy fine of £80 for the offence of producing the play without a licence and £50, the maximum amount allowable for the failure to submit the play to the Lord Chamberlain’s office. On appeal the fine was reduced to £10 and £5 – a sum that would not have made heavy inroads into the profits already accrued from the production in the first place (Carson, 1913: 236).19 Balanced against the appeal of having high profile ‘legitimate’ performers in a sketch as part of a Variety programme, the risk of prosecution was a risk worth taking. By 1909, the Theatre Managers Association had created a situation of ‘warfare raging’, where members might be seen in the audience timing sketches in music halls, and counting how many actors spoke during the performance: the duration and number of characters in a licensed dramatic sketch defined its status as ‘not’ a play (Blow, 1958: 202). This was in an economy where plays were associated with a particular (higher) class of customer. The ‘sketch controversy’, then, epitomized the ambition of producers of popular theatre to respond to market forces, and to gain a particular kind of professional citizenship. Author Cecil Armstrong warned aspiring actors in 1912 that ‘Every actor should be devoutly thankful for the coming of the “sketch” which has so materially widened his market’, but that he [sic] should be wary of the legal framework for performance: everyone knew the regulations and to go against them was to take a professional risk (Armstrong, 1912a: 95). The overwhelming demand for sketches also widened the market for playwrights and Allardyce Nicoll points to its further significance in terms of the development of the ‘architecture’ of playwriting more generally: the ‘sketch’ was in fact a ‘miniature play’ (Nicoll, 1973:122–128), the proliferation of which created heated debate. The ‘sketch’ is viewed by some historians as symbolic of the gentrification of the music halls (Murray, 1994). Mander and Mitchenson suggest the ‘sketch question’ came ‘to a head with the rise of the new variety theatres’ as part of an argument for the removal of regulation to allow and encourage free trade (Mander and Mitchenson, 1974 [1965]: 149). Amongst the lists of court cases brought against and between

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industry members in the annual Stage Year Book, for example, are those dealing with standard contractual or reputational issues: libel, breach of contract, personal injury (the fall of a ceiling on a performer), bounced cheques and other failures of payment (see Carson, 1913: 234–235).20 As the period moves into the 1910s, the lists of sketches are substantial, so too the litigation around their licensing. Cases are mainly constructed around reports that theatres have not attained the relevant licence – and fines ensue on average at around £5. Related cases litigate against the imitation or replication of form: two of particular interest here are George Edwardes’ case against Mr Pélissier for performing ‘Potted Plays’ at the Apollo in 1908, and Fred Karno’s case against the Kinematograph company Pathé Frère Ltd, also in 1908. Both of these raise questions about ownership and the status of professional citizenship. H. G. Pélissier was accused of reproducing musical numbers from The Girls of Gottenberg and The Merry Widow in contravention of Edwardes’ ownership. Known for their ‘potted’ burlesque versions of contemporary productions, his company was effectively performing not a sketch, but a condensed version of someone else’s show (Gardner, 1909): as a result, Edwardes won a permanent injunction (Carson, 1909: 266). Karno’s case is more complex and illustrative of the kinds of legal debate surrounding the ‘sketch question’ as a whole. Fred Karno, impresario and theatre entrepreneur, had developed and registered in 1906 a highly successful ‘dramatic sketch’, The Mumming Birds; or Twice Nightly, 21 passed on to his performers orally, as the text was not written down: a book of instructions written by Karno was used for the American productions of the sketch, which ironically played with constructs of theatricality and the experience of spectatorship. The performance consisted of, a representation of a music-hall performance, as viewed by a stage audience, and the humour depends on the frequent interruptions and interferences by the audience. The performers who appear are 1). the spectators or audience of the performance 2). The performers and artists 3). The stage attendants. (Carson, 1909: 272–276) Breaking with the traditional boundaries between performer and public, Karno planted performers in the ‘audience’: these included a boy in an Eton uniform and a ‘semi-intoxicated swell in evening dress’. The ‘acts’ included a male vocalist, a conjurer, a quartet and a wrestler. All performed in pantomime with ‘no sustained dialogue’ (ibid.). Pathé Frère Ltd ‘reproduced’ the show, filmed it, and sold the film to Kinematograph exhibitors, who were showing it in towns where Karno’s ‘real’ show was already booked, previous to its arrival. Pathé Frère Ltd had replicated his work and repackaged it, exploiting the voyeuristic possibilities of the original stage version and profiting from the existing reputation of the performance. Pathé Frère Ltd were clearly damaging Karno’s business. The defendants argued that as the ‘sketch’ was not written down, it was not under copyright: whilst they had sold their films to exhibitors they had no control over how, when or to whom the films were shown. The judge found in their favour, agreeing that the film company had clearly replicated Karno’s work, but noting that it was not

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covered under copyright law in the manner in which Karno had assumed: the sketch was not written down, even though its stage business was. Had Karno litigated against the exhibitors themselves, the case might have gone differently. He escaped litigation by theatre managers for the production of what he called a ‘dramatic sketch’, but had failed to win litigation against its replication because under law it was only possible to copyright a ‘composition capable of being printed or published’: a performance that did not have an actual script was neither a ‘stage play’ nor effectively, a ‘sketch’ (ibid.: 276). Often built on the same structural principles as sketches and consisting of a number of scenes, one-act plays became more popular with production managements into the 1920s. These were regularly produced in the commercial as well as the independent sector with separate casts, alongside a full-length play in production. One-act plays might run for the duration of the production of, and sometimes beyond, the longer play.22 Connecting the development of early film with the development of drama more generally (Mayer, 1997), the sketch enabled more hybridity in terms of audience expectation across types of venues catering to different clientele. The relaxation of litigation around the production of sketches after 1912,23 accommodated more fluidity between forms, performers, venues and materials, but regulatory frameworks still shaped the relationship between performance cultures, the market and their publics.

Regulating the performance industries: State interventions Regulation of the film industry was initially less concerned with content than with licensing practices for the safety of buildings in which films were exhibited. Figures for numbers of picture theatres and cinemas vary hugely: Rachael Low points to the differentials between Bioscope reports of 4,000 in 1911, to 7,000 in 1914 and the Kinematograph Yearbook figures at 5,000, with a published list of 3,500 in 1914 (Low, 1949: 23). More recently, James Robertson estimates the numbers as roughly doubling between 1910 and 1916 to 3,500 (Robertson, 2016 [1985]: 3). Considering the velocity of growth, it is surprising perhaps that there was not more early State intervention in cinema regulation: film was reaching far larger audiences at a time of tenable social unrest (ibid.). The Cinematograph Act of 1909 came into force in early 1910, in some ways an extension of the provisions of the Disorderly House Act of 1751(Kuhn, 1988: 17), which also provided for the regulation of theatres as places of entertainment. Concerned with public safety in buildings where flammable film was being shown, Low suggests the 1909 Act mostly impacted on exhibitors. Powers were delegated to local authorities, or their named agents. Like theatre, the application of regulation was uneven countrywide. So too the content of films could be altered, but unlike theatre there was no formal process for censorship: the British Board of Film Censors was approved, but not official. Local authorities were, however, able to use the 1909 Act as a means of censoring film content (Robertson 2016 [1985]: 4). The British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) began its work certificating films on the basis of content in 1913. Set up in consultation with the Home Office, but shaped by film manufacturers and exhibitors whose concern was to assure local authorities that

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film would not disrupt the ‘moral welfare of the community’ (Low, 1949: 88), the Board was chaired until 1916 by none other than the ex-Examiner of Plays for the Lord Chamberlain’s office, G. A. Redmond. Operating through a system of viewings with recommended cuts to footage of film, in its first annual report the BBFC reiterated the aim to ‘eliminate’ anything it considered to be ‘repulsive and objectionable to the good taste of English audiences’ (ibid.: 7): it banned twenty-two of the 7,510 films submitted in 1913, of which 627 were considered as suitable for adult exhibition only (ibid.: 22). The grounds for objection to films were more specific and extensive than those used in theatre and included objection to, ‘medical operations, painful scenes in connection with insanity, native customs in foreign lands abhorrent to British ideas, indecent dancing […] abduction and seduction, impropriety in conduct and dress’ (ibid.: 91). New ‘model conditions’ were regularly circulated by the Home Office as guidance, although it was not until 1923 that it recommended explicitly that local authorities should follow the advice given by the BBFC on specific films (Kuhn, 1988: 24). The moral, political and arbitrary quality to the work of the BBFC remained (Robertson 2016 [1985]: 47), and in the mid-1930s Knowles pointed to the fact that while the BBFC might ‘pass’ a film, local authorities could still use their right to refuse performance (Knowles, 1934: 240). The BBFC was founded at a moment where the ‘institution of cinema was in the process of becoming’ (Kuhn, 1988: 2), in ‘a period of uncertainty […] over the means by which cinema was to be understood, defined and regulated’ (ibid.: 1). The operation of film censorship assumed that, as audiences were predominantly working class, they were less ‘selective’ than theatre audiences (see Richards, 1981): the censor was particularly mindful around issues of public morality or criminality and political propaganda (Robertson, 2016 [1985]: 20 and see Montagu, 1939). Like theatre, cinema was flourishing and diversifying; like theatre, film was big business with different professional agendas between producers, creatives and managers. With the first films shown in the 1890s, cinema was a new art, perceived to be catering largely to the new urban masses. It is important to note here that public scrutiny of cinema was heightened by anxieties about its potential to influence behaviour. Anti-film sentiment was driven by what some historians see as ‘middle-class moralists’ (Rapp, 2002), with a particular concern firstly for the influence of cinema on women’s behaviour and, secondly, an interest in placing an ‘increasing emphasis on cinema’s role as educator and enforcer of moral codes for public conduct’ (Sanders, 2002: 99). State enquiries into both cinema and theatre rarely converted into formal regulation: such enquiries were intended to make ‘recommendations’ based on processes of social research. The Board of Education’s 1926 report on drama and adult education, for example, is more of a survey of current practices, detailing the growth of amateur groups and drama associations at a time of economic downturn (Adult Education Committee of the Board of Education, 1926). The enquiry sought to establish the educative value of drama and its role within formations of citizenship and community. It used the opinions of ‘witnesses’ – theatre professionals, academics, religious leaders and so on – to give assessments of public participation in drama activities. The report reiterates Granville-Barker’s analysis that enhanced engagement with dramatic art

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beyond its consumption was evidence that people were seeking not ‘self-expression’, but the ‘far more cooperative expression that drama provides’, engaging in a ‘genuine and creative interest in a highly organic art’ (ibid.: 3). Commissioned cinema enquiries on the other hand, were generally more driven by those anxieties noted above focussed on its potential to influence and disrupt behaviour. The picture house is the cheapest, the most accessible and most widely enjoyed form of public entertainment; it is the most popular in the poorest districts, and is attended by a very large number of children and young people. (Cinema Commission of Enquiry, 1917: xxiv). Conducted by the National Council of Public Morals (NCPM),24 the 1917 Cinema Commission of Inquiry, supported by the Cinematograph Trade Council (CTC), was tasked to report on the ‘physical, social, moral and educational influence of the cinema, with special reference to young people’ (ibid.: v). The six-month enquiry committee included members of the clergy, the education, medical and literary professions, as well as people from the film industry such as the new Chief Censor for the BBFC. Witnesses, including groups of children, members of the police force and teachers, were called on to share their experience or observations of cinema going. Produced toward the end of the First World War at a moment of transition and conflict, the report provides an invaluable insight into social and moral perceptions of cinema, as problematic and as outside of State control. it may be doubted if there is even yet sufficient realisation of the strong and permanent grip which the picture palace has taken upon the people of this country […] the lure of the pictures is universal […] moving pictures are having a profound influence upon the mental and moral outlook of millions of our young people […] no social problem of the day demands more earnest attention (ibid.: xxi) Based on the assumption that behaviour is imitative, that what is seen on film shapes patterns of public conduct, especially in boys, the picture house was also seen as ‘counter attraction’ to the public house and a potential preventative against hooliganism (ibid.: 49). The concluding recommendations of the report, however, suggested in a rather non-committal fashion that ‘suitable pictures shall be shown in suitable conditions’ (ibid.: lxxxvii). The agenda for legal intervention in the performance industries was frequently driven by economics, with limited recognition of the need for forms of State support. Thus, the Cinematograph Act of 1927 required exhibitors to show a quota of British films: defined as being made on British soil, with British labour. The terms were open to interpretation and commercial abuse. This was a genuine attempt to support the home film industry from which 25 per cent of British films shown in 1914 had been reduced to 10 per cent by 1925 (Dickinson and Street, 1985: 5). In contrast to Britain, the American industry had consolidated into a vertical structure during the war years.

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Under the Act, UK exhibitors and renters were required to show between 5 and 7.5 per cent British films with the quota rising to 20 per cent by 1936, until the expiration of the Act in 1938 (ibid.). Film historians vary in their assessment of the cultural value of some of the Act’s consequences, such as the production of ‘quota quickies’ – lowbudget British films speedily produced to fulfil its requirements. Built on a perceived division between American and British cinema culture and patterns of consumerism, the 1927 Act was underpinned by ‘criticism of a model of cultural value that was entirely economic’ (Napper, 2009: 22–24). Lawrence Napper suggests the Act was a form of ‘cultural and economic’ resistance, ultimately requiring the British industry to operate productively in the grey area between European ‘art house’ film and Hollywood commercialism (ibid.: 25–27). Some regulated economic concession for cinema came through the Sunday Entertainments Act of 1932. This allowed cinemas, not theatres, to operate on Sundays alongside museums, galleries, zoos and gardens. Under the Act, the Cinematograph Fund was established, funded through takings for the purpose of ‘encouraging the use and development of the cinematograph as a means of entertainment and instruction’.25 The British Film Institute (BFI) was established through the fund, but critiqued by some as having no power to influence the ‘improvement of films and the character of cinema entertainment’ (Ashley, 1934: 31). The drive to legislation for cinema, as the predominant form of mass entertainment by the 1930s, caused far more agitation to successive governments than theatre: moral anxieties which had at one time been generated by Music-Hall or Variety audiences had now transferred onto those frequenting the cinema on a regular basis. The Entertainments Duty, also known as the Entertainment’s Tax, impacted on the performance industries without discrimination from 1916 until 1960.26 Created as a wartime tax on income, not profit, to enhance revenue from amongst other things, cocoa, cider and mechanical lighters, the Act required additional tax, via prepaid stamps, on the sale of tickets. The tax drew continuous criticism from theatre managers and critics alike well into the period. In the mid-1920s Sydney Carroll argued that if theatres could open on Sundays, they would be full and therefore the tax would be less onerous on gross costs because a higher percentage of profit could be made overall (Carroll, 1924: 63). Earlier in 1916, Oswald Stoll pointed to the damage the duty would cause to smaller scale theatres that made less profit, in part because seats were cheaper in the first place: the tax was in effect an economic punishment on a populace already suffering because of war.27 Producer Alfred Butt also pointed to the fact that theatre buildings were already taxed two to four times higher than if they were used for commercial purposes, and likewise C. B. Cochran pointed out that the conditions created by war had already reduced business by a worrying level.28 In Parliament, James Hogge (M. P.) claimed the Entertainment’s Tax was causing the closure of the bulk of cinemas, pointing to unnecessary taxing by overenthusiastic officers.29 Levied at between ½d for seats under 2d in price, to sixpence for those costing between 5s and 7s 6d in 1916, by 1927 the tax had increased to 1d on seats costing between 6d and 7d, up to 2s for seats costing between 10s and 6d to 15s (Isaacs, 1927: 81): this impacted less on cinema, where

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seats were cheaper. Managements were responsible for logging and collecting the tax and were fined heavily for contravening regulations (ibid.: 74–84). Whilst some exemptions were made to the tax in terms of productions of plays with ‘educational’ purpose by the 1940s, the Act was not abolished in the UK until 1960. Formal regulation of the operations of the performance industries was more prevalent than in any of the other arts: with the lines between protection and prohibition not always clearly drawn. Such regulation reflected, in part, contemporary anxieties around the relationship between sociality and citizenship. We should note, however, that the performance industries often elected to develop self-regulatory frameworks and practices for themselves in order to enhance their professionalized status and ‘modify’ the environment for citizenship, as Trotter noted above (Trotter, 1922 [1916]: 63). Industry professionals found ways of regulating professional citizenship, which resulted in both systems of inclusion and exclusion, as this chapter goes on to explore.

Self-regulation and professionalization: belonging, giving and educating Establishing structures for self-regulation involved the development of existing systems, as well as the founding of new unions and professional associations. The industries moved towards formalizing their own foundations of practice, or in Goffman’s terms, their own ‘special sets of rules’ and ‘situational proprieties’, from within. This mapped onto a wider cultural mood about both self-formulation and, as Warren Susman notes, ‘self-realization’ (Susman 2003 [1973]: 276). The motivation to develop forms of self-regulation manifested largely in the areas of professional association, philanthropic enterprise, and the development of more formal educational contexts and practices. Professional allegiance could not be built on the basis of self-interest alone: working in the performance industries was precarious and opportunities for employment and financial stability irregular for the majority. As Herbert Fisher, historian and Liberal MP, suggested at the time, strategies for productive citizenship should take the need for fluidity into account (Fisher, 1924: 35). Many of the performance-related associations formed during the period had both built-in capacity for flexibility and binary remits: to regulate and represent, and to provide continuing forms of welfare. Some provided forms of welfare for their members, acting as benevolent societies and facilitating voluntary charitable activity. As with much contemporary philanthropy, membership operated through the belief that good citizens have ‘duties as well as rights’ (Prochaska, 2002: 3): activities often crossed class hierarchies as part of professionalized charitable citizenship. The use of ‘excess’ labour for philanthropic ends constituted an invitation to collectivity in ways everyday employment would not normally accommodate. Here a different set of professional hierarchies and situational proprieties might prevail. Some associations such as the Variety Artistes Federation (VAF), for example, occasionally questioned the assumption that performers ought to be giving their labour charitably for free: this undermined the demands of their everyday activities – why would they

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‘perform’ on their day off – or their professional status – why would they work for free?30 However, voluntary work and a ‘charitable disposition’ could be used as a means of accumulating welfare, as well as accruing both social and professional status (see Hindson, 2016: 5). In her seminal exploration of the British ‘public spirit’, historian Jose Harris noted that many professional and private associations founded during the period covered here, shared the ‘common aims of promoting active citizenship’ as part of a ‘richly variegated, autonomous and self-governing associational culture’ (Harris, 1993: 193). In the performance industries, the formation of associations and clubs was also part of an active desire to delineate the specifics of appropriate professional and public conduct. Early attempts to create a collective bargaining force in the Music-Hall in 1884 and 1897 were less successful than, for example, the Music Hall Artistes’ Railway Association that focused on negotiating terms with the railway companies over fares for touring workers.31 The Actors Association (1891) and the Actors’ Union (1907) had complex relationships between managers and workers, but again focused on perceived professional need (Sanderson, 1984: 96–115). Other such organizations included the Amateur Players Association (1905); the Copyright-Play Protection Association (1907 and prior to the passing of the Copyright Act of 1911); the Heads of Department Association (1902) for ‘master carpenters, electricians, property masters and master gasmen’ (Parker, 1909: 655); the National Association of Cinematograph Operators (1907); the Scenic Artists Association (1904); the Theatres Alliance (1908) ‘enlarged from the Suburban Theatre Managers’ Association’ of 1894 (ibid.: 657); the Actresses’ Franchise League (1908, see Paxton, 2018 and Chapter 6); the Variety Agents Association, the British Alliance of Variety Artistes, Musicians and Stage Employees (1906) and the Variety Artistes’ Federation (VAF) in 1906. The latter circulated its policies and activities via its own weekly journal, The Performer, founded in 1906: here ‘the greatest enemy to freedom is not the tyrant, but the contented slave’.32 The VAF stated its policy as, one ‘strong federation to raise their status, to voice their grievances, and to abolish […] injustices.’33 As a collegial protectorate, the VAF also demanded active participation of its membership in controversial disputes with managements over contracts and working conditions, as well as adherence to regulations, codes of conduct and professional ‘situational proprieties’. Weekly editorials reported on bogus managements and on the activities of other associations, as well as advertising ‘This Week’s Companies and Next Week’s Calls’, and offering reports ‘From the Stalls’, ‘Legal Opinions’, ‘Tips to Travellers’, trade gossip and so on. As a trade paper produced by a professional association, it facilitated and relied on communication between employee and employer. Very much focused on issues of professionalization and belonging, early issues, without irony, goaded that those unwilling to join the VAF were ‘Wibbly Wobblers’.34 Membership brought protection and a sense of belonging.35 The VAF relied on a ‘community of interests’ in Hadow’s terms (Hadow, 1923: 7), providing an alternative to a system of assumed shared values and communal loyalties prevalent in the late Victorian period (see Howkins, 1977). Based on the premise that its ‘citizens were unified’ by a professional as well as possibly a ‘moral purpose’ (Harris, 1993: 250) like

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many such associations, the VAF was protective but increasingly prohibitive as it became more established. Early discourse around unionization in the theatre industry was framed by questions of ideology and representation, as well as questions of industrial relations. Whilst the Trades Dispute Act of 1906 had given more formal power to unions, both Sanderson and Cochrane note the sustained conservatism of the industry in relation to unionization, arguably the point of divide between the ‘Victorian and modern actor’ (Sanderson, 1984: 112 and Cochrane, 2012). For critic and journalist H. R. Barbor,36 by the mid-1920s unionization symbolized the need to organize the industry for those who worked in it, as opposed to those who profited from it through financial investment. Critical of the cultural snobbery of practitioners like Frank Benson, who along with other touring managers, at points refused the benefits of affiliation between unions and associations, Barbor believed unionization would do the work of ‘stabilising conditions of theatrical employment and thereby raising the stage from the dubious dignity of “the profession” to the decencies of other departments of organised labour’ (Barbor, 1924: 29). Professionalization was viewed as something to be constructed, as opposed to being built on a model of ‘tradition of service’, with its tacit acceptance of variable but poor working conditions (see Davis, 2000a: 327). The lack of employment rights necessitated formal channels for arbitration to solve trade disputes: a direct result of a separation of needs between actors and managers. In a period that saw ‘the passage to a more class-conscious politics, displacing the cultural politics of the Victorian age’, it was difficult to separate out political affiliation from the politics of employment (Callaghan, 2012: 1). Cochrane proposes that actors needed ‘their establishment and the conservatism that came with it’ (Cochrane, 2012: 80), but not all those who were prounion accounted for themselves as socialists, although many who campaigned for unionization, such as Cecil Raleigh or Harley Granville-Barker, were known to be so. In fact, the politics of collectivism in the theatre industry were more complex than a politically left or right wing, worker or manager divide accommodates. In the opening decades of the 1900s, actors were often also managers and producers were often also actors: this in an industry which relied on accepted traditional hierarchies that the unions did not always attempt to undermine. The push towards unionization from the late 1890s argued for fixed minimum wages, contractual agreements, payment for rehearsal, better working conditions and so on. This was in line with the broader cultural and political shift around issues of labour, which gained momentum in the last decades of the nineteenth century (Tanner, 1997: 59). The Actor’s Association, founded in 1891, was not a union as such, but was set up, according to Frank Benson, to ‘establish cooperation between managers and artists’ (qtd in Sanderson, 1984: 96). By 1903, around 12.5 per cent of actors and actresses were members, but managers were excluded by 1907 in a move to make the association secure performers’ rights in a multi-million-pound industry, and so in 1908 the Society of West End Managers was formed. In 1907, the more radical Actors’ Union offered membership at a lower premium and was more inclusive to facilitate association with some of those working in Music-Halls. An officially registered trade union, its

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membership more than doubled from 400 in 1907 to 1908. It was absorbed into the Actors’ Association by 1910, however, with managers being invited back into the organization. This was a return to the kind of conservatism identified by Cochrane, with strike action being discouraged in a bid to harmonize the needs of worker and manager. Membership steadied at around the mid-800s until 1914. Interestingly, the Actresses’ Franchise League, founded in 1908 as a focused and politicized professional pressure group, had a similar membership of around 760 by 1913 (see Chapter 6). The setting up of the Stage Guild in 1924 was driven by political differences, but it was the founding of Equity, a closed shop union, in 1930 that bought together a larger body of professional performers with a membership of over 4,000 by the mid-1930s. Unionization in the film industry was not as universal. In her 1921 Practical Hints on Acting for the Cinema, Agnes Platt proposed that, as there was so much well-paid work available in such a large and growing industry, cinema actors did not see the need to unionise (Platt, 1921a: 153). This was a denial of the uneven power relations in an industry where actors were in great supply and so, unless given star status, had little potential to negotiate terms. The film industry did, however, produce protectorate organizations such as the Kinematograph Manufacturers’ Association (1906); the Kinematograph Renters’ Society (1915); the British Association of Film Directors (1922); the Film Artistes’ Association (1927), largely representing film extras; and the Association of Cine-Technicians (1933).37 These were founded in part to represent workers in trade disputes in the same way as a union might do. Such associations were built on the recognition of shared concerns, but also as a means to limit access to professional practice, to ensure that amateurs were classed as distinctive from professionals. This was also a recognition that the performance industries were being embraced by those seeking employment: unions and associations were a means of keeping the job market under control, of keeping distance between the professionals and their aspiring publics. Practitioners were concerned that the ‘dramatic life of the country’ relied on a binary relationship consisting of what Arthur Bourchier called ‘a happy contact of aspiring artists and appreciative audiences’: the boundary between the two being firmly established by the protocols of professionalization (Bourchier, 1926: 13).38

Theatres and their publics: charitable activity for the profession While Christopher Balme suggests that twenty-first century developments in communications have facilitated ‘more intense forms of feedback between theatres and their publics’ (Balme, 2014: 48), the intensification of feedback between performance cultures and their publics gained momentum in the early 1900s. Here, audience feedback and interaction with industry practitioners enhanced cultural marketability. Fans were consumers whose importance producers and performers acknowledged with increased alacrity as the period progressed. Jane Bryan notes that publications such as The Picture or Illustrated Films initially provided ‘stories of the films’, as kind of aids to ‘reading’ films, catering to an ‘imagined’ audience. Moving towards the late 1910s, however, such publications had a more defined sense of their target readership and, in some cases, reframed content toward ‘gossip and female friendship’, as well as

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information on film releases (Bryan, 2006: 26–28). Content was being marketed through a constructed empathic connectivity with the assumed reader. The perceived market transformed into a more readily identifiable one, as did the product, namely cinema and its environs. For theatre, publications like the Play Pictorial were also driven by an affinity for visual content.39 The consumer was encouraged to engage in ‘conversation’ with the industry in such publications, through comments pages, gossip sections, competitions and so on, providing a feedback loop, however limited or fabricated, between the performance industries and their publics. Other means by which performance cultures and their publics interacted was through the processes and products of charitable philanthropy. Signalling the theatre industry’s wider social role, as well as providing opportunities for philanthropic ‘giving back’ to the ‘citizens’ of the industry, by the early half of the twentieth century there had been a dynamic growth and expansion in the conceived function of industry-related charitable organizations. At times – especially during the First World War – charitable activities were focused outward; at other times, charitable labour was focused on developing professional networking, socializing and sustainability within the industry itself. Organizations such as the Three Arts Club, a social and residential club for women in the ‘three arts, music, painting and the drama’ and founded in 1911 (Ashwell, 1936: 176), were more concerned to accommodate the immediate economic and domestic needs of its ‘citizens’ or its members, in relation to their professional identity and activities. Reminiscent of the Rehearsal Club (1892),40 actress-manager Lena Ashwell led a team of women, including her sister Hilda, who had already started a club for girls selling theatre programmes, and the actresses Eva Moore and Madge Kendal in founding the club (Ashwell, 1936: 177). Inspired by the Professional Woman’s League residential club in New York, the Three Arts Club was designed to be self-sufficient, as Ashwell noted: We were determined that the club should be entirely self-supporting, and that the initial outlay should be paid out of balls and performances and all the efforts usually devoted in the profession to other causes than our own. (ibid.) As a performer, activist and manager concerned with pay and conditions for theatre workers (see Leask, 2012 and Gale, 2004b), Ashwell’s vision was that the club members would raise the money for running costs in what Daunton calls a ‘member serving’ society (Daunton, 2016 [1996]: 10). Operating through charitable activity, funds were raised to support the needs of its professional membership. The organization facilitated professional ‘self-help’, and was run by executive committee, from which Ashwell withdrew after their rejection of her plans for expansion in the opening months of the 1914–1918 war: she continued to raise funds for concerts for soldiers via the Three Arts Club Bureau Fund.41 Largely for the middle classes and without the radical remit of Kittie Carson’s 1891 Theatrical Ladies’ Guild, which provided financial and practical support for women struggling to balance precarious theatrical careers

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and domestic obligations (Davis, 1991: 61),42 the Three Arts Club shared the requirement of free labour from members to facilitate welfare. Through what Ashwell called ‘that rare kind of charity that begins at home’,43 the Three Arts Club provided women in the arts with an affordable place for respite from busy professional life. The set-up costs were raised amongst the membership, with an advisory board that included John Sargent, William Elgar and Arthur Wing Pinero, and an initial membership of 500 professionals or supporters of the arts,44 reportedly increasing to 700 by 1912.45 The building, at 19A Marylebone Road had accommodation of 100 rooms, ‘a large concert-hall, with a small stage, in addition to a spacious dining hall, writing and reception rooms’.46 With advisory committees for entertainment, music, drama and for fine arts and crafts, the club had a robust administrative structure and pricing system – £1.1s for town members; 10s 6d for country members, with various set prices for associate and auxiliary membership (male or female). The forty-eight listed regulations included information on voting, reporting from committees and resignation – compulsory if declared bankrupt or if found to have committed a crime. By-laws covered information on appropriate behaviour, or the ‘situational proprieties’ for members – no smoking unless in permitted spaces, no dogs to be brought into the building, no advertising for work using the club as an address. There were rules for storage allowance – thirty cubic feet per person – no gratuities to be given to staff unless via the Staff Christmas Fund, no unaccompanied strangers and so on. Board and lodging would be just about affordable for someone earning £3–£5 per week: Cost of Board and Lodging: Cubicle (with board) 19/6 a week;47 Single Bedrooms (with board) from 5s – to 7/6 per day (25s – £2 10s a week); terms inclusive of everything except: Afternoon tea, 4d; Bath, 2d.; Boot cleaning, 1d.; breakfast, 9d.; Luncheon 10d.; Tea, 4d. and 6d.; Dinner, 1/3; Guests’ Table Money, 3d., each.48 Here, then, professional citizenship was predicated on a particular level of income and, one might argue, class. The Three Arts Club had its own monthly journal containing articles, transcripts of talks and speeches given at the club, adverts for up-and-coming fund-raising events and news of members – who was working and where, and who was available for work as performer, artist or teacher.49 Hindson explores the regular Three Arts Club Balls, often held at the Albert Hall, and stresses both the consumer and charity value of the performers who participated in the events, which ‘centralised spectacle and stage personalities’ (Hindson 2016: 112). In one description of the costumed Christmas ball in December 1911, the author points to the fact that the actors were already costumed, ‘clad precisely as they stepped off the stage when the curtain fell’: they came to the ball as themselves, dressed as the characters they were already contracted to perform: The drama, being necessarily engaged elsewhere, was a little late in arriving […] now costume revealed instead of concealing identity. They arrived in troops – Maids of Japan from the Shaftesbury, Maeterlinckian personifications

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fresh from chasing the Blue Bird through the provinces, Bunty’s well-disciplined family from the Haymarket, Butterflies off the Wheel, Man and Superman (disguised as cowboys) from the Criterion, Follies from the Apollo and Glad Eyes from the Globe.50 The costuming here was less ‘creative personal expression’ (see McQuillan, 2013: 3 qtd in Hindson, 2016: 115–116) than it was evidence of an opportunistic capitalizing on the fundraising, as opposed to commercial, potential of their ability to engage in extra-theatrical performances of their professional performing selves. In his invited lecture to the club on the ‘Economics of the Three Arts’, delivered in October 1913, George Bernard Shaw stressed what he called the ‘degradation of the artist by Commercialism’, warning that the ‘exchange value’ of their labour often contradicted its ‘real value grotesquely’ (Shaw, 1913: 452–456). Shaw proposed that women in particular should understand their labour as dependent on an economic culture of supply and demand: their ‘rent of ability’ was the only means by which artists could effectively do the work they wanted to do, beyond what they needed to do to make a living. Ashwell understood the meaning of ‘rent of ability’, and directed members to use excess available professional labour as a means to help themselves and their associates. The self-help and charitable ethos underpinning the Three Arts Club mapped onto other female-led interventions in the form of support for those working in the performance industries who were more vulnerable than others. In her sixties when she founded the Theatre Girls Club (1915),51 actress Virginia Compton (neé Bateman) was from a theatrical dynasty and was mother to five children working in the arts, including actress Fay Compton and the novelist Compton Mackenzie.52 Initially activities focused on supporters recognizing the club as providing for the domestic needs of young, single, low-paid women within the profession.53 With permanent lodgings in the building, Virginia Compton bought the cultural capital of an actress with a long and respected career to the organization: ‘friends’ of the club included Cyril Maude, Ellen Terry, Sybil Thorndike, Lilian Baylis, Gertrude Forbes-Robertson and Maud Tree. Gerald du Maurier, known for his own charity work with the Actor’s Orphanage Fund, Gladys Cooper, Lillian Braithwaite, Sybil Thorndike and Owen Nares are often mentioned in related press reports.54 Whilst not formally incorporated as a charity until the mid-1930s due to administrative oversight, the Theatre Girls Club provided affordable accommodation and structures for welfare. In 1918, the club had 297 members plus associates. Fees were 21s 6d per week for girls in work and 17s and 6d for those without.55 By the mid-1930s, fees were set at £1 10s per week if in employment and £1 1s if out of work – for cubicle-based accommodation and four meals a day – and an annual subscription of 2s 6d. This was not so much a club as a busy hostel for girls aspiring to work in the performance industries. The organization settled at 59 Greek Street, formally the Soho Club Home for Working Girls opened by ‘welfare activist’ Maude Stanley in 1880.56 Staff acted in loco parentis: for Cyril Maude the club performed a kind of ‘mothering’ role in offering lodgings to some fifty girls.57 There is a robust moral undertone to the in-house documentation of daily activities in the extant Minute Books. The club

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housed young women – who decades before might have been sent into service – finding work in pantomimes, as extras, as dancers, in the chorus of large-scale shows, as attendants or usherettes. At the Prince Edward Theatre in the mid-1930s this would bring in 3s per performance – ‘with the dole it helps pay their bill’ – whilst some girls found the odd day’s filming here or there, including film work at £5 a week on a sixweek contract.58 They were found other kinds of jobs while they were waiting for theatre and film work, such as ‘demonstrating in the bathing pool at Hamleys’,59 or at exhibitions; modelling; lift attendance at Selfridge’s; administration; or even dog kennel maid work, from which one poor Daisy Bridgeman was sent home as her ‘temper’ made her an unsuitable employee.60 Patterns of employment reflected the seasonal nature of theatre work, with a sudden rush of job openings in pantomime, or for dancers in, for example, Max Rivers or C. B. Cochran shows in the 1920s and 1930s. The regular reports in the Minute Books from the 1930s, divided into sections on ‘spiritual’, ‘health’, ‘work’ and ‘business’, note how many girls are living in the hostel, who is working and where, as well as reporting on any club members who are ill or have found work abroad. With accommodation for some forty girls, figures vary as to the percentage of those in residence who are in work. One report in The Times in 1921 suggested ‘the average number of out-of-work girls resident was 38 per week and of those in work eight’: roughly two thirds of the organization’s earnings were from charitable fund-raising.61 Statistics on employment for girls staying at the club changed little but in the mid-1930s, there are reports that those looking for ‘straight work’ in theatre were finding it hard to get, although there was plenty of work for dancers.62 Girls reported employment opportunities for other residents and repaid loans given to tide them over between jobs once in work. They were given medical attention, sent for respite to the ‘house of rest’, Mapletoft, in Clacton-on-Sea if ill, and were given small gifts of money if getting married. Residents used the club as a London base, returning there when out-of-London contracts ended. Aware of the need to uphold moral codes amongst residents, certain kinds of behaviours and situational proprieties were expected. Thus, when one Esme Campbell, ‘studying at the Max Rivers’ School’ was seen ‘talking to strangers and asking for film work’, the minute book report suggests ‘she seemed to be stage struck, so as we could not take responsibility for anything that happened to her, we asked her mother to take her away’.63 Such moral gate-keeping was part of the reputational pull of an organization needing to raise funds to help young, single women working piecemeal in the performance industries. Compton had a strong sense of the need to keep costs low64 and committee papers attest to campaigns to raise funds, annual expenditure and the investment of assets, the total of which amounted to some £13,285 in 1935, worth around £660,000 to £870,000 in today’s money. Most of the income generated – from charitable events, campaigns, rent, donations or bequests – was used to pay for wages and up-keep, but money was also invested.65 Rental costs during the early years of the Second World War were reduced as the ‘girls are not coming to town and London for the time being is no longer the hub of the profession’: the club’s charitable status encouraged financial flexibility from benefactors.66 The Theatre Girls Club was set up by theatre workers for

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theatre workers, and was built from, largely funded by and relied upon professional theatre networks.67 The club’s moral codes were underpinned, on the one hand, by a protective set of principles around female welfare and domestic safety in an exploitative market, and on the other hand, by a restrictive stance limiting freedom and imposing standards of oldfashioned, middle-class, religious propriety as expectations for unmarried young women.68 Class difference must have been visible and ever present at the club, shaping the structure of care the girls living and working from there experienced. Historian Jane Lewis identifies perceptions of ‘duty’ as integral to late nineteenth-century middle-class women’s ‘social works’ (Lewis, 1991:11) and this sense of duty toward the less fortunate was central to the ways theatre artists like Virginia Compton played out their charitable impulses. Managing the Theatre Girls Club, the staff, the reports, the accounts and raising funds over a period of some twenty-five plus years was also a means through which colleagues could socialize and network while carrying out their philanthropic obligations, as citizens of a professional group identified with modes of selfless giving and the facilitation of self-help. Often no more than a footnote in historical narratives, organizations like the Theatre Girls Club crucially facilitated a combination of work and welfare, as a result the users created their own frames for ‘self-help’ and developed associative professional networks, at all levels from within. The insecure nature of employment had a consequent impact on the ability of performers to sustain professional lives. In 1914, Lena Ashwell, writing for the Fabian Womens’ Group, broke down the annual wages of the average performer in an already ‘over-crowded market’: an actor might earn around £70 per annum on average, more than half of which would be spent on expenses.69 Many in the profession, however, spent as much time looking for work, as doing it (Ashwell, 1914). Ashwell even suggested the ‘unfortunate worker is taught like a parrot, used for a short time, and then thrown on the scrap-heap of the unfit for the theatre’ (ibid.: 312). Charitable professional associations, then, were both generated by and promoted a ‘growing sense of mutuality’ (Kent, 1980 [1977]: 114), with a recognition that the differentials in pay and types of employment impacted on the profession in a divisive manner, in an ever more precarious employment market. Such associations promoted a collective outook in terms of frameworks for professional citizenship. So too formalizing educational establishments reflected the performance industry’s sense of its role in defining participation in the profession, as this chapter goes on to explore.

Education and citizenship: professionalizing performance and training The collapse of the nineteenth-century stock theatre company system, where training and secure employment could happen in one place (Kent, 1980 [1977] and Sanderson, 1984), coincided with a shift in the status of the performance professions, and an increase in the numbers seeking work within them. The ‘artistic and professional momentum’ from the 1890s until the opening years of the First World War (see Kent, 1980 [1977]) created a market for more formal training as a mark of

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professionalization, certification and the potential for social mobility. The early twentieth century saw the transformation of available professional training into more formally institutional-based models, a ‘revolution in the training of the actor’ (Sanderson, 1984: 32), although also substantially framed by the heritage of nineteenth-century practices. Training also served to regulate access to employment, affording a level of inclusivity – you no longer had to be part of an established company – but condoning a level of exclusivity: fees were prohibitive and access was effectively limited to certain classes. The founding of new drama schools in the first decade of the 1900s marked a convergence of both educational and professional possibilities, in a context where citizenship and the education system more generally were being reviewed and renewed. The Academy of Dramatic Art (1904) (later RADA) and the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art (1906) (later CSSD) became the ‘apex of the system’ of formal education in the industry by the 1920s (Sanderson, 1984: 190). They were established in part to provide ‘progress toward regulation’, as Sutherland suggests (Sutherland, 2007: 96), but also to accord status to the profession. Drama schools legitimated membership of a profession, providing an institutional pathway, via training, to forms of professional citizenship. Newly institutionalized educational practices were essentially a continuation of the kinds of nineteenth-century practice epitomized by actress-manager Sarah Thorne in her School of Acting opened in Margate in 1885, which provided classes to company members on, for example, voice production, gesture and mime, and pace. Students included Harley Granville-Barker, Gertrude Kingston, Ben Greet – who began his own Academy of Acting in 1896 (Sanderson, 1984: 34) – and the Vanbrugh sisters, Irene and Violet. Other performers, notably often women, ran small schools or offered training for would-be professionals. Rosina Fillipi, author, actress and teacher, ran her own classes in elocution as well as teaching in the newly established drama schools,70 and Margaret Morris and Italia Conti both trained children, with Conti’s school opening in 1911, eventually sharing accommodation with the Etlinger Dramatic School in Paddington. This was taken over by May Witty in 1922, where newcomers such as Joyce Carey and Witty’s daughter Margaret Webster – later to become a prolific director – were trained by established actresses like Kate Rorke, who also taught at (R)ADA. Constance Benson, who had run a large-scale touring company with her husband Frank Benson, set up the Dramatic School at Pembroke Hall in Kensington in 1919 (ibid.: 192). John Gielgud attended Benson’s school in 1921 on a tuition-free scholarship and claimed the ‘ramshackle drill-hall in Pembroke Gardens’ offered a curriculum that included elocution, fencing and dancing (Croall, 2011: 34–35).71 Eileen Thorndike founded the Embassy School with Ronald Adam in 1933, and in 1927, stage and screen actress Fay Compton set up the Fay Compton Studio of Dramatic Art, whose alumni included Alec Guinness and John Le Mesurier (ibid.).72 The daily running of such institutions is less well documented than their larger sister organisations like (R) ADA, but ex-students note that Compton’s School, for example,73 offered more ‘individual attention’ than (R)ADA. In the mid-1930s students, predominantly

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female, spent mornings in an ‘all sorts mix of […] fencing, mime, film technique, tap dancing’ (Le Mesurier, 1984: 25) and focused on the intricate details of stage business in the afternoon syllabus, working with classical texts.74 The Studio lasted at least until the beginning of the Second World War, remaining in what Alec Guinness describes as a ‘drill-hall with a stage at one end, together with changing rooms and offices’ (Guinness, 1985: 91).75 The Studio offered scholarships and public viewings of the students’ work – the first of which was in July 1928.76 The awarding of ‘certificates of fellowship’77 or prizes were adjudicated by stage and film personalities of the day: Marie Lohr, Owen Nares, Irene Hentschel and critic Ivor Brown.78 Students regularly performed for charity events, mixing with potential employers and other theatrical professionals. Adverts for the Studio appear regularly in The Times from the early 1930s onwards. Initially offering ‘complete training in Stage and Film’, later adverts are more bold: ‘Can you act? Let Fay Compton Studio teach you,’79 or ‘Children trained, amateurs coached. Private lessons and classes in elocution, singing and dancing.’80 Sometimes adverts for students included reference to teaching film technique, at other times to training for Repertory work for advanced students. Leading arts figures were happy to be invited to associate with and celebrate student work. Training appears to have been framed around potential employment openings, from the children’s ‘Saturday School’, to classes for adults. Adverts for the school reference the availability of scholarships and the lack of fee required to audition for them.81 Curricula design shared with (R)ADA and CSSD a concern for voice and movement as well as textwork, structured around servicing aspects of the (mostly) theatre industry, developing performance skills through training and rehearsal. This ‘professionalized’ education afforded access to employment and networks of more experienced workers at prizegiving, matinee, charity and annual student performances. Fay Compton’s status as a high-profile actress working successfully across stage and screen gave the school and its annual displays of student work a particular cultural cachet. Such makeshift and affordable organizations strategically provided a crucial service for the industry in terms of shaping and controlling ‘legitimate’ means of entering the profession. By the 1920s, film schools promising direct entry into the film business also flourished. Without the same provenance as theatre schools, they were not run by performers from an historically well-established art form, but by those working, and sometimes simply claiming to have worked, in what was often presented as a new trade. The New Oxford Cinema School, as early as 1914, advertised its course in Picture and Picturegoer on the basis that it could get applicants on the ‘cinema stage’, promising ‘large salaries for talented learners’ and claiming to teach ‘the art of cinema to those who have the necessary qualities of vim and brightness’.82 Many such schools were viewed as offering false hope to gullible and enthusiastic amateurs, as ‘bogus selfstyled cinema schools’ (O’Rourke, 2017: 96). The Victoria Cinema College was one such establishment, repeatedly investigated by the Public Control Department of the London County Council, who were concerned at its management’s reportedly dishonest practices: falsifying graduate employment statistics, over-registering students and using unqualified staff, in industry terms, to prepare students for work in film. Most notorious for running this kind of establishment was Marion Jessie Quigley, who

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from the late 1910s ran the Kinema Production Company with its own school and employment agency on New Oxford Street. With her many pseudonyms – ‘Mrs Welding […] Louisa Granville […] and Madame Luck’ – and after numerous other scams including setting up the Kinema Production Company in 192083 and the Cinema Academy of Acting and Dancing, both on Shaftesbury Avenue, in 1921 (ibid.: 88), Quigley appeared repeatedly in court cases. Offering ‘genuine opportunities’ for ‘Kinema beginners’, Quigley promised post-tuition employment in the industry, which never actually materialized. The numerous versions of the ‘school’ offered a series of lessons for around a six-guinea fee, to be followed by paid tuition related to potential employment opportunities: additional lessons in dancing and horse-riding – with a fee for the horse as well as the lessons84 – were offered. At one point she even falsely claimed that Maurice Elvey was casting for Oswald Stoll’s film company from her student cohort.85 Witnesses complained of Quigley’s consistent failure to fulfil her promise to secure employment, after fleecing some £2,482 worth of fees from hopefuls in 1922. She was vague about the names of the films being cast, but managed still to secure fees for lessons from some 300–400 students a year according to one report.86 Quigley, described as ‘fashionably dressed and well spoken,’87 played on the vulnerability of those looking for work in cinema with no training or existing professional connections. Offering a quick and easy route to fame and fortune, she repeatedly charged them for a contract of hope that could never be fulfilled. As Chris O’Rourke notes, such fantasies were fed by the industry – through fan magazines and, especially in film, through public competitions to find ‘new stars’ (O’Rourke, 2017). Concerned with the ‘how to’ of acting, few drama schools offered training for film work.88

Self-help education and ‘how-to act’: professionalizing the amateur Alongside professionalized citizenship offered through the formal education available in the industry, the period saw a proliferation of ‘how-to’ books on skills related to the industry: how to ‘get-on’ in film and on the stage, how to act or produce theatre or film for a broader public of fans, amateurs, hopefuls and emerging professionals. These sometimes blurred the lines between play and work, in a context of changed ‘leisure practices and behaviours’ to use Rojek’s term again (Rojek, 2005). The range of books on offer included Kinematograph Weekly’s extraordinarily detailed How to Run a Picture Theatre (1910), with its advice on how to choose a site, design all aspects of the building, how to staff it and how to programme and advertise: a book for an aspirational businessman, with an eye on the economic potential of the new art form (see Figure 2.1). Similarly capitalizing on the market for publications by those working in the industries, Frank Vernon’s Modern Stage Production, published via the office of the Stage (Vernon, 1923), offers anecdotal insider knowledge on the process of production for the stage. Part of a wider cultural focus on self-help/self-improvement, such affordable volumes, pitched somewhere between manuals, handbooks and autobiographical works, offered a different kind of inexpensive, democratized, ‘at-home’ and selfmotivated ‘education’. With self-improvement and professional or social mobility

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FIGURE 2.1

From How to Run a Picture Theatre, 1910

at their core, they were often aimed at an imagined ‘public’ interested in the working life and labour of an actor or indeed, in how to become one themselves. Written by journalists and critics as well as experienced performers and producers, these works were predicated on potential engagements between those ‘in the know’ and those wanting some form of extended access to and participation in the industry. The product of a performance culture in which the industries were concerned with re-configuring social function and status, as well as artistic products, these publications represented a different form of consumption. Like other self-help books, they were frequently underpinned by notions of character or personality: the idea that one could make oneself into something or even somebody else (Susman 2003 [1973]: 277). Self-formation also offered social mobility in a changing and challenging employment market, especially for the lower middle classes. Thus, Mills and Boon published numerous ‘Companions’ to professional and leisurebased activities in the 1910s, amongst which two related to performance by Cecil Armstrong, who worked as a play reader for West End managements: The Actor’s Companion and The Dramatic Author’s Companion in 1912 (Armstrong, 1912a and 1912b). Typical of like publications, his advisory digest is divided into chapters on ‘Why go on the stage?’; ‘The difficult art of acting’; ‘On tour’; ‘On make-up and dress’; amateurs; critics; and the ‘Stage as a profession’. He offers advice on how to conduct oneself, or how to behave in order to find employment in the theatre.

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Armstrong focuses on training and looking after the voice as well as proffering such shrewd recommendations as, it ‘is surely better to act consciously than unconsciously; but when you are acting, act, do not just look as if you are doing it’ (Armstrong, 1912a: 125). Stage favourite Seymour Hicks’s Acting: A Book for Amateurs (Hicks, 1931) shares similar thematic divisions with Armstrong’s, but places more emphasis on character, rehearsals and elocution. Like a number of other ‘how-to’ books on the subject, he offers a list of Don’ts: most of these are aimed, one suspects, at producing laughter – thus, ‘Don’t employ a press agent, or you will be made to appear even more ridiculous than you are’ (ibid.: 200). Also included is a detailed glossary of technical language or ‘the abbreviations used by professionals for stagehands’ (ibid.: 162–166). There is a broadly shared content across such publications, although each is heavily nuanced, as is Hicks’s by the public persona and appeal of the author as practitioner and celebrity. Other books on film-related labour produced during the period focus on employability and professional practice. These are less about how to do something, and more on how to convince others either that you can do it or that indeed, you have already done it. Terry Bailey’s recent work on photoplay manuals from the period points to a similarity in content and approach, but also to the fact that, playing into modernism’s penchant for the ‘new’ epitomized by cinema, these legitimated the ‘new art’ as well as appealing to a ‘target audience’ of ‘non-professionals’ (Bailey, 2014: 214). Many of the ‘how-to’ books on acting for cinema were written by critics and reporters, not performers. The second in the series Cinema: Practical Course in Cinema Acting in Ten Complete Lessons, for example, purports to be by Charlie Chaplin, but is in fact a deeply thoughtful analysis of Chaplin’s technique by his English publicist Elsie Codd. She details for the reader what it is that Chaplin does, not how he does it. As insightful as it is, her analysis that ‘Chaplin’s art is so unique because it is the concealment of art’ (Chaplin, 1919: 1) advocates little by way of advice on ‘how-to act’ promised in a series of practical ‘courses’ on cinema acting. Codd writes as an informed critical analyst from outside of a process of doing or making. Similarly, Lilian Bamburg, critic for the Era and Jewish World, produced Film Acting as a Career in 1929, as part of the Foulsham’s Utility Library Series. Mostly dealing with the history of the film industry, ‘How talkies are made’, ‘How to secure a job’ and the geography and feel of the studio, Bamburg is half way through her book before mentioning voice, deportment or ‘hints upon acting’ (Bamburg 1929). Published in the same series as Mary Woodman’s Amusements for Invalids, and Erroll Sherson’s 200 Ways of Cooking Fish (ibid.: 6), the book draws to an end with a chapter titled simply ‘Don’t!’, a glossary of technical terms and some helpful tips on how to write a scenario (ibid.: 121). Bamburg’s recommendation is that the screen actor needs ‘personal charm and training’ which they can display to the many film studios and dramatic and theatrical agents she lists in the centre of the book. John Emerson and Anita Loos’ Breaking into the Movies shares with Bamburg’s later volume an exploration of the field of employment: the jobs; make-up; dress codes; and salaries. Those wishing to ‘break into the movies’ are offered multiple avenues of employment, even though the book is written by a screen writer (Emerson and Loos, 1921).89 While critic and sometime playwright St John

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Ervine suggested, ‘it was only people with a charwoman’s mind went to the cinema,’90 interest in cinema’s potential employment possibilities was widespread. Critics, reporters and producers were given free rein in publications that promised potential access for all ordinary citizens, to a profession that appeared unattainable. Such publications rarely, however, detailed acting technique: this was more the domain of actors. Whilst the technical or theoretical language for understanding the ‘science’ of acting as an art form was being developed elsewhere in Europe, British inter-war actors nevertheless display a remarkable sense of tacit and embodied knowledge, which as authors of the ‘how-to’ genre, they commit to passing on to the reader. Thus, Violet Hopson, in her much quoted Cinema: Practical Course in Cinema Acting, Lesson Nine (Hopson, 1919 and see Gledhill, 2007 and O’Rourke, 2014), proposes would-be film actors observe those around them in order to be able to replicate different attitudes and behaviours: she calls this ‘kinemavation’ – a film version of the act of observation (Hopson, 1919: 23). She also insists that study, practice and preparation are the key to successful and continued employment, and places great emphasis on imagination and ‘acting out’. While in her section on ‘How to help yourself’ she insists that, ‘although twin arts, none in practice could be more dissimilar’ than screen and stage acting, the advice and exercises she includes are remarkably Stanislavskian (ibid.: 17); for example, the breaking down of emotional responses to reading a letter, here into a sequence of facial signifiers (ibid.: 20–22). Hopson creates the components for an active analysis of text in order to achieve what Leopold Wagner called in 1915, ‘being able to portray all kinds of emotion without the slightest aid of speech’ (Wagner, 1915: 12). Agnes Platt, author of Practical Hints on Acting for the Cinema (Platt, 1921a),91 and Fred Dangerfield, editor of Picture and Picturegoer (previously the editor of both The Stage Souvenir and The Playgoer) and author of How to Become a Film Artiste: The Art of Photo-play Acting in 1921, advise practical exercises – such as creating emotional responses in ‘mirror rehearsals’ on a daily basis – which would not be out of place in the daily practice of a stage actor. Each insists, however, that stage and screen acting are demonstrably different. Players who forsake the legitimate stage for the screen usually make good film actors when they do so whole heartedly, but between the two arts there is a difference as wide apart as the poles. (Dangerfield, 1921: 35) That stage and cinema were ‘as wide apart as the poles’ was less the case for those working across both. Agnes Platt was perhaps more interesting as an author for the ‘how-to’ audience. She trained as an actress under Herman Vezin – as she notes frequently in her Practical Hints on Training for the Stage (1921b) – and worked as a theatre manager as well as dramatic critic. The book offers a potpourri of observation and detailed tips on how to manage difficult professional tasks or situations, with recurrent reflections on her own experiences as actress and producer. Here, her professional provenance comes from stage not film work, but many of her suggestions for film acting are articulated as diametrically opposed to those for the stage. Platt proposes

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that, ‘an actors’ intelligence shows in the way he takes his breath’ (ibid.: 126), or that ‘we use the whole of our stage and we use it naturally’ (ibid.: 138), but also claims that film acting, with its ‘life size movements’, and its aim ‘to look natural’, requires ‘lip play’ to be as ‘quiet as can conveniently be managed’ (Platt 1921a: 24–25). Film actors are required to calibrate movement in a different register, thus, Movement is slower than it is on stage, and that elasticity which in stage parlance we call ‘being on wires’, and reckon as a virtue because it is so magnetic, will photo on the cinema as if the actor were a cork bobbing up and down on a stormy sea without rhyme or reason. (ibid.) Like Dangerfield, Platt is concerned that the commands of each medium necessitate a significantly altered set of skills, rather than a refinement or re-shaping of the same ones. She notes the different significance of pace, movement, the relationship between rehearsal and a fixed set of actions, the subsequent lack of room for spontaneity because of the cost of shooting film and so on, but later concedes that training for ‘facial expression’ is similar for stage and screen. Platt also refers to differences of scale and register when talking about acting for film and stage: she concludes that they are different enough for her to have written a book on each, published in the same year. Cinema required a re-examination of what acting is and how it functions, but the emphasis in such publications is on how the context of film alters what is required of the actor. In reality, however, professional stage actors as a group were far more flexible in the application of their skills than this perceived division suggests. In 1933, St John Ervine complained that the anti-theatricality of the naturalist movement now meant ‘actors and actresses behaved on stage as if they were in their own homes. Acting, indeed seemed as if it would disappear altogether, and be replaced by behaving’ (Ervine, 1933: 212–213). Whilst ‘how-to’ books for film actors frequently encouraged the simple study and mimicry of behaviour, stage actors tended to disagree – acting was something that had to be learnt and practised, but certain aptitudes were required in the first place. For Lena Ashwell in her ‘handbook’ volume The Stage, ‘charm and attraction’ (Ashwell, 1929: 71) were useless unless accompanied by ‘a good voice, control over movement, a good memory, an iron will, sensitiveness, and a reasonable appearance’ (ibid.: 59). Similarly, seasoned actress Constance Benson, founder of her own drama school in 1919, produced the pragmatic One Hundred Practical Hints for the Amateur in 1930. Here there is no philosophy about Gerald du Maurier’s ‘art disguising art’, a phrase used in response to St John Ervine’s accusation that actors were generally being paid to be themselves (Sanderson, 1984: 189). Rather, Benson makes it clear that the would-be performer has to work extremely hard in order to appear to be someone else. Self-conscious awareness of how one behaves and knowledge of how one needs to mould and re-shape daily habits to the requirements of a role is vital. She offers advice on embraces, fear, inaudibility and speech, writing as an actress and pedagogue resigned to her negative observations of behaviour, born of many years working with actors and advising amateurs. Benson proposes, for example,

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‘Fingers: Hold the fingers loosely, and slightly divided. Nothing is uglier than to see the fingers looking like a bunch of bananas’ (Benson, 1930: 19). Her advice to the ‘crawling actor’ is also pragmatic: ‘a “crawling” actor’, is ‘a person who goes from one piece of furniture to another, holding on for a kind of moral support’. She suggests, ‘Beware of this. Get yourself accustomed to move without touching anything or holding anything in your hand, or grasping your cloak or your dress’ (ibid.: 17). Benson is clear: acting well requires techniques, learn them, practise them, and put them into action on stage. Assuming the reader is genuinely an amateur who wants to act more like a professional rather than be one, there is no technical glossary or list of agents: the book, available for 1s and 3d, is simply an attempt to articulate the key ‘elements of acting’ as she calls them (ibid.: 55). For Benson, by now in her sixties, if amateurs wish to spend their time playing at being someone else, then they need to know how to do it like the professionals. The publications explored above were part of a cultural cycle of commodified selfformation offered within the frame of performance cultures. Many of them tapped into other shared models for self-improvement, the need to observe the environment in which you want to operate, the use of constructed or self-consciously moulded appropriate ‘behaviour’, and an understanding of the employment frameworks for professionalization. Increased leisure time provided enhanced opportunities to participate in performance, both as consumers and as aspirant ‘doers’: sometimes this is offered as a potential for mobility from one social world to another, from one place of citizenship to another, often through learning the skills and the vocabulary to selfimprove, so as to play at being someone else.

Locating citizenship: London as a dramatic place of citizenship In drawing this chapter to a close, I now shift my focus towards the ways in which citizenship and a sense of belonging were mediated in plays and performances which located London as a special place, in which modes of citizenship might be imagined, formed and played out. As a fast-growing urban centre, London epitomized both the possibility of social inclusion and, conversely, exclusion, as the next chapter goes on to explore. I went to London. We had a guaranteed run of eight weeks, but we continued to play for three years […] Apart from the fact that London is the Mecca of the profession […] most of my best friends and all of my relations are Londoners. (Gill, 1938: 244) I can only find scope in London. Everybody who is anybody goes to London. Must! London’s the magnet that draws – steel! Always did! Always will! I’ve got to have London. She’s marvellous, London is! She’s astounding! […] And she’s waiting for me. Waiting! (Bennett and Knoblock, 1924: 26)

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For Holston and Appadurai, ‘cities remain the strategic arena for the development of citizenship’ (Holston and Appadurai, 1999: 2), and within the broader framework of modernity, the search for the ‘self’ was reflected in the ways in which London was imagined and played out in performance cultures as a place of belonging, a place of citizenship. Maud Gill’s claim that London was ‘Mecca’ was to some extent no exaggeration: the larger component of the performance industries was concentrated in and around the city. A London engagement could transform one’s professional life as it did Gill’s when Eden Phillpotts’ The Farmer’s Wife transferred from Barry Jackson’s Birmingham Repertory theatre to an extended run in London, and she was subsequently cast in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1928 adaptation of the play. The fictional Blackshaw in Bennett and Knoblock’s less successful London Life (1924), has political ambitions that fatefully draw him to the metropolis: like many others of the era the play is full of references to the changing significance of London, as a real or imagined place, on the characters’ lives and identities as citizens. Performance cultures more generally provided an arena for the imaginative and somewhat introspective exploration of London and its role in the formation of citizens. Characterized by reinvention and by the belief that through the ‘exercise of imagination and intelligence, cities cursed by their slums and ugliness and dirt can be transformed into places of beauty and inspiration’ (Beard, 1928: 727), modern London was, in theory, being reconstructed for specific consumers of city culture created by modernity. The ‘slums’ were cleared from the centre and suburbs developed on the outskirts. Debates on the reconstruction of key areas of central London were driven by ideological and economic tensions, and by ‘competing visions of English society, economy and culture’ (Rappaport, 2002: 95). The debate was re-focused towards the end of the Edwardian period for three main reasons: changes in architectural taste, a weakened aristocracy and the increased power base of the commercial classes whose demands had to be explicitly accounted for in planning (ibid.: 105). The scale of the re-building of central London ‘permitted the symbolic incorporation of political and social values’ (Schubert and Sutcliffe, 1996: 115): the late nineteenth-century policy of residential decentralisation’ (ibid.: 118), cleared the way for the materialization of a new vision of London, and a new vision of potential citizenship, which embodied its status as the centre of the Empire. Performance cultures played a role in this process. The working classes were moved out of areas of commerce and replaced by commercial buildings, and in the case of the Coliseum (1904) in St Martin’s Lane and the new Gaiety, Waldorf and Aldwych (1905), new theatres built on land that had undergone slum clearance.92 With a predominance of neo-classical architectural design, London was modernized with an ‘increasingly imperialistic’ appearance and renewing theatres was very much part of this agenda. Similarly, early cinema found a central business hub around the corner from St Martin’s Lane, in Cecil Court, once renowned slum buildings owned by Lord Salisbury – Prime Minister between 1886 and 1892 – rebuilt in the mid-1890s with an eye to their commercial potential. In terms of place, then, this area of London’s performance cultures had challenging social relations and what Doreen Massey would call ‘felt dislocations’ between its ‘past and

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present’ (Massey, 1995: 182). London’s relationship with its citizens in real, fictional and theatrical terms was in a constant state of renegotiation. Theatre, in particular, played a role in using a fictionalized London to explore what Holston and Appadurai describe as ‘the tumult of citizenship’, and indeed often represented London as a site ‘through which we may rethink citizenship’ itself (Holston and Appadurai, 1999: 2–16). Lists of plays, sketches and revues built around the geography of London as a place producing particular experiences for its citizens, include London’s Curse (1900); The London Actress (1902); Whitestone’s Londoners (1903); London Night Hawks (1909); Pigott’s London Voices (1915); Ruipke’s London Docks (1922); Pecorini’s London to Baghdad (1921); and London’s Rhapsody (1937).93 Ronald Jeans and Noël Coward’s London Calling (1923) and Norman Lee’s The London Revue (1925) both attempted to ‘script’ modern London for a post-war generation of its citizens. The more successful London Calling, produced by Revue veteran André Charlot, was constructed around a series of ‘calls’ as sketches, songs or both: these were recycled for later productions.94 Many of these were predicated on self-referential commentaries, or critiques of current cultural fashions and trends, playing on the knowingness of the audience as well as on the marketability of forms of ironic nostalgia. Thus ‘The Swiss Family Whittlebot’, the twenty-first of the two dozen ‘calls’ in the original, features Miss Hernia Whittlebot and her brothers Sago and Gob, in a ‘Short Exposition of Modern Art’ (see Figure 2.2). Dressed in ‘undraped dyed sacking […] a necklace of uncut amber in unconventional shapes’, and a ‘gold band […] from which hang a little clump of

FIGURE 2.2

‘The Swiss Family Whittlebot’, from Nöel Coward and André Charlot’s London Calling, 1923 (author unknown)

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Bacchanalian fruit below each ear’ (Coward, 1931: 86), Hernia holds court – with her equally oddly dressed brothers – on life which ‘is essentially a curve, and Art an oblong within that curve’: she attempts to prove ‘the inevitable Truth in Rhythmic Colour Poetry’. The sketch ends with Hernia’s rendition of ‘The Lower Classes’ where she has ‘endeavoured to portray the bottomless hostility of the Labour party towards themselves and everybody else, written whilst in a Lighthouse’. Reciting how ‘Street hawkers cry apathetically […] Freedom from all this shrieking vortex/ Chimneys and tramcars and the blackened branches/Of superfluous antagonism’, then the theatre manager orders the orchestra to play over her voice so as to get the Whittlebots offstage and make way for the next act (ibid.: 86–89). Alongside other Charlot-produced sketches, ‘Call 21’ both mocks the avant-garde and embraces it as worthy material for the stage. Whilst London Calling offers thinly disguised critiques of London’s various citizens – the Whittlebots are burlesques of Edith Sitwell and her brothers – largely within the performance registers of song and dance, Norman Lee’s less successful The London Revue in 192595 was more directly shaped by London’s actual geography. It was built on the idea of a tour of London, from its opening sketch, ‘We’ll Show you the Treasures of London’, to ‘The Hammersmith Broadway Blues’, ‘The Italian Club, Soho’ starring screen favourite, Pearl White (see Figure 2.3),96 and ending with ‘The London Follies’, a reference to H. G. Pélissier’s company mentioned earlier. For one reviewer, the revue was ‘gloriously insular’ and the ‘visiting stranger, eager to know this London he has heard about […] will find it more instructive than a library of guide-books’.97 With its ‘almost too realistic’ depiction of Piccadilly Circus in the ‘very small hours’, The London Revue was seen as having as its motive the premise ‘that the Londoner does not know his London […] and the entertainment develops to educate the average citizen […] his native place that the Londoner has heard of but may not have seen’.98 J. M. Barrie famously used ‘real’, known Edwardian London – ‘a rather depressed street in Bloomsbury’ and ‘Loam House in Mayfair’ – as springboards for the creation of imagined island landscapes in which to explore childhood and belonging in Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up, and the complexities of the British class system in The Admirable Crichton (Barrie, 1936 [1928]: 17 and 161).99 In contrast, Ambient and Thompson created an utopian imagined world as a conceptual framework for critiquing ‘real’ London in the long-running musical play The Arcadians (1909), a surprise but welcome hit for its producer who had invested some £12,000 in improving the Shaftesbury Theatre pre-production (Courtneidge, 1930: 207).100 Here, the Serpent reports to a group of Arcadians – singing, dancing and living close to nature in pastoral bliss – about his journey to a ‘land peopled by savages […] they call them – the English. They crowd together on a place called London, and live in cages […] of brick and stone’ (Ambient and Thompson, 1909: 4). Londoners live in smog, cannot tell the truth, engage in commerce, drink alcohol, experience jealousy – all aspects of City life unfamiliar to the Arcadians. When Time brings them Smith from London, they try to convert him to their way of life and then ask Time to take them to London to offer the same service to its inhabitants. They are taken to Askwood Races – a thinly disguised Ascot – where they meet the

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FIGURE 2.3

Programme for The London Revue, with guest appearance by Pearl White, 1925 (V & A Theatre and Performance Collection)

‘smart set’, the ‘pick of Piccadilly’ who are, as the Ladies sing. ‘in Debrett/And also deep in debt’ (ibid.: 15). The play progresses with gags based on mistaken identity, double entendre, in-jokes about racing, class, commerce, politics and daily life in London. Act III takes us to ‘The Arcadia’ restaurant with its very own bowers of blossom and ‘Well of Truth’. Smith, a charming chancer, is the toast of the town and claims ‘even if they “Suffragette” me, I don’t think they’ll ever get me’ – but in the end he falls down the well after telling a lie, only to be redeemed and re-united with his wife. The Arcadians set off back to their own land, feeling they have failed to convert Londoners to truth-telling, only to be told conversely that they should feel pleased that they have bought bickering factions together and shown them that, as long as it doesn’t get you into trouble, you should always tell the truth. For Tobias Becker, The Arcadians became a ‘quintessential Edwardian musical play’, but signs of the known socialist leanings of its authors and producer are difficult to find in the text (Becker, 2014: 82). The Arcadians can, however, be read as a critique of London culture at the end of the Edwardian period. Arcadia, the world from which Londoners learn to be better citizens, is built on comradeship and collective action, while London has given way to greed and deception, with commercial acumen and vying for the attention of the fashionable set as shared aspirations. London – which according to Time ‘belongs’ to the Americans in the

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summer months (Ambient and Thompson, 1909: 6) – shapes the behaviour of its citizens. Fantastical, but very much in the present, Arcadia offers a viable alternative to fast-moving, morally corrupt and ecologically polluted London. Pastoral, comic and dominated by memorable and therefore marketable songs as it is, Arcadia is also a script conditioned by London’s status in the project of modernity. A number of works using London as a contextual framing device also explore the professional lives of its citizens. John Van Druten’s 1931 London Wall, 101 for example, is set in a London law firm where the embattled female clerical staff either deal with emotionally unattainable men, or fend off the attentions of their professional superiors. Bennett and Knoblock’s London Life (1924), mentioned earlier, is more concerned with the specific contrast between London and provincial life and with the draw of London as the centre of political power.102 While London Life depicts the city and its places of power as built on an historical permanency of social and economic hierarchies, Noël Coward’s Cavalcade acknowledged the potential social mobility of its citizens in a spectacular patriotic piece spanning thirty years of British history in three parts and twenty-one scenes. Running in London for almost a year from 1931 to 1932, Cavalcade was generated by Coward’s desire to write a large-scale play that would give him ‘enough scope for intimate characterisations against a background of crowd scenes’ (Coward, 1979a [1932]: 2). Within the play’s complex visual and spatial use of crowd scenes, the audience are often placed in the position of watching action through a frame, like a camera lens: much of the action is played out without dialogue. In Part I: VI, real citizens watch imagined ones through the ‘row of high railings down stage […] the trees and shrubs and people and dogs’, as the mourning populace, all in black, walk slowly through Kensington Gardens after Queen Victoria’s death (ibid.: 154); or in Part II: IX we watch as a foggy railway station slowly fills with soldiers on route to the Front whilst their loved ones wave them goodbye in 1918: the visual field is dominated by the ticket barrier, the back of the train and then the crowds (ibid.: 186–187). Similarly, Part II: XI is set in Trafalgar Square where Jane threads her way through ‘dense crowds of cheering yelling people’, past a motor bus ‘festooned with people’, ‘taxis and a hansom cab, all equally burdened with screaming humanity’ (ibid.: 192). These scenes function as a sequence of moving images and one can sense the influence of film aesthetic on what Coward is trying to achieve with his crowds and the visual narratives of the play as whole. Part II: IV has a Parade running along the back, ‘about 10 feet above stage level’ where there is a constant flow of passers-by ‘leaning on the railing, looking down’ and watching the comings and goings on the ‘beach of a popular resort’ with its band, huts and deck chairs (ibid.: 170–171). Here the English at play, watch the staged anonymous crowd performing English citizens at play. In Cavalcade’s ‘sphere of communication’ (Balme, 2014: 47) the audience are consistently being drawn into empathy with the characters and, with heavy use of directional lighting, are reminded they are watching from the outside looking in. These mimed scenes have a filmic dream quality, but they also re-position the audience in empathic relation to those on stage through the visual. Generally viewed as patriotic, Cavalcade is perhaps not as clear cut. In terms of citizenship, here the sense of belonging is mediated by

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contrast between the two parts of the last scene. In the first, the lighting shifts our attention, faster and faster, to and from the macabre scenes being played out in silence on stage, as a Riley light sign spells out the news and the growing noise of ‘steam rivets, loud speakers, jazz bands, aeroplane propellers, etc.’ creates the ‘complete chaos’ of modernity. In the second part, the light has faded only to come up on a stage of tiers full of the cast who sing ‘God Save the King’ as the Union Jack flies over their heads. This is not so much a celebration of Empire as a celebration of the citizen’s ability to survive its downsides – war, loss and, as the song ‘Twentieth Century Blues’ suggests, the disaffection it engenders. Disaffection notwithstanding, Coward’s London is one which ultimately embraces its citizens, whatever their class, whatever their misfortunes or their histories. Performance cultures used representations of London as a means of exploring particular formations of familial, domestic and professional citizenship, then. These formations circulated and reiterated ‘situational proprieties’ for behaviour that helped to set up models of membership and belonging. Inclusive practices, including the founding of unions, clubs and professional associations to the development of educational practices were thus framed by and contributed to the market. Equally, however, regulations and associations were designed to exclude those who were seen as not belonging. The performance industries thus participated in the formation of collective frameworks for citizenship and professionalization which were by default exclusive. It is notable that this happened at a moment when new legal frameworks for social exclusion were symptomatic of cultural anxiety about social disintegration and foreign invasion. Debates about the foreigner or alien, the stranger and the outsider also reverberate through the performance industries of the era, as the next chapter goes on to explore.

Notes 1 This Act paved the way for changing the make-up of the House of Lords after the persistent blocking of Liberal reforms, including the People’s Budget of 1909/10 – constructed largely to reform the tax on high incomes and land revenue in order fund social welfare reform. 2 See http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1912/mar/27/movable-dwellings-bill-hl 3 See Legislation.gov.uk, for the Public Order Act of 1936, which redefined organized protest in a public space, and so changed the relationship between the police and organized crowds. 4 Previously needed on an ad hoc basis, passports were required under the British Nationality and Status Aliens Act of 1914. 5 See the various versions of the Marriage of British Subjects Act from 1915. 6 Report of the Joint Select Committee on Stage Plays (Censorship) (1909), London: HMSO, pp. xxv–xxvi. 7 George Bancroft et al., ‘The Censorship of Plays’, The Times, October 29, 1907, p. 15. 8 See ‘Theatre Managers and the Censorship Report’, The Times, January 7, 1910, p. 9. The material impact, with only some 30 out of 7,000 plays being banned from 1895 to the 1909 report, was not the only issue: playwrights were concerned with the impact of censorship on creativity and art. Managers felt censorship largely worked in their favour but more, that their theatres were assigned prestige by the fact that they held licence ‘from the Crown’. See Report from the Joint Select Committee of the House of Lords and the House of Commons on Stage Plays

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9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

(Censorship) 1909, London: HMSO, and Report from the Select Committee on Theatre and Places of Entertainment (1892), London: HMSO. Hannen Swaffer, open letter to the Bishop of London, 1934, (qtd in Nicholson, 2003: 300). The operational requirements of UK stage censorship facilitated the archive of plays and reports in the Lord Chamberlain Play Collection now at the British Library. While not all plays or sketches were submitted, and a number have been lost or misplaced, the archive is a unique historical resource. ‘Theatre Managers and the Censorship Report’, The Times, January 7, 1910, p. 9. ‘The Lord Chamberlain’s Solution’, The Era, January 13, 1912, p. 21. Editorial, ‘The Sketch Question’, The Era, April 22, 1905, p. 17. ‘The Double Licence: How the Theatrical Manager and the Music Hall Manager May Get it’, The Era, July 1, 1911, p. 23. ‘The Lord Chamberlain’s Solution’, The Era, January 13, 1912, p. 21. ‘Authors and Sketches’, The Era, April 8, 1911, p. 20. ‘Granville–Barker v Tivoli’, The Era, May 11, 19112, p. 26. ‘The Police Courts: Stage Plays in Music-Halls’, The Times, May 9, 1912, p. 2. Carson was the editor for the Stage and is listed in some years as the editor for The Stage Yearbook. The Stage Year Book contained a comprehensive index and detailed reports on annual legal cases and prosecutions initiated within the industry. Under the conditions of copyright of 1709 until the Copyright Act of 1911 came into effect, ownership of copyright could be registered at the Book of Registry of Copyrights and Assignments at the hall of the Stationers’ Company, London. Gertrude Jennings’ popular Five Birds in a Cage is a good example: with two matinee try-outs it then ran at the Haymarket alongside H. Vachell’s Quinneys for 286 performances from April 1915. ‘The Lord Chamberlain’s Solution’, The Era, January 13, 1912, p. 21. Its stated objective was the ‘regeneration of the race – spiritual – moral – physical’: the organization was chaired at the time by the Lord Bishop of Birmingham; vice presidents included George Cadbury and J. Ramsay MacDonald. Sunday Entertainments Act 1932, section 2(2). The Act also permitted ‘musical entertainment’ on Sundays – but not theatrical musicals. Annual accounts were produced and the fund not wound down until 1972. See the Finance (New Duties) Act 1916 and the Finance Act 1916. ‘Taxation of Amusements’, The Stage, February 3, 1916. Ibid. See Hansard, HC (series 5) vol. 83, col 847 (28 June 1916). See, for example, The Performer, January 15, 1914, p. 13, for an article against Sunday charity performances. Members could obtain 25 per cent off ‘the ordinary fare on railways and steam boat journeys when travelling in parties of five or more; they are also insured against accident and for loss or delay if luggage when travelling and receive legal advice and free medical assistance’ (Parker, 1909: 656). The Performer, March 29, 1906, p. 5. Ibid. The Performer, May 3, 1906, p. 105. The Variety Artistes’ Federation integrated with Equity in 1967. Barbor was a critic, journalist, playwright and novelist and along with Iris Tree and Aldous Huxley wrote for Edith Sitwell’s modernist magazine Wheels (Sitwell, 1921). See Dickinson and Street (1985) for more on associations and unions related to cinema. Bourchier was a producer, actor and a founding member of OUDS whilst at Oxford in the 1880s (see Wilson, 1951: 99). The Play Pictorial, founded in 1902, provided pictorial documentation of West End productions. Following various mergers, the editorship settled with B. W. Findon from 1906 almost until its merger with Theatre World in 1939.

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40 The Rehearsal Club, originally in Leicester Square, was founded by the Rev. J. F. Kitto in 1892. Without accommodation, members paid two shillings per quarter and could make use of the club kitchen. The club was set up to ‘offer a homelike centre to minor actresses, Corps de Ballet and chorus, where they can find much needed rest and relaxation in the hours between morning and evening performances’ (Doughan and Gordon, 2006: 47; Gordon and Doughan, 2001: 122; and Davis, 1991: 63). 41 See, for example, The Times, July 5, 1915, p. 9 and October 7, 1915, p. 5. 42 Kittie Carson also founded the Actors’ Orphanage in 1896, which became the Actors’ Orphanage Fund in 1912 and paid for a school and a home (see Katharine Cockin (2014) ‘Dutton, Emily Courtier (1862?–1919)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/57870). 43 The Times, May 22, 1912, p. 6. 44 See Three Arts Club, London: 1912 (available in the British Library), which gives a list of regulations and membership. 45 Ibid. 46 Dominion, 4: 1119, May 1911, p. 9. 47 Hindson puts this figure at 17s 6d per week (Hindson, 2016: 112), but the journal, Three Arts Club, London, 1912 puts the price higher at 19s 6d. 48 Three Arts Club, London: 1912, p. 8. 49 Three Arts Club Journal, December 1913 (the British Library has holdings from 1: 1 to 2: 10, January 1913 – October 1914). 50 ‘The Three Arts at Play’, The Times, December 21, 1911, p. 5 51 Whilst the headed note paper used by the Theatre Girls Club states that it was founded by Mrs Edward Compton in 1915, the V & A archive hub information suggests 1914, and other sources date its opening from 1918 (see http://www.radiolistings.co. uk/programmes/t/th/theatre_girls_club__the.html). It opened at 5 Little Portland Street originally, but by 1917 had re-located to its permanent home at 59 Greek Street, W1 (see report on fee increases which claims in April 1918 that the club had been in Greek Street for a year, The Times, April 4, 1918, p. 3). 52 From a theatrical family, she also married into a well-known theatrical dynasty. Her husband Edward Compton, himself the son of an actor, founded the Compton Comedy Company, which toured throughout Britain from the 1880s into the early decades of the twentieth century. 53 Letter to Virginia Compton from HQ Chaplain, Church Lad’s Brigade Cadets, November 13, 1916. The Theatre Girls Archive is located in Theatre Girls Club, V & A/GB 71/THM 211. 54 See Virginia Bateman Compton Letters/2984, Penn State University Special Collections. See also reports on fundraising events for the club, The Times, May 17, 1920, p. 11 and February 19, 1923, p. 10. 55 The Times, April 4, 1918, p. 3. 56 After the Theatre Girls Club closed in the early 1970s, the building became a hostel for homeless women, retaining its philanthropic identity for almost a century. The lease from the Soho Club Home was renewed in 1935 (‘News in Brief’, The Times, December 10, 1935, p. 13). 57 Anon, ‘Mothering Young Actresses: Miss Ellen Terry and Theatre Girls Club’, The Times, May 17, 1920, p. 11. 58 See minute books for 1933–36, Theatre Girls Club, V & A/GB 71/THM 211. 59 Ibid., entry for July 26, 1933. 60 Correspondence between Virginia Compton and Mrs Hughes, November 1936, V & A/GB 71/THM 211. 61 The Times, March 30, 1921, p. 6. 62 The Theatre Girls Club archive includes accounts books, committee papers and correspondence as well as the minute books: Theatre Girls Club, V & A/GB 71/THM 211. 63 Minute book entry for July 1933, Theatre Girls Club, V & A/GB 71/THM 211.

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64 Virginia Compton failed to persuade the owner, Lady Rhoda Carlisle, to sell them the building so they could save on annual costs. 65 The Times lists a series of bequests from the late 1930s to the late 1950s ranging from £50, to a seventh of the residue assets from £62,640 left by Miss Alice Jean Dollar of Portman Square in 1957 (The Times, October 22, 1957). 66 Correspondence with Lady Rhoda Carlisle requesting a reduction in rent, October 2, 1940, Theatre Girls Club, V & A/GB 71/THM 211. 67 The Theatre Girls Club had, according to reports on his death, inspired art patron Ralph H. Philipson to open a similar establishment in Paris: he was a supporter of the arts, however, rather than a worker within them. See The Times, December 11, 1928, p. 11. 68 Betty Boothroyd, ex-speaker of the UK House of Commons, lodged at the club in the mid-1940s when employed as a Tiller Girl at age 17. By this time, it had become ‘fusty’, a place where ‘time had stood still’, with Club items locked away and post-war shortages adding to the misery (Boothroyd, 2002: 34–35). 69 This is between £5,500 and £7,400 in today’s money. 70 ‘Dramatic training is being superintended by Miss Rosina Fillipi, a popular author and actress’, London Welshman, April 7, 1906, p. 7. 71 Constance Benson criticized Gielgud for being ‘mannered, effeminate and conceited’ and noted that he ‘walked like a cat with rickets’ (Croall, 2011: 34–35). 72 With an interesting analysis of acting in film, Fay Compton’s autobiography (Compton, 1926) was published a year before her School opened according to Sanderson, 1984. 73 Compton’s Studio was variously based at Red Lion Square, WC1, in Rodmarton Mews off Baker Street, with offices later at 63 Baker Street administrated by her elder sister and fellow actress Viola Compton, who worked as ‘Comptroller’. 74 Peter Roberts, ‘Knights in the Theatre 5: Confessions of a chameleon’, The Times, December 4, 1967, p. 11. 75 The description of a ‘ramshackle drill-hall’ is almost identical to Gielgud’s of Benson’s school. 76 Reported in The Stage, July 19, 1928, p. 15. 77 The Times, August 10, 1931, p. 8. Certificates of Fellowship were described in The Times as being given ‘to students who, in the opinion of the adjudicators, have attained a degree of efficiency entitling them to professional engagements’, The Times, July 15, 1935, p.12. 78 The Times, May 2, 1936, p. 12. 79 The Times, July 20, 1931, n.p. 80 The Times September 7, 1933, p. 21. 81 Alec Guinness studied there on a fee scholarship for seven months, without a maintenance grant, surviving on gifts of food from other members of the school. The school was, according to one report, held in high esteem by both the public and the profession. 82 Picture and Picturegoer, October 24, 1914 (qtd in Bryan, 2006: 148). 83 Pall Mall Gazette, January 27, 1920, p. 2. 84 The Stage, February 16, 1922 85 ‘Alleged Cinema School Frauds’, The Times, January 21, 1922, p. 7. 86 The Stage, February 16, 1922. 87 Illustrated Police News, August 25, 1921. 88 Fay Compton’s School is one of the exceptions. 89 Anita Loos became staff writer for D. W. Griffiths and is best known for her Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925). 90 Anon (1935) ‘Stage Actors and Film Work’ clipping December 14, 1935, Biographical File for Gerald du Maurier, Bristol Theatre Collection. 91 Agnes Platt also authored Practical Hints on Playwriting (1919). 92 Oswald Stoll bought up freehold buildings along St Martin’s Lane from 1902 to accommodate the three quarters of an acre site he needed for the Coliseum, opened in 1904 and offering comfort and luxury to a 2,000-plus audience capacity. The Waldorf (permanently the Strand from 1913, until renamed the Novello theatre in 2005), and

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93 94

95 96

97 98 99

100

101 102

the Aldwych (a joint venture in ownership by Charles Frohman and Seymour Hicks) were both part of the Kingsway-Aldwych development in the first decade of the twentieth century. London’s Curse (LCP 1900/8); The London Actress (LCP 1902/9); Londoners (LCP 1903/8); London’s Voices (LCP 1915/32); London Docks (LCP 1922/30) London to Baghdad (LCP 1921/22) and London’s Rhapsody (LCP 1937/36). London Calling ran at the Duke of York’s Theatre from September 1923 until May 1924 for over 300 performances. Charlot took elements of the revue along with elements from the earlier A to Z and Rats on tour in New York as Charlot’s London Revue during the 1923/24 season with Jack Buchanan, Gertrude Lawrence and Beatrice Lillie headlining (see Moore, 2005: 76–80). Norman Lee’s The London Revue was produced at the Lyceum and ran from September to October 1925. Known for her serial roles in The Perils of Pauline and The Exploits of Elaine during the 1910s, Pearl White made her last film before starring in The London Revue: some critics were unimpressed with her acting, preferring her ‘well-known agility in scaling walls and performing other feats of daring to the sound of pistol shots and melodramatic screams’, Daily Telegraph, September 3, 1925 and see also the Observer, September 6, 1925, in Production File, London Calling, V & A. Ibid. The Times, n.d., Production File, London Revue, V & A. Each had long production runs and numerous revivals. Peter Pan has reappeared in many adaptations from its inception and some late twentieth-century readings see it as a vehicle for the exploration of innocence as a ‘portion of adult desire’: the play can be read as a ‘return of the repressed’ (see Rose, 1993 [1984]: xii). Seeing it as a transgressive play, adapted and revived, often with the same cast members in key roles, on an annual basis from 1904, but not published until 1928, might elicit more complex social readings to add to those originating in the Freudian turn. The production ran for three years and over 800 performances in the West End and then toured extensively. It also became very popular with amateur dramatic and operatic groups. £12,000 in 1909 is worth between just under £1 million to £1.3 million in today’s money. The play ran for 170 performances from May 1931. Praised by critics, the play ran at Drury Lane from June to July 1924. Some critics felt that Basil Dean’s production was drowned by the scale of staging at Drury Lane, still one of the larger stages in the West End (see Production File, London Life (1924), V & A).

3 STRANGERS AND CULTURAL TRANSGRESSORS ON STAGE AND SCREEN: REPRESENTING THE OUTSIDER, THE FOREIGNER AND THE POOR

In a 1907 report on what is described as ‘London’s First Yiddish Music Hall’, the journalist for the Performer drew attention to the strangeness of the scene, a strangeness framed, however, by the familiar – bill posters, a twice-nightly programme system, the mention of sketches and potential prosecution, biograph pictures and customary comic songs. Yiddish is the foreign language placed on top of wellknown tunes, and as the band ‘keep[s] the excitement going’, so the audience are reported as being in a near state of excited hysteria: A large crowd of Germans, Russians, and Poles awaited the opening, which was announced in strange posters we could no more read than we could the advertisements of the Chinese theatre in San Francisco […] it is probable that the great success of Yiddish drama at the Mile End Pavilion induced certain Jewish gentlemen with the keen commercial instincts of their race to start this new and interesting venture. As London has more Jews than Jerusalem (in round numbers about 100,000) the success of the speculation was assured […] Artistes who object to fancy fixings ought to be satisfied here […] There are no balconies and the narrow stage is supported by iron props. There is no fancy drop curtain […] – nothing but a white sheet – There is a ‘big three’ orchestra – pianist, cornet player, and violinist – who shatter the air with melody and keep the excitement going. The twice-nightly system prevails, and the show consists of biograph pictures, two sketches timed to avoid prosecution and some comic songs in which familiar English tunes are wedded to Yiddish words. The red-hot sensation and draw is a series of living pictures called ‘The Nihilist’ showing an anarchistic gentleman at his bomb-making and throwing, and depicting his arrest, flogging and death on the icy road in Siberia, after which we see the revenge taken by his family on the governor of the city who is destroyed by a bomb. These pictures appeal tremendously to the audience (followed by a farce […]).1

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Nonchalant anti-Semitism underscores the proposal that the ‘keen commercial instincts’ of the Jewish gentlemen funding the venture acknowledge the appeal to ‘their London brethren’, who in turn outnumber the ‘Jews in Jerusalem’. The marker of ‘artistes who object to fancy fixings’ is used to situate this as a make-shift event, suitable for the living picture sequence of an anarchist, called here a ‘Nihilist’, executed for bomb-making, whose death sentence by the Governor is avenged by his family: a sketch of violent political dissent, much enjoyed by the ‘foreign’ audience. The tone of the report, an odd mixture of insipid xenophobia and patronizing ‘objective’ appraisal, is in keeping with other performance trade papers of the time. It re-instils the easy rhetoric of ‘them’ and ‘us’, where uninhibited prejudices are juxtaposed with declared neutrality and appreciation of entertainment. Debates about foreignness, about the ‘alien’ and the poor – often conflated into the image of the ‘other’, the stranger or the outsider – were widespread in the early decades of the twentieth century. They were also central to the theatrical and cinematic imagination of the time. Whilst the immediacy and intensity of debates mutate as the period progresses, performance cultures engaged with, and often played out, the many prevalent social anxieties generated by fear of immigration, transgression, concerns about degeneration and the growing numbers of urban poor. Such performative articulations were both reductive – the evil ‘stranger’ in our midst – and highly complex in the way that they frequently blurred the boundaries of the familiar. The performative iteration of the stranger was shaped by the cultural environment that produced the Aliens Act of 1905, in which unease about the growing levels of urban poor, of political dissent and social alienation produced by the modern city, prevailed. Films such as Hepworth’s The Aliens’ Invasion (1905) directed by Lewin Fitzhamon, which dramatized anxieties about unemployment and the influx of cheap foreign labour, or Percy Stow’s The Invaders (1909), with its alien raiders disguised as Jewish tailors and female tourists, were popular. Such films negotiated the fine line between respectability and belonging, social suspicion or estrangement. The performance industries developed complex relationships with ideas of the ‘stranger’, the ‘alien’ or the ‘outsider’, capitalizing on the strange attraction of such uncanny figures, in part, through making them familiar stereotypes. Writing in 1908, social theorist Georg Simmel suggested that the ‘stranger’ is defined by ‘spatial relations’, composed of two opposites: ‘wandering’ and ‘fixation’. The stranger creates a sense of ill ease precisely because they symbolize the possibility of an alternative, somewhere beyond the here and now of our experience. For Simmel, the stranger, is not […] the wanderer who comes today and goes tomorrow, but rather […] the person who comes today and stays tomorrow. He is fixed within a particular group […] his position in this group is determined […] by the fact that he has not belonged to it from the beginning, that he imports qualities into it, which do not and cannot stem from the group itself […] to be a stranger […] is a specific form of interaction. (Simmel, 1950 [1908]: 402–407)

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Simmel’s notion that the stranger represented ‘a special form of interaction’ located them in a performative register. Indeed, the stranger was often identified through their performance: appearance and behaviour was a primary indicator of identity. Strangers are recognizably different from and yet operating amongst the mass, the stranger is then the ‘them’ to our ‘us’. Indeed Simmel, in both his theories of the stranger and of the poor, as this chapter goes on to explore, captured the contradictory experience of estrangement that both shaped modernity and was shaped by it. Here the sense of belonging, as in the description of the night in the Yiddish theatre, can only be defined by the sense of ‘un’ belonging. Whilst, according to Lee, the ‘English were not known as great lovers of foreigners […] especially in this the heyday of imperialism’ (Lee, 1980: 107), historian James Vernon suggests that by the early decades of the twentieth century, Britain had in fact become a ‘society of strangers,’ (Vernon, 2014: xi). It was, as Simmel also implied, the ‘new social condition of modernity’ to live not just with, but ‘amongst’ strangers (ibid.: 13), where the enhanced mobility of the urban population had created new forms of abstraction and estrangement in social life (ibid.: 7–11). Strangers, foreigners and the poor were popular subjects in works which were ultimately concerned with explorations of identity and belonging, in a fast-changing culture. Performance cultures of the era expanded through technological change as well as urbanization and thrived on abstraction and estrangement. They played with imagined manifestations of the familiar, the strange and the uncanny and reflected upon the prejudices they embodied, as well relying on both the established and the familiar.2 The 1905 Aliens Act was the first to create discretionary powers for the state in relation to immigration, separating out immigrants by class and economic status. Emanating from ‘wider currents of thought about race, eugenics, empire and national reconstruction’ (Pellew, 1989: 369), the 1905 Act was directly linked to anxieties about two particular demographics: the poor and the politicized. The manifestation of an exclusionary drive which shaped national understanding of who ‘belonged’ and who did not, the Act offered political asylum, but only on the unlikely basis that those fleeing persecution would have the paperwork to prove their status at hand (ibid.: 377). Some have suggested that the application of the terms of the Act, revealed only a ‘limited appetite for exclusion’ (Wray, 2006: 318–320). But amendments to the 1905 Act precipitated by the 1914–1918 war created more directly identified and targeted ‘enemy aliens’ and in 1919 placed further restrictions on employment rights for nonnationals in the aftermath of the war.3 The fear of Jewish immigration was one of the factors which fed into the formation of the Aliens Act (see Feldman, 2007). Settling in London’s already overcrowded East End, the Jewish community, which had been growing since the 1870s, was targeted as inward facing, seen as a homogenous mass, exploiting cheap sweated labour and engaging in radicalized or criminal behaviour. Such prejudices fed the activities of organizations like the British Brother’s League, founded in 1902, and which gathered some ‘45,000 East London signatures for their anti-Jewish manifesto’ (Bush, 1980: 147). Figures as to actual numbers of Jewish immigrants to the UK vary, but hover at around 150,000 between 1881 and 1914, in a London population which grew by over 1.5 million between 1891

Strangers and cultural transgressors 83

and 1911 to just over 7 million (Vernon, 2014: 20, and Feldman, 2011: 5). Vernon contextualizes immigration by reminding us that in ‘the decade before 1914, 1.7 million emigrants left Britain’ (Vernon, 2014: 25) and spread across the Empire, which by 1919, ‘stretched over a quarter of the globe and included almost a third of the world’s population’ (ibid.: 13): the Empire was built on migration and mobility. No more than 6.9 per cent of the total number of immigrant ‘traffic’ between 1906 and 1914 were ‘undesirables’ (Pellew, 1989: 383), defined by the 1905 Act as a ‘steerage passenger [in] […] a ship which brings to the United Kingdom more than twenty alien steerage passengers’.4 Steerage passengers held the cheapest tickets and were often crowded into unsanitary living quarters in the lower deck of the ship. ‘Undesirable immigrants’ had no visible means of economic support, a disability or illness, or were escaping a criminal charge in their home country.5 The law symbolized a cultural shift characterized by David Glover as ‘illiberal’, where ‘racial and class markers could not be disentangled’ (Glover, 2012: 4). Later, anti-Jewish sentiment manifested in populist social tracts such as Colonel A. H. Lane’s 1928 The Alien Menace, a vitriolic echo of former anxieties about the ‘hidden hand’ of international Jewish governmental and monetary power: this is a trope which also emerged in espionage dramas from the 1910s into the early 1920s (see Chapter 4). Lane claimed, amongst other things, that the British film industry, with the power to influence the ‘uneducated and uncivilized people’ who buy 7 million tickets to see films every week, was being infiltrated and controlled by ‘Alien Cinematograph “bosses”’ (Lane, 1934 [1928]: 76). He highlighted the connection between the ‘wellto-do’ founder members of the Film Society – Sidney Bernstein and Ivor Montagu in particular – left-wing propagandist films, and the proposed Jewish conspiracy of ownership of theatres, cinemas and newspapers in the 1920s. He provides lists of owners, co-directors and distributors with ‘foreign’ names – Bernstein, Becker, Blattner, Hyam, Levy, Mayer, Ostrer and so on – and connects them to the owners of American entertainment businesses as evidence of global spread. In a tone not entirely unfamiliar to us today, Lane also claimed the BBC had been infiltrated similarly by those who had made it ‘socialistic’ (ibid.: 80–84). Such fervent racist views were driven by irrational fears about the potential of strangers to undermine national identity and conservative ideology. ‘Specific forms of integration’, in Simmel’s terms, were both demanded and yet prohibited: other communities, such as the Chinese, were stereotyped as non-integrated, but then integration was frowned upon as creating undue influence and unwanted miscegenation.

Somewhere ‘over there’ on home stages: strangers in our midst The dramaturgical possibilities of the tension between the insider and the outsider, between what might be considered properly English and what might not, held audiences’ attention throughout the period. Thus, in his nostalgic Theatre to Music Hall, W. R. Titterton devotes a short chapter to the dangers of the ‘The Alien’: an ‘English’ form, the Music-Hall, must be kept within the realms of recognizable ‘Englishness’.

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There was a time […] when we stole our plots from abroad […] but the music hall remains […] our chiefest jewel […] we must deplore this inrush of foreign performers that threatens to swamp them […] much of the stuff imported for the Halls […] I object to merely because it is foreign […] some is rank poison in an English music hall. Most poisonous of all are the dances of naked lust: the cake-walk, the stomach dance, the Apache […] this is not the way that a Christian Englishman should dance (Titterton, 1912: 210–212) Titterton makes specific cultural choices about what this means in terms of performance, offering advice about the ‘true negro singer’ as a ‘dangerous fellow to be let loose in a hall’ (ibid.: 213), and likening female dancers and Japanese acrobats to insects and animals: cultural miscegenation will obliterate a recognizable performance form and its registers of Englishness. The irony here is that the Variety theatres, which began to dominate over the Music-Halls by the early decades of the 1900s, thrived on the marketability of foreign or, as we go on to see, seemingly foreign acts. Titterton’s concern here is with the proximity and potential of the foreign to disrupt our sense of nation. Writing on Orientalist performance in the opening decades of the twentieth century, Brian Singleton notes that such ‘proximity’ of the so-called foreign, often served the function of defining and reaffirming nationhood: what belongs is defined by what does not (Singleton, 2004). The exploitation of the imagined other as dramatic subject or theatrical spectacle, epitomized in a number of performer/producers Oscar Asche and Lily Brayton’s hit productions, was neither confined to one performative form, nor singularly based on racist assumptions. While some practitioners strove for authenticity in terms of representation of the ‘other’, such authenticity was not always based on detailed cultural research. ‘Over there’ in fact provided a means to critique the local, the ‘over here’. As noted above, notions of authenticity operated within the realms of the recognizable and the familiar, as much as those of the imagined ‘other’. Touring productions extended both the market potential and the reach of British theatrical culture abroad (see Balme, 2019; Kelly, 2010; Singleton 2004; and Reeve, 1952). Equally, the circulation at home of acts scouted from overseas was built into the marketing strategy for Variety producers such as Alfred Butt by the 1910s. Often facilitating play between the authentic and the imagined foreign, such acts expanded the geographic origins of what was on offer, and like Empire exhibitions and exotic consumer goods from overseas, effectively ‘bought the Empire home’ in bite-size encounters. Many such acts were constructed around the marketability of the idea of the stranger, the ‘exotic’ or foreign other. Acts frequently advertised in The Performer, such as, for example, ‘Ta-I-Ko the illusionist assisted by Oksuma’ or ‘Chief Cheechako and his two squaws’, were pitched as ‘novelty’ rather than authentic: sold as versions of, rather than imitations of, the real thing. Others, like ‘The Imperial Manchu Troupe’ which included ‘Chang […] the only genuine Chinese Comedian’, and the ‘Fuji Family of Japanese Acrobats’, were billed as ‘genuine’, ‘original’ and distinctive.6 While authenticity and originality became twin concerns in the marketing of ‘foreign’ performance in

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the 1910s, the performance of authenticity was also understood to be just that, a performance. Oscar Asche, for example, gleefully notes the ‘Eastern Supers’ were wearing their street boots and had brown faces and white necks in Reinhardt’s much lauded production of Sumurûn (Asche, 1929: 197). Based on The Arabian Nights, excerpts from the production had held audiences ‘spellbound’ at Stoll’s Coliseum in 1911 (Styan, 1982: 28).7 In pitting the visual against the literary – and in his terms, low culture against high culture – producer and critic Frank Vernon even suggested Sumurûn created a ‘wave of stage orientalism and decoratorum’, which he thought more appropriate for the Music-Hall: such decorative acts were not the stuff of the serious theatre (Vernon, 1924: 71). The ‘Orient’ was somewhere ‘over there’, before modernization, before the ‘Empire’, in a time and place, as Singleton also notes, beyond the civil and political unrest which characterized the 1900s and beyond the First World War into the 1920s, when such lavish productions became less dominant. The success of Orientalist productions depended on a combination of spectacle and ‘escapist fantasies of the Orient’, fed by nostalgia for ‘pre-European’ history (Singleton, 2010: 354 and Chang, 2015). They relied on the simulation of an imagined place where the ‘stranger’ is someone who, in Simmel’s terms, is among us but not actually with us: someone who has a particular objectivity originating from ‘a particular structure composed of distance and nearness, indifference and involvement’ (Simmel, 1950 [1908]: 404). The performance of the embodied foreign ‘other’, and the active willingness to engage in the fantasies of otherness through spectacle and comedy underpinned numerous Variety and Revue productions, but reached a peak in producer/performers Oscar Asche and Lily Brayton’s work. Thus, Charlot’s 8d a Mile (1913) and Rats (1923)8 rely on parodies of what Singleton notes were thought of as the ‘unfamiliar customs and manners of oriental people’. Like Ashe’s productions, they used parody and comic accents in simulated Oriental settings as a means of examining and at times even critiquing English customs (see also Singleton, 2004: 64). While 8d a Mile contained sketches such as ‘Omar Khyam’ and ‘The Orient’ with its tableau ‘Flowers of Allah’, along with its ‘Persian Ballet’, this was less of an attempt at replication than an excuse to display the most exquisitely imagined modernist-Orientalist scenery and costumes by Eugene Ronsin and Paul Poiret: ornate material versions of the Orient made for fashionable display and visual consumption. Rats’ sketch ‘A Bit of Bother’ by Ronald Jeans,9 on the other hand, offers a ‘comparison in three scenes’ of global processes of conflict resolution for courting couples built on comic stereotypes of home, abroad, custom and language. Part 1 is set in London’s East End outside a pub; Part 2, in China with characters named ‘Long Chin’, ‘Li Lo’ and ‘Tin Tung’; while Part 3 takes place in ‘Walla-Walla Land’: this was Thibet in the original manuscript, but was altered in production, where specificity gave way to a more generalized and imagined country – somewhere ‘over there’.10 Each of the three scenes is built around a conflictual mating ritual. Drunken pub fights are juxtaposed with very formalized language from Part 1, to Part 2 where we find the characters on the terrace of a tea-garden in China. Here, Long Chin is trying to persuade Chinese damsel Li-Lo to accompany him to the cinema where there is ‘an ingenious and gravity removing contrivance of lantern and screen […] enabled to give an eye deceiving representation of moving objects’.11

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Long Chin’s flirtations are interrupted by Tin Tung, who objects to his making a move on his girlfriend. Here language distinguishes class and nationality in the two scenes depicting a range of ways in which men fight over the attention of a woman: whoever survives gets the girl, and on a count of ‘one’ Tin Tung simply pushes his rival over the wall.12 Part 3 is performed in pantomime with a full-scale ‘tribal’ battle for the affection of a ‘Thibetian damsel’. Warriors in feathers carrying spears play the tom-tom, ‘jigging up and down and uttering fierce cries’, then chase each other repeatedly round the back of the stage and back onto the stage until the music changes tempo and Warrior number one and team return stage front and perform their ‘wardance’ with the ‘heads’ of their enemies on their spears. Each of these scenes exploits stereotypes of class and racial otherness: the Cockney in an East End pub, a ‘traditional’ Chinese scene of courtship and a primitive display of the combative physicality of a nameless ‘native tribe’. ‘Over there’ is used to develop a narrative of implied shared experience – a simple flirtation interrupted. The slapstick humour, the linguistic gymnastics in Part 2 and the physical expressivity in Part 3 are layered over what are essentially classist, racist stereotypes. The cartoon-like quality of performance and the shared narrative makes the foreign less ‘real’ or threatening, but still reveals a cultural anxiety fixated on the stranger. Here the desire to locate the familiar inside the strange, as it were, further evokes Simmel’s note on the everyday presence of the stranger. In his analysis of the appeal of Oscar Ashe’s work, Singleton points to the significance of the ‘anxiety-desire’ dialectic at work in British culture at this point, where expansionist policies created a sense of supremacy, mixed with fear of the ‘other’ (Singleton, 2010: 354). In intimate Revue, this is combined with issues of class and a performance form heavily reliant on visual spectacle and immediacy. As Ronald Jeans suggests, ‘the intimate revue should give the audience at any time during the run the feeling that it was written last night’.13 Asche and Brayton’s earlier hit production of Knoblock’s Kismet in 191114 was more concerned with authenticity, albeit an imagined version of it in terms of the exotic foreign.15 With props and fabrics bought directly from Tunis, the production created a generalized feeling of the authentically ‘over there’. Once optioned by Asche, after having been turned down by a number of managements, the production was rehearsed and produced within six weeks (Knoblock, 1939: 147). Loosely based on The Arabian Nights, the action takes place over the course of a day and a night, within a range of seven public and private locations – from street to busy bazaar, to the courtyard of a poor house, a lavish mansion and a prison of the palace and back. The lead character Hajj, in his ‘beggar’s cloak of a hundred rags and patches’ (Knoblock, 1957: 25), tells us that his son was murdered and his wife abducted: all he has left in the world is his daughter of ‘fourteen summers’, by another wife. Hajj transforms from a pauper to a man of wealth, taking money from a number of men he claims he will help avenge themselves. He becomes a murderer, killing both the man who murdered his own son and took his wife, and the son that came out of this union. Whilst the Caliph shows leniency, in part because he is in love with Hajj’s daughter, Hajj is banished to Mecca and we last see him seated on the stone where we found him at the play’s opening: wrapped in his beggar’s cloak, where he slowly falls asleep and the play

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ends. We identify with Hajj as a ‘common man turned mercenary folk hero’ (Singleton, 2004: 66). Asche was a familiar Shakespearian actor for London audiences. He could play on their knowingness of his work and in turn they knew he was playing the poor stranger. Singleton also notes that the imagined Orient on stage was very much Asche’s own, useful in ‘unwittingly […] instructing the audience on the business of Empire’ (ibid.: 69). Here, then, the foreign ‘other’ is presented from the point of view of its poor: Hajj’s begging is his vocation as it was once his father’s: ‘and before him, his; and so on to the beginning without beginning’ (Knoblock, 1957: 29). He moves from rags to riches and back again in a play full of references to class and social division which resonated with audiences. Kismet ran at the Garrick from April 1911 for 330 performances, and after touring was revived in March 1914 at the Globe for a further 223 performances until the early months of the First World War. In the year of the coronation in June 1911, the ceremonial aspects of the production were juxtaposed with ‘authentic’ marketplace scenes, both equally complex in terms of mise en scène and attention to a simulation of cultural detail. Thus in Act II, we see the ‘whole of the city of Baghdad: the architecture is of the finest Arabian’ (ibid.: 77), there is a lifesized mummy case, armed guards, numerous slaves, and eight female musicians and dancers (ibid.: 79). The earlier market scene in The Suk (Bazaar Street) of the Tailors, depicts the daily public meeting place – ‘A narrow street, arched over, with shops on both sides’, the action and dialogue ‘occurs simultaneously, producing a harmonious picture rather than separate impressions’. Compositionally, the scene unfolds in sequence with a parade of street sellers entering the stage to advertise and sell their wares, which as Singleton notes, resonates with the imagined ‘authentic’ operation of the localized ‘business’ of Empire: In a shop, left, sits ZAYD […] he has with him a tiny little apprentice, who is here, there, and everywhere […] a somewhat older apprentice is unpacking bales of stuff […] It is early morning. The life of the street is wakening to the business of the day … shopkeepers are spreading out their wares […] FRUIT-GIRLS enter from the right and settle down in the left corner […] Their cry is ‘Osmani peaches, Osmani quinces, Sultani citrons! Limes!’ […] A CHINAMAN enters, followed by a little boy carrying a fowl […] An OLD MAN with a donkey appears laden with jars of olive oil […] THE CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD struts majestically though the Suk […] TWO COURTESANS appear in flimsy veils and gorgeous draperies […] Cries and movement everywhere. (ibid.: 36–38) The production’s heady combination of exquisite spectacle and imagined Orient – which substituted for Empire – was combined with star performers, familiar stage stereotypes and a text which pastiched the formal poetic language of a generalized foreign culture. Kismet caught the cultural zeitgeist with what Singleton calls its ‘mythologized behaviour’ (Singleton, 2004: 75) of the Oriental ‘other’, from somewhere ‘over there’, and ‘nothing other than England spectacularly clothing English anxieties and desire in orientalist fantasy’ (ibid.: 69 and see Figure 3.1).

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FIGURE 3.1

‘The Bazaar’ from Kismet, 1911 (author’s own collection)

The production found popularity with audiences beyond England and beyond the stage: Asche and Brayton starred in the forty-minute 1914 film version of the play produced by the Zenith Film Co.16 Key members of the cast of the American production starred in the Louis J. Gasnier film of 1920,17 which moves even further away from any notion of oriental authenticity in its costuming featuring the spectacle of high-end hybrid versions of Arabic dress and contemporary fashion displayed in modernist interiors.18

Making the stranger familiar: from The Children of the Ghetto to Chaplin’s The Immigrant Other representations of race were shaped more by anxieties about racial difference and, in the case of Chinese immigrant communities, the racial ‘other’ as monstrous (see Witchard, 2016 and 2014 and Chang 2015). Performance cultures often produced an ethnocentric reaction to what were perceived as, in Richard Kearney’s terms, the ‘excessive’ characteristics of alterity (Kearney, 2003: 41). Performance offers a particular kind of engagement with alterity: the thing we presume repellent is the very same thing that attracts our attention as an audience. I return to sinophobic representations of the imagined Chinese community later in this chapter, but now I turn to the depiction of racial and religious difference by Israel Zangwill: novelist, playwright,

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intellectual and activist, known for both his early Zionist affiliations and support for the suffrage movement and who, prior to the First World War, used the structural registers of melodrama to focus on issues of race. As Feldman and Bush have noted, the popular press played upon racial typologies in its discussions of Jewish life, yet the Jewish community as a whole – centred largely around London’s East End19 – had its own class hierarchies, its own range of ideological and political allegiances, and was as various in habit and lifestyle as any other socially defined group (Feldman, 2007 and 2011 and Bush, 1980). Inhabitants of the East End were already ‘other’ in middle-class narratives of the late nineteenth century (see, for example, Sims, 1889 and Moseley, 1920). The figure of the Jew, however, was a kind of ‘double other’. Zangwill’s adaptation of his hit novel Children of the Ghetto opened in London at the Adelphi in December 1899. The American producer was concerned to create an ‘authentic’ mise en scène of the ghetto in the London production and reportedly sacked the extras – ‘a bunch of rank cockneys […] [made] up to look like Jews’. He then took Zangwill to Petticoat Lane to recruit seventy-five ‘genuine’ Jewish extras (Nahshon, 2006: 101), creating what The Times reviewer called ‘a curious world to the gaze’, which he claimed would be successful because of the curiosity it fed. Much like the comment on the Yiddish Music-Hall that opened this chapter, the assumption was that the play would attract a Jewish audience.20 The play is built on a ‘world within a world’: its Ghetto market place in Act IV, has ‘people of all styles and dresses, from the very rich to the very poor […] a cake seller […] a butcher, a greengrocer, a second-hand clothes dealer, a showman, a trickster, a beggarwoman […] On the walls are Hebrew bills and theatrical posters’ (Zangwill in Nahshon, 2006: 186). Children of the Ghetto made use of both the familiar and the strange in an historical moment where even middle-class Jews, ‘felt the stigma of alien status’ (Rochelson 2008: 62).21 The Jewish press, as Nahshon notes, had a mixed response, some of which highlighted the class difference of the largely Jewish audience and inaccuracies in the presentation of ‘authentic’ Jewish life. Such concerns were less foregrounded by the time of the British production of Zangwill’s The Melting Pot, premiered in Washington in 1908, produced briefly by the Yiddish People’s Theatre in the UK in 1912, with a larger scale production in January 1914 by the Play Actor’s Society at the Royal Court Theatre, then in the West End from April of the same year for some 118 performances. The UK touring production was taken off following a request from the Foreign Office and discussion in Parliament in 1915, because of its graphic reference to Russian violence against the Jewish community.22 London reviews made reference to Zangwill’s political connections: many ‘notable’ people, including liberal politicians Lord Bryce and Lord Mersey, had attended the production in its early weeks.23 The Melting Pot elicited a mixed critical reaction: essentially a melodrama, the play is built on the premise that racial integration and religious assimilation are both possible and positive. The issue of miscegenation is not what ultimately separates the two romantic leads, David Quixano – RussianJewish immigrant and musical genius – and Vera Ravendal – gentile philanthropist. Rather, it is the discovery of her father’s involvement in the violent racial attack in which Quixano’s parents, family and village were obliterated in Russia. Zangwill

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based the plot in part on the Kishinev pogrom in 1903 (Nahshon, 2006: 227) where ‘rampaging mobs of laborers, and artisans’ were joined by police as they took the lives and destroyed the homes and businesses of the Jewish community in the town (Penkower, 2004: 188). President Roosevelt reportedly celebrated the play’s depiction of America as the new ‘melting pot’ of civilization. Zangwill, however, makes the point that in the US racial integration did not include African American communities: when the Baron notes the commonplace lynchings which take place in the US, he is told that these are ‘unofficial’: racial discrimination is sanctioned whereas religious-racial discrimination is not (Zangwill in Nahshon, 2006: 326). The Melting Pot’s villains are palpable: the Baron is unapologetic about his antiSemitism: vermin […] A burrowing swarm creeping and crawling everywhere […] They ruin our peasantry with their loans and their drink shops […] ruin our classes by monopolizing […] industries. (Zangwill in Nahshon, 2006: 325–326) David engages the Baron in religious debate, but the most extraordinary theatrical moment of the play is the point at which he graphically describes the massacre which Vera’s father, the Baron, commanded, creating a ‘river of blood’ between the two lovers as David describes the attack. You never saw that red flood bearing the mangled breasts of women and the splattered brains of babies […] My father flies in through the door […] we see that in that beloved mouth of song there is no longer a tongue – only blood […] we dash out through the back into the street. There the soldiers – […] I saw lying beside me a strange shapeless Something […] By the crimson doll in what seemed a hand I knew it must be little Miriam […] the mutilated mass which was all that remained of my sister, of my mother (ibid.: 348) Vera refuses to forgive her father, yet David insists they positively invest in their sense of the future and in their adopted nation as a crucible for all the races coming to America.24 The UK Jewish community did not react unanimously to the production, in part because of their differently nuanced relationship to the politics of class, and racial and religious ‘otherness’ in the run up to the First World War. Although rarely revived, the play was adapted to film for the popular US market in 1915.25 Possibly the most celebrated and familiar performance of the ‘alien’ figure at the time was Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp in the 1917 film The Immigrant. 26 Contemporary reviewers saw it as another opportunity for Chaplin’s clowning, showing ‘his most charming pranks’27 or performing his ‘eccentric acts’.28 More recent critiques, however, foreground Chaplin’s explicit engagement in forms of social commentary, albeit through the physicality of a Music-Hall comic and the figure of the Tramp as ‘an urban version of the disruptive outcast’ (Chambers, 2006: 106). Emigrating to the US

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in the 1910s, Chaplin was famously, by the end of 1917, on a contract of a million dollars a year, for producing films starring a figure who possessed little but the ragged clothes he wore. As Richard Carr has recently reminded us, he played ‘a pauper condemned to perpetual poverty’ (Carr, 2017: 67). James Agate, whose criticism crossed theatre and film, appreciated Chaplin’s appeal as more than that of a comic: ‘I do not laugh at Charlie till I cry. I laugh lest I cry.’ He acknowledged the complexity of Chaplin’s stagecraft and its influence on his film persona, noting the ‘most grotesque of his hazards is fraught with moral significance’ (Agate, 1921: 401). In The Immigrant, Chaplin’s Tramp arrives in America on a boat full of immigrant passengers who we meet on the crowded deck, heaving from side to side in the choppy sea. The Tramp gives his earnings from gambling to a young woman and her widowed mother, placing them, unseen, in her pocket. The mother’s life savings have just been stolen from her while she slept and one of the deckhands accuses the Tramp of pickpocketing. The girl then finds bank notes stuffed into her pocket and the Tramp’s accuser withdraws. The rest of the film sees the Tramp find money on the streets of New York, eat in a restaurant, lose the money, re-find the girl, and use the money an artist has given them to work for him to get married. The film proceeds through a series of visual gags – Chaplin’s Tramp is seemingly sea-sick, but in fact enjoying fishing off the side of the boat; he trips over and then repeatedly body surfs on one of the other passengers in the food hall; he eats beans – his New York restaurant meal – politely, one by one, then shovels them in piles onto a knife to eat in haste, and so on. The gags centre on food, money, or feature the Tramp getting one over on a marauding bully: the chief concerns of the poor stranger in a new country. The film builds on a series of visual statements about impoverished immigrants. All are huddled on deck in clothes which have the appearance of east European peasant origin; all appear to own only what they can carry, and all are packed together and cordoned off on deck at the point at which the Statue of Liberty is seen on the horizon. In a New York restaurant, the plight of the immigrant merges with the plight of the American poor: again, here the stranger becomes a familiar figure. Richard Carr notes the context of the film was the US entry into the First World War and the passing of a further Immigration Act restricting entry for specific categories of aliens (Carr, 2017: 65).29 As Colin Chambers suggests, Chaplin’s alien status in America provided the lens through which he, as the ‘outsider […] would create in the little Tramp another outsider who became the seminal film icon of the period’ (Chambers, 2006: 97). We see the harsh foreign world through the Tramp’s eyes. This is a direct social critique, not the exotic, timeless ‘over there’ of Kismet nor, as Carr notes, ‘the “nevernever” world of other Chaplinesque fiction’ (Carr, 2017: 65). Chaplin’s concern with the wider implications of class mobility and class division were politically attuned, in part because of his own impoverished childhood: he recognized the stark extremes of wealth and poverty in America (Korte, 2010: See also Chaplin 1966 and 1922). Whereas Orientalist productions such as Asche and Brayton’s presented the ‘other’ as distant and timeless, Zangwill and Chaplin’s interests map more readily onto Simmel’s idea of the stranger as an interactive agent, whose

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presence shapes modernity. Chaplin was often viewed by the critical establishment as a Variety artist ‘made good’30 and was critiqued for his populist appeal, just as film was often seen as a ‘lesser’ art aimed at the masses. With more than seventy Tramp films made, Chaplin was, however, an artist with ‘a discernible pattern of growing social engagement’ (Chambers, 2006: 98). It is hard to believe audiences did not appreciate the ‘social criticism and sympathy for the dispossessed’ embedded in his work (ibid.: 106), even if the Tramp was, as Barbara Korte proposes, essentially ‘marginal’, ‘nomadic’ and ‘socially ambiguous’ (Korte, 2010: 136–137). While less consistent than the sheer volume of Chaplin’s work, there were other explorations of poverty in performance cultures of the time. Unlike Chaplin’s Tramp, a figure built on the desire to make the strange familiar, many of these were generated by perceptions of the poor as a social problem and as a kind of theorized ‘stranger’ or ‘other’.

The poor as the strangers living amongst us: performances of poverty The stranger, like the poor and like sundry ‘inner enemies’, is an element of the group itself. His position as a full-fledged member involves both being outside and confronting it […] [a] synthesis of nearness and distance […] Strangers are not really conceived as individuals, but as strangers of a particular type. (Simmel, 1950 [1908], 402–407) In his 1908 essay ‘The Poor’, Georg Simmel aligns the poor with the stranger as both a particular social type and as a part of the mass (Simmel, 1965 [1908]). In a society built on a series of reciprocities – of rights, and moral and legal obligations – the needs of the poor are met either because of a belief in social affiliation, or because those with means invest in helping those without. He noted that ‘when the point of departure is the obligation of the giver, rather than the right of the recipient […] the poor disappear completely as legitimate subjects’ (ibid.: 120–121). On stage, this often translated to representations of the subjectivity of the poor actually eroding their individualized presence: the poor are drawn as social types with generalized life stories. Their position in performance cultures as both familiar and outsider critic, in Simmel’s terms, is thus arguably rarely as well formulated as it is in Chapin’s work. It was often those who, in Simmel’s terms in ‘The Poor’, were in the position of ‘giver’ who created representations of the poor on stage or on screen: the poor did not generally do so themselves. Instead the ‘poor’ on stage generally reflected existing anxieties about the proximities between security and precarity. In Gwen John’s 1912 Edge O’Dark, banned by the Lord Chamberlain’s office for its implications of rape or forced prostitution, the domestic scene and the male aggression operating within it are linked directly to the ‘otherness’ of the impoverished men from a Derbyshire village reliant on its colliery for employment. Gwen John’s depiction of the working poor here is built on stereotypes of ‘rough’ working men and the women who are their victims and without economic power. The characters are drawn as ‘other’ to the class of audience who would likely have seen the play – produced largely for the

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independent subscription theatre demographic.31 John’s is a cautionary tale, for an audience unlikely to have a direct connection with the experiences articulated in the play. Other plays depicted the poor in the context of Workhouse life. The best known of these is Lady Gregory’s The Workhouse Ward (Gregory, 1909) adapted from an earlier collaboration with Douglas Hyde, The Poor House, in 1903.32 Here, old men argue with each other while incarcerated, and engage in what Anthony Roche describes as an ‘ever mounting level of physicality and threatening abuse’ (Roche, 2004: 174). The poor are sketched as articulate and witty, but nevertheless coarse and without subtlety in their response to conflict. Margaret Wynne Nevinson’s In the Workhouse,33 and her Workhouse Characters and other Sketches of the Life of the Poor were generated in part by her political work and activism, and offer, along with some of Harold Chapin’s plays such as It’s the Poor that ’Elps the Poor (1913) and The Autocrat of the Coffee Stall (1911),34 what were well-meaning middle-class depictions of the poor, influenced by current debates on the social challenges of poverty. Here the poor are viewed as ‘other’ to an assumed middleclass norm. Whilst humorous and warm, even in the cause of highlighting a political debate, such representations were rather two-dimensional. A few plays of the period offer an attempt to understand poverty and its relation to the economy more generally. Unusually here, Gertrude E. Jennings’ farce The New Poor (1920) focuses on the plight of the three upper middle-class Arbuthnot siblings, left without money or life-skills let alone vocational aptitude when their father dies. Lodging with Mrs Buckle and her kindly daughter, Heather, Mrs Buckle suggests of the Arbuthnots, ‘What do they care? Them’s the sort that grinds the faces of the poor and laughs over it’ (Jennings, 1920b: 16). Eric, the only Arbuthnot sibling in employment – a city clerk bringing in £5 a week – points out they are far from being part of the ‘upper ten’ – the wealthiest top 10 per cent of the population: they now have their own faces ‘ground right down to the bone’ and are now indeed the ‘new poor’ (ibid.). As one of the ‘new rich’, Mrs Buckle – whose husband made his fortune during the war ‘making braces at Bradford’ – has more money than she can spend. As Eric tells Heather Buckle, ‘You’re the aristocracy now […] It’s just the turn of the wheel’ (ibid.: 23). Essentially a farce, Jennings’ play is built on the recognition of economic uncertainty and provides an analysis of the fluid nature of economic status, even for the middle classes, in a post-war world, whilst also poking fun at the middle-class sense of entitlement. More forthright in their analyses of the causes and experience of poverty are two earlier plays, interestingly also by women: Edith Lyttelton’s The Thumbscrew and Margaret Mack’s Unemployed, both of which draw on emergent theories of poverty and attempt to dramatize the reciprocal relationship between wealth and poverty. Other writers of the era also drew attention to the close proximity of the rich and newly visible urban poor in the metropolis. Ford Maddox Hueffer in his 1905, The Soul of London, for example, juxtaposed the ‘lounging and luxuriating men’ in the wealthy clubs along Hyde Park with the ‘recumbent forms’ hidden in the park itself: the idle rich and the ‘dun-coloured mass’ exist in a state of connectedness, even though neither ‘sees’ the other (Hueffer, 1911 [1905]: 141–142).

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Emergent theories on poverty from the early 1900s largely focused on formulating frameworks through which we might understand and manage it. For example, Philip Snowden’s The Living Wage, provided a detailed analysis of data, and promoted State intervention in the regulation of wages and improvements in living conditions (Snowden, 1912: 145). However, in places he presented the poor as their own worst enemies: ‘working class families greatly aggravate their poverty by the wasteful and unwise expenditure of […] insufficient means’ (ibid.: 44). Others understood poverty as integral to an economic system in which, as economist and politician Leo Chiozza Money proposed, the population was composed of ‘a great multitude of poor people, veneered with a thin layer of the comfortable and the rich’; with less than 10 per cent of the population earning around 50 per cent of the annual income (Chiozza Money, 1905: 41–43). In other words, of a population of 43 million, he estimated that some 38 million earned less than £160 per annum and so were not liable to pay tax.35 This boundary included professions in the lower middle-class trades: shopmen, lodginghouse keepers, trades clerks and so on. Chiozza Money’s figures were not universally accepted, but his ideas around labour, production and poverty were influential. Both he and Snowden believed that poverty ‘costs’ society. Similarly motivated by an anxiety about social cost, the commissioned Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration of 1904 navigated between two seemingly opposed views on the causes of poverty: living conditions or what was seen as the essential ‘character’ of the poor – often ‘wastrels who live by casual labour’ (Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, 1904: 12).36 Concerned with improving the welfare of the working poor and unemployed, the extensive report concluded that there was an urgent need for further data and for State intervention. Despite the Housing of the Working Class Acts from the 1890s – here the working class included ‘mechanics, artisans, and persons working at a trade’ – there had historically been too much inaction (Allan, 1916: 347). The concern to understand and eliminate, where possible, the economic instability which created large swathes of urban poor was, albeit infrequently, reflected in performance. Already noted for her 1908 play Warp and Woof about the predicament of dressmakers and upper-class ignorance of the human costs of the fashion industry (see Kaplan and Stowell, 1994 and Gale and Bush-Bailey, 2012), Edith Lyttelton’s The Thumbscrew dramatized the plight of piecemeal workers in the clothing trade. Here, Lyttelton explores the relationship between pay and profit and its role in creating a fine balance between a barely managed household and one destined for poverty. Performed by Edith Craig’s Pioneer Players in 1912 at the Little Theatre in London, in an ‘interesting little triple bill’,37 the play was reviewed as having ‘more importance as a tract than as a play’, with little reference to the wider implications of its detailed economic analysis of labour and commodity. Married to the M.P. Alfred Lyttelton, close friends with a number of the political and theatrical elite and a founder member of the campaign for a national theatre (see Chapter 1), Lyttelton was known for her activism around sweated labour.

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The Thumbscrew is set in a small impoverished room: ‘On one side of a garret is a family slaving at hook-and-eye carding: on the other, the lodger’s son dying of lead poisoning’.38 Here, Mrs Field and her stepdaughter Bernice have lodgers – Mrs Dengate and her nineteen-year old son Will, already poisoned with a work-related lung disease – ‘Potter’s rot’ – who cannot pay their rent. When conversation turns to whether or not the three young Field children would be better off in the Workhouse, Mrs Field points out their situation has ‘gone on bad to worse’, but the Fields ‘don’t go to the work’ouse’ and that Bernice’s grandfather was once a landowner (Lyttelton, 1911: 3–4). The scene is punctuated by discussions of working conditions and productivity and by the rhythm of work itself – the passing to and fro of the carding equipment and the intricate sewing of the hook and eye cards. When Bernice’s fiancé, Joe, arrives she ‘never leaves off her work for a moment’ (ibid.: 6). Joe tells her he is emigrating to Canada where ‘every man’s equal’, where they don’t ‘have no rich nor no poor’, then reminds Will of the socialist ideals being circulated by Bernard Shaw and Keir ‘Ardie’ (ibid.: 8–9). Will points out that the enemy is ‘competition’ and there follows a detailed discussion on the ‘starvation’ wages the family is required to survive on, sewing hooks and eyes to cards: We get nine pence a pack. ’Ow much does that come to in a week? BERNICE: Sometimes four shillin’ – sometimes four-and-six. I have made five with luck. JOE: O, ’ave you? – hours, I suppose, six to ten at night? […] and the kids – What do they make? BERNICE: It’s counted in with mine and mother’s […] she does better – never makes less nor six – often seven. JOE: Ten to eleven shillin’s a week. What’s yer rent? […] Eleven shillin’ a week at most; four shillin’ rent. BERNICE: Mrs Dengate’s supposed to pay two. […] BERNICE: JOE:

JOE:

[…] What it means is this: you’ve six to seven shillin’ a week for food and clothes and every blessed thing – and there’s five mouths to feed, and five bodies to dress, and ten legs an ten feet, and – (ibid.: 14)

The economic situation is worsened by the arrival of Mrs Muggle, stereotyped as the ‘plump Jewess’, a profiteering intermediary between the factory and home worker: she will bring equipment and collect finished work twice a day in her ‘motor van’ – a ‘large, untidy double perambulator’ (ibid.: 15). Mrs Muggle has ‘bought the work’ from the factory and offers them a lower rate of pay, noting that plenty will work in these conditions. The lodger, Mrs Dengate, is willing to undercut her landlady and is quick enough to take ‘the bread out of other people’s

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mouths’ (ibid.: 18). After agreeing that, if married, they can send money home from Canada, Bernice asks Joe to wait for her there while she helps her stepmother to support the children at home: he refuses and demands she return his gifts. Finally she agrees to Mrs Muggle’s terms, offering to take on the work of a dead neighbour for even less pay. Angry, Joe tells them they are weak to take on the work and ‘don’t deserve the vote, nor nothing else’ and the curtain ‘goes down on the whole family bent over their work’ once more (ibid.: 32). Lyttelton’s play is significant because of its unusually frank exposé on stage of the domestic conditions bought about by sweated labour. These are embedded in the gendered dilemma of familial duty and the failure of collective action. The further division of profit between worker and owner is represented by the ‘middle-man’ Mrs Muggle, coercing workers who are powerless to set pay rates in the cycle of supply and demand that controls their arduous forms of labour. The poor are given statistical presence, their strangeness as ‘other’ is given practical depth and their plight theatricalized in terms of human cost. Whilst there were anomalies in statistical figures on pauperism and vagrancy produced in the late nineteenth century, Rachel Vorspan notes that theories on the numbers of poor ‘emerged from every conceivable quarter, from politicians, philanthropists, organizations, trade unions, the press and the poor law hierarchy itself’(Vorspan, 1977: 64–65). These had more shared ‘attitudes and assumptions’ than differences in their ‘social and political orientation’ might imply (ibid.). Other historians draw our attention to the prevalence of participant and immersive observation during the era, where the poor were often presented as a victim group by the ‘incognito explorer’ – invariably middle-class, dressed as and temporarily living amongst the poor. Their observations about poverty were often seen as more authentic versions of poverty than statistic-driven narratives could provide (Freeman, 2001: 106). Observation, then, was a form of social practice creatively expressed in the performance of the ‘other’. Using such language to represent the poor as ‘human units’ (Higgs, 1904a: 7) or ‘classes of incapables’ (ibid.: 45), Mary Higgs, for example,39 was a pauper-impersonator and journalist extraordinaire, commenting on the prevalence of public attention given to the problem of unemployment. Like many before her, she divided vagrants and the poor into two distinct categories, the deserving and the undeserving: ‘The workless man is so constant a presence that we have become familiar with him’ (Higgs, 1904a: 13). This juxtaposition of the strange – the ‘not us’ – and the familiar – the living amongst us – of the deserving and the undeserving poor is the starting point for Margaret Mack’s 1909 play Unemployed. 40 The play was originally produced by the independent Incorporated Stage Society at the Aldwych theatre in 1909, but then became part of the repertoire for the 1909/10 season at Annie Horniman’s Gaiety Theatre in Manchester (see Carlson and Powell, 2004 and Pogson, 1952). Mack later wrote under her preferred name, Margaret Macnamara and continued her playwriting career into the 1920s (see John, 1995 and Merkin, 2000). An active member of the British Drama League, she was ‘an ardent believer that, “Nothing short of the Socialist Revolution is really worth working for”’ (John, 1995: 204). Unemployed is a deeply political play with a remarkably detailed

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analysis of the relationship between labour, productivity and capitalist economics in the context of upper middle-class disregard for the lives of the poor. The play opens in the garden of a ‘weekend cottage some thirty miles outside London’: a tramp ‘with a heavily shambling tread […] haggard with fatigue and hunger’ goes ‘irresolutely’ to the front door to ask for work.41 Greeted by the housekeeper, he is informed that beggars are not welcome and told to go away. He hides behind a tree and sees Iris, the young woman of the house, run into the garden to ‘greet the sunshine’ and try to persuade her husband, Alec, not to return to the city for work at the weekend, but rather to stay and spend the day by the river with their weekend guest Charlie, ‘an elegant trifler’.42 Complaining that the housekeeper has allowed the housemaid a day off to visit her sick mother, she comments petulantly that this is the ‘fifth week-end I’ve dressed without a maid’.43 As Alec leaves to go and make ‘pots of money’, the Tramp re-enters in pursuit of Iris for paid work. Charlie steps in his way and, in response to the Tramp telling him he has lost his job through illness, has not eaten and does not want charity but work – Iris had given him half a day’s digging previously – offers him a shilling. Iris sheepishly tells Charlie: […] I’d never spoken to a beggar before and I thought it’d be amusing – but I’ll never do it again. CHARLIE: […] Giving them a stray job encourages them to come back for more … Your half-crown didn’t do him any permanent good you see […] IRIS: I gave him sixpence and a piece of stale cake […] I’m sure sixpence was quite enough for an unemployed […] besides he told me the most dreadful lies. He said he’d walked all the way from Poplar, because he couldn’t bare [sic] to be a burden on his wife. She was trying to keep his home together – I forget how many children – by making shirts, thirteen for a shilling and finding her own cotton.44 IRIS:

Charlie used to ‘champion the cause of Labour – just for the fun of it’ – while in the debating club at University. Here he researched ‘Unemployment and Sweating and all that’. Their conversation turns to why the poor would work in such appalling conditions: Charlie points out that they have no choice and that all ‘home-work’s [sic] is under-paid’, and tells Iris that the woman who completed the intricate embroidery on her dress, which cost her ten guineas, would have received less than ten shillings for the work.45 He suggests that the Tramp could not have been hungry or he would have accepted the money offered, and both comfort themselves with the thought that the Tramp’s pride is in fact his downfall. Charlie jokes that there is enough work to overwork the poor and so why should they complain about unemployment. Likewise, Iris proposes that the poor spend money instead of saving: the poor don’t want ‘fresh air and good housing’ as philanthropists might campaign for on their behalf. One of the idle rich, Iris is delighted to be engaged in a conversation about social politics but suggests that the poor ‘couldn’t have comfortable homes and so on. It’d be doing away with poverty’.46 She balks at the thought that, ‘if the wages of the rich were lowered’ then those of the poor might be raised: she pouts, ‘our incomes are ours – they

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belong to us’. For Charlie the poor don’t want anything to change, they ‘worship their parasites – are only too glad to feed and clothe and clean up after us’.47 After their rehearsal of the familiar debates, the Tramp takes the opportunity for one last chance to speak to Iris directly, but literally drops dead as he is trying to open the garden gate. Annoyed at the ‘confounded bore’ of the situation, Charlie goes off to find help. Iris is repulsed by her proximity to the dead man. When the local policeman arrives, he suggests the Coroner’s report will say either that the Tramp’s death was caused by ‘Starvation’ or was ‘Accelerated by want and exposure’, that such cases are not rare and that ‘they often drop dead sudden’.48 Iris and Charlie return to their preparations for a boating trip and the policeman assures Iris that when they return, ‘there’ll be nothing to remind you of the regrettable incident, beyond a slight mark in the grass where the body has been dragged along’.49 Reviewed as part of a double bill, The Times rather cynically proposed that ‘the philanthropic antics of the West-end of London in the East-end are fair game for […] the comic ironist’, and that the ‘hearts of West-enders often do them more credit in this matter than their heads’.50 The play in which ‘a tramp falls dead of starvation at the feet of two idle young middle-class persons […] talking flippantly about the problems of unemployment’ was deemed ‘brief and tedious’.51 Unemployed, however, offered an observation of the stark contrast between the beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries of capitalism: the debate is literally played out on stage. The Tramp has travelled from Poplar in London’s East End to the leisure space of the rich – a country idyll, perfect but for the lack of reliable servants. Despite his virtual silence, his presence is felt from the opening scene of the play: described and commented on, but his subject position is subsumed in the voice of the observer and he is rendered throughout as ‘other’. In Simmel’s terms, his subjectivity is eroded as he almost disappears as a legitimate subject (Simmel, 1965 [1908]: 21). In other words, while they stand around discussing his living conditions, they do not allow him the agency of speech and fail to notice that he is at death’s door. Issues of pauperism and sweated labour concerned both Lyttelton and Mack, and like Zangwill there was some tenable relationship between their imagined contexts for these human experiences and the actual contexts in which the poor were obliged to operate. This chapter returns now to the ‘other’ as constructed ‘abject other’, by re-examining the relationship between performance and the foreign ‘stranger’ in the prevailing Sinophobia which found a troubling level of traction in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Here the links between social or economic deprivation, ‘foreignness’ and transgression were conflated in the virulent mythology around the British Chinese community, a mythology completely disproportionate to actual demographic numbers, yet proliferated in both public debate and in performance cultures well into the 1920s.

The transgressive other and Sinophobia: The Yellow Peril and Mr Wu Generated by late nineteenth-century invasion narratives, a fear of miscegenation and a growing hostility to England’s embedded ‘foreign’ communities, the mythologies about the UK Chinese community solidified to symbolize degeneracy in the form of opium dens frequented by white ‘bohemia’, violent gang activity and the trafficking of

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women (Witchard, 2014: 8; see also Chang, 2015; Gan, 2012 and 2016; and Richards, 2017). So too the character of the Chinese villain proliferated on popular stages and in films such as Maurice Elvey’s The Yellow Peril (1915). In film, the most notable, and long-lasting, manifestation of this was Sax Rohmer’s ‘Yellow Peril incarnate in one man’, Dr Fu Manchu (Richards, 2017: 12). The villainous Dr Fu Manchu features in films from Stoll Film Company’s The Mystery of Fu Manchu (1923) well into the 1960s, with The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) coming from the US in the early years of sound cinema. Other films such as D. W. Griffiths’ Broken Blossoms (1919)52 also featured the imagined spaces of the Limehouse opium dens, made familiar in narratives of East London poverty and degeneracy by Thomas Burke in his 1916 novel Limehouse Nights. Griffith’s film featured ‘London’s fog-bound dockside streets, the lurid opium dens and gambling parlours, home to Burke’s displaced Chinamen and cockney waifs’ (Witchard, 2005: 172–173). Here concerns about morality are connected to issues around the presence and status of the stranger or foreign body in our midst (see Marchetti, 1993). The 1911 census showed that the permanent Chinese community, largely concentrated in London’s East End, was, relative to the population as a whole, diminutive, with less than 1,250 Chinese born nationals. Nevertheless, anxiety about the ‘Yellow Peril’ was often expressed in terms of concern about the deviant behaviour epitomized in the smoking of opium: Virginia Berridge usefully notes that in fact there were only small numbers of ‘smoking dens’, just over a dozen reported in 1909 in and around London’s then ‘Chinatown’.53 Xenophobic theatrical representations of the Oriental stranger share in their imagined sense of the Orient, but differ in the level of authenticity to which they make claim. Originally banned by the Lord Chamberlain’s office, The Yellow Peril (1913) was a one-act play featuring the already infamous Sexton Blake, authored by C. Douglas Carlile, who although not the originator of the Sexton Blake detective character, was both the director of and performer in a short film, Sexton Blake, produced and circulated in 1909. In The Yellow Peril, Blake is up against ‘a bigger thing than we have ever dreamt of […] the Yellow Peril’.54 He suggests there are a ‘hundred million yellow men trained and armed with all the death dealing implements of war, waiting for their moment to strike’.55 Blake’s mission is to find the leaders of the Silver Arrow society who are orchestrating an attempt to steal top-secret plans for Captain Worsley’s new aerosubmarine. Any nation which possesses these plans has the power to ‘dictate to the universe’. Hypnotized by the evil Li Hang, Captain Worsley’s wife opens the safe so he can steal the plans. We then find Blake and his accomplice Tinker outside Lee Sing’s Laundry in Limehouse, where after much comic business, ‘mock Chinese’ banter from Lee Sing – ‘What allee low about, we want go sleepee’56 – Blake, the ‘man who has pitted his brain against an empire’,57 manages to enter the opium den in disguise and escape with the stolen plans. The location shifts from the foggy exterior of Hackney Marshes – where the Silver Arrow gang have murdered one of Blake’s men – to the domestic English interior of Captain’s Worsley’s study, to a street in Chinatown. We end up in the interior of Lee Sing’s Laundry, typically presented as a front for opium smoking and degenerate assignations.

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In a similar reaction to other theatrical sketches in circulation, the censor found the play, submitted for licence the Bedford Music-Hall ‘lacking in plausibility’ and likely to ‘offend Chinese susceptibility’.58 The Sinophobic portrayal of the East was generated in the aftermath of the Boxer Uprisings between 1899 and 1901, in response to the anxiety caused in the West around the revolutionary transition in China. With at least three murders seen or reported in The Yellow Peril, the oriental stranger is presented as ruthless, violent and unrelenting. A similar depiction of Chinese masculinity is offered in the more mainstream Mr Wu, produced in London after a try out run in Manchester in 1913. Dongshin Chang notes that Mr Wu was part of an established trajectory of mainstream dramas in which what he calls ‘Chinaface’ appealed to audiences: these would include Chinese Honeymoon (1901) with princess Soo Soo and Mr Pineapple, and Yellow Jacket (1913). Like Singleton’s assessment of the Orientalist productions of Oscar Asche, Chang argues such performances were part of a process of the ‘renegotiation of British cultural values and identities’ (Chang, 2015: 8). Here ‘Chinaface’ concerns itself with notions of authenticity, replication and representation: China is exoticized, trivialized or indeed as in the case of Mr Wu, demonized. While Wendy Gan sees the character of Mr Wu as a literary cousin to Fu Manchu, whose circulation as an imagined figure of ‘yellow menace’ began around the same time, he is a character built entirely on a theatrical heritage, mapping directly onto a stock villain of melodrama (Gan, 2016: 363).59 Originally refused licence for performance, Vernon and Owen’s play opened in Manchester, then ran in the West End from late 1913 until late 1914. The production was revived in 1916 for just over forty performances and again in 1922, with the same performers playing Mr Wu (Matheson Lang) and Mrs Gregory (Lillian Braithwaite). In between, Maurice Elvey directed the film Mr Wu, released in 1920 with Matheson Lang in the lead, Lillah McCarthy as Mrs Gregory and up and coming star Meggie Albanesi as Nang Ping.60 Matheson Lang was known for his character acting of numerous ‘foreigners’ – these included Yuan Sing in both Sinclair Hill’s 1926 The Chinese Bungalow and Arthur Barnes’ 1930 version – and in particular for playing ‘Jewish’ leads on stage. He describes in detail his physical creation of Mr Wu, a role which he played repeatedly over almost ten years, in his autobiography Mr Wu Looks Back, also marketed with reference to his most famous role (Lang, 1940). Having recently travelled through China, Lang’s initial interest in Mr Wu was that it was about a ‘real Chinaman’ (ibid.: 113). He modelled his role in performance on a Chinese diplomat from whom he’d sought advice on ‘authentic’ behaviour for the character: he had ‘ [a] funny little trick of putting his head on one side and laughing in a queer, high pitched voice’ (ibid.: 115–116). Lang altered the shape of his face with a ‘cunningly devised wig’ and make-up, but had to shave his head completely for the film (ibid.: 117). Like Asche and other performers of his generation, Lang has no unease with his propensity to racial stereotyping, seeing this as a means of garnering audience interest in his ‘authentic’ creation of what is essentially an imagined ‘other’. The plot of the play is simple. Mr Wu, Oxford educated and well versed in Western ways, discovers his daughter has been having an affair with Basil, the son of a visiting business man. This is ‘a grave offense to his family and his honor’ (Chang,

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2015: 162). Wu kills his daughter, damages the Gregorys’ business interests, kidnaps Basil and tricks Mrs Gregory into visiting him. He plans a vendetta for the dishonouring of his daughter by dishonouring the mother of the perpetrator via sexual violation. Mrs Gregory’s faithful (Chinese) servant Ah Wong manages to pass her a vial of poison which ultimately kills Mr Wu, although she had intended to take her own life rather than be violated. While there is no doubt, as Gan and Chang suggest, that the play reflects specifically on Anglo Chinese relations, it also maps onto other ‘alien’ narratives on stage and screen. Here the alien is a stranger who lives or has lived amongst ‘us’, whose customs are at one and the same time familiar and strange, and whose presence threatens our own. Mr Wu does not approve of the indifference with which his daughter’s innocence has been exploited, nor like the Baron in Zangwill’s The Melting Pot does he wish for any kind of cultural integration. His primary reaction, to kill his own child, was not noted by the censor as being problematic in the same way in which the proposed rape of Mrs Gregory was. Rather, when the play was licenced for performance, it was noted that without the intended rape, the play was now no longer ‘revolting’ or ‘hurtful to Chinese susceptibilities’,61 despite the infanticide it contained. Mr Wu is presented as civilized but, at the same time, a vicious ‘psychotic Chinese villain’ (Chang, 2015: 165). The play’s ending has all the markings of the downfall of the evil melodramatic villain, as Mrs Gregory accidentally tricks Mr Wu into drinking her own poisoned tea. His death, a visual spectacle of his undoing, is played out over three pages of dense stage instructions: (She sips her cup of tea […] and then empties the tiny vial into her cup […]) (The door slowly opens. RE-ENTER MR WU. He has made another change of costume. Substituting his heavy and gorgeous cloak for a long garment of shimmering crimson silk) MR WU: Well, chere Madame! […] Am I not becomingly attired […] Your sacrifice for your son will not be in vain […] (He takes up his cup to drink, then stops […]) Ah! I see you have sipped your cup […] I will drink from the cup that has touched your lips! (She gives a gasp of horror under her breath as he slowly drains the cup […]) (He suddenly reels as he stands, and falls into his chair […] his face […] horror-stricken […] contorted with pain […] with an expression of diabolical hate […] He tries to rise […] has fallen back again in his chair, gripped with the paralysis of the poison […] A violent convulsion shakes the frame of WU and he lies quite still.)62 MRS GREGORY:

In the short final act of the play, Mrs Gregory tells no one what has happened, the servants all keep her secret and she and her family prepare to return ‘far away from China – safe in our own English home’.63 Mr Wu’s insistence on his own sovereignty disrupts, as Wendy Gan points out, the ‘very heart of Western society – the middle-class family’ (Gan, 2012: 447). In response, the colonizer

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FIGURE 3.2

Matheson Lang and Lillian Braithwaite in the death scene from Mr Wu, 1914 (author’s own collection)

returns home without shame: the villainous other is destroyed by his own traditionalism and insistence on cultural isolationism. The Chinese villain frequently appears as the distributor of outlawed substances: he is the destroyer of women’s good reputation and the insipid insider in a transgressive sub-culture. Playing on the already familiar figure of ‘Mr Wu’, André Charlot’s Revue Everything New? Not Likely at the Alhambra in 1914 had a sensational sketch scene, ‘The Opium Den’, in which a Chinese Apache dance ends in tragedy when the girl stabs her dance partner, and the dying man is left in the arms of the opium den keeper. Marek Kohn, in his seminal work Dope Girls, points to the number of sensationalized drug misuse cases at the time. In press coverage, as he notes, the ‘moral drawn from their deaths and degradation was that the premodern notion of womanhood had been right after all’ (Kohn, 2001 [1992]: 9). Drug cases were often linked to women’s new-found freedoms during the 1920s, with illicit nightclubs in the late 1910s and early 1920s, seen to ‘disrupt several highly sensitive social boundaries, of sex, class and race, and packed these destabilized ingredients into a confined space’ (ibid. and see Chapter 6). A series of regulatory Acts, such as the Pharmacy Act of 1908, shifted the legal status of drugs like opium and cocaine. There was still, however, ‘minimum government intervention’

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amid growing concern at pharmaceutical infringements such as those by large departmental stores like Harrods who, during the First World War were offering ‘morphia and cocaine’ as ‘useful presents for friends at the front’: such gifts were banned in 1916 (Berridge, 1984: 18–20). Interestingly, England was a leading manufacturer and exporter of morphine. The prohibition of the possession or distribution of cocaine was embedded as DORA regulation 40B in 1916 within a rising tide of anxiety about its misuse (Berridge, 1978b: 299), but it was not until the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1920 that the governmental, legal and medical positions were formalized. There were examples of actresses known for drug misuse before and after the war: for example, Janet Achurch was castigated by George Bernard Shaw in the 1890s for her dependence on morphia (Berridge 1988: 58). Socialite actresses like Lady Diana Manners – a fan of chloroform and morphine – and Brenda Dean Paul were known, with different levels of press coverage, to be habitual drug users and the earlier deaths of actress sisters Edith and Ida Yeoland in 1901 were blamed on drug misuse. Their deaths were linked in the press to their inability to secure quality, permanent employment in theatre: their hard struggle is typical of that endured by many other honest women in the desire to obtain occupation on the boards of a theatre, and it casts a pathetic light upon the overcrowded condition of the ranks of those who seek for fame before the footlights.64 Being a female performer then was thought by some to be a precarious life choice, that left one open to the evil charms of the transgressive. The two cases of performers Billie Carleton and Freda Kempton, have been well documented elsewhere. Both Philip Hoare and Marek Kohn link the sensationalization of the cases to public unease at the reported immorality of aspects of performance culture and celebrity more generally (see Hoare, 1997a and Kohn, 2001 [1992]): Carleton’s supplier had been an actor and costume designer, and press references frequently implied he had a probable ‘deviant’ sexuality. One witness claimed that they had taken Carleton to Chinatown and had shared the cost of the drugs.65 Actress Fay Compton (see Chapter 2) also claimed that Carleton had told her it is ‘impossible to resist what is brought to me’ and that she was often ‘highly strung’.66 In 1922, nightclub dancer Freda Kempton died through drug misuse and the restauranteur ‘Billy Brilliant Chang’ was questioned in court about his relationship with her. She had been a frequent visitor to his various business establishments and had been ‘given’ money by him on a number of occasions, so witnesses claimed. Both cases were framed as druginduced tragedies, ending the life, in Carleton’s case, of an up-and-coming star, and in Freda Kempton’s, of a performer turned dancer, professionally required to turn night into day and live by insecure means. Whilst cocaine was found in Kempton’s bloodstream, the press presented her as deeply depressed by and entrapped in a life in the twilight zone world of entertainment. Here then, the degradation of women is

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directly linked to the unregulated criminality of foreigners skilled in breaking both social and legal boundaries. Later plays and films connected with these cases caused consternation because of their direct references to drug cultures, such as Noël Coward’s The Vortex in 1926, or Graham Cutts’s 1922 film Cocaine (later distributed as While London Sleeps), with the character of Min Fu loosely based on ‘Billy Brilliant Chang’ (Sweet, 2005: 48). During and in the immediate aftermath of the Billie Carleton case, there were multiple submissions to the censor’s office of plays and sketches which combined to ‘take advantage of the public interest in drugs’ as one reader suggested.67 Reports on such plays as Clifford Rean’s The Dope, Frank Price’s Dope or Geo. A. Degray’s The Girl From Piccadilly and The Drug Slave (all 1919) shared a concern as to whether the scripts relied on the details of the Carleton court case still in progress: a play could, however, ‘deal with the crime itself.68 Such plays and sketches were often viewed by the censor’s readers as ‘idiotic rubbish, but comparatively innocuous’, or indeed as ‘lurid rubbish with an appeal to base sensationalism’.69 The villain was either a drug-dealing Chinaman, or under the mysterious control of one: drug misuse was invariably associated with the supposedly transgressive ‘oriental’ stranger in our midst. When Ivan Patrick Gore’s The Girl and the Drug was originally refused licence in 1919, it was because of the resemblance between the male villain, Winter, and Billie Carleton’s supplier, De Veulle, not because the female villain Marian who is ‘something in the West End’ is married to Leng Fo, hypnotic China man and the keeper of a ‘den’.70 Eager to capitalize on a very immediate cultural trend, the agent for the play noted the number of other plays – Owen James’s Drug Fiends, with its ‘Keeper of a Drug Den’ Mr Sin-Sin and women ‘tainted with Drugs’, Rhoda Reene and Ida Saville – and films being advertised profiting from the publicity around the case.71 In fact one of the films mentioned, Wilfred Carlton’s The Case of a Doped Actress (1919), with its lead character an actress named Bobbie Barton, her dealer Van Dorl and ‘a Chinee’, was rejected by the film censor, although this did not necessary mean it was not shown publicly (Robertson, 2016 [1985]: 25). Once the court case was over, Gore’s play was licensed and its explicit Sinophobia left intact. In Gore’s The Girl and the Drug, Paul Winter – ‘something in the city’ – tells Marion Dalton that ‘every white woman who marries away from her colour’ will inevitably go mad. He points out that her husband, Leng Fo, only helped her to break her drug habit so that she could lure others to his den: she is ‘the High Priestess of the orgies his evil mind conceived’.72 Eventually Act III, set in ‘The House of a Hundred Horrors’, with its torture scene where ‘The yellow devil has the white fool in the hollow of his hand’, was cut. Act IV is, however, set in ‘An Alley in Chinatown’ and in ‘Leng Fo’s Temple of Dreams’. In a blatant reference to the popular myth of Chinese white slave trafficking, Leng Fo suggests he could get ‘plenty dollar’ for kidnapped actress Eve in Canton or Peking. Finally, Marion repents and saves Eve, and the evil Leng Fo is taken off by the police. With its complex melodramatic plot, The Girl and the Drug also combined earlier xenophobic representations of the

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Chinese as foreign invaders, and malign influence, in particular on women. This was a much-repeated trope – so Roy Cartwright in Frank Price’s Dope, whilst ‘living by luring people to take drugs’, is in fact under the control of a ‘mysterious Chinaman’ who owns a den and, eventually, as the real villain, is shot dead. Censor G. S. Street did comment on the proliferation of such plots and wondered if ‘the Chinese Embassy might eventually protest against all these childish libels on Chinamen’.73 In reference to John G. Brandon’s The Heathen, he noted the unusual presence of a ‘good Chinaman’, notwithstanding ‘his illegal calling’.74 Here Yen Ho works for a gang of opium smugglers who plot to ‘sell him’ to the police. Full of complex plot twists, there is the murder of a ‘dope fiend’, extreme on-stage violence and heroism on the part of Yen Ho, who saves Beth from the murderous gang led by Captain Hammerton and ‘Tug’ Gerraghty. In doing so, he is shot and dies in Beth’s arms: her closing dialogue reveals much about the terms on which the heroism of a foreigner was framed at the time: BETH: (with a sob) Yen – little Yen – forgive me. I called you a traitor – a yeller dog. You – the whitest and cleanest of them all.75

It is interesting here that the foreigner or the alien stranger might indeed end up being ‘the whitest and cleanest of them all’. Like Margaret Mack’s Tramp, Yen has to die in order to re-balance the social and racial equilibrium, just as Knoblock’s Hajj in Kismet returns to begging and Beatrice in The Thumbscrew is resigned to a cycle of poverty. While there are exceptions, ultimately performance cultures affirmed the status quo on questions of race, economic inequality and social deviance. The performance of ‘other’ and the performative representation of their worlds, however, allowed for the playing out of possible alternatives – mixed marriages and social mobility. At the same time, it exposed British xenophobia, class hierarchy and somewhat self-righteous observations or representations of what were often merely ‘imagined others’. Where Chaplin, or the performers of the 1907 Yiddish Music-Hall at the opening of this chapter critically engaged with such narratives, their closer experiential connection with the world being represented on screen or stage facilitated a more joyful depiction. These theatricalized strangers reveal an uncanny interest in the stranger who ‘comes today and stays tomorrow’ in Simmel’s terms, noted in the opening pages of this chapter (Simmel, 1950 [1908]: 402–407). The stranger – be they foreign or poor or deviant – lives amongst us, but is not one of us, although they may help us reflect on who we are. In the following chapter, through looking at spy plays and registers of espionage in performance cultures more generally, I explore how this tension between observing and being observed, a tension on which performance depends, translated in particular to the performance of surveillance at an historical moment where the act of watching others amongst us became legitimized in law.

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Notes 1 ‘London’s First Yiddish Music Hall Started New Year’s Eve 1907,’ The Performer, January 10, 1907, p. 71. 2 Vernon suggests that only some 13 per cent of the global population was urbanized by 1900, a figure which rose to 29 per cent by 1950. 3 See the Aliens Restriction Act 1914, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo5/4-5/ 12/contents/enacted and the Aliens Restriction (Amendment Act) 1919, http://www. legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1919/92/pdfs/ukpga_19190092_en.pdf 4 Aliens Act 1905, section 8(2). 5 Ibid., section 1(3). 6 The Performer, January 8, 1914, p. 23 and June 5, 1919, p. 11. 7 The play ran in full at the Savoy from early October for 36 performances. Ernst Lubitsch produced a film based on the same scenario in 1920. Marketed in America as One Arabian Night, it starred Pola Negri. 8 Rats ran in the West End for 264 performances from February 1923. Edward Knoblock had written a ‘version’/caricature of costumier Poiret [Monsieur Jaquelin] in his play My Lady’s Dress in 1914 (see Kaplan and Stowell, 1994: 144 and Knoblock, 1957). 9 Ronald Jeans (1887–1973), an important figure British Revue, was instrumental in setting up two independent theatres – the Liverpool Repertory theatre with Alec Rae and Basil Dean before the First World War, and the London Mask Company with J. B. Priestley and Michael Macowan in 1938. Jeans wrote sketches and adaptations for Fred Karno, André Charlot and C. B. Cochran, and worked with Jack Hulbert and Noël Coward (see James Ross Moore (2004) ‘Ronald Jeans (1887–1973) playwright’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/ 9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-73132 and Ronald Jeans/Biographical File, V & A). 10 Revues were often updated after license and supplementary materials were not always resubmitted. The character of Tin Tung in the manuscript was also changed to Tin Lung in the performance programme. See Rats (1923) Production File, V & A, Theatre and Performance Collection. 11 Ibid., p. 6. 12 Ibid., p. 9. 13 James Ross Moore (2004), ‘Ronald Jeans (1887–1973) playwright’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/ 9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-73132 14 Based on Edward Knoblock’s original play: Asche took an option and ordered some radical re-writing (see Singleton, 2004; Asche, 1929; and Knoblock, 1939). Knoblock’s career has not been well documented. He was a prolific playwright and film scriptwriter: Kismet has been adapted on numerous occasions for both stage and screen. There are extensive holdings of his papers in the Harvard Theatre Collection, MS Thr 167. 15 Joseph Harker designed the sets using photographs Knoblock had taken whilst in Tunis as inspiration (Knoblock, 1939: 147). 16 The film is now lost; see http://collections-search.bfi.org.uk/web/Details/ChoiceFilm Works/150215277 17 http://collections-search.bfi.org.uk/web/Details/ChoiceFilmWorks/150215278 18 There were further film versions in 1931 and 1943 and the ‘musical’ of Kismet, adapted from Knoblock’s original opened on Broadway in 1953. Vincente Minnelli’s film version was produced in 1955. 19 David Feldman puts this figure at ‘around 83%’ (Feldman, 2011: 5). 20 The Times, December 11, 1899, p. 7. The US film Children of the Ghetto, directed by Frank Powell, was distributed by Box Office Attractions Co. and Fox Film Corporation in 1915. According to Nahshon, Zangwill had no involvement in the film (Nahshon, 2006: 107). 21 See Children of the Ghetto, Adelphi, December 11, 1899, Production File, V & A, Theatre and Performance Collection.

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22 Hansard, HC (series 5) vol. 72 col. 649 (16 June 1915). See also The Times, June 17, 1915, p. 10. 23 ‘Mr Zangwill and the Masses’, The Era, February 19, 1914, p. 17. 24 Zangwill pointed to the high number of UK emigrants to the US in his appendix to the 1914 republication of the play. See Zangwill in Nahshon, 2006: 366. Of the 1,427,227 migrants admitted in 1913, the numbers were as follows: 264, 348 southern and 54,171 northern Italians; 185,707 Polish; 100,062 English; 31,434 Scottish; and 105,826 Hebrew. 25 The Melting Pot was produced by William Cort, with Walker Whiteside (playing David Quixano) from the US and UK productions in the lead. 26 The Immigrant (Mutual Film Corporation) starred Edna Purviance and the cinematographer was Roland Totheroh, both of whom worked with Chaplin on numerous films. The film is available on archive.org, as are numerous of his other early films; see http s://archive.org/details/CC_1917_06_17_TheImmigrant 27 Courier and Argus (Dundee), August 21, 1917, p. 2. 28 Daily Mail (Hull), August 24, 1917, n.p. 29 The US Immigration Act of 1903 imposed restrictions on anarchists and those suffering from epilepsy or insanity, whilst the 1907 amendment added those with infectious diseases and mental or physical illness. The 1917 Act required immigrants to take literacy tests and banned immigrants from the Asia Pacific zone. 30 Saturday Review, December 15, 1917, p. 475. 31 Gwen John, ‘Edge O’Dark’, The English Review, November 1912, pp. 592–603. See Andrew Maunder (2011) for a detailed analysis of Gwen John’s work, pp. 201–205. 32 Anthony Roche suggests a resonance between this play and later works by Beckett and Martin McDonagh (Roche, 2004). 33 Carlson and Powell assign this play to Margaret Mack (Carlson and Powell, 2004: 252). It is by Margaret Wynne Nevinson (see Croft, 2009). 34 Harold Chapin was the son of Alice Chapin, also a performer and playwright. His career was cut short by the war, when he was killed in action in 1915. See Maggie B. Gale (2018) ‘Alice Chapin (1857–1934) and Harold Chapin (1886–1915)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001. 0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-107352 35 Where £100 in 1905 is worth between £8,500 and £11,500 in today’s money. 36 The commissioned report was based on collating ‘evidence’ over a short period (26 days) from experts and ‘witnesses’ – government or local officials, medical professionals, academics, charity workers and so on. The evidence is often anecdotal and there is a consistent call for more reliable data. 37 ‘The Pioneer Players Triple Bill’, The Times, December 16, 1912, p. 10. 38 Ibid. 39 Mary Higgs produced ‘social research […] on an original plan’ (Higgs, 1904b and see Higgs, 1904a and 1906). 40 Margaret Macnamara’s papers are in the University of Bristol Theatre Collection. Unemployed was not published (Unemployed, LCP 1909/7). Patricia Ellen Lufkin’s 2002 PhD, An analysis of the plays of Margaret Macnamara is available online at https://digita lcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/2114. It does not, however, critique Unemployed. 41 Unemployed, LCP 1909/7, p. 1. 42 Ibid., p. 3. 43 Ibid., p. 5. 44 Ibid., pp. 7–8. 45 Ibid., p. 9. 46 Ibid., pp. 11–12. 47 Ibid., p. 12. 48 Ibid., p. 17. 49 Ibid., p. 20. 50 ‘The Stage Society’, The Times, March 30, 1909, p. 13.

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51 Ibid. 52 The film was originally titled Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl. 53 The ‘centre of English settlement lay in two narrow streets of dilapidated houses, now destroyed by bombing and redevelopment – Pennyfields and Limehouse Causeway. The Chinese formed a small sealed community, isolated by culture and language, and the transience of their stay from the surrounding neighbourhood’ (Berridge, 1978a: 3). 54 C. Douglas Carlile (1913) The Yellow Peril, LCP 1913/6, p. 2. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., p. 10. 57 Ibid., p. 4. 58 See comments on LCC correspondence The Yellow Peril, LCP 1913/6. 59 Mr Wu has gained in-depth scholarly attention in recent years, particularly in the work of Chang (2015) and Gan (2012 and 2016) who both provide detailed readings of the cultural contexts of the production in relation to attitudes towards China at the time. Chang’s study contextualizes the play in relation to historical representations of China on the British stage from the seventeenth century. 60 There was also a US film of the play made in 1927 with Lon Chaney in the lead. 61 H. M. Vernon and Harold Owen, Mr Wu, LCP 1913/36 and LCC 1913/2028. Unusually for a play which had been so successful, Mr Wu was never published except in the form of a novel: see Milne (1918). 62 H. M. Vernon and Harold Owen (1913) Mr Wu, LCP 1913/36, Act III, pp. 21–23. 63 Ibid., Act IV, p. 6. 64 The Star, September 7, 1901 and also see The Times, July 20, 1901 p. 7. 65 The Times, December 13, 1918, p. 3. 66 Sunday Times, New South Wales, February 9, 1919, p. 5. 67 LCC for Clifford Rean’s The Dope, February 17, 1919. The sketch title was later changed to The World of Dreams. 68 LCC for Owen James’s Drug Fiends, February 7, 1919. 69 LCC for Frank Price’s Dope, February 11, 1919, LCP 1919/4 and LCC for Ivan Patrick Gore’s The Girl and The Drug, January 20, 1919. 70 Ivan Patrick Gore’s The Girl and The Drug, licensed April 23, 1919, LCC 1919/2177. 71 He mentions a film The Curse of the Poppy, LCC 1919/2177, letter 8. 72 The Girl and The Drug, ‘Act I: Sunnydale – for better or for worse’. 73 LCC for Dope (LCP 1919/4), letter dated February 11, 1919. 74 John G. Brandon, The Heathen, February 15, 1919, LCC 1919/2030, LCP 1919/4. 75 Ibid., p. 24.

4 PERFORMING ESPIONAGE: SURVEILLANCE, THE UNCANNY AND THEATRICAL SPIES

The early decades of the twentieth century saw ‘the real foundation of the modern Information State in England’ (Higgs, 2001: 183–184). In this new environment of surveillance, the gathering of information on people’s lives gained momentum and underpinned ‘person rights and obligations at the level of the nation state’ (ibid.), although we should note that the middle and upper classes were largely immune to the class bias operating in the processes of information gathering under the Liberal reforms and beyond (Vincent, 1998: 141). Britain was invaded by an army of fictional spies. They landed in their thousands on bookstalls and in bookshops […] in hundreds of newspapers and magazines […] [in] dozens of popular stage plays, and were even spotted in cinemas and on the pages of children’s comics. (Hiley, 1990: 55) In theatrical iterations of surveillance, such class differences are less clear, but the fashion for spy and espionage narratives was built using similar agendas: the gathering of information, the cataloguing of behaviour and the surreptitious surveillance of others under the aegis of a national and domestic security agenda. There was an intensification of cultural anxiety about invasion from which performance cultures profited. This provided both practical frameworks for spying as well as producing actual spies during the war, and a proliferation of acts of espionage on stage and screen. Performance both informed and impacted on a developing ‘culture of surveillance’. Mirroring the use of literary professionals in the production of official propaganda during the 1914–1918 war, significant numbers of high-profile theatre practitioners were either suspected of, or employed to engage in espionage by the State surveillance agencies, which were in the process of formation themselves. Within a surveillance culture, behaviour was observed according to a social script for citizenship: good

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citizens behave in particular ways in specific situations, and those who do not may well indeed prove to be enemies of the State. Some have argued that processes of observation became formalized as a means of keeping cultural anxieties at bay (Stafford, 1981: 500). The State rationale for surveillance, and the implications of social and psychological theory around the uncanny, secrecy and scopophylia – the act of looking so integral to performance itself – were frequently framed by discourses that contained a performative register, from instructions on what makes a good spy, to how to identify a spy, to the narratives in the documentation of surveillance in cinemas and political meetings. Like performance itself, surveillance and espionage involve modes of rehearsal, deception, duplicity and the performance of different registers of knowing-and-not-knowing. As a figure operating amongst the crowd, the spy shares characteristics with the stranger explored in the previous chapter. Thus, Nicholas Hiley notes the frequency in espionage narratives of an ‘overwhelming sensation […] of great strangeness and danger concealed within the familiar’ (Hiley, 1990: 63). In terms of social behaviour, the spy was considered a ‘low sneak’ whose objective of collecting knowledge ‘by clandestine means’ was ungentlemanly in the late 1800s: acts of espionage were assumed to be motivated by the desire for financial gain (Stafford, 1981: 506–507). Spies were described by Mansfield Cummings, who recruited for the newly formed Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) from 1909, as ‘scallywags’ operating in a ‘free market of espionage’ (Judd, 1999: 97–98). By this point, however, spy literature more generally suggested the act of spying was ‘sporting’ – a combination of ‘stimulation and utility’, accommodating the thrill of both observation and the risk of capture (Hitchner, 2010: 422). Spy plays and sketches were prevalent before the First World War (Collins, 1998: 184–185), but the ‘vogue for spy plays’ proliferated during the war years and for some time afterwards (Haddon, 1922: 108). Public reaction to the war, as with the performance industries as a whole, was fluid and changeable. ‘War plays’ were as likely to connect audiences with the everyday experience of war on the home front, as they were to provide escape from the real anxieties created by a war being fought largely abroad. Set in Gibraltar in the opening months of the war, Earl Derr Biggers’ Inside the Lines, which premiered in New York in 1915, was not untypical in its combination of espionage and the domestic and military contexts of war. The London production ran four times as long as the US one in 1917 (Derr Biggers, 1924). The plot centres on a failed attempt to blow up the British fleet and an exposé of the impervious attitude to the war by those from neutral countries. German sympathizers on the ‘Rock’, along with an aggressive political insurgent in the form of the Indian servant Jaimihr – thought to be ‘so very faithful that he’s rather uncanny’ (ibid.: 76) – plot the destruction of British defences. The General mistakenly assumes the servant to have caught Jane, a costume buyer stuck in transit, and Woodhouse, supposedly an English officer, in the act of espionage. It is in fact Jaimihr who has been plotting with the enemy to steal the codes for blowing up the mines in the harbour. In the very last moments of the play, Woodhouse reveals that he is in fact the real secret agent, stops Jaimihr and his accomplices in their tracks, and saves the day. The enemies here are the imagined

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German nation and, evidencing an entrenched racism, the subaltern avenging the historical colonization of his country. The play utilizes what was by then familiar spy dramaturgy: multi-layered plotting and melodramatic form, in alignment with popular drama of the day on stage and screen. For producer and critic J. T. Grein, the popularity of such dramas was one reason why London theatre had become ‘trivialised’ during the war (Williams, 2003: 150) and for G. T. Watts, the reason ‘legitimate theatre had all but disappeared’ (Collins, 1998: 177). In contrast, Collins proposes that spy plays were in fact part of the ‘contemporary psychological and propagandist function of the theatre’ (ibid.). Collins also reminds us of the multiple dramatic possibilities offered by the spy play (Collins, 1998: 185), and that whilst plays of the war period more generally were ‘topical – and thus ephemeral’ (Maunder, 2015: 4)1 – the spy or espionage play was not simply a response to war, even though enhanced levels of demand and supply were created by the war (Williams, 2003: 150). Nor indeed did the preference for the melodramatic form evidence that such plays failed to ‘grasp the seriousness’ of the war, as Kosok implies (Kosok, 2007: 31). The popularity of performed espionage was evident in pre-war performance cultures with films like Lubin’s Execution of the Spanish Spy (1898), Lieut. Rose and the Foreign Spy (1910) and Hepworth’s Was He a German Spy (1912), and plays including The Diplomacy of Sue (1907), Cecil Raleigh and Henry Hamilton’s Sealed Orders (1913) and Frank E. Potter’s The French Spy (1913).2 The popularity of the spy drama was revived in films during the early 1930s, especially in those films depicting the war of the previous decade like Victor Saville’s I Was A Spy (1933) and his 1937 Vivien Leigh vehicle Dark Journey, or those with duplicitous, erotically charged enemy spies: George Fitzmaurice’s 1931 Mata Hara is a good example. Rebecca D’Monté has recently proposed that spy ‘thrillers’ functioned in war time to, ‘engage with a nexus of abstractions about truth, trust and duty’ (D’Monté, 2015: 74–75). However, the spectrum of engagement with notions of truth, trust and duty offered by espionage plays has wider connections to the experience of the social realm during the period as a whole. Both public and private hysteria about spies and enemy infiltration were bound up with the formation of State systems of surveillance and control through censorship, new laws impacting on public behaviour and the establishment of organizations dedicated to seeking out subversion, such as the Secret Service Bureau from which emerged the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), the original iteration of what was to become MI6. Such transformations of the public sphere then necessitate perhaps a more nuanced exploration of what Michael Hammond calls the ‘texture of experience’ for audiences absorbed by the idea of espionage and surveillance (Hammond, 2006: 15).

Surveillance, secrets and the uncanny: Simmel, Jentsch and Freud Early twentieth century urbanization bought with it new social and psychological challenges related to the use and division of space. Connecting urbanization to the continuing popularity of melodrama, Ben Singer suggests that in terms of experience, the ‘aggressive individualism of modern and social and economic life […] still

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registered as something relatively new and strange, something disquieting’ (Singer, 2001: 145). Surveillance culture is built from and relies upon this sense of disquiet, a disquiet inherent in the formation of the modern metropolis where, as Singer suggests, ‘the individual faced a new intensity of sensory stimulation […] a barrage of powerful impressions, shocks, and jolts’ (ibid.: 34). Simmel’s work on ‘the consciousness of modernity’ is also useful here (Leach, 1997: 65). Veracity and mendacity are thus of the most far reaching significance for the relations of persons with each other. […] modern civilized life […] depends upon faith in the honor of others. (Simmel, 1906: 445–446) Focusing on the ‘modern condition’ of everyday human interaction, Simmel proposed that urbanization and city living produced an ‘intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli’ (see Chapter 6). For Simmel the fragmentary nature of modernity produced citizens with particular psychological conditions, both a part of the crowd and individuals who circulate through public space with a ‘disinterested’ air: here forms of ‘dissociation’ act ‘as […] socialization’ (qtd in Wolff, 1950: 416). This paradox, of identification with a particular modern crowd, and yet separation from it through a process of individuation and dissociation, is manifestly embedded in a culture of surveillance. What Hammond calls the ‘texture of experience’, then, is generated by both a sense of estrangement and its opposite, belonging (see Chapter 3). Just as the spy can only be discovered by those upon whom they are spying, through a process of legitimate ‘spying’ – the spy catcher spies the spy – so too Simmel, in his 1906 essay on secrecy, proposed, the ‘secret offers […] the possibility of a second world alongside the manifest world: the latter is decisively influenced by the former’ (ibid.: 330). Here then, there is something both inherently attractive and repellent about secretive behaviour: ‘the secret gives one a position of exception’ at the same time as producing ‘an immense enlargement of life’ (ibid.: 330–332). Secrets have to be concealed and revealed, as Simmel suggested, ‘the secret is a form which constantly receives and releases contents: what originally was manifest becomes secret, and what once was hidden later sheds its concealment’ (ibid.: 335). When secrets are exposed, the power dynamic shifts as one group uncovers the action of another. This relies on a particular relationship of ‘knowingness’. Like theatre, in this ambient environment of surveillance, the individual is always caught somewhere between watching and understanding what watching and being watched entails. Here, Simmel’s ideas resonate with Sigmund Freud’s theory of the uncanny and its connection to the consciousness and operation of surveillance. Developed later, although within an intellectual culture in which Simmel’s ideas would have been circulating, Freud’s short 1919 essay on The Uncanny was predicated in part on a reading of philosopher Ernst Jentsch’s 1906, On the Psychology of the Uncanny (Jentsch, 1906). Like Freud, Jentsch was interested in the psycho-pathology of the everyday, and like Freud, he recognized that modernity produced a more discernible psychological condition in relation to the perception of new or strange experiences or social

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phenomena. Jentsch suggested that responses to what he called the ‘uncanny’ are not universal and that indeed asking what constitutes the uncanny is less productive than understanding how the ‘affective excitement of the uncanny arises in psychological terms, how the psychical conditions must be constituted so that the “uncanny” sensation emerges’(ibid.: 8–10). Both he and Freud, then, were concerned with the relationship between the familiar and the unfamiliar embodied in the uncanny. For Jentsch, the uncanny is created by knowledge or experience of an event, object or sensation which is ‘new/foreign/hostile’, creating ‘abnormal conditions’ which in turn disrupt what he calls the ‘power of the habitual’ (ibid.). It is interesting to note here that Jentsch used theatre as a model where our horizon of expectation allows for ‘emotional excitement’, or the sensation of the uncanny, without us having to deal with its consequences. This is particularly apt around the performance of espionage. While critics have read Freud’s essay as simultaneously exposing and obscuring the meaning of the uncanny or ‘Unheimlich’ – unhomed – it is also referred to in relation to other theoretical propositions which articulate the ‘disquiet’ of the early decades of the twentieth century in socio-psychological terms. Thus, Hélène Cixous reminds us that it is in ‘the nature of the Unheimlich to remain strange’ (Cixous, 1976: 529). While Freud’s method was not scientific, he tried to find the ‘nucleus’ of the concept in order to ‘distinguish the “uncanny” from a more generic frame of the strange, the unfamiliar or the frightening’ (Freud, 2003 [1919]: 212). For Freud then, the uncanny is not entirely unfamiliar but rather ‘that species of the frightening’ that reaches back to something already known, a return of repressed anxiety filtered through an object or a sensation which makes us uncomfortable, ‘unhomed’. Revelation produces a surfacing of the uncanny ‘when the boundary between fantasy and reality is blurred […] when a symbol takes on the full function and significance of what it symbolizes’ (ibid.: 150). Reminding us of Brecht’s edict that theatre should make the familiar strange, Nicholas Royale usefully points to Anthony Vidler’s suggestion that the uncanny is a ‘metaphor for a fundamentally unlivable modern condition’ (Royale, 2003: 5–6). In other words, the modern condition was structured through the uncanny. The attraction of secrecy and the uncanny identified by Simmel, Jentsch and later Freud, were key components of a ready-made dramaturgical form in melodrama, built on sensationalism as well as a strong demarcation of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ – which although often hybridized or indeed what historian Ben Singer calls a ‘cluster concept’, remained the dominant form (Singer, 2001: 54). Indeed for Singer, melodrama offers ‘a compensatory response to the “transcendental homelessness” of modern society’ (ibid.: 34).

Surveillance legislation, the performative and how to spy Amongst the very first results of war psychology was […] spy mania […] It was not only aliens who were suspect, for respectable persons of British nationality were reported to the authorities merely because they ‘looked odd’, because they were heard ‘whispering’, because they had ‘voices like Germans’. (Peel, 1929: 39)

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As journalist Constance Peel noted in her reminiscences of life during the war, spy mania had its roots in earlier manifestations of paranoia and fear of foreign infiltration. Shaped in substance by the fictional, vivid works such as William Le Queux’s 1906 The Invasion of 1910 heavily influenced government policy and triggered a ‘cataloguing of public nervousness’ (Judd, 1999: 68). Le Queux’s book, with its vicious force of Saxons, now reads as sensationalist scaremongering but it caught the imagination of both officialdom and the public at the time. Film adaptations such as Gaumont’s The Raid of 1915 were even considered ‘too sensitive to be released’ in 1913 and refused license by the recently formed British Board of Film Censors (ibid.: xxiii). Hiley stresses that the Secret Service Bureau (SSB) formed in 1909 often mixed fiction and fact, and that the numerous emerging counter-espionage networks at the time were often run idiosyncratically according to the deeply prejudicial beliefs of the group commander. They often had vague remits such as, ‘to expose and frustrate the clandestine activities of enemy aliens in whatever form they may be encountered’ (Hiley, 1986a: 635). Other historians share his frustration at the lack of genuine extant documentation of such organizations (see Porter, 1989),3 especially when taking into consideration later accounts such as that of New Scotland Yard’s Basil Thomson,4 in which he noted that few government departments thought themselves ‘complete without an Intelligence Service […] Mysterious offices cropped up everywhere’ (qtd in Hiley, 1986b: 395). There was also the spread of ‘spy services’ in industry, with large companies employing their own spies to carry out surveillance on their employees. Gertrude Jennings’ 1908 sketch The German Plot dramatizes such strategies. Here industrial espionage is being carried out by German forces determined to undermine British industry. The play ends with a cry for ‘No more talking of factories abroad – Let’s trust in England, in the British Empire and in the good sense of Tariff Reform’.5 Industry kept close contact with the ‘Government espionage system’ (Porter, 1989: 144). The deliberate conflation of fact and fiction is a familiar strategy in more recent counter-terrorism (see Hughes, 2011), but the ‘official’ histories about aspects of the secret service operations at the time were often drawn from highly personalized accounts written by ex-officers or even their wives, as in the case of Vernon Kell.6 The active embracing of a mélange of fact and fiction promoted in popular espionage novels such as Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of The Sands (2013 [1903]), fed the ‘growth of international suspicion and underground activity’ (Morton 2010: 26). This environment generated the official overhaul of the 1889 Official Secrets Act in 1911, an Act reliant on a performative conceptualization of acts of espionage. The 1911 Official Secrets Act7 opens with a statement on ‘Penalties for spying’ relating to any person acting in a manner ‘prejudicial to the safety or interests of the State’. Such behaviour is defined by three potential actions: entering forbidden space, producing papers ‘calculated to be […] useful to an enemy’, and obtaining or communicating details of any such documents from or to another party. The Act states that a conviction does not have to be evidenced materially but can be made if, ‘from the circumstances of the case, or his conduct, or his known character as proved, it appears that his purpose was […] prejudicial to the safety […] of the state’ [my emphasis]. Official documents may not be circulated without formal sanction and spaces related to activities in a ‘time of war’ – dockyards, telegraph

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offices, State buildings and so on – or places with works that have a purpose of ‘public character’ – rail yards, gas works, water works – were restricted. Harbouring spies, or being suspected of doing so was prohibited. Identified patterns of undesirable behaviour and entry into forbidden spaces became part of a regulatory regime built around a particular idea of how a spy might act or inculcate those around them to act. The 1911 Act formalized further the distinction between open and ‘closed’ public spaces, and the ways in which one might behave within them. It also removed the right of habeas corpus, thus suspicion of behaviour is evidence enough for detainment: an accusation of false detainment would not stand. A further amendment to the Act in 19208 opened with a section on ‘Unauthorised use of uniforms […] personation’, declaring it illegal to ‘personate, or falsely represent’ anyone authorized to hold prohibited documents, to produce false documents, pass on codes or communicate with a foreign agent. The Official Secrets Act, then, relied on processes of surveillance as a means of stopping surveillance: the spy has to be spied upon in order to be proved a spy. The immediacy of a theatrical framing of espionage in the 1920 amendment is explicit: here the performative quality of spying – disguise, impersonation and false representation – also implicates more firmly those who are bearing witness. Other Acts such as the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA), passed without debate in the opening month of the First World War, equally set out to regulate public behaviour. Vincent points out, however, that some were immune to such regulation. Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, for example, regularly revealed confidential cabinet discussions in private letters to his daughter’s companion: in doing so he was ‘simultaneously deploring and practising the leakage of information’ (Vincent, 1998: 138–139). Authorized to have access to such information, but not to disclose it, Asquith was not prosecuted: those in official circles were above the ‘public’ under suspicion, unless German, Jewish or radical. Before moving on to explore espionage on stage, I want here to look at the ways in which processes of surveillance, often framed in a performative register, became part of acceptable social practice, embraced beyond official State bodies. Foregonners. Algy’s been sacking ten spies a day for weeks. It’s a grossly overcrowded profession. (Waugh, 2003 [1938]: 11). Evelyn Waugh’s fictional construction, from his 1938 novel Scoop, exaggerates the ubiquitous nature of the spy, but processes of observation and surveillance were culturally embedded by the late 1930s: inevitably they involved the observation of one group by another. The Mass Observation project, for example, was set up in 1937 by three men who had variously worked as an anthropologist, journalist, poet and documentary film-maker. A social research project using participant observation, it originally set out to formulate a large-scale study of ‘everyday’ life, overseen by those ‘turning back towards the mass from which they had detached themselves’ (Hubble, 2010 [2006]: 4). Mass Observation was a prolific social movement with a mission to ‘liberate “facts” about what people did and said in order to “add to the social

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consciousness of the time”’ (Summerfield, 1985: 440). Produced as a kind of ‘science of ourselves’, it used, an ‘anthropological technique of informants’ who were to act as ‘incognito observers’ (ibid.: 448–449): Mass Observation’s findings were generated through processes of ‘unobserved observation’ (Jeffrey, 1978: 5). The project has been critiqued for its application of an essentially ‘middle-class colonial gaze’ in a process of formal surveillance of the working classes (Storey, 2014: 40). Protocols originated, however, from a remit to generate materials related to ‘a large number of “subtly graded class cultures” formed around a complex web of associational, economic and individual relations’ (Campie, 2016: 100). Even so, the critical reference to its colonial gaze reminds us of the performative slippage between observation and surveillance so integral to acts of espionage. Other State-commissioned reports in the 1910s and 1920s also merged performance and surveillance: from reports on performance venues to the use of ‘role’ play and dramaturgical reportage in the operation of political surveillance. Often this involved the surveillance of specific social groups, thus Mass Observation focused at times on the ‘habits and supposedly lax morals of working women’ (Gurney, 1997: 270), and Lucy Bland points to the police monitoring of women during the First World War as a direct attempt to patrol women’s behaviour in public and their sexual behaviour in private (see Bland, 1985). Similarly, the Metropolitan Police’s surveillance of cinemas was also driven by moral panic and the assumption that large groups of the working classes gathered at leisure would misbehave in the dark corners of entertainment spaces, engaging in ‘consensual indecency’ (Rapp, 2002: 442).9 Commissioning women from the National Union of Women Workers to report on activities in London cinemas, the Metropolitan Police sanctioned a surveillance operation during the 1914–1918 war where, ostensibly for six pence for an eight-hour day, a team of six ‘competent and especially selected ladies’, mostly from Kensington, Hampstead and Hyde Park, would patrol cinemas and complete reports over a fourweek period. Framed by questions about audience behaviour (Moody, 2011: 55),10 extant reports from the lady cinema spies suggest they had a strong interest in the whole cinema-going experience. Reports noted the mix of soldiers and civilians, a girl accompanied by a sheepdog, particular turns of phrase, overheard conversations and arguments, and even comments on the appeal of the films themselves. Thus, a Miss Gray noted the ‘Good style of film’ being shown and was surprised to find herself sharing taste with those on whom she was spying: ‘really good high-class films. I was so interested that I forgot occasionally what I had come for, and was sorry to leave!’. Whilst other films seen were ‘Usual silly vulgar American films not bad, except in general demoralizing tone’.11 Few extant reports provide evidence of impropriety, and where they do, no actual detail is given. The commissioning officer even complains that a Miss Kersey and Miss Hicks reported indecent behaviour and undesirable films, but gave no specific details to their team leader.12 Unregulated places of entertainment were frequently seen as clandestine haunts of the suspicious and the immoral, but the surveillance that took place in them often produced nothing more than confirmation of differences in class and taste. Thus, surviving reports from agents working for domestic intelligence units such as PMS 2,13

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operative during the First World War, evidence the very explicit delight of spying on civilians, especially those with differing politics. Agents were meant to mix with union members and political activists, for example, but were not supposed to act as agents provocateurs, in other words they could witness but not ‘join in’ except to observe opinion and conduct. The lines between ‘playing the game’, role-play, impersonation and provocation were not always well drawn. Reports from ‘informants’ such as those from ‘AG’ in 1917 caused concern because of their revelation of the obvious thrill of not getting ‘found out’ by those under surveillance. AG’s reporting was structured as a mixture of prose and dialogue: ‘Sit down brother’. […] ’ow can I tell wot I am going to say if you keeps saying ‘sit down brother’? (Loud laughter) […] I replied: ‘You are quite right comrade, it is so.’ (Loud Cheers.) I then wished the ‘boys’ farewell, and amidst quite an ovation, made my exit. It was a scream.

CHAIRMAN: BROTHER:

(Hiley and Putowski, 1988: 328–329) The official response to this report was that the Ministry should not employ men to ‘go about posing as extreme agitators’, that doing this might even ‘bring down the Government’, being as it was ‘right up against the Englishman’s sense of fair play’ (ibid.: 329). In the context of surveillance, ‘fair play’ is loosely defined here as an assumed knowledge about how to ‘play’ at or perform being the gentleman. The qualifications for engagement in professional espionage were framed by association: members of the intelligence community came from a ‘relatively closely-knit social group, tied by class, education, and in some cases, regimental or service affiliations’ (Fisher, 2002: 12). Secret Services also made use of commercial travellers, businessmen and academics, those who could speak a number of languages, as well as theatre professionals. Many who have since written about their espionage work stress its ‘desk job’ qualities, punctuated by brief moments of intrigue and excitement. Some detail recommendations for training which bear more than a passing resemblance to performance training, or instructions on how to be a competent stage performer. So, for example, Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scout movement, suggested that to be a ‘really effective spy, a man has to be endowed with courage and self-control, with the power of acting a part, quick at observation and deduction, and blessed with good health and nerve of exceptional quality’ (Baden-Powell, 1915: 45). His My Adventures as A Spy is a kind of ‘how-to guide to espionage’, with its advice on ‘quickdisguises should the spy find himself in a tight corner’ (Fisher, 2002: 16). Mansfield Cumming, head of SIS, was also known for his skills in disguise and for ‘using the theatrical costumier, arsonist and blackmailer, Willie Clarkson’ (Morton, 2010: 58; see also Judd, 1999). Interestingly Clarkson, from a long line of wigmakers and known for his own criminal activities, developed disguises for both officials and criminals (see Greenwall, 1936). Appearance was all important, although after the war it was noted

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that the belief that ‘if a man was outwardly respectable and clear of any criminal suspicion, he could not be a spy’ was an insufficiently effective strategy for public safety (West, 2014: xxi). Cumming had operational systems he called ‘tradecraft’: never seeing potential spies alone, limiting contact between spies, never noting proper names or personal information. There was an assumption that coming from a close-knit community ensured a shared, tacit and embodied knowledge about, in Goffman’s terms, the ‘special sets of rules’ for behaviour (Goffman, 1963: 243; see Chapter 2), essential for espionage. One espionage memoir proposes the ‘tradecraft’ taught to a motley collection of ‘journalists, actors […] banks clerks, several clergy’ had a more practical application. In the form of a ‘Spy School’, students were lectured on lock-picking, the ‘technique of lying’ or of ‘being innocent’ by ex-detectives (Porter, 1989: 135). Duplicity and pretence were part of the performance of ordinariness and innocence if under investigation. Parallels with the profession of acting are obvious and those working in theatre were familiar with the necessary skills for spying. In other words, performers and playwrights operate in the grey area between being and playing, truth and deception, the real and the imaginary, watching and being watched. Performance professionals were indeed targeted for undercover war work as much as for recruitment and propaganda activities.

Performance professionals as spies Performance professionals were used to travelling and fitting in with new communities. It is no surprise, then, that a number of cases of suspected espionage involving theatre professionals were linked to the establishment of surveillance organizations and practices of observation as they developed in the early war years. One stage electrician was arrested for spying whilst using naval signalling as part of his work on the Dover Hippodrome ‘novelty’ ‘The World at War’ in November 1914. He had purchased a signal code book and perused it in full public view on the sea front whilst looking, through binoculars, at the boats in the harbour. The escapade made the ‘Variety Gossip’ section of The Stage, where it was reported that with his release secured, he returned to work without any negative reflections on ‘his patriotism’.14 Other cases are more disturbing with little evidence to convince. Thus, Kitty Marion, Music-Hall performer and activist, had been in and out of Holloway for her militant suffragette activities and the authorities were trying to trace her whereabouts in early 1915. They had received letters about her stating she was a ‘brute – of a woman’ – who should be ‘sent out of England – at once’.15 Being German by birth, anti-authoritarian and a theatrical professional was enough to warrant state suspicion that she would likely be a spy (Gardner and Atkinson, 2019). Her pursuit by the authorities lost momentum during the war and her request not to be repatriated was accepted, especially in light of her professional recruitment activities.16 Suspected of lacking patriotic loyalty because of her pre-war political affiliations as a suffragette, ironically the surveillance of Marion tapered off precisely because of her affiliations: the authorities did not want to ‘open up fresh troubles with the suffragettes who have behaved well since the war began’.17

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Documented more consistently is the case of Leonard Vieyra, also known as Leo Pickard, manager of Pickard’s Film Agency in Acton, London. According to James Morton, Vieyra had a, ‘slight cast in one eye and a moustache’, but contradictory descriptions have him variously as ‘a slim flashy young man’ and as a man, ‘5’6 inches, of stout strong build’. He worked under a number of different names and may indeed have at one time or another fitted all these descriptions (Morton, 2010: 125). His police files are extensive and yet contain very little evidential materials as to his physical and visual identity.18 Of Dutch-Jewish extraction, Vieyra had come to London from Amsterdam via Paris in 1909 as manager of an acrobatic troupe called ‘The Midgets’. He then went on to manage the Bijou Cinema in Finchley Road and set up as manager of a film agency in Acton. After being convicted under clause 18A of DORA, essentially for being ‘in communication with a spy’, Vieyra was sentenced to death, only to have the sentence commuted to imprisonment. Deported to Holland in 1924, the police were still making enquiries as to his visual identity and his whereabouts. His case was built on a series of witness reports of his activities, captured by the interception of letters sent with information on naval and military movements, often in invisible ink. One newspaper suggested he inscribed secrets onto the reels of film he was importing and exporting to Holland. Vieyra’s acts of espionage were facilitated by his vocation: firstly, as the manager of an international performance troupe and, secondly, as a cinema manager and importer of films. The performance industries provided productive contexts in which acts of espionage might take place. The references made by William Melville, originally of Scotland Yard and later seen as MI5’s master spy, to ‘HH’ in his diary have been taken to refer to magician Harry Houdini. Morton suggests that the evidence put forward that Houdini acted as a spy for British intelligence is thin, but notes that ‘he had some credentials: a good cover story for a spy is essential, and music hall artists, circus people and dancers have instant cover’ (Morton, 2010: 18). Kalush and Sloman, however, point to Houdini’s reliance on police collaboration to generate publicity in anticipation of his stage appearances. Publicity stunts – for example escaping from a real police cell – blurred the lines between performance and reality, and created a ‘special’ civilian relationship with law enforcement officials for Houdini. He appears to have sent reports of his observations on German matters to Melville whilst on tour there in 1900 (Kalush and Sloman, 2007: 111–112 and 229). Houdini also had a significant following in Russia, with access to the Russian élite in the early 1900s. He grew up around native Hungarian and Yiddish speakers, as well as travelling and performing all over Europe: Kalush and Sloman suggest he may also have been asked to carry out espionage work in Russia (ibid.: 127). Houdini’s international celebrity status would have been a perfect cover for espionage: living very publicly in an environment conducive to the manufacture of myths and gossip for mass circulation would seem anathema to quiet acts of espionage. Oddly, however, they fit the kind of ‘performance persona’ Melville had proposed for practitioners of espionage: ‘the mysterious manner should be avoided. It only engenders distrust. A frank and apparently open style generally gains confidence […] one can joke and humbug […] one can talk a great deal and say nothing’ (ibid.: 17).

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Other performers worked for British Intelligence Services in America: these too were recognizable public figures whose vocation legitimized their presence as foreigners. From acting ‘royalty’ as the son of George Grossmith and brother of the producer George Grossmith Jnr, Lawrence Grossmith was a well-known musical comedy performer. He had performed successfully in New York prior to the war, and had been assigned to ‘the British-Canadian recruiting staff’, then transferred to British intelligence operations in New York for ‘code work’ (Spence, 2004: 516). Michael Smith suggests he was New York bureau chief for a short time in 1918. Grossmith appeared in shows during his time in New York and so one can only assume that his work running agents somehow fitted with nightly appearances on Broadway. Possibly the most celebrated, although perhaps unlikely, British agent from the performance industries during the First World War was playwright and novelist Somerset Maugham. Fluent in French and German, Maugham was recruited through John Wallinger – later head of French and Swiss intelligence services. He used the cover of being a writer seeking peace in a neutral country and worked for British intelligence in Switzerland from 1915 to 1916. He then worked, from 1917, for Mansfield Cumming – via the US station chief William Wiseman – in Russia, which he disconsolately describes as a failed mission: I went as a private agent […] [to] get in touch with parties hostile to the government and devise a scheme that would keep Russia in the war and prevent the Bolsheviks […] from seizing power. It is not necessary for me to inform the reader that in this I failed lamentably. (Maugham, 2009[1928]: 196; see also Maugham, 2001 [1938]). The British ambassador in Russia refused to cooperate with Maugham, seeing him as a ‘meddling, amateur intruder’ (Masters, 1987: 51). However, the fictionalized accounts offered in his novel Ashenden attest to Maugham’s detailed knowledge of the Russian situation, his ability to make useful alliances and his determination to take seriously his espionage role. Alan Judd, amongst others, sees Ashenden as setting a new tone for fictional spies: masculine, disenchanted and yet unquestioningly dedicated to service (Judd, 1999: 395). Published in 1928, following Winston Churchill’s insistence that a number of chapters were removed as they contravened the Official Secrets Act, Ashenden was adapted for the stage by George Campbell Dixon in 1933 but not produced. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1936 Gaumont film, The Secret Agent, was based in part on the play (Mander and Mitchenson, 1955: 287). Maugham briefly picked up his espionage career in the Second World War, but like Noël Coward’s work in the same war, the duration and details are poorly documented. Coward himself had gone to Paris to set up a Bureau of Propaganda: his experience with the activity was short lived, and whilst he makes jokes about visiting ‘Hush-Hush headquarters’ before leaving for France, he also states, with some gravitas, that the job for which he had been commandeered was ‘neither so serious nor so important’ as he had been ‘led to believe’ (Coward, 1986 [1937]: 300– 339). Maugham’s experience in espionage work was less office-bound, but he begun to sense a pointlessness to his role by 1916. He became disillusioned with the methods he

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had been instructed to use, which he thought in the end, appeared to have come from a ‘shilling shocker’ (Maugham, 2001 [1938]: 192). In Ashenden, Maugham directly references the strange liminality of surveillance work where you are never quite sure whether you are watching or being watched. This is very much the perspective on surveillance offered by Edward Knoblock, German-American naturalized British playwright friend of Maugham and fellow agent (see Chapter 3), who took over from him in Switzerland (Smith, 2010: 176). Knoblock was an ‘enemy alien’ at the beginning of the war but as a relatively high-profile industry figure he was able to gain naturalized status. His first attempts to gain employment from the War Office were unsuccessful and he threw himself into writing recruiting sketches with Seymour Hicks, and writing plays for charities (Knoblock, 1939). All share the view that espionage involves ‘hours of infinite drudgery in which, only rarely, there occur moments approaching the dramatic’ (ibid.: 208). For Knoblock, ‘All the things that one has been taught as a child as being the essentials of clean living are disregarded’ as the job involves ‘Lying, deception, opening other people’s letters, overhearing conversations […] working secrets out of others by any methods available’ (ibid.: 209). His descriptions of encounters with spies share many tonal qualities with the spy plays discussed later (ibid.: 209–215). The New York branch of the SIS, for which Grossmith worked, was run by William Wiseman, with a remit to minimize the impact of German agents attempting to ‘obstruct the critical, financial and economic support neutral America provided’ (Spence, 2004: 512). Wiseman also took on actor-manager Harley Granville-Barker, despite his close professional alliance with George Bernard Shaw – a known objector to the war – and his challenging of British officialdom in the campaign to end censorship. Barker had toured east coast theatres and university arenas in the US with his partner and professional collaborator Lillah McCarthy during 1915 and returned America in early 1917, reportedly to lecture and to work on a production. Letters to Wiseman suggest he had already been recruited by Cummings before arriving, sending advance information about his tour in a letter from the Garrick Club in November 1916.19 Richard Spence proposes Barker’s mission was to deliver pro-British talks to select groups and to gauge support for the allies (ibid.: 520). There is evidence that Barker was doing more than just promoting British interests, however. His reports, sent from various hotels all over the US, refer in detail to overheard conversations, offer reports on men with industrial connections to Germany, or make specific recommendations about potential allies amongst those he meets. A number of his letters contain proposals for a ‘press appeal’ to ‘propagate a definitely pro-English sentiment’,20 or suggest that Wiseman should feed local papers with propaganda-based ‘news’.21 Barker observed the social formation of many of the groups he visited: in Colorado Springs, it is ‘an entirely artificial community’;22 in Santa Barbara, ‘a colony of rich and smart people’.23 By early March 1917, Barker is called back to England by his solicitor, presumably to deal with matters related to his impending divorce from Lillah McCarthy, as by this point he is involved with American poet, novelist and wife of one of his wealthy backers, Helen Huntington. Barker notes that he will be away from the US for just over a month, that Wiseman will need to be ‘settling it’ with ‘C’

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(Cummings), and that he would like to know if Wiseman wants him to continue as he does not wish to ‘leave his job un-finished’.24 Commissioned in late 1916, Barker wrote frequently to Helen Huntington about everyday activities in the London office of the intelligence services: he used the phrase ‘office soldiering’ to describe his military work.25 Barker’s SIS work, called ‘military service’ by a number of his biographers, was in espionage. His new relationship with a married heiress gave him access to wealthy Americans, and her position as a writer gave him access to the elite literati. This enabled him to spy in full view of these influential communities. This period, with his divorce26 and the end of his friendship with Shaw, coincided with his withdrawal from an active period on the London theatre scene. His spy work had other aspects to it: according to Alan Judd, he was record keeper for the New York office (Judd, 1999: 351) and Michael Smith also makes reference to the fact that he was responsible for keeping Arthur Ransome ‘in the field’ in Sweden as a forerunner to getting him into Russia during the 1917 revolution (Smith, 2010: 265). Archived letters from Scandinavian officials to Lillah McCarthy, suggesting an extensive tour of revived productions and sent during the months when Barker was in the US in 1917, propose that Barker was thought by some in officialdom to be proGerman.27 The Scandinavians, and possibly McCarthy herself, would not have been aware of his work for the SIS and there is no evidence to suggest he was working as a double agent. Such rumours do, however, suggest that Barker was comfortable with a duplicitous demeanor and had the ability to be acutely observant without seeming to be so: necessary perhaps for both a theatre director and a spy. Relatively scant records of performance professionals’ work for the government exist: reference is repeatedly made to them having been destroyed, or scattered amongst the private papers of ex-intelligence officers or government officials. Even so, a picture begins to emerge of the resonances between the professional skills of those working in the industry – observation, creativity, easy association, impersonation and the ability to read and replicate behaviour – and the skills required for espionage. Dramatic representations of espionage that found such popularity in the years leading up to and during the 1914–1918 war are, conversely, driven by complex plotting, intense action, frequent shifts from one location to another, curious mixtures of buffoonery and cruelty, and in the ‘spy’ films of the 1930s, by a strong focus on the erotic currency of surveillance. This is a far cry from the overriding sense of waiting and inaction in the ‘job’ of spying as described by playwrights and performers themselves.

The performance of espionage: masculinity and the spy play It is a pity that the public should be given a lot of idiotic rubbish about the secret service, but it would be a great innovation to forbid it. I should doubt any audience being ignorant enough really to believe it, and no harm is intended. There are the usual vague references to the ‘hidden hand’ controlling things.28 This is a long-winded and foolishly impossible play, blending the now familiar spy motive with the complications of humble domestic melodrama […] The

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whole piece is incredibly crude in its conduct of the conflict between vice and eventually victorious virtue. But it is otherwise inoffensive29 Comments on spy plays by the play examiners from the Lord Chamberlain’s Office (LCO) frequently reference their inauthenticity, reliance on melodrama, unfounded references to the ‘hidden hand’, or their ‘strained sensational nonsense, hardly to be taken seriously’.30 Archibald Haddon, an early drama critic for the BBC, noted by way of contrast that espionage plays, with their ‘plots thickened by a lavish employment of cyphers, codes, cryptograms, signals and wireless messages’ explored the ‘fun’ of espionage, with the secret service spy/catcher as a light-hearted but cunning hero accompanied by the audience in a journey of deduction (Haddon, 1922: 108). There is a pattern of shared themes in spy and espionage plays – deception versus truth, duplicity versus authenticity, loyalty and duty to the enemy versus honour and duty to the British Empire. Many are also consistently comic or melodramatic, as well as focusing on issues of gender and class. Their popularity is also evidenced by the fact that many were adapted to film, even years after original production.31 With their complex plotlines, shifts in register and familiar stock characters, they were also reflective of and reflected upon the experience of a growing culture of surveillance in which audiences found themselves living. The espionage plot, with its visual playing out of the threat of outsiders, on stage or on screen, in some ways defined the cultural moment. Theatrical explorations of espionage were often configured around particular constructions of gender. Linked to notions of honour, loyalty and duty, the allied spy is complex as a ‘lead’ character: his true identity has to be hidden from those around him and he often separates himself off from the ‘real men’, in order to literally see in from the outside, to find the enemy and catch them in the act. The enemy spy on the other hand, is often explicitly patriotic and overly masculinized precisely as a means of hiding his own true identity and outdoing the allies: he engages in the world of male sociality, assuming their identity and performing as one of them. Featuring Christopher Brent, played by Dennis Eadie, The Man Who Stayed at Home (Terry and Lechmere, 1916)32 ran in the West End for almost a year and a half from late 1914, and was followed by a film adaptation in 1915. Its lead character appears again in the less successful sequel, The Man Who Went Abroad, in 1917. Brent is a suave middle-aged, pipe-smoking and apparently nonchalant gentleman of no particular vocation: issues of labour here define masculine status. In the play, set in the early months of the war, we find Percival Pennucuik, chatting with other guests in their seaside hotel sitting room, wondering if Brent has not signed up for active duty because he has problems with his sight. The older, pompous and judgemental Preston proposes Brent’s eyeglass is ‘sheer affectation’,: it is ‘perfectly abominable’ that Brent is not serving his country (ibid.: 16–17). Brent is a ‘clean-shaven, eye-glassed man of thirty-two or three […] affects a languid drawl … [which] he uses solely as a mask, and when occasion offers for him to be his natural self he discards the pose entirely’ (ibid.: 24). He shows no embarrassment when handed a white feather by fellow hotel guest Daphne. His real identity is revealed to the audience when Miriam – his accomplice – questions him as to how he will keep the ‘vital’ (secret) part of his life hidden from Molly, his love interest. For Brent, such matters are all part of a day’s work: ‘I knew

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what I was in for when I took this thing on, and I’ve got to see it through’ (ibid.: 29). He manages to obtain, ‘A complete key to all codes used by German spies in their various methods of communication’ (ibid.: 33) and plays both cunning spy catcher and upper-class layabout. Brent uncovers the devious enemy plans by the naturalized German spies disguised as seaside hoteliers, and foils them by discovering their German wireless hidden up the chimney at the opening of the fireplace (see Figure 4.1). While the audience are ‘in the know’, both Brent’s loyalty and his masculinity are questioned by those around him. When Preston accuses him of having no ‘remnant of manhood left’, we see him ‘flinch almost imperceptibly’, but he ‘immediately recovers his self-possession’ (ibid.: 73–74). He places himself, like the audience, as outside the social networks in the play, but gradually brings all the characters in the play into his ‘reality’, sharing his real identity firstly with Pennicuik, and finally with Preston and his daughter Molly, who reminds us that Brent is the man they ‘all sneered at because he stayed at home’ (ibid.: 148). Here the model of masculinity offered up by Brent – intelligent, perceptive and patient – overrides any notions of a narrowly defined militarized masculinity in times of war. Similarly, in The Black Feather, 33 produced after the end of the war in 1919, the clandestine heroism of Dick Kent is hidden beneath what he calls his ‘bashful disposition’,34 living a ‘life of idleness’ which he advises is both a vocation and a ‘science’. He

FIGURE 4.1

Discovering the enemy signalling machine in The Man Who Stayed at Home, 1915 (author’s own collection)

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claims he is ‘an awful duffer about most things’,35 and is deemed both un-English and unmanly by the partriarch, Sir George, and by the evil Baron. Both believe him a fool with no business in their powerful diplomatic circles. Dick uses his cunning to catch the enemy agent, Hogue, whose activities he has been cataloguing, but is still taken for a bumbling upper-class amateur, suspected of working with the enemy or certainly of having enemy sympathies. Dick’s love interest, Evelyn, daughter of Sir George, realises her father is being duped by his ‘high ranking’ acquaintance and is wasting his time castigating Dick Kent when ‘all the while the real article sits at your dinner tables, dances at your balls, smiles in your face, wins your confidence, – and then betrays you’.36 Dick Kent’s masculinity has been defined in terms of his father’s achievements – as a lauded diplomat of the Empire – and he redefines it, like Brent in the previous play, in terms of a different model of war-time masculinity and heroism. The louche, but dutiful Englishman was not the only model for espionage. The Era commented in 1918 that naturalized aliens effectively made better theatrical scapegoats (qtd in Williams, 2003: 185). These spies often came in the form of high-ranking social figures, working against the establishment from within the establishment. Lawrence Cowan’s 1918 play The Hidden Hand gave concern to the censor’s office that it was, rather like the previous play, ‘calculated to increase vague popular suspicion about German agency in high places’.37 The play offers an assertion of the causes of the war, and is one of a number in which the stage enemies consist of a duo of spies. Here, Sir Charles Rosenbaum tells the Kaiser that in England ‘Labour is seething with revolt’ and that the ‘Irish question has bought the country to the brink of war’, as well as informing him that he has the ear of a number of politicians from the cabinet and the opposition. Cowan makes specific note of the ‘semitic’ type amongst his characters – in this case Curzon, who points out to Lady Adela that whilst he is the ‘first money-lender’ she has met, ‘wealth, like poverty, makes us acquainted with strange bedfellows’.38 Charles’s secretary is Schafausen, described as ‘an evil-disposed Teuton – short and thin with an upturned moustache and close cropped unparted hair […] [he] speaks with pronounced German accent’.39 Sir Charles – with his name naturalized from Rosenbaum to Strathconnel – and his friends have a shared interest in making money, and are brought together for a social weekend at his east coast Scottish residence in 1915. His factory workers are restless and unhappy but do not want to strike during the war. The Directors of the company are holding out and refusing to meet their demands, but Sir Charles secretly manipulates a strike by providing the funds to make it possible. Pretending he is simply helping the workers to get justice from their employers, he assures his accomplice Schafausen that the strike will happen and the two are gleefully optimistic about the damage to the national economy their industrial sabotage will cause. Both comment on how stupid the English are not to be more suspicious of them as naturalized Germans. They discuss Sir Charles’s plans to release ‘tubes’ containing ‘the germs of the most deadly and horrible diseases known to scientific man’.40 Act III opens with a secretive meeting between the two where they again make jokes about the gullibility of the English, until their plans are foiled by Claude who has realized that Schafausen is a German spy. Sir Charles is willing to sacrifice Schafausen to keep his own identity

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secret: but his castigations are met with the revelation that their different social status is in fact part of their cover: Schafausen reminds Sir Charles, Here, you may be my social superior. In the Fatherland I am yours. I am noble, and an officer, associated with you in our task for the All-Highest on equal terms.41 Their plans to blow up the fleet are foiled and instead it is the German U-boats that are destroyed. The enemy agent, moving freely amongst the social elite, plans their downfall from within the ranks of their untouchable class. This ‘super-spy’ play is interesting for its use of the dramatic device of the espionage duo – the villain and his henchman to drive the plot, willing each other on to ever more daring scenarios for destruction that will please the ‘Fatherland’. The powerful business magnate and the military devotion of his secretary replicate a homo-social attachment as opposed to one of master and servant, the identity of which is reversed. In Austin Page’s 1918 long-running play By Pigeon Post, 42 the villains are similarly embedded within allied territory: Major Pierre Vaudry is head of the Wireless Service in French Lorraine and the orderly Laeken is his henchman – both are spies and thoroughly unsavoury characters. Vaudry is determined to stop Captain Paul Chalfont, head of the Carrier Pigeon Service, from transporting secret documents, and is also trying to win the affections of Chalfont’s love interest, Dr Marie Latour. The two male leads are drawn in opposition, but Vaudry is always trying to claim responsibility for Chalfont’s successes and publicly belittling him. Dr Marie Latour is not fooled by his charms and realizes the Major keeps sending Chalfont into life-threatening combat situations without reason, simply because he wants to ‘get him out of the way’.43 Laeken has been given the job of looking after Chalfont and so the audience believe him to be an ally until Major Vaudry and he become embattled over military strategy. Vaudry claims he is acting the bully to avoid suspicion, but Laeken points out: If there’s any acting to be done – that’s my province. The German Government didn’t choose its leading character actor for nothing! Even the theatre must serve Germany’s ends. Now listen – I’ve just overheard something vital. There’s only one more pigeon left44 The audience are let in on the real nature of the relationship between the two men: the German agent, once an actor now performing the role of a military orderly, and the French spy with an axe to grind about the British. From this point on it is clear who is in charge and Laeken gives Vaudry orders to ‘get rid’ of anyone who might get in their way. Laeken intends to cause harm, but both are foiled by Dr Marie and Chalfont. After the General ironically congratulates Laeken on being a ‘consummate actor’, he bows theatrically: ‘In the name of the Deutsches Theatre I thank you!’45 Here the ‘master and servant’ spy construct allows for particular exploration of class, social status and the performance of male sociality, at a time of war. In both plays, the villains’ romantic attentions are rejected by women faithful to their country and fellow countrymen.

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Not quite Mata Hari: femininity and spy plays British intelligence services could not unequivocally coordinate photographic evidence in their extended surveillance of notorious double agent Mata Hari, even though extant photographic archives suggest images of Mata Hari, dancer and convicted spy, were readily available for circulation – as postcards, in newspapers and in magazines.46 The female agent, in both espionage fiction and intelligence history, is most often sexualized and her role confined to seducing the enemy (Wheelwright, 1993: 293). No historian has ever provided evidence that Mata Hari’s dancing was inspired, gifted or artistic. But her ‘exhibition’ was an instant success […] bringing her popularity and wealth […] she often gave private performances to solitary male admirers […] the passionate violence of her dancing demanded for her over-generous breasts the restraint of a jeweled brassière […] [she] […] lived with abandon […] and entertained countless admirers in her boudoir. (Hutton, 1971: 9–11) The prevailing mythology surrounding Mata Hari was that she was never the person she claimed to be. Executed for espionage in 1917, many remain convinced she was framed by the French authorities, others that she was the ruthless and sophisticated German spy ‘H21’. Witness accounts of her performances vary from the adulatory to the dismissive. Thus, ‘Mati Hari does not perform only with her feet, her eyes, her arms […] her red lips; Mata Hari […] dances with her muscles, with her entire body,’ sits alongside French novelist and Music-Hall artiste Collette’s more disdainful description: ‘she did not actually dance, but with graceful movements shed her clothes. She arrived fairly naked at her recitals, danced “vaguely” with downcast eyes, and would disappear enveloped in her veils’ (Shipman, 2007: 153–155). Whilst Bernard Hutton suggests her performances were nothing more than a prelude to prostitution, they exploited similar cultural motifs from the work of other dancers of the period, such as Maud Allan (see Chapter 6). Indeed by 1909, reviews of her performances aligned her with the innovative dancers and performers of the day – ‘Isadora Duncan, Lois Fuller, Lola Montez […] and La Belle Otero’ (Waagenaar, 1965: 81). Mata Hari’s performance persona unquestionably exploited the erotic fissure between the seen and the unseen, the contained and the uncontained, the known and the exotic ‘other’ (see Figure 4.2). Operating professionally across Europe in a niche market place, she was divorced and had a taste for an extravagant lifestyle. Hutton’s disturbingly sexualized description of her, however, echoes an early twentieth-century ‘virulent response to anxiety over women’s sexuality’, identified by Susan Grayzel, where seemingly ‘immoral women’ were transformed into the ‘internal enemy’ (Grayzel, 2004: 73). Mata Hari is also drawn by her contemporaries as an exception. Previously mentioned police chief Basil Thomson suggested:

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FIGURE 4.2

Mata Hari, c. 1910s (Popperfoto: Getty Images)

women do not make good spies. Generally they are lacking in technical knowledge, and therefore are apt to send misleading reports through misunderstanding what they hear. Their apologists have urged that one of their most amiable qualities, compunction, often steps in that the moment when they are in a position to be most useful: just when they have won the intimacy of a man who can really tell them something important they cannot bring themselves to betray his confidence. (Thomson, 1922: 181) Thomson is careful to point out that during his own interrogations of Mata Hari in 1916, he was immune to her ‘battery of charms’, which were ‘a little dimmed’ by the passing of time, for she must have been ‘at least forty’; he then gives the incorrect date for her execution. Transcripts indicate her seeming ability to disguise herself so thoroughly made her another exception to Thomson’s assertion that women lack the technical knowledge to be successfully duplicitous. His interviews with Mata Hari bought him his own fame; he was still writing about her for the popular press in 1930. In the prolific histories, mythologies and police records of Mata Hari (born Margaretha Geertrude Zelle in 1876), it is often impossible to disaggregate fact from the fiction and there is rarely any note of her professional achievements. Late into the 1920s, her identity and activities remained contested: Mata Hari is constructed

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through assemblages of fact and fiction. She is at one and the same time exotic dancer, courtesan, traitor and femme fatale, super-spy and seducer or untrained ‘amateur’ international performer, divorcee, mother, wronged and ‘mature’ woman. For Captain Bouchardon, whose condemning testimony was vital in her trial, in ‘use of men, she is the type of woman who is born to be a spy’ (qtd in Waagenaar, 1965: 264).47 As biographer Julie Wheelwright points out, in the many myths which proliferate, Mata Hari was ‘any woman, everywoman and no woman at all’ (Wheelwright, 1992: 101) in the world of the spy, which was often assumed to operate like an ‘exclusive male club’ (ibid.: 111).48 Popular cultural motifs of women spies align them with the femme fatale, a seducer of secrets under whose influence male resistance disintegrates. Such motifs were encouraged by official propaganda during the First Word War. In reality, the femme fatale was perhaps less prominent in the world of espionage than the office worker. As Tammy M. Proctor reminds us, women’s labour was central to the formation of British intelligence services, who even used the more reliable Girl Guides to replace the Boy Scouts they had employed as messengers at their HQ in London (Proctor, 2003: 53–59). The femme fatale reappears in films of the 1930s, but in popular spy plays a different construct of femininity and espionage emerges. Deborah Van Seters points to autobiographic accounts from female spies in which there is a ‘more complex tale’ of the experience of espionage and a ‘wealth of material in which self discovery vies with repeated references to stereotypes of the female spy’ (Van Seters, 1992: 403). She also notes that in later films of the period leading up to the Second World War, female spies possess ‘courage, intelligence and initiative’. So too popular stage representations of women in espionage scenarios were often framed by the adventurous, the spirited, by loyalty and intuitive intelligence. Displays of coercive intimacy or openly sexualized encounters and seduction would have been censored. Equally, such representations did not align with the image of the wholesome British girl, working hard and waiting patiently at home for men to return from the front. Audiences inevitably came to expect high-octane adventure from spy and espionage plays, not seduction. In terms of taxonomy, female characters in spy plays tend to divide into a number of groupings: women mistaken for spies; women who act as accomplices to spies – sometimes enemy aliens, shown to have poor judgement and misplaced loyalties; female enemy agents; and finally the female spy compatriots, without whose cunning aid the male spy – usually a British double agent – could not succeed. Such intuitive, bright and independent women were not completely new on stage, where explorations of female agency or emancipatory narratives had become more popular leading up to the war (see Chapter 6). Similarly, popular spy plays often embraced issues of class and gender, focusing on relations between the sexes in war-time. Spy play narratives, then, often involved male-female teams, as spies or as spy catchers. Theatrically, this placed women and questions of female heroism at the centre of the action, at a time when women had more social and economic freedom and were operating more visibly in the public realm. Sos Eltis proposes that the theatre of the war years in particular ‘only tangentially’ reflected ‘the radically altered landscape’ of women’s labour (Eltis, 2015: 103). There were more complex explorations of the relationship between gender and

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labour on stage: pro-active women with an agenda beyond the domestic and a concern for national security made for popular theatrical entertainment. There were coincidental theatrical references to suspected espionage where cultural anxieties about the ‘enemy in our midst’ provide opportunity for a more subtle means of social critique. Thus, in A Kiss for Cinderella (1916), J. M. Barrie capitalizes briefly on the public obsession with ‘spymania’ when setting up a mysterious ‘little drudge’ for Bodie – played in the original production by matinee idol Gerald du Maurier – to uncover her story. Even though she knows some German words, she is in fact ‘the slavey she seems to be’ (Barrie, 1936 [1928]: 397–400).49 After interrogating her, he discovers that although desperately poor herself, she has been looking after children orphaned by the war, one of whom is German. In the context of war, the accusation of espionage is used as a device to critique social skepticism about strangers. That the suspected spy is female echoes perhaps a cultural anxiety about an abundance of women being ‘out of place’ – more economically independent, more publicly visible and socially engaged – as a direct result of war.

The enemy within: women performing the spy to catch a spy There were numerous short spy plays where the enemy spy might have escaped if it were not for the determined cunning of women, often falsely accused of espionage or of consorting with spies.50 Other plays centred around misplaced assumptions of women’s espionage activities such as Terry and Humphries’ Foiled, 51 or Michael Orme’s (Mrs J. T. Grein’s) The Woman on the Window Sill (1917), which offers a more comical take on the ways in which women make canny spy-catchers, pointing out their husbands’ duplicitous colleagues who have been operating unnoticed right under their noses. In The Woman on the Window Sill, licensed for performance in 1917 at the Empire Theatre in Birmingham, we find Lady Penelope Praede, estranged from her husband for six years, ‘dressed in the khaki-coloured trousers, smock and tam-oshanter of the window cleaners’.52 Her husband works for the War Office and she suspects the man he is trying to get their daughter to marry, Mr Steene, has befriended him because he is actually a German spy. She, on the other hand, is proud to be making an active contribution to the war effort. I’ve enrolled for National Service […] and my overalls are just as honourable as a Tommy’s khaki kit. I’m proud to belong to the Window Cleaners’ Brigade […] my legs are jolly useful chaps. And, as a short-sighted Government won’t let me shin up a mast or carry despatches on a motor-bike, well, I thought a window cleaner’s career was the one for me. It’s awfully thrilling doing the one-step on a sill.53 Her estranged husband thinks Steene an excellent match for their daughter, but Penelope insists he is ‘a rotter’ and manages to persuade him to let her catch Steene out. She returns to the window from where she observes Steene’s pantomime of espionage as he tries to make copies of the vital War Office documents.

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STEENE wanders over to fireplace, sits down, lights a cigarette. He glances round cautiously […] He […] slips over to the desk. With infinite precaution, he opens two or three drawers with a skeleton-key […] gets tracing paper, etc., from his pocket […] finds what he wants and starts work on a plan which has taken from a drawer. (ibid.) Penelope leaps out of the window onto the sill after pushing her spy to the ground. He is eventually marched off, gleefully shouting that there are many more German spies yet to be caught. Praede realizes that he has missed his wife’s ‘high spirits’ and unconventional ways: the play ends with their joyful reconciliation. As hybrids between propaganda plays and romantic comedies, spy plays often entangle questions of national duty with explorations of marital relations. Structured around misinterpreted agendas, revelations of an enemy within, struggles between good and evil and reconciliation, the theme of espionage was woven into ready-made plotting devices and sometimes appears no more than incidental. But such plays were frequently submitted to the censor’s office and often received dismissive judgements of their cultural worth as ‘strained sensation nonsense’ or ‘ridiculous […] innocuous rubbish’.54 However, playwrights clearly understood the dramatic potential of surveillance and the audience appeal of the feisty, unconventional adventuress. Thinking back to Georg Simmel, such plays predicated on the spy scenario offered an ‘enlargement of life’, here providing new contexts for dramas largely playing out conflict between the sexes. R. Hope Lumley’s Marie Sees It Through (originally The Enemy Within) is a good example. Its cast includes a war hero, an old scientist professor, a cleverly disguised German spy and the brave, intelligent and cunning heroine of the title.55 Here it is Autumn 1916 and Marie de la Fosse is a Belgian refugee living with the elderly Professor Bolton – inventor and eminent scientist – and his family. She suspects that a family acquaintance, Mr Harding, speaks French like a German and is in fact a German spy, planning to steal the plans for Bolton’s invention which the War Office is about to test: he is ‘Too pleasant’ and indeed ‘not vat ’e pretend ’e ees’.56 Marie warns that there are Germans everywhere. She catches Harding stealing the invention plans to sell to the highest bidder. He tries to blackmail her, and after much struggle she capitulates. Marie then manages to swap the briefcases before the professor gets on the train. The professor has seen her, however, and now suspects that she has been a spy all along. When eventually confronted by the Professor, Marie asks him to trust her and let her complete her plans to catch the real spy, to ‘see it through’, on her own. The police arrive and Marie persuades them to set a trap: Harding is completely fooled, arrested and taken off – telling the Professor he should be grateful that Marie has ‘sharper wits’ than all of them. The plot is constructed around the adventures of a seventeen-year old refugee with the affectionate nickname ‘Featherweight’, suspected of espionage, but respected enough to be taken at her word when she points out the disruptive man in a quiet middleclass household who is not what he seems. It is Marie who senses Harding’s ‘out of place-ness’: the good outsider recognizes the bad one.

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Similarly built around the dutiful courage of a young woman and subtitled ‘A Story of a Woman’s Courage and a Spy’s Treachery’, A Woman in Khaki begins in the year 1908 and moves to 1914. Sergeant’s daughter Madge is working for Cabinet Minister Lord Alistair, ‘an apostle of universal disarmament’. Baron Manheim, Alistair’s close friend, is a devious German spy, who has been tampering with Alistair’s secret Cabinet papers and manages to get the family to believe that is it none other than Madge who has committed espionage. She is taken off to prison but defiantly tells Manheim: You have robbed me of my honour, love and happiness – dragged me to the very depths of degradation and shame. But […] look to yourself Heindrick Manheim, German spy and informer, for we two shall meet again.57 While Manheim believes the police are ‘country yokels’ and the English mere fools, he thinks he has them all under his control. He manages to make Lord Alistair’s daughter swoon before she passes on secret documents – but doesn’t account for Madge’s dogged determination: You who think to measure wits we me, who disgrace your sex by wearing your country’s uniform – A Woman in Khahki – bah!58

MANHEIM:

Madge ensures Manheim is discovered; Lord Alistair’s son – who was in love with her from the start of the play – is discovered to be alive; the secret documents are safe; and Madge forgives Lord Alistair’s family for refusing to believe in her honourable character. She is the class outsider who exposes the fault lines in the easy associations between the ruling class of one country and another. Hastings Walton’s play intentionally highlights social disquiet with the ‘out of place-ness’ of a ‘woman in khaki’, and reverses this in its representation of female deeds of duty and honour. As the plays so far suggest, dramaturgical formulae adapted from sensational melodrama formed the basis of popular spy dramas, and the shape and function of women’s labour, uniformed or not, is central. These plays reflected on versions of war-time life: class conflict, women holding the fort and politicians who cannot see what is happening under their noses.

Class and the villainess The villainess of Geo A. Degray’s 1913 The Secret Service Spy, a pre-war spy melodrama originally performed in Leicester then toured as The Morals of a Mill Girl, is by contrast, a disenfranchised mill girl, Kate. The play has an extraordinarily complicated plot with multiple locations – amongst which are a kitchen; the Manchester ship canal; a flat in Piccadilly; the Embankment; and a police station to name a few. Kate is pregnant by Rudolph who left her penniless and with child. Class pride and moral purity are seen as interdependent by her fellow mill girl Doris:

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’Tis the owd fashioned fowk what have set the standard of purity & truth which all reet minded men & women in the world honour to-day. And if to agate wi’ the times, a girl mun sell her self-respect […] I’ll stop owd-fashioned to the end of my days.59 The father of her baby, Rudolph, intends on stealing Archibald’s secret airship plans and coerces Kate into helping him. She knows that when her father discovers she has had a child out of wedlock she will have no future: ‘I’ve done with the old life of poverty, & slavery from to-neet. To-morrow it’s London, and a damned good time’.60 Kate threatens to throw her baby into the canal, violently intimidates her fellow mill girl, administers chloroform, claims false identity and threatens to shoot one of her victims. In contrast Paul, the upper-middle-class hero of the play, plans to marry Doris the mill girl: social rank means nothing to him. Position will not cover the lack, or take the place of purity, and there are thousands of so called ladies in Society today, who might well learn a lesson from the morals of a mill girl.61 The central plot, with its comic turns and romantic twists, focuses on the bid to steal secret plans for an invention, created in a garden laboratory in Lancashire, that will help the allies in the war. Judged to be ‘longwinded and foolishly impossible’ by the censor’s office, the play exploits national paranoia about espionage, but speaks to the concerns of provincial audiences. It interweaves the local with the national: what goes on in a Lancashire mill town impacts on British defences in anticipation of war. Embracing a clear distinction between good and evil, the play is full of comic characterizations and stage business, and operates through an almost constant filmic shifting from one register and location to another. Whilst the censor thought Royce Carleton’s The Secret Service Girl, produced in 1918, to be a ‘crude and childish melodrama’, it was in fact constructed around issues of class as well as the hugely popular ‘girl’ format – with ‘Pearl the Secret Service Girl’ also playing a number of incidental comedy roles as the plot to catch a spy and save the navy unfolds.62 Called on for one last mission to catch the evil Baron Heinrich Muller, ‘Chief of the Hidden Hand – and Master Spy’, Pearl – whose friends and family all appear to know that she is working for the Secret Service – has a strong sense of her prior professional achievements: When no one could trace a spy – or unravel a plot – they came to me – and I succeeded – I could fool any man […] and I loved the game for the game’s sake. I loved to fool men who were trying to fool me – I loved to find out how silly they were – for all their brains and experience, when a woman took them in hand.63 Delilah Sabine, one of Pearl’s colleagues, is also a British Secret Service agent who has gone rogue: she is in cahoots with Muller, who in turn has disguised himself as a Mr Henry Miller of the Union Jack Lodge, Dover. Pearl agrees to complete one

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more mission for the Secret Service so that she can find the spies who are informing the enemy of transport routes to France. Amongst many comic interludes, Pearl approaches Muller in disguise, then feigns inebriation as her ‘real’ self, and even feigns love for the Master Spy himself. In doing so she discovers his plans to set off the mines rigged in the harbour so as to destroy the fleet. Pearl gets herself onto Muller’s submarine, threatens to shoot him if he doesn’t stop the detonation, manages to stop the explosions being set off, shoots Muller and takes the submarine to the surface, where it is attacked by the allied forces. Pearl then ‘returns from the dead’, Muller (still at large) is arrested, Delilah is revealed as a double agent and Pearl is rewarded when she declares her love for Jack, the man she saved through her pursuit of the enemy. For a play in nine scenes, there is an enormous amount of heightened frenetic activity, with a comic duo, Rose and Alf, performing lots of comedy stage business. But the plot is driven by the Secret Service women – one of whose heroism saves the fleet, whilst the other is only in it for the paycheque from the German master spy. Many of the spy plays explored here are reliant on male-female pairings of lead characters – who are either interdependent because they work in opposition as good or evil, or as is the case with female characters who act as ‘spy mates’, because the spy – usually male – cannot function effectively without their assistance. Thus, in Earl Derr Biggers’ Inside the Lines 64 noted earlier, Jane is an American buyer for a department store, caught up in Gibraltar while in transit from Paris to America in the opening months of the war. Here she is reacquainted with Captain Woodhouse, having met him originally en route to Berlin, and agrees not to tell their military hosts that she knows him. At first it seems that her trust in him is misplaced, but then we realize Woodhouse is a British agent who has uncovered a plot to completely destroy the British fleet. Jane is a kind of silent partner, her trust for Woodhouse in the face of evidence which suggests he is not all he seems, pays off – her silence is strategic. In The Man Who Stayed at Home, Miriam Leigh and Christopher Brent also work together as a team. Miriam, widowed before she was thirty and described as a charming, quietly spoken ‘woman of the world’, is Brent’s professional partner rather than love interest (Terry and Lechmere, 1916: 25).65 They both conceal their identities and while Miriam acknowledges that they have worked together many times before, they tell the other guests at ‘Wave Crest’ that they have only just met. Miriam switches between benignly chatting with the guests and completing the spy-catcher tasks Brent has set her, improvising her way through their planned deceptions and constantly keeping an eye on progress. Miriam persuades the enemy agent Carl that she is his comrade in arms, ‘One of the Fatherland’s most humble but most devoted servants’ (Derr Biggers, 1924: 127). She befriends the spy team, finds out their plans and manages to get them to accept her offer of ‘special transport’: they are of course being driven straight into the hands of the law. Miriam is pro-active and protective: she completely trusts Brent’s reading of the situation, and when Brent suggests that, ‘Diplomacy and espionage are amusing recreations for the man who has to stay at home’, one can only assume that this is also the case for his plucky accomplice (ibid.: 143).

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There is also a critique of traditional gender roles embedded in romantic comedy in Austin Page’s By Pigeon Post.66 Whilst we have explored the relationship between ideas of masculinity and espionage above, here I want to focus on the function of the two sister-heroines in the play, played originally by Madge Titherage as Dr Marie Latour and Dorothy Lane as Margot Latour. These combine love interest with assigned vocations, as all energies are focused on helping Captain Paul Chalfort run his Carrier Pigeon Service transporting stolen attack plans. Unusual in its use of a war-torn location – a Chateau twenty miles from German Lorraine – we are with the French army and feminine duty is defined here in terms of providing service rather than joining in with daring acts. However, the Latour sisters both have jobs traditionally assigned to men – Marie is a fully qualified doctor working in the army hospital service and Margot is an assertive, competent chauffeur to General Delapierre, commander of the Lorraine division. Margot refuses to be called a ‘chauffeuse’ noting, ‘if holding down a 70 h.p. Peugeot at a hundred kilometres an hour on these rotten roads doesn’t put me in the chauffeur class, I’d like to know what does’. She makes frequent reference to the relationship between her professional practice and her gender: ‘As I am doing a man’s job, I prefer being treated like one’ and ‘It’s a damn bit of luck that the man in charge of your car is a woman’.67 Dr. Marie on the other hand, provides medical care to Paul when he returns from a reconnaissance trip injured, it turns out, by Laeken, the spy he thought was his army assistant. Marie is also three steps ahead of Captain Paul, her secret love interest: she identifies the spy team and it is her strategic analysis of the situation which provides their downfall at the end of the play. Dr Marie out-manoeuvres all the villains, and agrees to marry Paul at the end of the play, at which point he jokes about how useful it will be to have a doctor in the family. The two sisters are vocationally skilled and forward thinking, at the same time as playing the ‘romantic’ partner. Margot, of course, wins the General around to her charms. They are just the right kind of ‘modern’ women needed to outdo the perpetrators of espionage. Popular spy plays leading up to and following on from 1914–1918 war were far less likely to contain the seductive females and dangerous vamps epitomized in the myths about Mata Hari, than they were the kinds of bold, intelligent and feisty women described above. Issues of class and gender are also more likely to come into play, where women might see the potential of espionage as a route to social mobility, or they may see their own class origins as somehow justifying their traitorous actions. There is a very contemporary feel to the framing of both the masculine and the feminine in these plays: masculinity is de-militarized and women are located in the realms of surveillance and espionage, integral to the action and to agendas of duty at a time of armed conflict. The next chapter, however, focuses on wider themes of conflict over the period. Whilst war produced a very specific framework, performance cultures also engaged with and consistently explored broader definitions of conflict, especially those related to class, gender and generational difference.

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Notes 1 Such plays are not included in Onions (1990), which refuses the popular/populist as representative of the performance cultures of the period. 2 See The Diplomacy of Sue, reviewed in the Stage, March 21,1907; and S. Potter, The French Spy, LCP 1913/5. 3 A ten-volume report commissioned on British Secret Services work during the war was written by Dr Lucy Farrer in 1921; the report has been edited, see West (2014). 4 Basil Thompson was Head of the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) of New Scotland Yard. 5 Gertrude Jennings, The German Plot, LCP 1908/24. 6 James Morton draws much of his information about Kell’s work with MI5 from an unpublished manuscript by Kell’s wife written after his death (Morton, 2010: 212). 7 http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo5/1-2/28/contents/enacted 8 Section 1; http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1920/75/pdfs/ukpga_19200075_en.pdf 9 See TNA/PRO, MEPO 2/1691, ‘Indecency in Cinemas, 1915–1917’. The folder is incomplete in that only a few of the commissioned reports remain, and seemingly only a small proportion of the original correspondence. All quotes are from letters and reports in this file. 10 See also TNA/PRO, MEPO 2/1691, letter from Home Office to Metropolitan Police, June 7, 1916. 11 TNA/PRO, MEPO 2/1691 ‘Indecency in Cinemas, 1915–1917’, Reports from members of surveillance teams and subsequent correspondence. 12 Ibid. 13 Parliamentary Military Security Department 2: a short-lived security section during the First World War. 14 The Stage, November 12, 1914, p. 13. 15 PRO 221.874/22, 3.3 and 3.5. 16 PRO 221.874/32/5.3. 17 PRO 221.874/32/5.1. 18 PRO File KV 2/3–1, pp. 38–44. 19 Letter, November 20, 1916, from Granville–Barker to William Wiseman (Address: The Garrick Club), FO161, MS 0666: William Wiseman papers, Yale University Library. 20 Letter, February 20, 1917, from Kansas to Wiseman, FO164: 24 MS 0666: William Wiseman papers, Yale University Library. 21 Letter March 8, 1917, from Santa Barbara to Wiseman, FO163: 41 MS 0666: William Wiseman papers, Yale University Library. 22 Letter February 26, 1917, FO163: 50 MS 0666: William Wiseman papers, Yale University Library. 23 Letter March 8, 1917, from Santa Barbara to Wiseman, FO163: 24 MS 0666: William Wiseman papers, Yale University Library. 24 Ibid., FO163: 22 MS 0666: William Wiseman papers, Yale University Library. 25 See letters from Granville–Barker to Helen Huntington, British Library, London, BL Add MS 71899/152. I am grateful to Simon Shepherd who pointed me in the direction of these letters and kindly gave me his notes to use here. 26 The divorce was announced in the New York Times on November 11, 1917. 27 Lillah MacCarthy Archive [1902–1953] THM/182, V & A Theatre and Performance Collection, UK. Letters A, B and C from Mr Edwin Bjorkman at Stockholm to Mr Vansittart, January/February 1917: in fact, the letters run to late March along with the ultimately unsuccessful negotiations around the possible tour. At this point Barker is working for SIS in the US. 28 G. S. Street, LCC, The Secret Service Girl, 1796/1918/17, British Library. 29 Ernest A. Bendall, LCC, The Secret Service Spy, 2154/1913, British Library. 30 Ernest A. Bendall, LCP Correspondence File, Married on Leave,1503, 1918/7, British Library.

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31 Roy Pomeroy directed the 1930 film version of Inside the Lines mentioned earlier, but here both the male and female leads were British double agents. 32 The play ran in London from December 1914 to April 1916 for 586 performances. Cecil M. Hepworth directed the 1915 ‘silent thriller’ film version and Dennis Eadie starred in both as Christopher Brent, with Violet Hopson as Miriam. Brent featured again in the sequel The Man Who Went Abroad (J. E. Harold Terry, LCC/485), which ran for less than a month in 1917. 33 W. A. Tremayne, The Black Feather, LCP 1919/10. Tremayne was a prolific Canadian playwright and film script-writer. This was one of his later plays (also produced as The Man Who Went), which ran in London at the Scala in 1919 for 89 performances. 34 Ibid., p. 25. 35 Ibid., pp. 27–31. 36 Ibid., Act III, p. 13. 37 Lawrence Cowan (1918), The Hidden Hand, LCC, 1588, May 16, 1918. The play premiered in Liverpool, transferring to the Strand in London from July 1918 for 165 performances. It was an adaptation of Cowan’s film It’s for England, 1916: the theme of the ‘hidden hand’ is prevalent in his work. 38 Ibid., p. 2. 39 Ibid., p. 8. 40 Ibid., Act II, p. 39. 41 Ibid., Act III, p. 8. 42 Austin Page (1918) By Pigeon Post, LCP 1918/5. The play ran at the Garrick from March 30, 1918 to December 14, 1918 for some 380 performances. The play was less successful in its subsequent New York production. US critics found its subject, once the war was ended, lacked currency (New York Clipper, November 27, 1918). It was not published despite its popularity. 43 Ibid., Act I, p. 12. 44 Ibid., Act I, p. 33. 45 Ibid., Act III, p. 12. 46 See PRO KV2/1 (PF2917/V1) and KV2/2 (PF2917/V2) and the Mata Hari Collection, Friesmuseum, Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, http://friesmuseum.nl 47 Waagenaar had worked for MGM as a researcher on Garbo’s Mata Hari in 1931. Whilst carrying out his research, he was put in touch with Ann Lintjens, Mata Hari’s servant from 1905 up until her death in 1917. Although she had burnt Mata Hari’s papers, she had kept two large scrapbooks full of photographs and cuttings which she gave to Waaganaar (Waagenaar, 1965: pp. x–xii). 48 Wheelwright notes Winifred Ludecke’s suggestion that female agents were most often ‘actresses, dancers, artists from the music hall, and cabarets […] school teachers, seamstresses and laundry maids’ (Wheelwright, 1992: 111, qtd in Ludecke, 1929: 225). 49 The production ran for 158 performances from March 1916, with Hilda Trevelyan, who starred in a number of Barrie’s plays, in the lead role. The play was revived in December 1916 and 1917. 50 For a report on Adrian Silas’ spy drama The Diplomacy of Sue, see ‘Miss Mouillot’s Studio’, in The Stage, March 21, 1907, p. 13. 51 E. Norman Terry and Frederick B. Humphries (1914) LCP 1914/28. 52 Michael Orme, A Woman on The Window Sill (marked as the property of Violet Vanburgh), LCP 1917/13. All quotes are from the unpaginated manuscript. 53 Ibid. 54 LCO report on Dorothy Mullord’s Married on Leave, LCP 1918/7 and LCO report on Gladys Hastings Walton’s A Woman in Khaki, LCO August 14, 1914 and September 1, 1915. 55 Licensed for performance in the Electric Theatre, Tiverton in the South West of England in 1917. 56 R. Hope-Lumley (1917) Marie Sees It Through (renamed The Enemy Within), LCP 1917/ 15, Act I, p. 8. 57 Gladys Hastings Walton, A Woman in Khaki, LCP 1915/23, p. 27.

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58 59 60 61 62 63 64

Ibid., p. 34. Geo A. Degray, The Secret Service Spy, LCP 1913/42, Act I, p. 4. Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., Act 3, p. 7. LCC, 1796 (G. S. Street) The Secret Service Girl 1918/17. The Secret Service Girl 1918/17, n.p. Earl Derr Biggers was also the author of the hugely popular Charlie Chan detective series, much adapted for screen and radio in numerous languages. 65 Miriam does not appear in the sequel, The Man Who Went Abroad (J. E. Harold Terry (1917) LCC 485) although she is referred to often in the play. 66 Austin Page, By Pigeon Post LCP 1918/5. 67 Act I, pp. 23–29.

5 PERFORMING CONFLICT: BEYOND THE FIRST WORLD WAR

The four decades of British performance cultures explored here were bookended by the Boer War (1899–1902) and the Second World War. These decades were both shaped by and reflected structures of feeling, to use Raymond Williams’ term, conditioned by war. Structures of feeling formed in the ‘true social present’ were ghosted by the impact of war, the sense of loss, mourning, recovery and apprehension, as well as political, class and generational discord (Williams, 1971: 132). Actual military conflict manifested against a broader experience of social ill ease. These conflictual times were underpinned by an extant Victorian colonialist agenda and a growing civic dissonance around issues of gender, labour and economic inequality. In terms of performance cultures, such themes were visible and at times dominant, although differently nuanced over the period as a whole. War, and more broadly conflict, shaped the experience of citizenship during the period, but the performance industries found opportunity as well as experiencing hardship in this context. Existing social concerns shaped the theatrical response to the First World War in terms of the industry and its textual products. These extant social concerns reassert themselves with more force and frequency after the war in the 1920s. Focusing enquiry on the significance of a conflictual social environment and the cultural impact of war, this chapter, then, opens with a brief exploration of the first war of the century – the Boer War – and the manner in which it was embraced by the theatrical imagination. It then moves towards the 1914–1918 war as a central reference point for an exploration of the ways in which performance cultures responded both directly, and in broader terms, to the experience of conflict in relation to ideas of sociality, domesticity and community.

The home disrupted: invasion, war and domestic life The public’s access to information on the progress of the 1899–1902 Boer war was shaped by a changed level of interaction between those reporting the war and those

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fighting it (Morgan, 2002: 6). Fought on another continent, the war was also ‘brought home’ through theatre with plays and sketches such as Boer Meisje (1900),1 Found on the Veldt (1902),2 Mafeking in London (1900) and Mafeking (1902).3 Other productions like For The Colours, performed in Derbyshire in 1900, were marketed as offering something special by way of spectacle: here, the ‘story of the Matabele War’, by a ‘magnificent company of London artistes’, claiming the inclusion of ‘ten real Zulu Chiefs’.4 Even though relatively new and fragmented, the film industry developed a pattern of circulating ‘factual’ shorts, such as A Reservist Before and After the War (1902) or Robert Ashe’s The Bombardment of Mafeking (1899),5 where soldiers blithely continued their card game whilst heavy bombardment went on around them. Seen as central to victory over an extended enemy blockade during the Boer conflict, the battle of Makefing remained the subject of American films in the 1910s: for example, The Heroine of Mafeking (Selig Polyscope film, 1910) and The Siege of Mafeking (Empire Production Company, 1913). The idea of the empathic ‘crowd’ was embedded in press reports on the celebrations of the siege of Mafeking, presented as an ‘event’ also marked inside the theatres. The press, for example, noted that Eleanora Duse’s performance was called to a halt as ‘Mr Comyns Carr stepped forward from the wings. There was a moment of silence, then came the magic word “Mafeking” and a great shout arose’.6 In Piccadilly Circus, the crowd was added to by ‘the stream of omnibuses and cabs bringing people from the theatre […] people were waving anything they could lay their hands on […] the people had obviously taken them to the theatre in anticipation’.7 Going to the theatre is presented here as a prequel to joining the crowd for victory celebrations. The war that opened the century caught the public imagination on screen, stage and street for its assumed heroism, a symbol of overcoming the odds when the Empire was under attack, with little mention of British atrocities. In the aftermath of the Boer war, the dramaturgical imagination focused more on threats of invasion: the assumed enemy was nearer to home. Invasion narratives drew on both the anxiety of foreign incursion (see Chapter 4), and the perceived state of indifference to its dangers. One of the most widely circulated ‘invasion dramas’ was Guy du Maurier’s An Englishman’s Home. Produced in 1909, the play was subject to direct interference from the censor’s office, who removed references to German forces, changing the names of characters and places, for fear of aggravating anti-German sentiment (Hiley, 1991: 219, and Wood, 2016). Written by the brother of matinee idol Gerard du Maurier,8 An Englishman’s Home ran at the Wyndham’s Theatre from the end of January 1909 to mid-June for 163 performances. This was followed by numerous touring productions countrywide, many of which were ‘spearheaded by local Territorial regiments’ (Wood, 2016: 196), and inspired numerous marketing campaigns – from adverts for records of ‘four of the most stirring patriotic speeches’ in the production programme,9 to the advertising of domestic and interior goods using the title of the play as a tag line (ibid.: 199). The play was twice adapted for film, firstly in 1914 directed by Ernest Batley, and secondly in 1939 directed by Albert de Courville (see Chapter 1). Each of these were produced in the first year of war and emphasized the anti-pacifist element of the original.

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An Englishman’s Home takes place in one room of ‘“The Firs” at Wickham, in Essex’ (du Maurier, 1909: 1) – later called ‘Myrtle Villa’ to confuse one of the intruders (ibid.: 34) – a quiet suburban home owned by Mr Brown described as, ‘middle class – rather near the bottom of that class’ (ibid.: 1). Peopled by those who view the military as unnecessary in times of peace, inevitably the house is invaded and destroyed by a foreign army, the ‘Nearlanders’. Banned from performing a direct and unpatriotic burlesque sketch by the censor, H. G. Pélissier (see Chapter 2) turned An Englishman’s Home’s overt anti-German sentiment into a comment on the rising intolerance of the English public for foreigners. In making a performance out of the fact that a script had been banned, a mock disagreement about whether they could perform the sketch was staged in front of the audience.10 An Englishman’s Home was unusual in its instigation of so much debate across such a broad range of cultural contexts, both amongst the theatregoing public and in the civic realm. It also inspired other plays such as Bernard S. Townroe’s A Nation in Arms, with its call for conscription arousing ‘patriotism rather languidly applauding with kid gloves in the stalls, and shrill voiced, eager-eyed Boy Scout patriotism in the gallery’11 (Townroe, 1909; see also Wood, 2016). Townroe, Mayor of Hampstead in the mid-1930s, was later involved in developing policy for slum clearance and re-housing, but in 1909, A Nation in Arms was his ‘frankly propagandist’12 play, calling young men to military duty: the souvenir programme included a rationale and details for the shape and costs for a systematic scheme for Universal Military Training.13 Both plays resonated in the wider public realm and contributed in some part to the growing antagonism toward German and other foreign forces. An Englishman’s Home was, by late 1914, viewed as a suitable basis for the anti-German film adaptation in what Hiley calls a ‘new wave of belligerent patriotism’ (Hiley 1991: 226). Both plays have garnered more recent academic interest in part because of the ways in which their thematic concerns converge with military, rather than theatre, histories. Between them, Hiley, Wood and Hegglund provide detailed assessments of the themes, circulation and reception of the plays, but it is Hegglund’s perspective that the Edwardian home, ‘a space of crisis as well as comfort’, was also considered a ‘sacred space of Englishness’ that is useful here (Hegglund, 1997: 399). For Hegglund, An Englishman’s Home frames the ‘home’ as a place of ‘crisis of national identity’, vulnerable to invasion. With du Maurier’s depiction of family members as ‘Shrewd, but not very intelligent’, ‘short, thin, narrow-chested, sloping shoulders, knock-kneed and lark-heeled’ and ‘little overdressed in a cheap suburban way’ (du Maurier, 1909: 1–2), the analysis is implicitly eugenicist: the crisis is class specific and the underpinning concern is about forms of citizenship and belonging (see Chapter 2). The physical stage space replicates the post-Christmas chaos of a foggy Boxing Day morning in the ‘playroom’ of a suburban villa. Here we meet the family at leisure, surrounded by books, papers and magazines, with Mr Brown practicing his new hobby of diabolo,14 while his son reads out instructions. Towards the end of the first Act, a mysterious group of soldiers are discovered sitting on the lawn, surrounding the house, where they are joined by soldiers on horses: the enemy, named ‘Nearlanders’ following the censor’s interventions, has begun its invasion. At the beginning of Act II, the playroom has been transformed into an officers’ HQ with the furniture moved

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around and articles of middle-class comfort and consumption – vases, photographs, magazines, table cloths – pushed aside or onto the floor, the curtains pulled down and transformed into a blanket. Standing in the doorway or by the fire, the soldiers are ‘muddy and travel-stained’. Mr Brown, his family and friends have been removed, and the Captain has turned the house upside down (see Figure 5.1). Eventually the ‘Nearlanders’ leave, taking with them any supplies they find in the house, which they politely offer to pay for. Paul, family friend and one of the territorial volunteers who has been out scouting, informs the family: ‘the whole damned country is coming down like a house of cards […] and thousands like you are saying it’s not your business, and as long as it doesn’t interfere with you, let it go on’ (ibid.: 71). The second act ends with another invasion of the home, this time by Captain Finch and a group of volunteers, whom he orders to defend the house against the enemy. They proceed to move furniture and smash their rifle butts through all the windows. The enemy begin to attack the house and Geoffrey, still convinced that this is not a real war, gets shot while standing on a table to get a good view. By the opening of Act III, the domestic space is unrecognizable, it has been under ‘distant shell fire’: ‘Window openings toward the enemy have been barricaded and strengthened with mattresses, rolls of carpets, rugs and matting’. The room, a shelter for the wounded as well as a place of counter attack, is bombarded and the roof has caught fire (ibid.: 95). The collapsing building is finally re-invaded by the Nearlanders: all that is left of the ‘Englishman’s home’ is a war-torn shell in which Captain Yoland orders the execution of the homeowner, Mr Brown – a civilian who has taken up arms – in the closing moments of the play. The play combined the melodramatic with the sensationalist: rarely was such obliteration of a domestic space shown on stage, and to the accompaniment of shell and gun fire which transformed it into a place of disorienting, life-threatening military combat.

FIGURE 5.1

An Englishman’s Home after the enemy invasion, 1909 (author’s own collection)

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Domestic life turned upside down through war provided a wide-appealing dramatic scheme. Home-based audiences, many of whom were engaged in work to support the war effort, sat side by side with more transient military audiences for whom, as soldiers in transit, such entertainment gave the domestic renewed significance. G. S. Street, journalist and reader for the Lord Chamberlain, suggested that in part such transient audiences had provoked a reversal of the usual pattern of productions: more new plays and sketches were being put on in London than country wide, where the theatre industry suffered more economically, over the war years (Street, 1918: 108). Here the domestic front was situated as a place where, through a process of adaptation, those not fighting at the front could display resilience and sustain ‘home’ as a place of sanctuary. The class stereotyping used by writers like Knoblock – whose Mrs Jupp in his propaganda sketch The Way to Win is proud to have sent her three sons off to war and speaks in a cockney twang, with a comic take on ‘middle-class’ words like asparagus which she calls ‘sparrer grass’ (Knoblock, 2011 [1915]:138) – is more broadly applied by other writers. Gertrude Jennings, Harold Harwood and Fryn Tennyson Jesse, for example, are more gently critical of the middle classes in war. Here the domestic space is invested with what Raymond Williams, in his discussion of structures of feeling, names the ‘felt sense of the quality of life’, during wartime (Williams, 1961: 63). Thus, in Billeted, set on the anniversary of the beginning of the war and produced in 1917, Bette Taradine has adjusted to managing her household during war and looking after billeted officers.15 One of ‘only’ two servants left, her cook threatens to leave. She would rather work in ‘mewnitions’ in the North with her brother than be insulted by the suppliers whose bills Betty has failed to pay (Harwood and Jesse, 1920: 50). In a final twist, normality is restored and Betty is saved from bankruptcy by the surreptitious return of her husband. A far cry from the war-torn domestic space in An Englishman’s Home, Billeted offers a comic take on the domestic conditions of war with which audiences would have been familiar. Actress turned prolific playwright Gertrude Jennings explored class hierarchies in plays produced during the war such as No Servants (1917) and Poached Eggs and Pearls (1916). Here she relied on the currency of comedy born of domestic upheaval in wartime. Originally performed at the Princes Theatre in April 1917 as part of a fundraising matinee for the Metropolitan Special Constabulary Ambulance Fund, No Servants had a star cast including Lillian Braithwaite and Otho Stuart. Here, an aristocratic widow is in crisis because her servants have all decided to take up wartime jobs: Sparrow is taking over a sausage shop, Harris is becoming a policeman and Maud is going on the stage. The servants’ quarters in the kitchen at Knotley Park are taken over by Lady Streetly and her guest Francis Mayfield from the Foreign Office, about to go on government business in Africa. Lady Streetly can speak five languages, but cannot cook even simple fare; Mayfield once peeled a potato whilst at Eton. The comedic value of their domestic ineptitude drives the plot, which ends in a proposal and of course the return of the servants who have missed the train that was to take them to their new professional lives in the city.16

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Jennings’ Poached Eggs and Pearls similarly depicts the upper and middle classes as floundering with the disruption to domesticity created by the war effort. Produced at the Apollo in November 1916 under the management of André Charlot, the play is set in a wartime canteen dining room and pantry, where ladies serve soldiers on leave or in training. Managed by the Duchess of Froome, who’s ‘splendid at the sink’ and runs the kitchens like clockwork (Jennings, 1917a: 21), this is a tongue-in-cheek critique of the contributions made by such women to the war effort (see Figure 5.2). Lady Clara has fallen in love with an airman who always orders poached eggs on toast as these take longer to serve than the standard sausages and mash. Lady Mabel doesn’t want to wash up and spoil her manicured nails, as she has to dine at the Ritz that evening (ibid.: 7–8). Miss Deacon – from middle-class, ‘quite simple people’ (ibid.: 26) – is rather impressed by working amongst the aristocracy, who ‘don’t behave as quite as we do’ (ibid.: 30). Her domestic incompetence is the source of much comedy business on stage as she manages to break a whole dinner service while on her shift. Equally reliant on comic timing, expressions of class snobbery and mistaken identity, the action is conditioned by the topsy-turvydom of domestic life during war. Other of Jennings’ wartime plays focus on class relations to drive her plots. Waiting for the Bus (1917), for example,17 sees aristocrats giving up their cars for the war effort and forced to take public transport, and the long running Five Birds in Cage (1915)18 similarly depends on the comedy created by the interaction of classes who would rarely have met as equals prior to the war, all stuck in a lift shaft together, waiting for a mechanical fault to be repaired (see Figure 5.3). The domestic impact of war then, was frequently articulated on stage through preexisting concerns about class and gender inequality, where the familiar is made strange and vice versa in the topsy-turvydom of war.

FIGURE 5.2

Scene 1 of Poached Eggs and Pearls, Apollo Theatre, 1916 (author’s own collection)

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FIGURE 5.3

Five Birds in a Cage, Haymarket Theatre, 1915 (author’s own collection)

Gwen John’s Luck of War, Miles Malleson’s Black ’Ell – removed from bookshops under DORA regulations (Hynes 1992 [1990]: 151–152) – and Evelyn Glover’s A Bit of Blighty,19 offer more overtly critical takes on the impact of war on domestic life. Glover’s ‘soft propaganda’ sketch, set in the living room of a tenement building in London,20 is a comedy of misapprehension. Mrs Eagle’s parlour is covered in patriotic prints and as she notes, if she’d had a dozen sons, she would have sent every one of them to enlist. We find her sitting for a photograph by the ‘Snapshots from Home League’ photographer, Miss Holt.21 She intends to send this to her son Jim on the front line. Mrs Eagle is concerned about a young woman her son has courted while on leave, but what she doesn’t realize is that Miss Mary Balkwell, who has come to the tenement also seeking out Miss Holt, the photographer, is the self-same woman she has been cursing. Mary’s patriotic speech about how she wishes she could fight instead of working in ‘the ’mewnitions factory’ convinces Mrs Eagle that she is the right kind of girl for her son. All ends well and they have their photos taken together to send on to Jim. In this play, the home, the ‘second line of defence’ as Miss Holt calls it, is the place in which conflict is resolved.22 Similarly, in Gwen John’s Luck of War, the domestic space is disrupted by war when Ann, assuming her soldier husband dead, remarries. Amos proves a better, more sober husband, looking after the children and making possible a life Ann would not have dreamed of previously, before her first husband George joined up. George returns from war on crutches, however, and is surprised that Ann has remarried. His military action is described as duty and so too Ann reluctantly but dutifully agrees to return to her husband. For Holledge, the play, originally produced by Edith Craig’s Pioneer Players in 1917, brought to the stage issues that particularly impacted on working-class women (Holledge, 1981: 138).

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Ann’s grievance at having been left to fare for herself with two children and one on the way is well articulated. In what must have been at the time an unpatriotic play, George has assumed life will carry on as before, after his return from war. As in John’s Edge O’ Dark (see Chapter 3), the home is ruled by men, as are the women, and here, war does not alter this inequity, despite the alternative model of partnership offered by Amos. Although written in the middle of the war, Miles Malleson’s Black ’Ell, was not produced until the mid-1920s, when its virulent anti-war stance would have been more acceptable. A pacifist play, written early in his acting career, Malleson’s class analysis is embedded in a critique of warfare and the home is set up as a place of ignorance. As the play opens, Mr and Mrs Gould’s peaceful breakfast is interrupted by news of their son’s return from the front as a hero, to be awarded the military Distinguished Service Order (DSO) (Malleson, 1925: 41). Harold Gould quietly finds his own way home, away from the gathering crowds, haunted by the battlefields and in no mood for celebration. He tells the maid Ethel that the dead – from whichever side – all end up ‘thrown in somewhere with a heap of others, with some earth scrambled over them’ (ibid.: 53). For Harold’s father, ‘one or two good breakfasts at home, a few nights in your own bed, and a dinner […] at the Club’ is all that is needed to get Harold out of his morbid state (ibid.: 58–59). He warns him not to talk like the ‘cranks’ who have refused to join up, that he should not give in to ‘sentimentalism’ (ibid.). Harold notes bitterly that it is predominantly working-class men who are sent off to war and that those who promote war do not fight themselves. The play ends with the juxtaposition of Harold’s passionate anti-war speech and their neighbour bursting into the house with a crowd of family and friends to celebrate his D.S.O. while ‘he stands there, white, with clenched fists, and still’ (ibid.: 64). War punctures the illusion of ‘home’ as sanctuary, yet the domestic realm provides no comfort with its rigid boundaries of class, masculinity and militarism. For Malleson, war offered the opportunity for ‘our internal domestic life as well as our external relation with others’ to ‘undergo very great, very fundamental alterations’ (Malleson, 1916b: 11). Whilst Hynes has queried why Black ’Ell specifically violated DORA regulations, it clearly provoked antagonism (Hynes, 1992 [1990]: 151). Malleson attacked the general public, who he believed ‘saw the war as entirely and altogether somebody else’s fault’, in his pacifist pamphlets (Malleson, 1916b: 4). He viewed war as the antithesis to socialism and, much like Harold Gould in the play, thought that ‘violence and its consequent hate cannot be ended by violence and hate’ (ibid. and see Malleson, 1916a).23 Overtly pacifist dramas, if they managed to negotiate the process of censorship, were few and far between, although playwrights contributed to national debate about the war. For George Bernard Shaw, the war was a ‘heartbreaking wreckage’ (Shaw, 1914: 1), where mostly working-class men were sent to fight without training, without rights and effectively as ‘servants’ of the state. He called for the abolishment of ‘the militarist soldier’ in favour of trained combatants ‘receiving Trade Union rates of pay’ (ibid.: 31). Shaw stressed the ‘obsolescence and colossal stupidity of war’ (ibid.: 16), but was publicly pilloried for doing so, both in the press and by his fellow playwrights (Sutro, 1933: 263–267). Playwright Harold Owen attacked Shaw by means of a whole book deconstructing his arguments

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against militarism. His Common Sense about the Shaw was dedicated to those who have died in the war, ‘while fools at home contend’: Owen suggested Shaw had a ‘hopeless, unworldly impracticability’ (Owen, 1915: 211). The relative failure of Henry Arthur Jones’ 1917 The Pacifists suggests, however, that audiences were perhaps even less keen on anti-pacifist plays by this point in the war: Jones, popular amongst the previous generation of playgoers, claimed what he had written as a burlesque had been taken ‘for a realistic play’ (Duncan, 1964: 294). His description of the Peebody family’s parlour in the play, is underpinned by similar class snobbery as du Maurier’s earlier play: ‘provincial, middle-class and furnished in the usual incongruous bad taste’ (Jones, 1955: 1). The play is a parable about the townsfolk of Market Pewbury, unwilling to stand up for themselves in the face of the town bully Ferguson, who pleases himself by fencing off common ground, threatening all who cross his path and walking off with Peabody’s wife. The implication is that violence can only be usefully met with violence as ironically, another bully – Tom Bluke, the ‘great Bashificator’ (ibid.: 98) – is bought in to deal with Ferguson and save the town.

Performance industries shaped by the First World War Just as playwrights responded in diverse ways to the war, so too the performance industries more generally manifested a range of reactions. These were initially shaped by concerns about the feasibility of business in wartime: there was surprisingly little regard for the politics of war. Many writers and performers signed up or engaged in recruiting and propaganda work, as part of the initial industry reaction to the war, but moved into other related areas of labour. As noted previously, Edward Knoblock moved from writing wartime sketches to working with intelligence services abroad (see Chapter 4). Alfred Sutro, playwright and official translator of Maurice Maeterlinck’s plays, worked in a government censorship department which eventually became the War Trade Intelligence Department,24 but continued to write plays – only some of which were for propaganda purposes. Plays and sketches were often commissioned by government departments for specific purposes. Sutro notes a ‘government Economy Committee invited half a dozen dramatists’ to write ‘playlets’ for the Coliseum, to ‘induce the working-classes, now in receipt of increased wages, to save in and invest in […] War Loan Certificates’ (Sutro, 1933: 268). Whilst in charge of the production and circulation of propaganda at Wellington House – the headquarters for war propaganda in London – C.F.G. Masterman also called on playwright/novelists Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy, as well as using John Masefield, Ian Hay and J. M. Barrie on propaganda tours of America in the early years of the war (Buitenhuis, 1987). Over the war as a whole, the government gradually came to recognize the ‘importance of skilled workers in key industries’ (Pattinson, 2016: 712) and the performance industries were quick to define their professional contribution as one of specialist skill, and to adapt the application of such skills to the war effort. At the same time, a key concern in the opening months of the war focused on issues of business and labour: how to keep the industries profitable and flexible at a time of social and economic uncertainty:

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The amusement trade suffered […] musicians and theatrical folk were reduced to serious straits, and those anxious to help them organised concerts to which we went accompanied by our knitting. (Peel, 1929: 60) As we saw in the previous chapter, a series of critical judgements on the seeming failure to represent the ‘realities’ of war are often applied to the theatre made during the First World War (Kosok, 2007; Onions, 1990). These tend to negate the significance of work which reflects on the experience of war through exploring the disruption or adaptability of domestic life. Other studies of performance and the First World War read the cultural products of wartime as more complex and place value on their diverse qualities in ‘defining people’s sense of what the war was “about” and what was at stake’ (Maunder, 2011: xxiii). Amongst these, Maunder and Williams point to the sheer number of plays and sketches produced during the war. Many of these, as I have already noted, responded to existing social issues, the significance of which are further highlighted by war; many were produced only once, or circulated outside of London perhaps, but then largely disappeared from consciousness (Maunder, 2011 and 2015 and Williams, 2003). Williams even suggests the war produced a halfdecade ‘golden age’ in terms of productivity and participation in theatre: the same contexts threatening the entertainment industries also appeared to produce a boom within them (Williams, 2003: 2). As Bernard Weller noted in the Stage Yearbook for 1918, in the ‘fourth year of the war […] there were more theatres and music-halls open than in an average peace year’ (Weller, 1918: 11). Contemporaries were quick to critique the proliferation of a new class of audience during wartime – soldiers on leave or ‘flappers’ in the stalls (see Gale, 1996 and Gardner, 2015) – but as discussed in Chapter 1, concerns about the transformation of the theatre industry by a ‘new’ generation of audience run through critical observations of the period as a whole. Reports early in the war that Music-Halls were considered to be doing ‘harm to the minds of our soldiers’ and that their ‘taste for frivolity’ might ‘be discouraged’25 have to be read in the broader context of antagonism towards the independent tastes of popular audiences and the social insularity of moralizing critics: in other words, the war intensified existing attitudes. Similarly, the theatre industry as a whole threw itself into fundraising and charitable labour during the war, but this kind of professional engagement in philanthropic enterprise was based on existing patterns of labour. War-time legislation, which impacted on the manner in which the theatre industry might conduct itself as a business, added to existing prohibitive frameworks for professional practice, framing what could happen and where in the theatre, and to some extent in the film industries. Other new Acts and governmental edicts during the war, such as the Aliens Restrictions Act of 1914 and the Restricted Occupations Order of 1917 defined who could be employed. In the latter case, no fresh employment was to be given to men aged between 18 and 61 capable of fighting (see Collins, 1998: 33 and Weller, 1918: 12). This legislative framework created limitations on new entrants to the industry: production relied on

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a diminishing pool of workers once compulsory conscription for single men aged between 18 and 41 – enhanced and continued until 1920 – was bought in under the Military Service Act of 1916. It is worth focusing attention briefly here on the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) passed as an emergency Act without significant parliamentary debate in August 1914.26 DORA had a direct impact on the conduct of citizens and the operations of the theatre and film industries, as did the Entertainments Tax in 1916 (see Chapter 2). Under DORA, journalists were subject to jurisdiction, travel was limited, theatres were prohibited from selling chocolates or sweetmeats after 8pm – when shops were also required to close – regulations which lasted beyond the war into the 1920s.27 Night-time curfews were imposed, street lighting was prohibited and the everyday operations of places of public entertainment were placed effectively under a form of martial law. More broadly, DORA’s emergency powers were used to control growing levels of insurgency in Ireland and were used against pacifists later in the war.28 There were some direct comic references to DORA in performance, but most theatres found it ‘a source of nuisance and very unpopular’ by the early 1920s.29 Its regulatory framework impacted directly on marketing for theatre: shortages of paper placed restrictions on advertising so posters could not exceed 20 x 30 inches, thus reducing the potential visual reach of advertising.30 While many felt the ever-increasing amendments to DORA had little to do with securing the realm,31 the policing of potential contraventions meant that business could not carry on as usual. Initially the business of performance was seen as potentially surplus at a time of war. According to the Stage, some 800 actors enlisted as volunteers in 1914 (Collins, 1998: 14). Whilst noting in late August 1914 that artists had confessed they felt it inappropriate to perform when their fellow men were being sent to the battlefields, an editorial in the Performer also proposed that ‘to keep the halls open represents a duty to be fulfilled towards their country’ that is ‘even more necessary in such a period of trouble and stress:32 articles also questioned how the industry might survive without its workforce. As a counter balance, some managements regularly advertised in programmes that they did not employ workers who were eligible for conscription.33 Attitudes to industry involvement changed during the war itself, but initially issues of labour and profitability were paramount, as was the need to establish an appropriate structure for professional conduct. This might involve highlighting the availability of products with an immediate currency for wartime: Pooles took out full page advertisements offering scenery they named ‘War Myrioramas’, to which they would add events ‘as they occur’, noting that such items would be ‘the only money maker during the present state of the country’.34 Indeed, Fred Karno’s proposition for a ‘Ladies Only Revue’ in October 1915, for which he advertised for ‘Lady Artistes in all Lines’, was a shrewd move to avoid accusations of employing potential combatants, at the same time capitalizing on the wartime audience appeal of acts such as the ‘Sisters Sprightly’ and their colleagues.35 Within weeks of the declaration of war, then, there was a clear drive towards adaptability in the performance industries, and a recognition of the need to adjust to the shifting wartime market. Such adjustments changed shape as the war progressed, so, for example, Hammond notes that the early common practice of ‘Roll of Honour’ films featuring

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‘stills of men who were at the front’ began to prove less popular (Hammond and Williams, 2011: 3). Audience taste moved quickly, so whilst The Battle of the Somme (1916) broke box office records, the lack of sales for Battle of Arras released some ten months later suggests ‘that audiences had lost interest in feature-length battlefront films’ (Reeves, 1999: 31). The balance between serving the cultural economy of the war and sustaining the industries was a fine one. Despite the antagonism toward film as a medium associated with working class culture at the beginning of the war, it was also recognized as a major, versatile and popular means of producing and circulating propaganda. Post-war reports on the activities of Wellington House and the Foreign Office in the commissioning of film propaganda suggest that the Cinema Department of the Ministry was keen on new types of film and entirely new machinery for their display (see Figures 5.4a and 5.4b).36 Geoffrey Malins, cinematographer of The Battle of The Somme, notes that his official role afforded him ‘unique opportunities to gain knowledge of the whole system required to wage the most terrible war’ and he did not, as a film maker, ‘let these opportunities slip by’ (Malins, 1920: 145). War provided profitable opportunities for the performance industries from a number of perspectives. Some theatre managements tried to establish cooperative and profit share schemes, which by 1915 were almost entirely defunct. Gordon Williams summarizes such schemes as exploitative and indicative of a managerial protectorate (Williams, 2003: 92–146). Here, fees for performers were to be based on a percentage of takings so that the risk of producing and circulating work would not fall to managements alone: performers had to pay their own expenses on top of receiving reduced fees, and trade adverts were placed for acts willing to accept patriotic ‘war terms’ in the early months of the war. Less threatening to forms of performance labour was the call to ‘rally to the flag’ and buy Britishmade: ‘Gouldings British Grease Paint’,37 or ‘Glarko’ the ‘all-British’ grease paint. As consumers, performers were advised to ‘Be British and Buy British Goods’.38 Some performers also embraced the potential of a war cultural economy: ‘Daisy Squelch and her Patriotic Band – See their new magnificent battleship scene! Hear their wonderful patriotic novelties’.39 Others made sure that managements knew them to be British, even though they had ‘foreign’ names: Jean Schwiller the Anglo-Russian cellist took out a large advert ‘informing managers and agents’ of British subjecthood; Dezsö Kordy, that his is a British Act with performers who have been naturalized citizens since 1902 and resident in the UK for twenty years.40 By early 1916, pictures of artistes at the battle front are commonplace amongst trade journal copy, as are articles on ‘Alien Labour Prohibition’ or on the ‘Profession in Wartime’.41 Rising production costs are acknowledged, as are new industrial conflicts between managers and workers. The production of a ‘pre-war’ directory of acts in January 1919 recognized a new phase of professional activity bought about by the end of the war: demobilization further raised costs and salaries in a manner which would impact on the industry’s relationship to its labour force. The Era suggested that ‘war plays’ might have a currency still, or that the ‘war drama and musical comedy and farce’ that had gained such popularity in the war,

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FIGURES 5.4A AND 5.4B

A First World War mobile cinema unit (author unknown)

might be slowly replaced by ‘Peace Plays’ or a ‘play of Reconstruction’: ‘real war plays’, reflecting on the actualities of war would come in time and they too would be profitable.42 The new curfews imposed in early 1918, requiring theatres to close by 10.30pm, were not anticipated to further impact on business.43 There was even a claim that for large crowds to travel to and congregate in theatres was, in fact, a post-war ‘patriotic act’; that theatre was an ‘institution of utmost national importance’.44

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Whilst in the opening months of the war there were reports of overseas artistes breaking contracts to return home with speed, so too there were complaints at the influx of foreign workers. During the latter months of the war, the trade press also reported on the impact of new additions to the DORA regulations on employment: both ‘friendly’ and ‘neutral’ aliens were finding travel and employment difficult in the light of orders which prohibited entry without relevant documentation and guarantees. All performers, whether British or not, found travel difficult because of requirements for identity books in order to perform in ‘prohibited areas’ such as coastal naval outposts, where ‘neutrals’ were not allowed to perform at all. Trade copy often welcomed the distinction between home and alien employees, suggesting that this distinction might stop an influx of foreign labour after the war.45 The Era noted however, that ‘restriction is pressing unduly hard on an already suffering profession’.46 Questions of labour in the performance industries after the war – from who should do it, to how much was available – were embedded in wider frameworks of restriction and paucity of resource.

Celebrity reminiscences of war Some performers write about the new working conditions bought about by war with a remarkable lack of engagement with the realities of armed conflict. Cedric Harwicke, who saw active duty and continued in the army working on concert parties for some time after the end of the war, noted, ‘I was a rotten soldier, but the theatricality of certain aspects of the War appealed to me enormously’ (Hardwicke, 1932: 101). Similarly, his memories of London during the war suggest that soldiers on leave were, for example, ‘thrilled at the delightful prospect of spending a night at the Alhambra’ (Hardwicke, 1932: 105–106). Doubtless the horrors of war would not make good autobiographical copy for an actor writing for a specific post-war readership, many of whom would have shared a home-based experience of the war. Such autobiographies capitalized on the desire for reminiscences of war as community-building and sustaining: the emphasis is on home, work and adaptation to everyday war conditions, albeit scarred by the impact of zeppelin attacks or by the memory of streets darkened by curfews. The war is always close at hand, as Gladys Cooper noted: During the War the Playhouse […] was a comparatively safe place to go to, but, on the other hand, we had a machine-gun almost opposite us on the embankment, and a part of the roof is made of glass. (Cooper, 1931: 160) Others share memories of their wartime work, even if briefly. Cyril Maude, for example, started ‘The Special Constable, Actor Contingent’ in which older actors or those who were unfit to sign up, were out on ‘police’ duty from 6am to 10am each morning. This was a short-lived occupation as by early 1915 he was touring in the US and became an intelligence agent there as part of the effort to end US neutrality, reporting to the ambassador his reading of American feeling about the war (see also

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Chapter 4). Meanwhile his wife was back in England looking after Belgian refugees (Maude, 1927: 246–249). Other theatre workers write of their ‘proxy’ experience of the war as non-combatants. Perhaps one of the oddest of these is Owen Nares, who turned down an opportunity to work with D. W. Griffiths in America during the war and worked as an assistant transport officer for a London hospital, in between performances on stage and screen. Looking back in 1925, Nares rather fantastically suggests that he and his wife could ‘feel’ the gun barrages across the Channel from their house in Surrey: ‘like waves of sound turned into waves of feeling – an uncanny, unforgettable sensation’ (Nares, 1925: 183). Other practitioners’ war activities, including touring concerts and entertaining troops, such as those of Lena Ashwell or indeed Cicely Hamilton, have been well documented elsewhere (see Ashwell, 1922; Collins, 1998; Gale, 2004b; Hamilton, 1935 and Leask, 2012). The war work of members of the Actresses’ Franchise League has more recently been explored by Paxton, who stresses the speedy adaptation of their existing skills to civic need in a time of war (Paxton, 2018). Less well documented are those unaffiliated with pre-war organizations and tied into the commercial theatre. Gladys Cooper, for example, pregnant with her second child, was a member of one of the first concert parties to be sent to France in December 1914. With Seymour Hicks’ team, she performed in ‘twenty-minute relays’ from Havre to Rouen (Cooper, 1931: 100). Theatre operated within the social economy of war. If the war provided a ‘golden age’ as William’s suggests, then so too did it provide the opportunity for the theatre industry to further evidence its social and civic function beyond commercial acumen: one could be a good professional citizen and experience economic gain. The altered conditions of war created constant employment for some: a number of performers feature serially in productions during the war. Dennis Eadie, for example, became a familiar figure in wartime plays and films such as The Man Who Stayed at Home (see Chapter 4). Considered unfit for military duty, Owen Nares, already known for his stage work, moved easily between stage and screen in leading roles (Nares, 1925: 182), and for Gladys Cooper, the war provided the context for her move into management at the Playhouse with Frank Curzon in 1917. Like many others who wrote about the war, looking back from the late 1920s or 1930s Cooper remembers it as a time of opportunity mixed with danger: ‘theatres had a boom time in the War’ (Cooper, 1931: 165). Even if the war created a ‘boom’ in business as Cooper suggests, the market was generally more fluid and the industry’s response to this varied. Oscar Asche and Lily Brayton’s lavish spectacle Chu Chin Chow (loosely based on Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and following on from the success of the Orientalist Kismet – see Chapter 3), opened at His Majesty’s in 1916, and was perhaps the phenomena of wartime theatre. It caused much consternation amongst the critics during its long run of over 2,238 performances and became a focal point for negative assessments of the changing nature of theatre during the war (see Ervine, 1933 and Singleton 2004). The production necessitated a significant initial financial outlay, but audiences appear to have returned to see it multiple times. Alfred Sutro even writes of a man who claimed to have seen it eighty times and witnessed a woman arguing at the box office because she could not get the seat she

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wanted for her twenty-sixth visit to the show. For Sutro, the success of the production was ‘fantastic and phenomenal’ and he claimed ‘all theatrical London’ was pleased for the Asche and Brayton hit (Sutro, 1933: 269). Critics were more dismissive of the spectaclefocused nature of the production, although ‘S. O.’ suggested in The English Review in 1920 that if the play ‘is the despair of art, it is none the less Britain’s hope’. Chu Chin Chow had ‘taught artists their business!’ and was keeping film from overtaking theatre in popularity.47 It had successful runs in America and Australia and toured on and off into the 1940s and beyond, as well as being the basis for two films in 1925 and 1934 – the latter starring George Robey and Anna May Wong (see Chapter 6). Another industry response to the fluidity of the wartime market was to stress the importance of economy in production: Alfred Butt’s call in 1917 for ‘economy in theatrical productions as part of the general scheme of national retrenchment’ may well have been a slight on the success of the Ashe and Brayton production. Indeed, he even suggested that ‘brains’ as opposed to ‘paint brushes and canvas’, should be the basis of production, otherwise irresponsible profiteering managements would take over the industry, and deplete ‘high-quality’ audiences.48 Revues and Variety offered flexibility but were expensive to mount. Andrew Maunder points to the proliferation of complaints amongst wartime critics that Revues were taking over the West End ‘without even a particle of a pretence of seriousness of purpose about them’49 and that some thought them completely unsuited for wartime, ‘the great crisis in our history’ (Maunder, 2017: 22–23). As before the war, Revue at this point still had to rely on its capacity for immediacy, spoofing the latest trends or public debates, providing star turns who often imitated other star turns and so on. Maunder’s assertion that the form adapted to provide ‘subversive versions of wartime life’ is apt (ibid.: 37), and indeed it may have been precisely this subversive quality that appealed to the more transient London audiences who appeared to be causing the critics such concern. Ever the producer to respond to the immediacy of contemporary issues – especially the accusation of spendthrift attitudes to production costs, Cochran’s £150 – a ‘War Economy Revue’ by Walter Hackett – ran for just under a month at the Ambassadors from April 1917: Cochran is also listed as licensee or licensee-manager for over half a dozen other productions at the time. £150 was not the longest running Revue of the period, but interesting for the way in which Cochran played his ‘economizing producer’ card, for a production with a focus on wartime life and projections of post-war life. The delayed opening of the production and its financial overrun of £4 and 15s was much publicized: he had promised to mount the show for a mere £150. With its topical sketches about returning soldiers, visions of ‘The Future after the War’ via a transformed shop interior (see Figure 5.5) and a sketch on the ‘Pitfall of a Flapper’s Dance’, the show included ‘A Review of Revues’ with skits on the different kinds of revue offered at the Ambassadors, the Alhambra, the Palace and the Hippodrome, and also included a new generation of Revue performers such as Binnie Hale and Alec S. Clunes.50 £150 does not include the Music-Hall, Variety or film interludes of earlier revues and instead is created around a conceit of the appeal of ‘temptations’ no longer available because of the war.

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FIGURE 5.5

Interior of a shop pre-war and post-war in Cochran’s £150 Revue, 1917 (author’s own collection)

The topicality – a couple forced to halt their romantic dinner early, in Part II, Scene II, because of DORA regulations – and the self-referentiality of earlier Revues is still central, as is the sketch format where moments can be removed, re-positioned or added to.51

Philanthropic investments: women’s wartime charity labour Debates in the trade press often focused on the necessity for continuities of practice as well as the impact of military conflict on issues of labour. Working lives were disrupted by the war, as was the balance of gender in relation to labour. Naomi Paxton stresses the prevailing government antagonism towards the organizational efforts of the Actresses’ Franchise League on the immediate outbreak of war. Their bid to become, in Lena Ashwell’s words, a ‘nucleus of an organisation to cooperate with the authorities without loss of time or money’ was stymied by attitudes to women’s labour (Ashwell, quoted in Paxton, 2018: 163). These were coloured by existing anxieties about women’s social status. Debates about women’s

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labour in wartime were inconsistent: in the opening months their ignorance or lack of experience was cited as reason for them not to work, by the end of the war they were assumed less productive than men (Thom, 1998: 24). The Women’s Emergency Corps however emerged out of the Actresses’ Franchise League to become such a nucleus, coordinating numerous annex departments which distributed women’s voluntary labour to all areas of wartime social need. Women in the performance industries often had more autonomy and more status than in other professions. Even so, there was at times a somewhat scathing position on women’s wartime work, especially their work in the voluntary sector. For example, Edward Knoblock’s The War Committee (Knoblock, 1915) has the ‘earnest’ Mrs Mallaby coordinate the everexpanding committee of volunteering aristocrats – amongst whom is Lady Trent, played by Lady Maud Tree, real life charity committee aficionado. The committee expands to include servants and well-wishing assistants like Miss Column, a suffragette who has ‘been in Holloway’ and learnt how to use a type-writer ‘since the war’. Mrs Mallaby suggests that ‘the more women there are on a committee, the less is done’ (Knoblock, 1915: 8), and indeed members of the committee appear to have little idea as to its purpose, although Lady Trent tells us she is longing to do something ‘soft and rich and sweet’ in ‘connexion with […] food relief’, suggesting a ‘glorious spiritual super-pudding to feed all suffering humanity’ (ibid.: 9). For Lady Trent, the inclusion of the Cockney char-woman on the committee is ‘racy’ and she tells us, ‘Every dropping of an “h” opens new vistas of smoking chimney pots and squealing children. It’s adorable’ (ibid.: 11). The women achieve little by way of focused activity, and Mrs Mallaby, unsure if the committee is ‘quorum or forum’, loses her members to Mrs Bullock, who arrives dressed as ‘Britannia’ in order to carry off all the committee members to perform in a tableau, the principal item in her ‘charity matinee’ at the theatre. Knoblock carried his comic take on women’s charitable works through to a 1938 version of the play – now with an all-woman cast and re-titled A Charity Committee with Athene Seyler, Gladys Cooper, Edith Evans and Angela Baddeley in the June 1938 production at His Majesty’s theatre. As notable contributors to charitable performances and events, the actresses were playing social types they themselves had worked amongst on a regular basis, especially during the First World War. Whilst Knoblock’s is a fairly gentle satire on women’s charitable labour, he shares with the press of the day a cynicism around the quality and reach of such work. Familiar with the structures and strategies of charity fundraising, women in particular galvanized their previous experiences as a means of fundraising for warrelated causes, at a level and frequency which has arguably not been seen since. Hindson, however, reminds us that this activity was a continuation rather than a separation of women’s charitable activity (Hindson, 2016: 204). Wartime charity performances – at times dominated by ‘tableaux and pageantry’ (ibid.: 199) – did not always escape the sharp scrutiny of critics quicker to admonish the artistic quality of performances than they were to acknowledge fundraising potential. Plays and sketches in particular came in for critical assessment, with complaints about the quality of writing in, for example, ‘Extra Special’, a sketch on journalism and the press in the 1915 Motherhood Matinee: even the inclusion of stage stars

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Edward Gwenn and Hilda Trevelyan could not stop the accusation of amateurism.52 Charity matinees often came in for reviews which reveal as much about the gendered prejudice around volunteerism as they do the work being reviewed: The performance arranged by Lady Randolph Churchill in aid of Lady Limerick’s free refreshments buffet for soldiers and sailors at London Bridge Station and given yesterday at the Shaftesbury Theatre, offered a programme that was not too long, not thrown on anyhow and not composed of matter hackneyed and beyond hearing: so it was different in three important points from most things of the kind.53 Evidence suggests, however, that charity performances were more strategic, canny and hybrid affairs – mixing forms and genres – with a dual remit to raise money and profile the charitable focus of the industry and its labour force. These operated in part through the appeal of well-known performers or celebrities selling programmes and ‘servicing’ the event, a strategy tested and established in the pre-war period. Events usually raised money for a specific community: the Women’s Tribute Week, July 3–8, 1916, for example, was a ‘patriotic fair and entertainments’, profiled as ‘the women’s tribute to the sailors and soldiers of the empire’. Its various events included specially commissioned works: Dion Calthrop’s short play, The Popular Novelist starring Hilda Moore and matinee idol Gerald du Maurier, and excerpts from established shows – Gertie Millar and chorus girls performing a song from Bric a Brac, or Alice Delysia singing a song from her show at the Ambassadors. This was a highprofile event spread over a week, which included many stalwarts from the industry: Nigel Playfair, George Alexander, Julia Neilson, Irene Vanbrugh and so on.54 Other such events might raise money for special building works under the umbrella of an established charity: thus, Lillah McCarthy produced a performance for the British Women’s Hospital in June 1916 as part of the Star and Garter Building Fund. As was accepted practice, premises were lent by the owners and managers, here Oswald Stoll and Arthur Croxton’s large capacity Coliseum. Souvenir programmes or editions were sold and circulated by celebrity programme sellers – amongst whom were Miss Nancy Cunard, Violet Keppel and Lady Diana Manners. For this particular event, publishers Hodder and Stoughton produced a special reprint of J. M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton, including portraits of celebrities and a landscape of ‘The Island’ where the shipwrecked characters’ status as masters and servants are reversed: apt perhaps for an event where the ‘stars’ offer services for free. Invariably the war economy, with its limited resource for social investment, necessitated more such charitable performance events, many of which contained specially commissioned works. The patronage of royalty and the aristocracy, alongside celebrity performers, enabled these events to raise significant funds. Just as the ‘Theatrical Garden Party’ for the Actor’s Orphanage had become a serial event prior to the war (Hindson, 2014 and 2016), so too other wartime charity performances became annual events and women experienced heightened levels of visibility as professional citizens focused on charity fundraising. Thus, the Motherhood

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Matinee, in aid of the Women’s League of Service (see Singleton, 2004: 127 and Maunder, 2015),55 was held in 1915, 1916 and 1917. Under the patronage of a host of aristocratic personages, and with its own matinee and executive committees, the programmes included a mixture of music, sketches and recitations – some specially commissioned, others borrowed from successes of the day – from Unity More singing ‘Mary from Tipperary’ by kind permission of Sir George Alexander and Frederick Harrison, directors of the Empire and Palace Theatres in 1915, to Oscar Asche and Lily Brayton appearing in the ‘Slave Market Scene’ from Chu Chin Chow, in 1917. Other acts were becoming ‘charity’ staples – so Gerald du Maurier and Mabel Russell here appeared in A. Neil Lyons’ A Bit of Lad, commissioned for a previous event.56 The Motherhood Matinees garnered annual press coverage and could attract a ‘crowded audience’57 according to the Era critic Mabel Koopman, because of the ‘opportunity they afford of seeing a number of stars doing their particular “stunt” of the moment’. Koopman proposes regular theatre goers attended these events to look for ‘slight inflections’ in familiar individual performances.58 Notwithstanding her own assessments of specific performances at the 1917 matinee, she frames the event as consciously theatrical both on and off the stage: for example, she notes Leslie Henson and Lewis Sydney pretending they were rehearsing for a Revue in the interval, and ‘guying’ each other and the other performers. Over the three years, the Motherhood Matinees had in common the opening numbers by Miss Lillian Elven’s Child Dancers and souvenir programmes sold by celebrities containing numerous adverts for highend clothing and medical supplements for children – these were also sold in department stores such as Selfridges. Postcards and photographs were sold at the events by the child dancers and the children of celebrities ‘for the benefit of the other Babies who are so much less fortunate than they are’.59 The inclusion of a photo of ‘some of our mothers’ in the 1916 programme suggests, as do the press reviews, that such events were far beyond the economic reach of those for whom they were raising funds, however (see Figure 5.6). The level of money raised by the Motherhood Matinees was relatively consistent over the period: £450 in 1915 and £400 in 1916 – sums announced during the events themselves. The level of focus on issues around motherhood varied in how they manifested in performance. The image of Britannia as ‘mother’ of the nation was used to both recruit for the war and depict its atrocities (Gullace, 1997) without irony. Byam Shaw’s 1916 programme cover for the event depicting various ideals of motherhood echoed his tableaux constructed the previous year for the 1915 event. Here, the Telegraph reported, Genevieve Ward held the central position in ‘Motherland’ and was surrounded by, amongst others, Constance Collier as Venus and ‘Miss Lilian Braithwaite as a typical mother’: they held sway over a small tableaux-within-atableaux entitled ‘Carry On’, the implied meaning of which was clear.60 In understanding the place of such events in a social history of performance cultures, the question of purpose is an interesting one. Lists of patrons and committee members invariably include many who could have simply funded the charities concerned. Wartime charity performances were nevertheless part of a self-conscious circulation of excess

FIGURE 5.6

‘Some of our Mothers’ from the Women’s League of Service, c. 1916 (author unknown)

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performance labour which facilitated social interaction between the artistic and aristocratic communities. The inclusion of trained amateurs in the form of child dancers was accompanied by the translation of celebrated scenes from successful professional shows: all sides and levels of the industry were profiled, overseen by the aristocracy of British society as well as the ‘aristocracy’ of the performance industries. Such performance work could enhance career profiles and indeed some performers, such as Ada Reeve, who became the ‘Anzacs friend and Guardian’, completely re-positioned their professional status through war-charity work. Reeve’s Antipodean war-time touring revitalized her career when she was in her forties and ‘strategically’ connected her fundraising with her ‘positioning as a transnational star’ (Lipton, 2012: 14 and see Chapter 2). Charity performances, then, were invariably a celebration of the theatre and its communities, but they were also used as a genuine opportunity to connect these communities to those less visible and more explicitly impacted by the war. The class distinction between those giving their time and skill on stage and those left with reduced means by the war was fairly stark. Some suggest that war-time charity work was ultimately self-serving (Lipton, 2012), or indeed that those making performances were out of touch with the realities of war (Williams, 2003). Issues of gender found their way into such discussions and well into the middle of the war anti-suffragists were convinced that suffragists and working women were somehow taking advantage of the war, in an attempt to further their power base through visible public service and labour.61 Women from the performance industries certainly dominated charity performance activities, foregrounding their own ‘usefulness’ in a time of war, and invested in connecting communities in a way that undermined such prejudices driven by anxieties about women’s so-called new found freedoms and the sense of ‘general social disorder’(Grayzel, 2004: 73). Charity work, then, took place within a social and professional context shaped by the real and present conflict of the war, but also by the legacy of pre-war conflict around class and gender.

Conflict and the psychology of ‘home’ In the late 1910s and early 1920s, a number of plays and films highlighted narratives of intergenerational disharmony and discontent. In Miles Malleson’s The Fanatics (1927)62 and Israel Zangwill’s We Moderns (1925), on which the 1925 Colleen Moore film of the same name was based, the conflict between the generations is a direct result of the discontinuities created by the war.63 Here the home becomes a space of philosophical, moral and aspirational conflict, with the elder generation pitted against the younger in setting the pace and direction of familial life. As Dick tells his father in Zangwill’s We Moderns, We moderns have grown out of your standards, they’re too small […] We mean to live by our own light, not by yours. Your generation has reduced Europe to a shambles – and what touches you more nearly – to a

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bankrupt estate […] so before you come the accusing angel, kindly remember you’re in the dock. (Zangwill, 1925: 23–26) Acrimonious relations between father and son are a direct consequence of war in Malleson’s slightly later The Fanatics, where John Freeman tells his father that his generation were wrong to have assumed that after the war family life – with its hierarchies and inherited moral codes – could be taken up ‘at the point where it was left off’ (Malleson, 1927: 26). Again, Freeman reminds his father, ‘your generation has done ours in! Smashed it! Millions […] and before their corpses have rotted into earth, new wars are preparing and the world’s a damned sight worse’ (ibid.: 120). In an echo of his earlier pacifist plays, Malleson here combines a condemnation of warfare with a radical philosophy for living: cohabitation without marriage, and following one’s instinct in a civilization gone ‘wrong’ (ibid.: 29). Sos Eltis notes the play’s similarities in terms of the discussion of sex and marriage to Shaw’s 1908 Getting Married, and suggests the play has ‘no resolution and little action’ (Eltis, 2013: 212). The Fanatics ends, however, with the two young generation Freemans breaking with all traditions as Gwen goes off with a successful playwright to see if she may, or indeed may not, want to marry him and John leaves the economic security of his father’s business to find like-minded thinkers with whom he can write. This is only after they vow to help the maid Rosie – pregnant but unmarried – to manage her precarious situation. Although ‘a piece for adult minds’, Malleson’s is, as one reviewer noted, a ‘post-war intellectual drama’.64 The Fanatics is a development of the pre-war play of ideas, with the added element of farce – women hidden in bedrooms, openly illicit relations and sensational semi-nudity as Toby the chorus girl is discovered in her underwear by Mr Freeman. The pacifist position taken by John Freeman disrupts domestic harmony: the war won’t simply go away. There were a number of other plays during the latter 1920s and early 1930s which questioned the agenda and impact of war: some, such as Somerset Maugham’s ‘indictment of the post-war world’,65 For Services Rendered (Maugham, 2017 [1938]), were criticized even as late as 1932 for being too anti-war or for blaming a war now ended more than a dozen years ago for middle-class angst and disaffection.66 With Cedric Hardwicke and Flora Robson in the cast, the play had a respectable three-month run, however, and so had some resonance with audiences less familiar with Maugham as critic of the status quo.67 John Van Druten’s adaptation of Rebecca West’s 1918 novel The Return of the Soldier was built on a more haunting depiction of the manner in which war destroys the familiar sense of home. One of a number of attempts to dramatize the novel, the play was produced by Basil Dean and ran at the Playhouse from early June 1928.68 Here, in the spring of 1916, shell-shocked Captain Chris Baldry returns to his family estate in Harrow Weald with no memory of his recent years. He does, however, remember Margaret Grey, an inn keeper’s daughter with whom he had a romance some fifteen years earlier, and his sister Jenny, who now lives in the family home. Baldry’s wife, Kitty, is drawn as cold and unapproachable, showing little understanding of his

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condition at first. Then, following advice from the ‘specialist’ doctor, she allows him time with Margaret, who manages to bring his ‘waking personality’ (Van Druten, 1928: 93) back to the present by reminding him of his dead child. Memory restored, Baldry once more becomes head of the household and will return to the battle front as soon as he recovers from his physical injuries. Criticized by St John Ervine for its use of psychoanalytic terminology, Rebecca West was quick to point out that this is incidental to the plot, where loss and the harsh realities of the impact of war on the mind as well as the body, are juxtaposed to the comfortable domestic quietude of an uppermiddle class household.69 Kitty is disturbed by the fragility of Chris’s manliness (Labon, 1997): they do not talk of their dead child so too they do not speak of the war. Just as in Black ’Ell and The Fanatics, disruption of normative masculinity is also a disruption of the sanctuary of the middle-class home. As a ‘unifying symbol’, home sat in tension with the experience of the horrors of war (see Monger, 2011), and by the late 1920s post-war dramas often undermined what had been presented as the symbolic value of home as a place of peace and return. Of the numerous recent evaluations of Journey’s End, Lawrence Napper’s work on the original 1930 film adaptation remains the most germane.70 The film was made when the play was still ‘playing to packed houses at the Savoy, already translated into twenty-one languages and being presented to fifty-one companies worldwide’ (Napper, 2013:19). Napper points to the significance of the film being made on the cusp between silent and sound cinema (ibid.: 25), with this impacting on the war soundscape. Critics were torn as to the play’s anti-war stance, and certainly R. C. Sherriff talked of his play in terms of expressing experience not polemic. It is far less clearly an overtly anti-war play in the manner of Sean O’Casey’s contemporaneous 1928 expressionist play, The Silver Tassie, or Velona Pilcher’s less performed expressionist antiwar play, The Searcher (1929). Where Sherriff’s play uses conventional form and plot structure and a simulation of the rhythm of familial domestic middle-class life, O’Casey’s was, for its English director, actor Raymond Massey, ‘plotless and formless’ (Massey, 1979: 83). Mixing realism and expressionism, Massey thought The Silver Tassie a ‘fantastic and ferocious satire on the war’. Famously refused production by W. B. Yeats at the hitherto home of O’Casey’s plays, the Abbey theatre in Dublin, the play presents one of the most harrowing stagings of war of its day. Act II opens on a scene of the ‘war zone’, where ‘heaps of rubbish mark where houses once stood. From some of these, lean, dead hands are protruding […] Crouching above, on a ramp, is a soldier whose clothes are covered with mud and splashed with blood’ (O’Casey, 2014 [1928]: 32–33). The scene is watched over by the Croucher, made up as a ‘death’s head, a skull […] hands […] like those of a skeleton […] languid as if very tired of life’ (ibid.: xix). Even with C. B. Cochran as producer, Charles Laughton in the cast and Gladys Calthrop and Augustus John’s scenic designs (see Figure 5.7), the production only ran for just under a month at the Apollo theatre: with its realistic war hospital scenes and its jilted hero, the play’s depiction of war was perhaps too close for comfort. By comparison, set in a trench from which we only ever catch a glimpse of the outside world, Journey’s End deals with the psychology of living in a combat zone, waiting, the ennui of daily life mixed with the terror of impending death, in an

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FIGURE 5.7

Act II of The Silver Tassie, as designed by Augustus John at the Apollo theatre, London, 1929. Gladys Calthrop was also a designer on the production (author unknown)

onstage dugout so dark that according to one critic, ‘most of the time one can’t see the faces of the players distinctly’.71 The sociality of the all-male environment is central and Raleigh’s opening public school ‘“Boys Own” view of the war’ (GoreLangton, 2013: 121) is strongly contrasted with the practicality of Mason, the only working-class figure in the play. Being cook and servant doesn’t exclude Mason from the slaughter which ends the play: he cleans and packs up the kitchen before donning his uniform and going up the trench ladder to battle. Mason’s interjections – offering tea and poorly cooked food, or fetching whiskey – break up the class singularity of the stage picture: this is a play centred on the officer class who even have an improvised table cloth to complete the conversion of the trench table for ‘refined’ dining (see Figure 5.8). The serving of food, as well as jokes about its quality or lack of, frame the play as a whole: the best food is kept for the night before the final battle. Trotter even comments ironically, ‘I never knew anything like war for upsetting meals’ (Sherriff, 2000 [1929]: 27). Whilst home, however inadequate, is replicated in some way on stage, ‘home’ is constantly present in the character’s reminiscences: home is a place before the war, to which return appears ever more unlikely once the date of the impending offensive is established. J. R. Ackerley’s less well-received and rarely revived Prisoners of War (1925) also placed domestic life in the centre of the visual field. Here the men, prisoners of war awaiting re-patriation, without the daily structures of military engagement, have only pointless leisure pursuits and petty squabbles to pass the time. The homosocial

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FIGURE 5.8

From R. C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End, January 21, 1929 (Robert Speaight as 2nd Lieutenant Hibbert and Colin Clive as Captain Stanhope. Originally produced at the Savoy Theatre by Maurice Browne, Apollo Theatre, London. ARP1329354 University of Bristol/ArenaPAL)

environment is only rarely punctuated by women’s presence: Marie the maid, Madame Louis, a Jewish widow running card games, and Mrs Prendergast, a ‘motherly’ volunteer with the local YMCA (Ackerley, 1925: 45). While Captain Conrad is as ‘masculine as the next officer’, he experiences ‘sequences of exploitation and dejection’ from Grayle, a younger, spoilt and freeloading officer who treats Conrad’s living room and his possessions as his own (de Jongh, 1992: 26). The men are akin to a family in a simulation of ‘home’ in a room in ‘a mild state of chaos, the tables [….] are piled with books, papers, articles of clothing […] tennis balls, a racket and two packs of cards scattered’ (Ackerley, 1925: 1). They are free to choose activities, but not at liberty to return home in the summer of 1918. Critical reception of the play varied, with some suggesting its tragic and ‘unpalatable’ subject was out of tune with cultural need and others applauding its verisimilitude: it was created by a man who had himself fought in the war.72 The underlying question about homo-sociality explicitly explored in the relationships between the men was not commented on by many of the critics at the time, although de Jongh suggests the play bought Ackerley a ‘coterie reputation’ (de Jongh, 1992: 28). The aftermath of the 1914–1918 war was theatricalized through explorations of patriotism, repression and the broadening of the terms on which the conflict was understood to have either disrupted or re-configured the idea and experience of

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home, family and the domestic. This drew, however, on wider anxieties about class conflict, the levels of which increased in frequency, intensity and visibility over the period as a whole.

Confict, capitalism, class and labour For some historians the 1914–1918 war ‘brought an abrupt end to a phase of acute industrial conflict’ (Waites, 1987: 184). Indeed, in 1913, before coming into office as the first Labour prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald noted that the widespread strikes had by 1910 created a sense of the public’s awareness of ‘labour unrest’ (MacDonald, 1924 [1913]: 3). With a stark contrast between those with access to the ‘colossal national wealth’ (ibid.: 51) and the majority, with lowering wages and increased living costs, debates about the politics of labour inequality and unrest had a certain presence in the performance industries as a whole. But plays like Rowan Orme’s The Anarchists (1908) or Viola Tree’s short-running exploration of middle-class attraction to fascism, The Swallow (1926), were rare in their overt exposition of ideology. In The Anarchists, 73 a one-act play set in a windowless, dimly lit Moscow cellar with a noose hanging from the ceiling, Tarhov has been called to duty by the ‘Hand of the Red Death’, a pro-revolutionary political group, only to discover they think him a traitor. He doubts ‘a kingdom planted on corpses and drenched with blood can even blossom’.74 His lover Vasilissa, poor and ‘of the people’, believes suffering will bring a better Russia ‘from which slavery and caste are banished, with one class only’,75 but she is then tasked with Tarhov’s execution. In a tragic ending, he shoots himself and she herself – the indifferent characters left on stage express some pity, but propose the lovers’ deaths ultimately serve the new Russia. Viola Tree’s The Swallow offers an equally grim depiction of political extremism, here combined with a kind of upper-middle class ennui when Mary falls in love with Dianti, ‘interested in all this Fascist business’ and its potential to ‘make Italy what it once was, bring back the old glories’.76 With only a short run at the Everyman in 1925, the play is nevertheless interesting for its depiction of the attraction of fascism for a young upper middle-class woman surrounded by talk of exploitative foreigners and the golf handicaps at the club.77 Fascism is part of a ‘new Italy where everything’s seething’ and the poor and the elderly are in conflict with the new political movement which belongs to the young and fanatical.78 Even though Tree includes moments from a speech by Mussolini in the play,79 the real focus is the symbolism of Mary’s own internal conflict between the contrast of the staid life she was born into and the unknown of a foreign country in political turmoil. She shows no understanding of the political conflict on which Fascism thrived, even suggesting at the end of the play, once she has returned to England after Dianti’s death, in a street demonstration, that the fascists were ‘kind […] enthusiasts […] poets some of them’.80 Critics voiced their disdain for both the characters in the play – spoilt, naïve, or fanatical – and about its manifestations of fascism. Mary – who James Agate accused of being ‘void of any quality of interest beyond […] [her] soulfulness’,81 returns to a world where the conversation remains unchanged.

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For theatre historian Steve Nicholson, successful plays of the period which reflected on the politically conflictual, were invariably framed by a ‘confident conservatism’ (Nicholson, 1999: 45). It is certainly the case that conflict between the classes was often contained by the comedic; such as in Gertrude Jennings’ plays Scraps (Jennings, 1928), where the servants outwit their employers in the game they call ‘scraps’ by piecing together their drafted and discarded letters to reveal family secrets. Equally, class conflict was contained by the conciliatory as in J. M. Barrie’s The Admirable Chrichton (1902) but more, in Galsworthy’s wartime play The Foundations.82 Projecting into the future, The Foundations (1917) is set in a post-war world when the aristocratic war hero Dromondly and his family come under attack during their annual ‘AntiSweating’ charity dinner. The discovery of what appears to be a bomb planted in the wine cellar sets the action off as the discontented ‘mass’ gather in the streets and congregate outside the family Park Lane mansion in London. James the footman notes at the beginning of the play that the tales of ‘the wonderful unity that was comin’’ after the war were, of course, proved wrong: whilst the classes fought together, class difference prevails in a post war world where the press seek a marketable story of class discontent. Lemmy, the plumber erroneously suspected of planting the bomb, gives his analysis of the current state of class dissent: If all you wealfy nobs wi kepital ’ad come it kind from the start after the war yer’d never a been ’earing the Marseillaisy naow […] Ow you did talk abaht Unity and a noo spirit in the Country […] soon as ever there was no dynger from outside, yer stawted to myke it inside, wiv an iron ’and […] most of the nobs wiv kepitel was too old or too important to fight […] naow that bad times is come, we’re ’owlin’ for their blood. (Galsworthy, 1929: 505). For Lemmy the only solution is to begin ‘agyne from the foundytions’ (ibid.: 509). But the play ends in the restoration of harmony with any radical propositions ultimately placated by the fact that Lord Dromondly has listened to demands and has proposed collaboration as a way forward. James Gindin proposes that at this point Galsworthy’s ‘symbols for a coming futuristic revolution’ were ‘worn and dated’ (Gindin, 1990: 81), yet in the context of wartime theatre culture his ‘revolutionary imagination’ was perhaps more alive to the specific contexts of war and its potential impact on class relations than such a reading suggests. Steve Nicholson’s ‘confident conservatism’ is then complicated by the presence of plays during the period which deal directly with the complexity of industrial unrest, even though many present collective action and more, strike action, as ‘inevitably and entirely destructive’ (Nicholson, 1992: 166). They do however, reveal an appetite for the political and a theatrical currency for the discussion of the relationship of ideology to labour. James Sexton’s immediately pre-war The Riot Act (1914) and Galsworthy’s Strife (1909) deconstruct the relation of labour to capital, the exploitative economics of factory work and the complexities of Unions, ‘neither thieves nor traitors’ (Galsworthy, 1964 [1911]: 42). Sexton, a union leader

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and politician, based his play on the 1911 dockers’ strike in which he participated (Sexton, 1936: 2016). He argued that, you ‘cannot go on mortgaging the lifeblood of this country without reaping the inevitable, economic reward’ (Sexton, 1914: 85). The play explores capitalism through the sequence of negotiations between owner, workers and Union. Cunliffe, the General Secretary of the Quayside Worker’s union proposes the ‘Capitalist silently and scientifically puts his Juggernaut in motion which crushes the life out of us eventually’ (Sexton, 1914: 74–75) and stresses the ethics of the right to industrial action as much as the importance of the outcome (see also Chapter 6). Similarly, in Ernest Hutchinson’s 1920 Right to Strike, with a production run requiring transfer to three different theatres in just over two months, discussions of the ethics of industrial action have a cross-class dynamic. Written before the General Strike of 1926, the play, authored by a man who by profession was a barrister, takes the aftermath of war as a starting point, converging an exploration of the war with issues of generational and class conflict. Dr Miller is quick to point out to his son that life at home was not left in a state of suspension whilst he was away fighting: You think the War’s passed us by […] but we’re different, we’re changed […] The War has bred a different spirit here […] a spirit of unrest and mistrust […] Strikes, profiteering and labour troubles everywhere. You’ve finished one war abroad only to find another far worse at home. Worse because it’s Briton against Briton.83 Here the railway men’s strike, where the men refuse to let goods through to the local hospital, precipitates a retaliatory strike by doctors: the professional middleclass in direct industrial dispute with the workers. Winston Churchill and Keir Hardie were in the demonstrative first night audience, and the play became the ‘talk of the political salons and the London clubs […] [the] “intelligentsia”’ (Lion, 1949: 88; see Figure 5.9). According to one review, the, ‘bourgeoise pit cheered wholesome middle-class sentiments, and the more democratic gallery got excited now and then when the stage Socialist mouthed purple perorations […] if you haven’t been to a political meeting for a long time the Garrick is now the place to go’.84 Other reviewers saw the play as a call to brotherhood with an essentially melodramatic plot.85 The critical response to the play stressed the currency of its subject matter: it was revived and translated a number of times, with a swift adaptation to novel. Ronald Gow and Walter Greenwood’s 1935 Love on the Dole shows a world little changed in its treatment of the industrial poor since before the war years. Hugely popular and touring extensively from its early production in Manchester in 1934, the play is located in Hanky Park, the ‘site of working-class subjugation’ in Salford (Warden, 2013; 47). Whilst the specific setting is integral to a reading of the play, the wider implications of the economic limitations of a capitalist economy for the working classes are also focused upon, from Larry’s revolutionary talk on capitalist exploitation, to Sally’s deconstruction of the gendered relationship of labour to capital. Following her fiancé Larry’s death during a demonstration, and the continuing lack of work for

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FIGURE 5.9

Leon M. Lion as the ‘Communist’ in The Right to Strike, 1920 (author’s own collection)

her father and brother, Sally’s decision to become ‘housekeeper’ for the local bookmaker, entrepreneur and businessman Sam Grundy is made in full working knowledge of its consequences for her moral reputation. Sally is driven by her sense that there is no escaping the inevitable failings of her community without literally leaving it. She has financially supported her family but has no power within the home, where her father holds on to control of the household. She refuses to be like the other women, ‘working themselves to death and getting nothing for it’, fit to be called his daughter only if she was on workhouse relief, ‘with a tribe of kids at me skirts’ (Gow and Greenwood, 1966 [1934]: 191–192). Having organized jobs for both her father and her brother with Grundy’s company, Sally sets off to her new life in a taxi, much to the excitement of the neighbours. Rapidly adapted for the stage from a hugely successful novel, Love on the Dole combines a melodramatic plot of good versus evil; impoverishment overcome by community spirit and rebellion; the fallen woman whose fate changes the lives of those around her, with a ‘realist’ representation and analysis of the inequalities of the class system. Stephen Constantine points to the unusual global success of a novel with such seemingly localized concerns. He alludes to the authors’ surprise at its West End run of 391 performances, and its successful runs in New York and Paris (Constantine, 1982: 233–234), but argues, along with Gaughan, that ‘although written about a

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working-class community by a working-class author’, its audience pre-film, was largely middle-class (Gaughan, 2008: 48). Suggesting that the shift from Labour to Conservative in the general election of 1931, a moment of economic decline, gave Greenwood a ‘jaundiced view of the political awareness of the working classes’, Gaughan proposes that the play elicited sympathy about the ‘social and psychological stress caused by unemployment’ (ibid.: 238). Other critics claim the play essentializes and caricatures the working classes (Ross, 2004: 190). Discussed in Parliament and ‘eulogised by a prominent politician’, Sydney Carroll praised the play’s ‘spiritual resolve’.86 In a letter to The Times, one reader noted that the Garrick theatre had offered free tickets to ‘great number of unemployed men of London centres’ who connected with its representations of unemployment.87 Whilst contemporary critics reflected little on the direct discussions of politics, class conflict and inequality central to the play, its landscapes of class inequality prompted the British Board of Film Censors to block its film production in the mid-1930s, because of the play’s ‘sordid story [and] […] sordid surroundings’ (ibid.: 234). Contrary to more recent readings of the play’s production history, one might see the blocking of the film as evidence of the play’s perceived potential impact on a wider mass market: the play represents the working class as self-aware, articulate and on the brink of revolt. Such nuanced and complex representations of working-class lives were still rare on stage or film in the 1930s. Interestingly, when it was eventually adapted for film by surreptitious order of the war-time government in 1941 (Levine, 2006: 849), the inherent themes of community and persistence in the face of adversity were foregrounded. It was made into a war play for a new war. The film, set in 1930, opens with a statement about the ‘Darker days of our industrial history’ and ends with the call for a new Britain; where the unemployed will not become the ‘forgotten men of peace’.88 Just as with ‘war’ plays explored earlier in this chapter, Love on the Dole looked to the wider, lived experience of class conflict and issues of inequality, with an eye to the authentic in terms of representation and to the long-term conditions conflict produces. That Sally Hardcastle’s body might be a means to liberation links us usefully to the focus of the last chapter of this book, where the varying social and aesthetic transformations of the body in performance were shaped by and indeed shaped the structure of feeling during the first four decades of the century.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

LCP submitted for licence August 22, 1900. LCP submitted for licence April 2, 1902. LCP 1900/18 and 1902/16. Produced at the Ilkeston New Theatre Royal in 1900. See http://www.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/529532f4a02bc The Times, May 19, 1900, p. 7. Ibid., p. 12. George du Maurier was a renowned satirical cartoonist for Punch magazine but is best known as the author of Trilby, the hit novel which became the basis of ‘Trilby-mania’ in the late 1800s – influences from which the ‘Trilby’ hat and even the Phantom of the Opera still circulate in the twenty-first century (see Purcell, 1977).

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9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Programme from An Englishman’s Home, January 27, 1909, Production File, V & A. The Times, March 4, 1909, p. 10. ‘“A Nation in Arms” at the Savoy Theatre’, The Times, June 26, 1912, p. 9. Ibid. Souvenir programme, A Nation in Arms, courtesy of Christopher Townroe, Exmouth. A popular skill game like ‘Chinese Yo-Yo’ played with a rope and wooden yo-yo object. The production ran from August 1917 to March 1918 for 240 performances at the Royalty theatre. Dennis Eadie played the lead and produced along with J. E. Vedrenne. The play includes completely unguarded racist descriptions – not unusual for their day – of life in West Africa. One might read these as Jennings’s reflection upon colonialist Foreign Office attitudes: they are spoken by a man being sent to manage a hostile colonial outpost (Jennings, 1919: 23). Performed as part of a bill of five one-act plays including No Servants and Evelyn Glover’s Their Mothers that were produced by Alfred Butt. After a couple of charity fundraising performances, the play ran at the Haymarket for 286 performances from late April 1915 until the end of the year, staying in repertoire for the entire run of the main production, Vachell’s Quinneys’. Performed as part of a matinee fundraiser for the Bull Dog Club and the Britannia Club for sailors and soldiers on January 30, 1917 at the Queen’s theatre with a cast including Inez Bensusan. Evelyn Glover (1917) A Bit of Blighty, LCP 1917/03, p. 14. The ‘Snapshots from the Home League’ was a scheme set up by the YMCA during the 1914–1918 war and reinstated during the Second World War. Amateur photographers were sent out to take morale-boosting pictures of soldiers’ loved ones, which were then sent to them abroad. Evelyn Glover (1917) A Bit of Blighty, LCP 1917/03, p. 14. Miles Malleson, born in 1888, had a prolific career in films in later life, from the 1930s onward. In his early career as actor, playwright and screen-writer, he was connected with the ILP (Independent Labour Party) and with socialist causes. See http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C640 ‘Censors of Variety Theatres’, The Times, October 1, 1916. There are various references in the press to DORA and its many amendments. See The Public General Acts 1914, HMSO, Chapter 29, August 8, 1914, Defence of the Realm Act, 1914, 4 & 5 Geo 5, p. 80. Comments on the lack of parliamentary discussion on the original Act in 1914 are most prominent in the early war years. See, for example, Hansard, HC (series 5) vol. 70, cols 287–332. ‘Theatre Chocolates: D.O.R.A. and the “end of the war”’, The Times, September 23, 1920. Whilst West End managers had taken it upon themselves to operate as if the restrictions had been lifted, Parliament had in fact kept the regulations in place. Philosopher Bertrand Russell was convicted under DORA for pacifist activities. See the The Stage, April 1, 1920, p. 32 and January 20, 1921, p. 26. David Allen & Sons advert offered their ‘enormous stock of pictorial printing’, The Stage, March 8, 1917, p. 9. R. B. Marston (author of popular books on fishing) ‘Eels and D.O.R.A.’, Letter to The Editor, The Times, August 8. 1918, p. 4. Marston complains that the amendment requiring compulsory eel farming will not secure the realm. The Performer, September 17, 1914, p. 11. See, for example, ‘Conscription and the Music Hall’, The Performer, December 2, 1915 and ‘Do Stage Folk Make Good Soldiers’, The Performer, August 16, 1917. The Performer, August 13, 1914, p. 18. The Performer, October 21, 1915. PRO INF 4/4A, ‘British Propaganda during the War 1914–1918’: this is a post-war report commissioned after the war. The Era, August 26, 1914, p. 11.

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38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

64 65 66

67 68 69

The Performer, October 8, 1914, p. 20. The Performer, September 3, 1914, p. 24. The Performer, September 17, 1914, p. 19. See, for example, The Performer, March 2, 1916, p. 19. ‘The Future of War Plays’, The Era, January 22, 1919. ‘The New Curfew’, The Era, April 3, 1918. ‘The Fuel Shortage and the Theatres’, The Era, September 11, 1918. ‘Alien friends and D.O.R.A.’, The Performer, June 13, 1918, p. 14. ‘Restricting British Performers’, The Era, September 25, 1918. ‘Chu Chin Chow’, The English Review, July 1920, p. 96. Fred Russell, ‘Economy in Stage Production’, The Performer, April 12, 1917, p. 19. ‘In England Now’, The Bystander, March 10, 1915, p. 327 (qtd in Maunder, 2017: 22). C. B. Cochran Collection, V & A/GB 71/THM 97 Vol. 9. See ‘“£150” at the Ambassadors Theatre, by Jingle’, The Bystander, May 16, 1917, where the author predicts erroneously that the show will have a long run. ‘The Motherhood Matinee’, The Times, June 6, 1915. ‘“Theatre of the Soul”: Banned Play at Charity Matinee’, The Times, December 5, 1915, p. 11. See V & A Production File, ‘Women’s Tribute Week’ 1916, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Producer Arthur Collins thanks Edith Craig and Ellen Terry for their ‘kind and cordial co-operation’ in organizing the event. The organization was founded to ‘unite women in a common bond, to further the interests of motherhood, and to help and befriend mothers and babies’. Working class women with soldier husbands would have their household wages substantially reduced as corporals might earn as little as 2s 8d a week. Women munitions workers could earn around 2s 6d per week in 1917 (Bowley, 1921: 187), but motherhood would tie women to the home and limit their earning potential. The sketch was first performed in March at the St James’s theatre for the Royal Free Hospital Appeal. See ‘Plays and Players’, The Times, May 20, 1917, p. 4. Mabel Koopman, ‘The Motherhood Matinee at His Majesty’s’, undated clipping, May 1917, Production File, V & A. See programme for Motherhood Matinee, May 26, 1916, Production File, V & A. Daily Telegraph, June 2, 1915, p. 11. Edward A. Mitchell Innes, National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage, ‘Women and War Work’, The Times, May 22, 1916, p. 10. Opening at the Ambassadors theatre in March 1927, the play ran for 313 performances, transferring twice. The play opened in Southport in May 1925 and in London in September at the Fortune theatre, where it ran until December. The film, now considered lost, placed Moore’s flapper at the centre of the plot and while Zangwill had little to do with the film, he was pleased to see his play with its ‘popular appeal, though considered “highbrow” by the brainless wealthy’ filmed on location in London, with a Hollywood star (Zangwill, 1925: 220–221). Horace Shipp, ‘On Being Entertained’, The English Review, June 1927, p.758. W. A. Darlington, ‘Mr Maugham’s Grim Play’, Daily Telegraph, November 2, 1932. James Agate suggested that Maugham’s characters would not have fared well in peacetime or war: Maugham’s bitter condemnation of the lack of state care given to those who had fought was, for Agate, over generalized (James Agate, ‘“The Dramatic World” too bad to be true’, undated, November 1932, Production File, V & A). The play opened at the Globe in November 1932 and closed at the Queen’s theatre in late January 1933, running for 94 performances. The production ran until July 21, 1928 for 46 performances. ‘“The Return of the Soldier”: Miss Rebecca West and Mr Ervine, the study of psychoanalysis’, The Observer, undated clipping, June, 1928, Production File, V & A.

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70 The 1930 film was directed by James Whale and was a UK/US co-production. The 2017 film Journey’s End was directed by Saul Dibb. 71 Morduant Hall, ‘“Journey’s End” as Film is Often an Example of Well-Rounded Lines’, New York Times, April 13, 1930, p. 126. 72 Unassigned clipping August 31, 1925, Production File, V & A. 73 Orme’s The Anarchists (LCC 352/Add MS 65825 Q) was produced as part of a benefit matinee for the East London Hospital for Children (Shadwell) at the Royal Court theatre in May, 1908. Edith Craig’s production of Christopher St John’s On the East Side was also on the bill. 74 Rowan Orme, The Anarchists, LCC 352/Add MS 65825 Q, p. 6. 75 Ibid. 76 Viola Tree, The Swallow, LCP 1925/LCC 6024, Act I, p. 9. 77 An actress and daughter of Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Viola Tree’s play was written after her successful collaboration with Gerald du Maurier on The Dancers in 1923 under the pseudonym Hubert Parsons. She was also the sister of Iris Tree, poet and muse to modernist painters and sculptors. 78 The Swallow, LCP 1925/ LCC 6024, Act II, p. 11. 79 Ibid., Act II, p. 29. 80 Ibid., Act III, p. 14. 81 James Agate, ‘The Swallow’, Sunday Times, May 10, 1925. 82 The Foundations ran at the Royalty from June to July 1917 for 23 performances. Even the joint and often successful production team of Vedrenne and Eadie could not secure a longer run. 83 Ernest Hutchinson, The Right to Strike, LCP 1920/23, Act I, p. 9. 84 John Foster Fraser, ‘“The Right to Strike”: Lively Patches Last Night at a New Play’, Evening Standard, September 29, 1920. 85 ‘“The Right to Strike’: The Middle-Class View at the Garrick’, Pall Mall Gazette, September 29, 1920. 86 Sydney Carroll, ‘A Play of Our Times “Love on the Dole”’, Daily Telegraph, March 14, 1935. 87 Letter from a Lilian Darlington of Kennington to The Times, May 24, 1935. 88 The 1941 film Love on the Dole, directed by John Baxter (British National Film) is available at: https://archive.org/details/LoveOnTheDole_476

6 CORPOREALITY AND THE BODY IN PERFORMANCE: AGENCY AND DEGENERATION

This final chapter explores the body in performance through a number of thematic frameworks. The representation of bodies in public culture was transformed in the earlier decades of the 1900s in three essential ways: through political struggle, through photography and film, and through innovations in dance and movement. Each of these were underpinned by shifts in moral codes and in the levels at which the body was commodified in the economies of modernity and performance. While this chapter touches on all three areas, its focus is on the connection and interstices between them and the discourses of degeneration, emancipation and regeneration which were so central to social debates about the body over the period as a whole. For contemporary Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger, a woman’s demand for emancipation and her qualification for it are in direct proportion to the amount of maleness in her […] the deep-seated craving to acquire man’s character, to attain his mental and moral freedom, to reach his interests and his creative power […] the real female element has neither the desire nor the capacity for emancipation in this sense. (Weininger, 1906: 64–65) Whilst of dubious scientific provenance, the tone of Weininger’s inflammatory but popular reading of the campaign for women’s emancipation was not unusual. Here, to be truly feminine and one of ‘the real female element’, was to deny the desire for social equality. Transgressing traditional boundaries of the feminine, however, was not confined to the suffrage movement in the early decades of the period. For cultural historian Mica Nava, ‘the emergence of new forms of social interaction and perception’ during the era, facilitated the ‘development of a new consciousness about the possibilities that modern life urban life was able to offer’ women in particular (Nava, 1996: 38). While the ‘woman question’ dominated public debates, so too new

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technologies bought a proliferation of visual representations of women’s bodies, with a potential level of cultural circulation – through photography and film – hitherto unimaginable. As art historian Lisa Tickner suggests, changes in photographic technology created a ‘different kind of detail and immediacy’ in an expanding visual culture, where reconfigured representations of specifically the female body and its signifying potential in public and private space were, borrowing from Guy Debord, ‘mediated through spectacle’ (Tickner, 1997: 68). The development of performance cultures during the era was shaped in large part by a ‘new photographic hegemony’ (ibid.), as enhanced forms of spectacle became a means through which women’s bodies, and through which the ‘feminine,’ might be defined and redefined. Like Weininger’s, many of the anti-emancipatory narratives which found popular expression in the press and in social texts of the day saw the call for women’s equality as a symptom of a wider issue of, largely imagined, cultural degeneration. In turn, the early decades of the twentieth century evidence a performative playing out of the tension between the two tropes of degeneration, and re-generation. The former was centred on concerns about race and the failing ‘health’ of the nation, but was equally embedded in social anxieties about emancipation, in relation to both class and gender. Ideas of re-generation were reiterated in the enhanced visibility and circulation of representations of the body, especially the female body. Born of the tension between the demand for freedom and the containment of traditional models of womanhood and femininity, representations of the female body were linked to women’s increased status as social and political agents. Women’s bodies – who ‘owned’ them, how they ought or ought not to be displayed and how they might move in performance – remained contested sites. The interrogation of femininity as essential, rather than socially or even economically constructed, featured in numerous plays and sketches of the period, as did the question of women’s status as citizens. Such questions were central, for example, to many of the plays of George Bernard Shaw, as well as less remembered playwrights of the day. Equally the means through which women’s bodies were represented on stage, in film and in photography arguably gave visual momentum to the ‘rapid dismantling of traditional forms of womanhood’ (Søland, 2000: 4). In fact, the enhanced cultural presence of women as a visible social group, as both agents and consumers, was one of the driving forces of the performance industries of the period, as well as underpinning the modernist cityscape.

Photography and the changing cultural status of the performing female body In the last chapter, Love on The Dole was presented as reiterating the connection between capitalism, class inequality and deprivation, but it also dramatized the dilemma of a woman’s choice about what she does with her body. For Sally, the only means to economic survival lies in her power to assert her corporeal agency and profit from its currency in the market place. She no longer has to contend with the cycles of poverty offered by Hanky Park, but she does have to fight off the attentions of Sam

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Grundy, the entrepreneurial capitalist in whose employ she has chosen to be: emancipation and containment are placed side by side. It is precisely this tension, between containment and emancipation which is given presence through photography and in turn, through film and performance during the period. The enhancement of photographic circulation in the press and in magazines from the early 1900s meant that images of performers could be better marketed through reference to their potential to ‘capture essence’ (Linkof, 2018: 9). Susan Stewart’s note on the body is particularly useful here: there are a number of ways in which the body and the world, the experienced and the imagined, mutually articulate and delimit each other […] the body is made an object and […] is something which offers itself to possession. (Stewart, 2007 [1993]: 132) The female body, whether through in-role postcard portraiture or depictions of celebrities in ‘everyday life’, was mediated to audiences beyond its live performance. As Viv Gardner notes, one didn’t even need to attend a performance to ‘own’ a version of the performer’s body (see Gardner, 2004a). The exchange of actresses’ bodies ‘captured’ by photography became part of the currency of friendship and sociality: the actress is ‘thus literally owned by her immediate public […] a vast demotic consumership whom she might never encounter in the theatre’ (Kelly, 2004: 114). Some actresses’ careers were both established and extended in part through their cultural recirculation in photographic or filmic form. Penny Farfan even suggests that Ellen Terry ‘remediated her stage presence through modern technology (photography, the postal system […] advertising)’ (Farfan, 2012: 110): she also actively embraced film in the last decade of her life (see Cockin, 2019). The tension between the representation of the performing live body and the capturing of performance was also epitomized in the story-board pictorial offerings of magazines like the Play Pictorial or the Sketch. Clement Shorter, editor of the Illustrated London News created the Sketch in the early 1890s with the view that the new mass circulation of photographs of celebrities, with the enhancement of halftone printing and its promise of ‘authentic experience’ and ‘truthfulness’, would appeal to female readers: he aimed to explicitly ‘cultivate female audiences’ with its coverage (Linkof, 2018: 22–33). By the 1910s, photographs of performers had become commonplace and prominent in trade magazines like the Performer. Here, whilst visuals did not attempt to replicate performance as such, photography provided the representation of those individuals or teams who made up various acts. For example, Welsh strong-woman Vulcana, of the ‘Atlas and Vulcana Troup’, billed as ‘The Most Beautiful, Symmetrical and Physically Perfect Woman on Earth’, has quarter- and half-page advertisements running from the mid-1900s to the First World War. The photo remains the same over nearly ten years. The repeated image intimates beauty not strength: she is not shown lifting weights – she is on display, but not at work (see Figure 6.1).

FIGURE 6.1

Advert for ‘Vulcana – The Most Beautiful, Symmetrical and Physically Perfect Woman on Earth’, the Performer (author’s own collection)

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Photography also enabled the circulation of images of performing women and female troupes in various states of undress, where textual reference was made to their unique stage acts. Again, and notwithstanding the limitations of live photography, they were rarely shown at work. Thus, Kirk and Saraski, ‘The Girl Aquatic Marvels’,1 Lily Smith and Sisters ‘posing swimming and diving act’,2 or ‘Pauline Travis and Her French Lady Gymnasts’3 are tantalizingly dressed for work – in body suits or loose sports clothing, but striking a glamourous pose. The ‘Edivicta Troupe of Six Charming English Cyclists’, including ‘Doris the Girl Wonder’, are advertised with one bicycle between them, with cloth mop-caps, flimsy shorts and chemises: shapely feminine outlines, clad in single colour, body-hugging suiting, are what draws our eye into the frame (see Figure 6.2).4 Here then, there is a seeming reticence to make direct visual reference to bodily activity or enhanced physicality and the explicit replication of forms of female performance labour. The female performer’s scope for physical risk-taking is contained within a re-feminized image of a static body. For trade magazines, there remained a tension between the explicit display of women’s bodies in particular and the need to maintain ‘respectability’. Physical strength or the kinds of agility normally associated with male bodies, and acts involving women, risk and endurance, are visually represented with reference to ideals of passive femininity and beauty. These photographic images however, still facilitate the visual display of the body ‘as object […] which offers itself to possession’ as Susan Stewart proposes above (Stewart, 2007 [1993]: 132). By way of contrast, fan magazines marketed to consumers rather than traders in art and entertainment, were far more likely to use photography to simulate or reference the body of a female performer at work, playing with the forms of female

FIGURE 6.2

‘The Edivicta Troupe of Six Charming English Cyclists’, December 1914 (author unknown)

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labour they chose to make legible and manipulating the photograph’s potential to implicate or replicate the performing female body. As David Mayer has noted of the proliferation of theatre photography from the late nineteenth century, whilst the photograph relates, in some way or another, to performance, ‘it is also immediate and certain evidence of a complex commercial and social transaction that implicated management, production, performer, venue and a range of theatrical consumers’ (Mayer, 2002: 232). Here it is interesting to turn to publicity photos of the early years of Beatrice Lillie’s career which play on her ability to transform between the performance of masculine and feminine. Accompanying copy almost always made reference to the underlying ‘feminine charm’ of this actress who has an uncanny ability to ‘play the man’ in Revues such as Now’s the Time (Alhambra, 1915), Some (Vaudeville, 1916), or Cheep (Vaudeville, 1917). The Sketch ensured her ‘masculine’ characters were juxtaposed by her feminine ones, utilizing photography’s capacity to simultaneously display her masculine disguise and re-instate her ‘real’ feminine identity (see Figure 6.3). Similarly, Play Pictorial in its coverage of Now’s the Time, noted that ‘there is no business of a “nice boy” […] [Lillie] does not carry out with masculine accuracy, just tinctured with feminine charm’: to have the skill of accuracy is a masculine trait. The copy continues, ‘It is amusing to see a suggestion in our photograph that the cleverest woman, confronted with a collar problem, shares the fate of the proverbial brave man struggling with adversity’: even her dexterous feminine fingers can’t over-come an everyday masculine struggle with a shirt collar (see Figure 6.4). Later to become one of Coward’s performing partners in Charlot’s revues in the 1920s before a successful career in film and intimate cabaret, Lillie had an uncanny

FIGURE 6.3

Beatrice Lillie from Cheep, 1916 (author unknown)

Corporeality and the body in performance 179

FIGURE 6.4

Beatrice Lillie in Now’s the Time, 1915 (author unknown)

transformative ability as a male impersonator. Whilst photography made this ‘transgression’ visible, it also enabled a re-instatement of the status quo: her ability to transform to a male is contained by the reassurance that she always returns to her ‘natural’ feminine state.5 For Laurence Senelick, the shift in quality of portraiture facilitated by photography in the nineteenth century ‘reorganized the public concept of personality’ (Senelick, 1991: 1). By the early decades of the twentieth century, performing women’s bodies, contained in photographic form, embodied a different cultural significance during a period of social change. This impacted in particular on the conceptualization of configurations of women’s status, agency and physical presence in public and professional spaces. Combined with emancipatory narratives, photographic portraiture circulating in the public domain was in fact reorganizing not only the concept of personality as Senelick suggests, but the concept of ‘woman’ more generally. The female body in performance cultures was one means by which these new negotiations of the relationship between woman and the social and political realm was played out as the performative or fictive in relation to the real. Photography was also used to market performers and their endorsements without reference to any of their actual work. Musical comedy performer Phyllis Dare reminisced later in life that the hundreds of photos of her and her sister as teenage performers, circulated in the early 1900s to feed the craze for postcards of female performers, had little to do with what she actually did on stage – her actual work as a performer.6 Interestingly, such postcards often depicted actresses in ‘domestic’ settings – with pets, on a swing amongst the garden roses, walking through the grounds of their country home or, as Dare remembered, ‘as skaters in the snow, under a tree in blossom or as diary maids in a meadow’.7 These were the same

180 Corporeality and the body in performance

kinds of postcards sent for signing by autograph-hunting fans, delivered in their hundreds in Dare’s theatre postbag (see Dare, 1907). Here, the female body is shown beyond the frame of work life, in a more familiar and empathic relationship to the domestic, or engaged in forms of leisure that might connect to the aspirations of the fans: they might better see themselves in reflections of the actress at leisure, where she is ‘just like them’ (see Figure 6.5). Features in magazines like the Sketch were often built around showing the viewer the actress at home, with her children, hobbies or pets. The celluloid containment of the female body was not necessarily beyond women’s professional control, however, and provided the possibility of establishing a constant presence beyond the circulation or consumption of their professional work. Gladys Cooper, photographed professionally from a young age, was often featured in domestic, non-theatrical or sporting scenes in magazines of the day, even when she was running a major West End theatre (see Figures 6.6 and 6.7). Performers were frequently used in product endorsements from the late nineteenth century, but by the mid-1920s the verisimilitude made possible by enhancements in photographic technology gave performers additional capacity for

FIGURE 6.5

Phyllis Dare in a domestic scene for the fans (author unknown)

FIGURE 6.6

Gladys Cooper in a domestic scene with children (Gladys Cooper 1888– 1971, English actress with children Joan and John Buckmaster, signed photograph, 1915. ARP1285560, Ronald Grant Archive/ArenaPAL)

FIGURE 6.7

Gladys Cooper, offering fans a chance to see her ‘other’ professional life as the sponsor of skincare products (author’s own collection)

182 Corporeality and the body in performance

self-publicity and forms of marketing. Such marketing campaigns would have been tightly controlled by agents or by the performers themselves. In the early 1900s and 1910s, for example, numerous legal cases were taken out by female performers against photographers or agents who had misrepresented their professional reputations via appropriating their image for advertising (see Gardner, 2019). Thus, even before the 1920s, actresses were clearly willing and able to manage the reproduction of images of both their domestic and professional selves as a means of building publicity and maintaining their cultural currency in the marketplace. Music Hall performer and musical comedy star Ada Reeve, for example, produced Pot Pourri: Reminiscences at Random in 1913 as a souvenir magazine: ‘multum in parvo’ (‘a great deal in a small space’), for her fans at home, following her tours in America, Canada and South Africa. Some thirty-two pages in length and printed on quality paper, the booklet was full of photos and commentary: Ada Reeve on American unions; Ada on the British audiences in Winnipeg; Ada’s commentary on her sixth South African tour; photographs of Reeve standing by theatres, hotels, audiences, mountains, exotic animals and so on. The booklet ends with a portrait of Ada Reeve at home, returned to ‘domestic normality’ relaxing with her dog and her embroidery on the veranda of her country home (see Figure 6.8). Following an extended period of global touring, and approaching middle age, Reeve would have been less familiar to younger audiences: she used the potential of the photograph to act as marker of a range of her professional and private selves. Her readers could ‘experience’ her tour vicariously: they could

FIGURE 6.8

Ada Reeve, in a domestic scene, back at home after her tour of the colonies, c. 1913 (author unknown)

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be ‘beside her’ without having to leave the country. Like many other female performers, she used photography to extend her cultural and domestic presence, offering fans access to the excitement of her world of work and the intimacy, albeit fabricated, of her private life as a celebrity. For some performers, however, the ‘work’ photograph was the dominant image they put into mass circulation. This was particularly the case for Maud Allan whose 1908 dance ‘Vision of Salome’ was part of a longer act billed as the hit of the variety season at the Palace by producer Alfred Butt. Other acts on the bill early on during her time at the Palace included Sam Elton, ‘the man who made the Czar laugh’, and ‘Princess Trixie, the only animal in the world known to be possessed of responsive intelligence’.8 During ‘special matinees’ in 1911, Allan did not revive her most famous dance, ‘Vision of Salome’, so publicized in 1908. For such matinees, often for charity (see Chapter 2), Allan was ‘an artist, and an artist in a new kind of work’ (see Figure 6.9):9 the entertainment closed with the Palace Bioscope of ‘Scenes from Shakespeare’s KING HENRY VIII as performed at His Majesty’s Theatre by Arthur Bourchier, Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Violet Vanbrugh’.10

FIGURE 6.9

Maud Allan dancing (author’s own collection)

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What a woman might do with her body: ‘natural’ dance Allan’s early autobiography, published during the tide of fame brought about by the popularity of her ‘Vision of Salome’ dance, situates her work as an art form, as opposed to an entertainment (Allan, 1908). Here, the body is engaged in direct spiritual and physical relation to nature. The ‘Vision of Salome’ is explained as a choreography of trance, in which the young Salome remembers her actions, as opposed to performing them. It is, however, her photo in role in which she appears semi-naked by the standards of the day, that has resonated through time. It is the costume and corporeal form that predominantly featured in photographs of Allan, both during her seasons from 1908 through to the early 1910s under Butt’s management, and in the publicity for the notorious 1918 libel case some ten years after her 1908 debut (see Hoare, 1997a and Figure 6.10). Spoken of by contemporary dance historian John Flitch as a ‘dance of a strange and haunting fascination’, to which many found themselves ‘unaccountably drawn […] night after night’, much has been written of Maud Allan’s take on Salome (Flitch, 1912: 115). Her professional achievements are contextualized with reference to her place within a group of dancers, including Lois Fuller, Ruth St Denis and Isadora Duncan, who all epitomized the turn to ‘the natural’ in dance during the early decades

FIGURE 6.10

Maud Allan as Salome from her Vision of Salome, 1908 (author’s own collection)

Corporeality and the body in performance 185

of the modernist period (see Carter and Fensham, 2011). With its necessity for emancipatory, loose, un-corseted clothing, in dance the notion of the ‘natural’ was easily converted by critics into the sexualized. Many of Allan’s critics associated her with semi-naked ‘acts of a vulgarly suggestive nature for which even the usual excuse of Art could not apologise with any semblance of conviction’.11 Of her earlier performances W. R. Titterton, with his own special brand of moral high-ground criticism, had suggested she ‘danced well’, with ‘a hint to the sexually provocative’. He claimed she exploited the convergence of Duncan’s philosophy of natural dance, with the acclaim and notoriety she had received from Richard Strauss as the best Salome dancer – ‘forbidden to dance on the grounds of indecency’.12 Strauss had revived the figure of Salome, a figure which resonated with both Oscar Wilde’s banned play and with his notoriety as a transgressive playwright. Interestingly, popular dance crazes of the time such as the Tango were, in opposition to ‘natural’ dance, built on a choreographic premise of physical control and containment. Allan often features in modernity narratives of transgression and the emergence of new moral conservatisms because of her sensational libel trial against right-wing independent MP Noel Pemberton Billing, ten years after she first wowed London audiences at the Palace theatre, in 1918 (see Kettle, 1977 and Hoare, 1997a). More recently Marlis Schweitzer has directed our attention toward the cultural significance of the term ‘Salomania’, coined at the time in the US with reference to the craze amongst performers and audiences for Salome dances sweeping the continent in and around 1908 and 1909.13 These were often based on versions of Allan’s dance, criticisms of which nevertheless mirrored social anxieties about women’s bodies and a fear that the ‘proliferation of scantily clad Salomes would pollute the contained, corseted bodies of respectable women and corrupt the minds of men’ (Schweitzer, 2015b: 891–892). Schweitzer also usefully points to the inferences connecting mania, epidemic and disease which dominated narratives of Salome dance performers: the dance ‘spread from body to body’, with reproductions of varying technical achievement (ibid.: 902). Salome’s costume consisted of harem pants and an ‘oriental’ bodice top, usually in the form of a jewelled bra, with varying amounts of beads and necklaces, and heavy ‘oriental’ headgear. Un-corseted, the body was free to move and the limbs could be seen under the diaphanous fabric covering them, a ‘light classic drapery’ that might ‘serve as ambient air wherein she floats’.14 Amy Koritz draws our attention to the fine line between the sexual and the aesthetic in Allan’s dance and its reception by critics, but also notes her ‘reputation for aesthetic seriousness and feminine respectability’ (Koritz, 1994: 69): this was in large part a result of the agency she maintained over the circulation of her ‘stage persona’ via photography. Allan gave many interviews where conversation was steered toward discussion about dance and her 1908 autobiography is centred on a description of not only the symbolism of the ‘Vision of Salome’ dance, but of the aesthetics and techniques of dance as a form more generally. However, it is photographs of Allan in various stages of the role that established her cultural presence: moments of her performance could be ‘enacted,’ caught, framed and re-circulated, giving her ‘work’ a

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resonance previously unimaginable – both quantitively and qualitatively. When details from the 1918 libel trial filled press reports, it is the bodily image of Allan’s iteration of Salome some ten years earlier – the biblical, ‘oriental’ version of transgressive femininity – that is re-circulated. The image, embedded in the public imagination, was also frequently recycled, re-circulated and re-referenced, for example in a burlesque configuration by music-hall female impersonator Malcolm Scott’s ‘Salome’ (see Figure 6.11), in H. G. Pelissier’s caricature (see Figure 6.12), or even in what at the time was viewed as a risqué iteration where one tour of The Dairymaids included a child Salome scene. Essentially a disturbing sexualization of a group of girls dressed up in the latest craze, this was one among the many manifestations of versions of Allan’s embodiment of Salome (see Figure 6.13).15 The innocence with which Allan characterized Salome’s ‘vision’ in her 1908 My Life in Dance was at odds with the transgressive quality of Salome’s varying cultural iterations from children’s dressing up, to the performance costume of supposed spy Mata Hari (see Chapter 4 and Figure 6.10) and a bizarre libel case which ultimately back-fired on Allan and her supporters in the tide of paranoid conservativism during the last year of the First World War. Historians have noted Allan’s anti-suffrage stance in her autobiography, where she suggested that women should have little to do with politics: indeed, essentially a woman’s role, even if she was educated, was to bring beauty into the home of her husband (Allan, 1908: 111; see also Buonaventura, 2018: 117 and Koritz, 1994). Her dance, with its free expressivity and diaphanous costumes, signified an

FIGURE 6.11

Salome impersonators: Malcolm Scott as ‘Salome’ (author unknown)

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FIGURE 6.12

Salome impersonators: H. G. Pelissier as Maud Allan (author’s own collection)

emancipatory trope for the body, but Allan refused to align herself with the suffrage cause and especially with suffrage militancy. Her dances were embedded with references to the classical and to essentialized depictions of femininity. But these were also sexualized iterations of the female body and this fact, along with her friendships with celebrities and powerful politicians and their wives, came back to haunt her during the 1918 Pemberton Billing trial. Here she was overtly associated with narratives of degeneration on her return to the London stage, this time as the lead in J. T. Grein’s private production of Wilde’s banned play Salome, interestingly a part taken earlier by key Actresses’ Franchise League activist and actress Adeline Bourne in 1911. It is important here to note Allan’s earlier strategy to distinguish her own emancipated dancer’s body – on the fluid borders of the transgressive as Salome – from that of the suffragette. In contrast, at least one contemporary psychoanalyst asserted that, as a fictional figure, Salome, as drawn from Wilde, was an example of feminine ‘repressed sexual aggression’, similar in nature to that which might manifest in social conflict of the kinds precipitated by ‘the militant suffragettes of England’ (Coriat, 1913: 258).

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FIGURE 6.13

‘“Dressed in a Chic Ventilation”: Miniature Salomes’, Phyllis Dare and the ‘tiny Maud Allans’ child chorus parody of the rage of the moment in The Dairymaids at the Queens, the Sketch, June, 1908 (author unknown)

Agency and performing the suffrage body Maud Allan’s attitude to the suffragettes, and her alignment with those holding political power against their cause, was noted in the press and even dramatized in a short sketch in the Referee in June 1908. In ‘Salome and the Suffragettes: How Women Answered Mr Asquith’, set on the River Terrace of the House of Commons, with Lloyd George, Churchill and Asquith as characters, Maud Allan is kidnapped by a band of forty militant suffragettes lead by Mrs Drummond.16 Even though Allan threatens that she will ‘have all their heads on a charger’, they ‘scale the terrace’ and take Allan hostage, driving off the cabinet ministers by ‘pelting them with strawberries’. When Alfred Butt arrives to escort Allan to the Palace theatre, he is told she has been ‘seized by the Suffragettes’ and is being kept captive in the cliffs near Rosherville, until the government enfranchise women. With the threat of letting down the three ‘crowned heads’ and five thousand people all waiting at the theatre, Asquith, ‘with great emotion’ and in the ‘face of a National Disaster’, orders the franchise to be given to women. Salome is transported to the Palace at sixty miles an hour and women are promised the vote.17 Here then, the topicality of the struggle for the vote and its turn to militancy converges with a tongue-in-cheek swipe at the Liberal government. This is a government that will not grant them the vote, but has loosened its moral frame in

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its public approval of Allan’s act, an act which is as transgressive as the suffragettes in its break with socially ‘acceptable’ models of femininity. Neither Allan nor the suffragettes escape being the focus of satire, but then, neither do the politicians Asquith, Lloyd George or Churchill. Other performative imaginings of the suffragette body could be more critical or at least more brutal, but the line between the suffragette as a transgressor of the ‘normal’ balance of domestic life and the suffragette as socially transforming political activist was not always clearly drawn in performance. Whilst Rebecca Cameron has recently suggested that the voicing of suffrage polemic often divided audiences between the ‘supportive’ and the ‘oppositional’ (Cameron, 2016: 294), I would suggest here that the suffrage body on stage might also have elicited a wider spectrum of responses. The suffragette often appeared as a figure of fun in music hall or variety settings, but was rarely accompanied by the kind of vitriol used by many anti-suffragists, like immunologist Amroth Wright, for example, for whom, even though a great friend of suffragist George Bernard Shaw, suffrage ‘was a surrender to a very violent feminist agitation […] traced back to our excess female population and the associated abnormal physiological conditions’ (Wright, 1913: 86). Like others, Wright thought women who chose to be disruptive in public lacked ‘intellectual or moral sanction’ (ibid.: 1). Suffragettes used the performative power of disruption to agitate: body-based suffrage agitation made good press and no more so than when it took place in public or theatrical venues (see Gale, 2015). They disrupted public meetings and church ceremonies, where full congregations were interrupted by suffrage protesters interjecting proceedings by loudly castigating the church congregation for their lack of intervention against the legitimation of violence against women through the practice of force feeding.18 Suffragettes were reportedly making an ‘organised onslaught upon a number of London theatres’ in June 1914. Here, they ‘made sundry interruptions and showered down numerous handbills upon the heads of surprised audiences’.19 Gladys Cooper later reports one such incident, betraying her lack of sympathy for such forms of political activism: I spent most of the afternoon being thrilled by the sight of struggling women being thrown out of the theatre by perspiring policemen. One woman was so firmly chained to her seat that they had to take out her seat and all. (Cooper, 1931: 255) Some theatre managements were warned in advance of planned activist interventions and attendants were swift to eject offenders; rarely a gentle affair, protesters were removed by physical rough-handling. During the campaign for disruption in the first half of 1914, the suffragette protesters often focused on drumming up support amongst audiences: the ‘theatres have now become the regular scene of Suffragette protest’, where audiences were reminded that whilst they were being entertained, ‘women of their own race were being tortured in a London prison’.20 Unlike the ‘inexorable movement towards greater equality’ in the post-War

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cultural turn during the 1920s (Bingham, 2013: 95), before the war emancipation through suffrage was predominantly viewed as the means by which women ‘would slip the reins of domesticity, femininity […] constitutionality […] through their exercise of political rights’ (Mayhall, 2003: 61). For suffrage historian Laura E. Nym Mayall, the manifestation of the suffrage body as an activist body, both ‘challenged and reaffirmed culturally held assumptions about women in the public realm’ [my emphasis] (ibid.: 62); in fact, a great deal of theatre did the same. Music-Halls and Variety theatres offered a steady flow of sketches featuring suffragettes in direct response to the predominance of the figure of the suffragette in the public domain. She became a productive means of publicizing the topicality of an act. Thus, we see Macbeth as a burlesque ‘in three convulsions and a final “kick”’, advertised for four weeks at the Tivoli in London in 1907.21 Here the cast list included Macbeth (The Wronger of Rights) with Macduff (The Righter of Wrongs – a detective), performing alongside Lady Macbeth (A Suffragette).22 More domestic in its outlook were Bella and Bijou, ‘the celebrated society entertainers’, with ‘their latest, greatest triumph “The Suffragettes” – quite the most uproariously humorous item they have produced’.23 The performance was advertised by way of focus on its topicality. From the review of the Plymouth Palace of Varieties we learn the act is ‘based on the recent women’s rights outcry in London’: The subject which has been so prominently thrust upon the public is portrayed in the most concise form and Bella simulates the most handy Suffragette in her most blatant tones, whilst Bijou, as the husband […] with the turning of the ‘worm’ sets the house in uproar with his taming of the shrew.24 The inclusion of the suffragette is ultimately reassuring as finally ‘mere man is left master of the situation […]. And moves off to the appropriate strains of “Britons never shall be slaves”.’25 Other popular depictions of suffragettes were less asinine and Naomi Paxton suggests many made light of the violence against protesting women, which became more prevalent in the years leading up to the First World War. Such mockery of suffragettes was often performed by men in drag (Paxton, 2018: 135). Whilst Paxton emphasizes the knowingness of such performances, representations of suffragettes were also less clearly drawn in black and white terms on the popular stages of the day. For example, in E. G. Crawley’s sketch The Suffragette: A Quick-Change Knockabout Farce, Miss Catawall (the Suffragette) outwits the Home Secretary Mr Asterisks (Asquith) and his valet, by reappearing in his study in disguise as a policeman, the Duke of Portland and another government minister. Miss Catawall is mischievous but skilled – she climbs in through the window unnoticed, gets delivered to the Home Secretary’s house as a parcel and eventually manages to get Mr Asterisks arrested whilst she is disguised in his clothes. Each time when asked who she is, she proclaims with great resilience, ‘I’m Votes for Women’, and the sketch closes with her bowing and removing her false nose and moustache.26 Rather than being antagonistic, the sketch offers the suffragette as modern and knowing in comparison to the MP, who is pompous and

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slow to catch on. By contrast, George Dance’s The Suffragette (1907) offers little by way of suffragette action, but makes use of suffragettes as a framing device, with the opening chorus singing: For as a crowd of suffragettes/Our living we be earning/We are anxious to get up and spout/And in Hyde Park to rave and shout/As members of the Club of Suffragettes.27 In many other of the sketches produced during the transition in the struggle for the vote toward militantism – such as P. Nash’s Suffrage Girl (1911), Murray and Hilburn’s Suffragette (1912), M. Robson’s Suffragette (1914) and J. Allan’s Suffragette’s Redemption (1909) – the figure of the suffragette might be simply used as an enticement for audiences’ interest.28 Equally, as with later sketches such as Mark Daly’s Flannels and Flappers (1919) and R. Guy Reeves’s Flapper’s Night Out (1917), the ‘flapper’, often depicted as an independent young woman with her own social and moral agenda, is used as a signifier for a particular transgression from a traditional norm of passive femininity.29 Where there is a more overt engagement with the politics and potential for personal agency through female suffrage, the figure of the empowered woman is drawn with more layered detail. Ned Joyce Heaney’s satirical sketch When Women Rule (1913), for example, is built on the conceit that 100 years into the future, women have the vote, run parliament and have reversed male and female social and domestic roles completely. Florence is running for election when her ‘wild-oat days’ come back to haunt her as she is asked to ‘make an honourable husband’ of a man with whom she has previously had relations. Cyril, the boy she wants to marry, ‘is about 21, rather tall and thin. He wears a boy’s Norfolk suit, trimmed with lace, a girl’s hat […] he carries a bag, with a long string that he dangles’. Cyril’s mother promises him his ‘poor father’s jewels’ – in a skit on the exchange value of a potential marriage partner. Florence has paid off a formal lover Harold, who declares that yes, she paid him ‘but did not give me back my good name’. The sketch ends with Florence being threatened by Cyril’s mother and Harold falling into a faint as he announces ‘the mother of my child and I wear no wedding ring’.30 Intriguing in its gender reversal and comic critique, the sketch capitalizes on the humour suggested by women with political power behaving ‘just like men’: it achieves this through a very overt feminization of the men, whilst the women appear in rational masculinized clothing. The costuming of Florence’s body is used to signify her ‘maleness’: she wears ‘a man’s collar and tie […] a man’s vest and a mannish cut black coat […] a divided shepherd plaid skirt’. Her accomplice Patricia, ‘a great political boss’, also wears a man’s collar and tie and they greet each other by the masculine gesture if shaking hands ‘vigorously’. There is no discussion of suffrage, simply a representation of a future world turned inside out as a result of it. The Liverpool Repertory Theatre production of MP James Sexton’s The Riot Act (1914) was bought to public attention in part because of the disturbance created by a suffragette who reportedly objected to his portrayal of the suffragette sisterhood in the play. Newspaper syndicated reports suggested that the suffragette had protested against the abusive portrayal of women in the play, epitomized by

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Sexton’s character of Miss Vaughn, ‘typist and shorthand clerk’, who effectively lies and openly declares her affections for her boss, Union leader Cunliffe. In her history of the Liverpool Rep, Grace Wyndham Goldie suggested numerous suffragettes ‘rose in the stalls, protested and were forcibly ejected; or they addressed the audience from the boxes and were ejected from there’ (Goldie, 1935: 93): this is not mentioned in detail by Sexton in his autobiography (see Sexton, 1936 and Chapter 5) and is reported as a singular protest from a singular suffragette in the local press.31 Such disturbances were familiar in theatres by this point, and were variously reported by the Suffragette journal under titles like ‘Waking Up the Public’ and ‘Suffragettes Everywhere’.32 Here, public attention was drawn to specific aspects of the campaign through a kind of organized guerrilla theatre where activists placed themselves amongst the audience, then stood up and pronounced whilst banners were lowered from balconies or pamphlets thrown down from the gallery. It is possible that some twenty years later, Wyndham Goldie conflated the general reporting of suffragette theatre protesting with what happened during the production of Sexton’s play. As G. S. Street noted, The Riot Act is a ‘play of labour politics’, dramatizing an earlier strike action (see also Chapter 5).33 In the play, Miss Vaughan’s actions – she copies her boss’s private post and forges a document – are driven by her admiration for him. The issue of suffrage is discussed in detail between herself and the antagonistic Dunne as he tells her to ‘abstain from giving lectures on the subject of votes for women and the policy of the W.S.P.U. The charwoman is getting unbearable since you put such notions into her head’ (Sexton, 1914: 9). When Dunne complains about her to their boss, the union leader Cunliffe, he is told that voicing one’s political opinion is a democratic right. Cuncliffe objects to the move to militantism, which Miss Vaughan supports, however suggesting there might be ‘a more womanly and dignified method of protest’ (ibid.: 13). One of the few plays of the era by a male author that gives voice to the general arguments for female suffrage within debate about labour relations, Sexton’s Miss Vaughan is integral to the action of the play. Without necessarily wishing to reduce the political significance of their subject, suffragettes were also drawn in comic terms by female playwrights of the period. As a strategy, this foregrounded the dynamic quality of the cause for theatre audiences. Thus, Cicely Hamilton and Christopher St John’s 1909 How the Vote Was Won makes much comedy out of the sheer social and physical range of women protesting their independence as they arrive at the Brixton home of clerk Horace Cole on the afternoon of a women’s strike. Cole’s sister Agatha tells him that as the value of her domestic work goes unrecognized, he will have to support her from now on. His cousin Maudie, a singer in the Music-Halls, arrives, telling him all the theatres are closed and ‘the actresses have gone on strike until women have the vote’ (Hamilton and St John, 2016: 354). Women who support themselves financially through work arrive at Cole’s house demanding that, if indeed their lack of political citizenship is a result of the assumption that they are ‘supported by men’, then they will no longer work and pay taxes without the vote. Hamilton and St John deliberately bring all social classes into one room to universalize the issue of

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votes for women: under threat of having to provide for the motley selection of both close and far-distant female relatives, Cole is quickly converted to the cause. In both plays, the political arguments for female suffrage are given voice through the corporeal presence of the female suffragist. The context for women’s emancipation is widened, as is the physical range of women presented who have in common their lack of civic agency. In Netta Syrett’s Might is Right (1909), which the Sketch sneered was merely ‘an amusing little farce’,34 again women from different social and professional contexts are bought together in a plot to convert the government to the cause. Syrett had been the winner of a high-profile playwrighting competition which had the commitment to producing the winning play: a factor made much of in the publicity surrounding a single performance of her first play The Finding of Nancy in 1902 (see Syrett, 2011 [1902]). The later Might is Right had a two-week run at the Haymarket theatre in November 1909. Whilst Syrett’s first play was concerned with issues around gender, morality and marriage and her later Two Domestics with class and domestic labour (see Syrett, 1922), this comedy directly referenced the campaign for votes for women. Here the militant suffragette, Miss Finch, is portrayed in comic terms, but nevertheless voices the specific intellectual argument of the suffrage cause. Miss Finch is drawn as one extreme type of a spectrum of women, all bodily present on stage – from aristocrat to chorus girl – who all share a commitment to the urgency of their cause. Finch’s character enables the intellectual logic of militantism to be embodied and expressed in what is essentially a comedy, albeit one with a very clear ideological focus. The play centres on the successful plot by the women of the ‘Secret Society for Women’s Suffrage’ to kidnap and convert the Prime Minister. Their tactics, once he is captured, range from the dogmatic to the charming. Miss Finch attempts to educate the young Prime Minister with her pamphlets, posters and writing on the subject ‘under sixteen headings, subdivided into thirty-two sections of which the first is The Nature and Limitations of Man’ (Syrett, in Paxton, 2018: 29).35 Speaking with a ‘subtle cockney accent’, Bobby Binns, ‘outrageously dressed […] [with a] huge hat with plumes’ (ibid.: 5), is a musical comedy star with friends amongst the men in government. She designs the whole scheme to get the Prime Minster into the house, whereupon she suggests ‘never so much as mention the bally vote after you’ve once made him understand that he won’t get out till he’s promised it’. She thinks they should keep him ‘jolly’ until he comes around. Once kidnapped, they dress the Prime Minster, Beauchamp, in ‘a loosely flowered and lace trimmed dressing gown’ (ibid.: 16) making much of the fact that they have taken away his male clothing (see Figure 6.14). All the authorities are out looking for him but the women, whom Beauchamp realises are ‘superior tacticians’ (ibid.: 17), manage to keep him imprisoned until he agrees to their terms. In part, this is because he wants to marry one of them, Miss Tracey, who presents him with a document to sign ordering the vote be given to ‘duly qualified women’, in lieu of a marriage contract. With a range of both class, gendered and strategic positions, the women work as a collective body. Collectivity and collective action is presented as an antidote to contemporary suffragist W. L. Blease’s assertion that ‘disenfranchisement stamps and brands the disenfranchised

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FIGURE 6.14

The Prime Minister has been kidnapped and given a woman’s dressing gown to wear in Netta Syrett’s Might is Right, from the Sketch, December 1, 1909, p. 234 (author unknown)

with an indelible mark of inferiority’ (Blease, 1910: 170–172). Whilst representations of the suffragette in later plays such as G. B. Stern’s The Man Who Pays The Piper (Stern, 1931; see Gale and Bush-Bailey, 2012) focus on the relationship between equality and power in marriage or work, these earlier works concerned themselves directly with placing identifiable female suffrage bodies on stage. Sometimes these are minimalized as political bodies, providing a circuitous means to joke about class or a particular generation of women, but often they are fully contextualized within the frame of a detailed emancipatory discourse, individuated beyond simple binary types, and shown working together as a collective.

‘Marriage as a trade’: who owns women’s bodies Staged discussions of marriage and its civic and domestic inequalities exposed a particular mode of discourse around the ownership of women’s bodies. Whilst questions of marital arrangements or disharmony have been the backbone of British theatrical comedy for centuries, the early twentieth century saw a particular shift in the tone of discussion. This was not un-related to changes in the law, changes in women’s position within both the family and the job market, and more generally a loosening of the terms within which sexual relations might be discussed or at least alluded to. Whilst legislation and the First World War completely transformed both the idea and lived experience of womanhood across classes and generations, female agency, womanhood and the social constructions of femininity remained contested sites of public discourse and social concern. As Pat Thane notes, the antagonism toward women having the licence to vote remained for many years after the franchise was awarded (Thane, 2001: 288). In connection with this, fears about the uncontainable nature of women’s sexuality were often expressed through concerns about the corporeal (see Bland, 1995). The question of women’s bodily

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agency also sat at the heart of a number of plays early in the period which focused on women’s place within the institution of marriage. The late nineteenth century ‘marriage debate’ was constructed around ‘the central theme of a woman’s right over her own person – her personal autonomy – and a transformed, purified and moral relationship between the sexes’ (Bland, 1995: 125). For campaigner Mona Caird, marriage demanded that women become the possession of their husbands, and taking this further, playwright and actress Cicely Hamilton later suggested in Marriage as a Trade (Hamilton, 1981 [1909]) that the ‘mercenary quality of the marriage market rendered it equivalent to prostitution’ (ibid.: 127). Questions of women’s position within marriage have a different flavour by the late 1920s and 1930s: here there is much more discussion of the gender imbalance of domestic or professional life. Noël Coward’s Private Lives (1930) and Fallen Angels (1925), for example, comically dispute the sanctity of marriage in favour of personal freedom and the expression of desire. Earlier plays, especially those produced in and around the 1910s, question much more the exchange value of women and their bodies within the economy of marriage. With her Marriage as a Trade already in print by 1909, Cicely Hamilton’s Just to Get Married (1911) was first produced in London by suffragist actress and theatre manager Gertrude Kingston (see Kingston, 1937), who also took the lead role of Georgiana Vicary, an unmarried woman, approaching thirty and living with relatives attempting to arrange a marriage for her. Kingston spared no costs in staging the play, even producing a replication of a railway station – the location for the reconciliation of Vicary and the man she has previously rejected as potential husband, at the end of the play (Moran, 1917: 145). Whilst Anna Andes views this as one of Hamilton’s ‘non-suffrage plays’ (Andes, 2015: 503), the framing of questions of marriage are, in fact, entirely dependent on an understanding of the inequalities of women’s domestic and economic status. For Hamilton, this is central to the suffrage issue: women’s position in the marriage market and the ensuing contract is one whereby marriage ‘is a trade that is practically compulsory’ (Hamilton, 1981 [1909]: 28): effectively marriage transfers the ownership of women’s bodies to their husbands. As we witness the various rituals of familial matchmaking, so Georgiana Vicary becomes more and more aware of this potential transfer of ownership. The premise is that Georgiana should – through her sense of womanly duty – please those around her by agreeing to marry someone with whom she has little natural affinity: she does so, but then changes her position. From this point until the closing moments of the play, we believe that, instead of the path of least resistance, she has chosen to embrace the economic hardship of an independent life. There is a moment of stark bodily resistance on Georgiana’s journey towards marriage at the end of Act I, however, when she first agrees that she will marry Adam. All her relatives gather around and ceremonially grab at her face to kiss her in a ritualistic display of congratulation: for Georgiana this is a form of bodily intrusion. Good heavens do you want to kiss me too? […] [she seizes BERTHA by the hair, pulling back her head and gives a vicious peck on each of her cheeks] […]. There you are. Had enough or would you like anymore?

GEORGIANA:

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[…] [stands with her arms to her sides and her face lifted stiffly], anyone else want to fall on my neck? If so please come on and get it over … Aren’t you yearning to embrace each of my blushing cheeks? […] As there appear to be no further offers, I suppose the touching ceremony may be considered at an end […] You’re delighted – I’m delighted – everyone’s delighted and – we’re engaged! […] Curtain(Hamilton, 1914 [1911]: 37). Georgiana closes the first Act with a physical display of what it is to have her body symbolically possessed as a result of her promise to marry. After ending her engagement to Adam, she notes that her aunt and uncle have been ‘hawking me round for years to one man after another. That’s been my life – being hawked round […] I’m not going stop here and be groaned over by an entire family’ (ibid.: 68). Georgiana then refuses the traditional choice of marriage and the symbolic bodily incarceration that goes with it, until her suitor agrees to her right to self-definition, both economically and corporeally. Another popular play in which marriage and courtship are considered a state of being in which the female body is constructed as desirable, attainable and possessable is Emily Morse Symonds’ Clothes and the Woman, first produced by Normal McKinnel’s group, the Pioneers, in 1907 under her pseudonym George Paston. Novelist and biographer Symonds’ feminist take on marriage is woven through much of her work:36 Clothes and the Woman sustained its popularity – with productions in 1919 and 1922, with Iris Hoey as Robina Fleming (see Figures 6.15 and 6.16) – because its themes were less tied to the struggle for suffrage which had contextualized its original production, than they were to women’s social and domestic condition more generally.37 The plot builds around the visual transformation of Robina Fleming, who we first meet sitting in her workroom surrounded by piles of books and shabby furniture, dressed in a ‘short mud-coloured skirt and loose baggy drab coloured blouse […] no plainer than the average woman […] with no attempt at ornament’ (Paston, 1922: 7). Her old school friend, the widowed Mrs Desmond, acts as, in Kaplan and Stowell’s words, ‘the agent for Symonds’ metamorphosis’ (Kaplan and Stowell, 1994: 165); Robina is put through a total make-over by her friend who insists that, ‘It’s just as well to marry, so that when you’re old you mayn’t imagine it’s better than it is’ (Paston, 1922: 19). After the transformation, the aim of which is to use clothes to construct a particular mode of femininity for Robina so that she can perform ‘being a woman’, ‘she conveys the effect of a very chic and brilliant French woman among a group of average well-dressed but rather ineffective Englishwomen’ (ibid.: 25). Robina enjoys a few weeks of flirting with the men who are overwhelmed by her well-constructed feminine appearance: she wishes for a deeper sense of engagement but suggests men ‘don’t like intelligence in a woman’ (ibid.: 26), to which her old friend retorts that indeed they do, as long as it is not visible. Mrs Desmond instructs that she needs to use her intelligence to ‘learn the rules of the game, practise the tricks of the trade’: in other words, having transformed her body, she now needs to ‘perform’ its femininity (ibid.). Mrs Desmond cynically notes, ‘Most people are like the audience at a cinema theatre. To them the whole world is a

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FIGURE 6.15

Iris Hoey as the professional version of Robina Fleming in Emily Morse Symond’s (George Paston’s) Clothes and the Woman, 1922 (author unknown)

moving picture and if one isn’t in the picture – […]’(ibid. 50). Robina is bored of the ‘game’ of courting men, and in need of getting back to work, she returns to her workroom and to her assistant, Mrs Pershore, who doesn’t care what Robina looks like as long as she is ‘just you – yourself’ (ibid.). Fast on her tail comes Mrs Desmond who acrimoniously accuses, Most of us think we require adornment beyond our native charms. But you expect to be adored for yourself alone – the raw woman. (ibid.: 51) An independent woman supporting herself as a writer and reviewer, Robina has ‘performed’ femininity in what Barbara Green names the ‘regime of constant observation’ in which fashion and the ‘ritual’ practice of adornment held women hostage (Green, 1997: 13). Aghast at the cost of performing womanhood in a ‘burgeoning commodity culture’ (ibid.: 89), Robina returns to her formal life keeping her new, expensive clothing and wig in the cupboard, placed on a mannequin. She then castigates the men who courted her only in her hyper-feminized state, but capitulates and agrees to marry Dr Lomax for whom, ultimately, ‘clothes are the woman’ (Paston, 1922: 58). As Kaplan and Stowell suggest in relation to both this play and Paston’s

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FIGURE 6.16

Iris Hoey as the ‘feminised’ version of Robina Fleming in Emily Morse Symond’s (George Paston’s) Clothes and the Woman, 1922 (author unknown)

Tilda’s New Hat (1908),38 there is a conscious politics to fashioning the female body (Kaplan and Stowell, 1994: 166–168). Fashion is not simply about consumption, it is primarily a form of conscious, bodily, self-formation theatricalized at a historic moment when women’s agency in processes of self-formation is very much at the centre of debates on gender equality. In turn, self-formation is central to experiences of citizenship and belonging as explored elsewhere in this book (see Chapter 2). By the time of Noël Coward’s Fallen Angels in 1925, the question of marriage and bodily agency had moved on quite dramatically. For Julia Sterroll and Jane Banbury, marriage is not an obstacle to fulfilment or sexual desire. They feel free to seek both of these outside marriage, in a planned secret assignation with Maurice, the suave Frenchman with whom they both had affairs prior to marrying their husbands. Edna Best and Tallulah Bankhead eventually played the leads after Coward had been obliged to tout the play around different West End producers, no doubt aware of having to weigh up its obvious comic appeal against the kind of moral panic which ultimately underpinned much of its critical reception (Coward, 1986 [1937]; see Figure 6.17). For Sos Eltis, the two women put ‘adultery and social etiquette on the same moral plane’ (Eltis, 2013: 231), and Fallen Angels pre-figures the disregard for the

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FIGURE 6.17

Edna Best and Tallulah Bankhead in Fallen Angels, 1925 (author unknown)

‘orthodox morality’ (ibid.: 233) of Coward’s Private Lives (1930). In both plays, marriage is a disharmonious formality: pleasure seeking and narcissistic gratification are essential. For Jane, marriage provides a ‘lovely firm basis of comradeship and affection’ but is not ‘soul shattering’ (Coward, 1979b [1925]: 188–189). As they wait around for their former lover to arrive, each woman suspects the other of the intention to double cross, and the call to collective action which prevailed in plays in the 1910s gives way to a more subtle and comic critique of individualism. Coward noted that the reviews of the production were ‘vituperative to the point of incoherence’, which made for good box office (Coward, 1986 [1937]: 145). The women were seen as ‘wayward creatures’ in a play that was ‘vulgar, disgusting and degenerate’: such views were part of what Coward later described as a ‘strange pathological avalanche’ of moralizing (ibid.). Julia and Jane get drunk together and openly discuss both their sexual conquests and their sexual desires. As they are awaiting the arrival of the man with whom they share a sexually active past, their discussions have an immediacy teetering on the edge of respectability. On these terms their behaviour – and perhaps indeed this is one reason why the production had a substantial run – was degenerate where the ‘degenerate was […] anything deviating from middle-class-defined normalcy’ (Ledger and Luckhurst, 2000: xxii).

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Whereas the perceived social threat from overt expressions of women’s sexual desire was less new by the 1920s, some suggest that ‘anxieties about otherness shifted away from a threat to domestic femininity towards a threat from women themselves’ (Ledger and McCracken, 1995: 8). The woman question, framed by concerns about degeneracy, was not just about civic agency then, it was about bodies, gender and power more generally.

Degenerative bodies The performance industries reflected the interest in the ‘woman question’ beyond the specifics of suffrage, and ‘woman’ plays and sketches in general proliferated especially during the first two decades of the century. Producers across the country sought licences for plays such as A Woman of Two Lives (1910); A Woman Intervenes (1912); A Woman in the Case (1913); The Woman Who Didn’t Care (1912); The Woman Who Wants (1912); The Woman Who Told (1913) and during the 1914–1918 war, The Woman Who Wouldn’t (1914); Woman Power (1916) and The Woman Who Didn’t Want (1919).39 Some of these were comic, others such as Mrs F. G. Kimberley’s Women of the Night Club (1922), provided salutary warnings for women seeking comfort in the freedoms offered by the twilight world of the night club. Here, Phyllis draws Christine into addiction by order of dealer and pimp Jasper Deane, under whose spell she has fallen, along with developing an unhealthy obsession with the cocaine he has liberally provided her with. For Kate Newey, Mrs F. G. Kimberley, a prolific playwright and theatre manager during the 1910s, wrote in reflection of ‘a world in which the class and moral certainties of the Victorian period are swept away’ (Newey, 2005: 163– 166): there was clearly a popular audience for such work. Even so, this play about degeneracy, broken marriage and destitution ultimately ends with salvation as Christine is reunited with her husband.40 The prostitution of a woman’s body in Kimberley’s sketch is contextualized by narcotic addiction, expressing more overtly the perceived link between sexual freedom and substance abuse than in earlier plays where the links are more implied (see Chapter 4). Whereas in H. M. Harwood’s earlier one-act play Honour Thy Father, first produced by the Pioneer Players in 1912, Claire’s body brings her economic independence in a world where, as she notes, ‘very few ways of making money are decent or lady-like’ (Harwood, 1926: 37). Claire has been supporting her family, subsidising her pompous bankrupt father, through prostitution. When a family friend reveals that he has ‘made use’ of her professional services to her family, she responds to her family’s shock by pointing to her lack of education and to the fact that her father did not see fit to equip her with the skills she would need to survive as an independent woman: she was ‘utterly ignorant and utterly useless’. Claire notes ‘if I had to sell myself I would do it frankly – and get the best price […] do you really think that posts worth £3 a week and more are to be picked up by a girl with no experience at all […] now you know what women are worth’ (ibid.: 49–50). As with the heroine of Antonia Williams’ The Street (1907), also produced by the Pioneer Players in 1913, Claire Morgan is forced to sell herself to keep a family financially afloat. As Eltis notes, such plays shift

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representation of the ‘theatrical fallen woman’ within a new critical ‘emphasis on economic causation’ in discussions about women’s bodies and degenerative immorality (Eltis, 2013: 173). In Harwood’s play, Claire’s father turns a blind eye when faced with the choice between being supported by Claire selling her body, or facing impoverishment, an exposure of hypocrisy not dissimilar to that expressed in George Bernard Shaw’s banned Mrs Warren’s Profession, 41 given a private production in 1902. Plays which included overt discussion of prostitution and the economic exchange of women’s bodies were unlikely to reach public stages as Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession evidences. Licences were given to works which claimed to be dealing with the trafficking of women, however. Such plays as Eva Elwer’s A White Slave of the Streets (or A White Slave Victim) (1913) or A. Myddleton-Myles’s The White Slave Traffic (1913) were licenced even though assessed by the Lord Chamberlain’s office as dealing with a ‘very undesirable subject’. Of Elwer’s play, the censor’s report suggested its story was ‘preposterous, the theme is obviously unwholesome’, whilst the latter play was deemed an ‘artless, conventional meandering melodrama’.42 With their focus on fallen women or a loss of morality, both however tapped into public concern about sex trafficking without debating its urgency as a social issue. While the Criminal Law Amendment Act in 1912 had been underpinned by the ‘conflicting agendas and selfinterest of those pressing for reform’ (Stevenson, 2017: 220), it exemplified the move to legislative control typical of the early decades of the century. The law had the purpose of protection on one level, but it also delimited forms of sexualized behaviour in public spaces. It came about in part because of public panic about sexual behaviour, and a moral panic embedded in the public discourse about the ‘white slave trade’. Cofounder of the Women’s Freedom League and early Labour Party member Teresa Billington-Greig called the flurry of rumours about sex trafficking in the 1910s, ‘spicy morsels of horror’ and famously pointed to the lack of evidence behind such rumours (Billington-Greig, 1913: 435). When plays attempted to treat the issue with more complexity, they inevitably failed to make it on to the public stages of the era. Thus, Cicely Hamilton’s stage version of Elizabeth Robins’ novel Where Are You Going to? was derided as ‘ladylike and exaggerated’ (qtd in Thomas, 2005: 213), whilst at the same time being refused licence for performance, largely because of its depiction of a high-class brothel.43 This is a tale of innocence exploited, where two sisters are kidnapped as a result of the evil plans of the family dressmaker, Madame Aurore. Warned by her mother in rather vague terms of ‘men with the beast in their souls’,44 Honor has had no sex education nor, more importantly, has her younger sister Bettina. On their trip to London, they are tricked into believing that ‘Grey Hawk’ is their Aunt Josephine – she has been given the tip-off by Madame Aurore and has disguised herself to look like their aunt using a photo stolen from their home. As the plot unfolds, the young women realise that none of the windows or doors in the house open. Whilst Bettina is plied with drink and happily engaged in flirting with the men she believes to be her aunt’s acquaintances, Honor is informed by one of them that they have been bought to the wrong address: that they are in fact in ‘one of the most infamous houses in Europe’ and that she and her sister have been caught up in ‘a masterpiece of devilry’.45

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Honor manages to escape and to find her real aunt, but cannot trace her way back to the brothel to save her sister: by then drugged and assaulted we assume. The police get involved and she castigates them for knowing such houses of ill repute exist, yet taking no action to close them down. Bettina, it is reported, has been taken to France by the brothel keeper, where she is discovered to have died in Marseille in the closing scene of the play. This is a harrowing tale in which the young women are hampered by their lack of sex education and the fact that they are the possession of men – first as their bodily protectors and then as the exploiters of their bodies. Here masculinity is drawn in binary terms – except for the character MAN who befriends Honor in the brothel, and helps her because, as he says, ‘there’s a certain sort of foulness that’s beyond me’, whilst he is suffering from an ‘attack of moral indigestion’.46 Sue Thomas notes that the ‘popular success’ of Robin’s novel on which the play was based, meant it had ‘a leading role in the consolidation of the moral crusade’ of those campaigning for changes in the law (Thomas, 2005: 215). Where Are You Going To? and other plays which dealt so explicitly with the selling of women’s bodies were prohibited from becoming part of the direct means to public debate because of censorship. Other kinds of texts which were built around either the domains of degeneration – night clubs or the imagined haunts of the criminal underworld, such as The Rat in 192447 – or around ideas of degeneration, somehow avoided censorship, with a particular flurry of such locations on stage and screen in the mid-1920s.

Locations for the degenerate body: clubland Cultural anxiety about degeneration was expressed across the political divide. As Daniel Pick notes, we find ‘liberals, conservatives and socialists deploying the terms and assumptions of degeneration’ (Pick, 1989: 224). Eugenicists believed in genetic degeneration and plays like Marie Stopes’s Our Ostriches (1923) and Elizabeth Baker’s Bert’s Girl (1927)48 brought debates about eugenics, class and population control on stage. So too variety sketches occasionally made fun of eugenicist fanaticism on popular stages as in Charlot’s ‘Kill That Fly!’ (1912) (see Chapter 1). Built on the belief in a ‘mediated process of decline in which a relative deterioration in the body of the city population’ created ‘disintegrative effects upon the nation and empire’ (ibid.: 184), eugenicists believed that some categories of people should be allowed to breed, whilst others – the disabled, the physically weak or intellectually challenged – should be discouraged from doing so (see Childs, 2001 and Bland and Doan, 1999). Georg Simmel, on the other hand, saw heightened states such as those often depicted in drama with degenerative themes, as created by the social interactions inherent in urban modernity, where the ‘psychological foundation, upon which the metropolitan individuality is erected, is the intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli’ (Simmel, 2000 [1903]: 62). In other words, the modern city over-provided the kinds of stimuli that promoted degenerative behaviour. Private clubs, which thrived in the 1920s, were seen by their critics as environments that provided gathering places for degenerates – for those whose impulse was to flaunt their disregard for social and moral proprieties. Many such clubs became notorious and were repeatedly raided and closed, only to re-

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open elsewhere. James Nott notes that nightclubs were seen as ‘symbolic of a new age of moral decline by their detractors’ (Nott, 2011: 227) and that the campaign against London’s nightclubs from 1924 to the close of the decade was part of an emerging push for ‘moral policing’ amongst select conservatives. Interestingly, a number of night clubs were directly connected to the performance industries. Frida Strindberg’s relatively short-lived club, ‘The Cave of the Golden Calf’ became a meeting place for early modernist artists and poets in the 1910s (see Tickner, 2000: 89). After the First World War, other establishments like Ivor Novello’s Fifty-Fifty Club in Wardour Street, resonated with their pre-war counterparts in their emphases on providing a private urban space where artists and performance industry workers could gather. Phillip Hoare points to Noël Coward’s memory of the club as ‘catering “exclusively to ‘Us’”, meaning the theatre clique’, but also notes its queer foundations, which might be seen in part as reflected in the name of the club itself (Hoare, 1997b [1995]: 138). Long-term collaborator Constance Collier suggests that Novello’s club began as a place for young actors to gather after work, but fast became a ‘rendezvous for all the smartest people in London’, where one might mix with celebrities outside of their professional roles, but in the company of their professional colleagues (Collier, 1929: 281). With a mural by celebrity cartoonist Einar Nerman, which Collier notes depicted ‘caricatures of all the leading actors in London’ (ibid.), the club had its own catering and orchestra (see Figure 6.18).

FIGURE 6.18

Ivor Novello and Einar Nerman standing by Nerman’s mural of London celebrities at Novello’s Fifty-Fifty Club (Photo: Sasha/Hulton Archives/ Getty Images)

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Collier reminisces about the atmosphere in which ‘any of the artists who happened to be there would get up and sing, or entertain, or act […] performances were spontaneous and some evenings were quite brilliant’ (ibid.: 281–282). The Fifty-Fifty was notable for both its mix of performers and non-performers, and for the fact that it was a venture unconcerned with commercial gain: as Collier tells us, whilst at one time you ‘could have charged any price you liked for a table’, the club ‘could not make profits’: its original members were poor performers (ibid.). The impetus behind the club was not born of the same ideological stance behind say, the earlier Three Arts Club (see Chapter 2), however it shared a similar belief in a collective identity: it was a club for theatre and film professionals, run by them and for them. Performer and raconteur Elsa Lanchester’s club, the Cave of Harmony, opened in 1921 and had a more pronounced performative flavour than the Fifty-Fifty Club, catering to an intersection of ‘London’s haute bohème […] artistic intelligentsia’, and what Ann Witchard calls the ‘West End’s flamboyant theatre crowd’ (Witchard, 2016: 225). With the aim of putting on ‘one-act plays at midnight’ and originally situated in Charlotte Street, with pink walls, yellow woodwork and red velvet curtains (Lanchester, 1983: 54), the club moved in 1924 to Chenies Mews in Bloomsbury (McWilliam, 2014: 177), then to a disused pub, ‘The Grapes’ in Seven Dials in 1926,49 operating into the late 1920s. The daughter of a radical mother who had been secretary to Eleanor Marx, Lanchester had trained with Isadora Duncan and Margaret Morris from a young age. She earned her living in part from teaching dance both for Morris and privately, at one point paying her rent from her weekly class at the then progressive Bedales boarding school in Hampshire (Lanchester, 1983: 50). With her striking looks, in her early twenties she had become a popular model amongst modernist artists like Epstein. From a socialist background and with a thoroughly bohemian upbringing, she found fame in the 1930s through her performance in James Whale’s 1935 The Bride of Frankenstein, as well as through her marriage to actor Charles Laughton. Known for her witty and highly physical performances, one critic dubbed her ‘a sort of feminine Charlie Chaplin’ (see Figure 6.19).50 Lanchester’s club was in part a pretext for the development of her own performance style, but it was also, like the Fifty-Fifty, set up to serve London’s theatrical community. With makeshift furniture and scenery and serving basic food, the performances it hosted varied from improvisations to one-act plays by ‘famous writers such as Pirandello and Chekhov – plays that most people never saw performed – and actors were anxious to perform in them’ (Lanchester, 1983: 55). Critic and producer J. T. Grein noted that the cabaret atmosphere at the Cave of Harmony produced a particular kind of atmosphere of ‘impressionistic […] intime’, which could not be replicated.51 Theatre workers came after work to the club and so Lanchester notes, ‘we were able to get distinguished actors and actresses to perform for us’ (ibid.). Lanchester created her own acts which were later re-worked in her Hollywood cabarets after the Second World War. Building on improvisatory structures, her stage work included her popular sketch with Angela Baddeley, performing as ‘charwomen’ Mrs Bricketts and Mrs Du Bellamy. The two women opened each performance with their feet soaking ‘in basins of hot water and a clothesline of laundry strung across the front of the stage’: here they

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FIGURE 6.19

Elsa Lanchester, proprietor of the Cave of Harmony, in role, c. 1927 (Photo: Sasha/Hulton Archives/Getty Images)

would, ‘chat, completely impromptu, about anything that was in the daily headlines’ (ibid.). Her other performances often including re-workings of out-of-print MusicHall songs, which she had researched in the British Museum with pianist Harold Scott, and which she also took on tour,52 or forgotten eighteenth-century songs,53 and performances of new work by contemporary composers like Herbert Farjeon (ibid.: 59). Before opening the club, Lanchester and Harold Scott had run the Children’s Theatre for a charitable organization trying to keep children and young people off the streets, but this had been closed down with both accused of child exploitation by the London County Council (ibid.: 50–53). Their club, however, became what one trade journalist described as ‘one of the minor crazes of eccentricity in London’.54 Such clubs, set up specifically to cater for the intersection of those working for the performance industries, artists, musicians and the ‘intelligentsia’, as the trade press repeatedly called them, performed a particular kind of social role. Known for the fact that they provided a meeting ground for the ‘very successful and the entirely penniless, the famous and the disreputable, and ask[s] no questions’,55 clubs like the Cave of Harmony broadened the scope of what was on offer in performance cultures outside the mainstream commercial and subscription theatres championing primarily textbased theatre. These were hybrid venues, that were seen as degenerative by some, but were arguably re-generative, encouraging a particular kind of nostalgia for the passing

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of the Music-Hall, a celebration of the work of those less likely to be embraced by the commercial, and places of impromptu ‘free’ invention. They were also locations where there was ‘no restrained relationship between entertainer and entertained, where all take their turn at being both’:56 here there was a fluid movement between amateur and professional, viewer and viewed. In popular staged versions of clubland, these were represented as locations where all classes might mix – the aristocrat and the criminal, the working girl and royalty: Collier even makes a veiled reference to the presence of royalty in her description of crowded nights at the Fifty-Fifty Club (Collier, 1929: 282). Historian Ronald Blythe also noted that the campaign to close night-clubs was based on the assumption they were ‘full of whores’, but that in fact they were more likely to be ‘crammed with “society”’ (Blythe, 1964: 37). In reality, then, the interchange between classes was more likely to take the form of cultural tourism. Interestingly, Collier and Novello’s hit play The Rat begins from this premise and like their later co-authored play Down Hill (1927),57 both stage and screen versions involve an invitation to voyeurism and a visceral if vicarious experience of the ‘underworld’, where dancing bodies work alongside criminal ones and the two are at times indistinguishable. The play and its production were collaborative ventures by the two stage stars at a time when the theatre was experiencing ‘conditions that were anything but good generally’ (MacQueen-Pope, 1954 [1951]: 108). Novello had invested his money in his film company, ‘Novello-Atlas Renters’, which despite his own star status was ‘nonproductive’ (ibid.:100). MacQueen-Pope insists the play was ‘an honest-to-goodness romantic melodrama […] a thriller of the Apache section of Parisian life’ (ibid.: 107). Notwithstanding that such plays have been put to one side in histories of British theatre, there is more to the The Rat than MacQueen-Pope allows. Written in the years leading up to the economic depression, and with ten years passed since the First World War, the play borrows from both the pre-war cultural mode and situates itself in the modernist moment of the mid-1920s. Lisa Tickner notes that the Apache Dance, the central moment in both the stage and film version of The Rat, echoes the pre-war popularity of productions like A Day in Paris at the Empire Theatre in 1908. Here the passionate physicality of the ‘Danse des Apaches’ resonated with the popular craze for dances like the tango and the imagined geography of Paris, which while easily accessed by train and boat, was seen as somehow exotic (Tickner, 1997: 71). ‘Apache’ was a catch-all term used to denote the streetwise Parisian underclass and the dance itself is built on the juxtaposition between ‘extremes of attraction and repulsion’ (ibid.: 74). Indeed, the description of ‘the Rat’ by the women working at the White Coffin club, contains a similar combination of opposites: He is dangerous. That attracts women. Also, they never know if he cares […] And which moment he will disappear and never come back.58 So the dance has an established ‘legibility of gesture’, to borrow from Christine Gledhill (Gledhill, 2003: 40), carried forward from the heady 1910s to the mid1920s. Here, masculinity is both familiar and strange and the character of the Rat

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can be seen as a kind of queer intervention into performing class and masculinity. The Rat is torn between his love for nightclub dancer Odile and his attraction for aristocratic celebrity Madame Zelie, who, as law enforcer Caillard tells him, is one of the ‘sightseers’ wishing to come to the White Coffin to be entertained: a voyeur of underworld sociality (see Figure 6.20).59 When Zelie observes interactions in the club, she is surprised that the ‘underclass’ should have feelings unconnected to criminal anger: ‘A very touching little scene! I had no idea these people were so fond of each other.’60 The scene is set for the dance to which our attention is drawn by both its corporeal violence and its emotional intensity. The tango is danced as ‘an exhibition ballroom dance’, but the Rat is ‘smoking all the time’: to the precision of his moves is added his careless smoking, which brings an ‘underworld’ authenticity to his character, as the stage directions suggest: [The Rat suddenly rises and throws a chair, which is in his way […] catches hold of America [one of the dancers]. They begin to dance and immediately the atmosphere of the place changes. Zelie gets very interested and murmurs ‘The real thing’ and the rest of the room watch intently, and follow their every movement].61 Entranced, Zelie draws the Rat into her own world only to be rejected when he returns to Odile at the end of the play. The audience are taken through the shifting locations of the story, from the stark interiors of the underground night club,

FIGURE 6.20

Ivor Novello in the White Coffin nightclub, from David L’Estrange (Novello and Constance Collier), The Rat, Prince of Wales theatre, London, 1924 (author unknown)

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to the chic glamour of Zelie’s apartment, to the relative poverty of the Rat’s attic rooms and back to the White Coffin. This is a play about the mediations between class, the body and social space, as much as it is a romantic melodrama. Similar kinds of shift in location underpin other ‘underworld’ plays such as Gerald du Maurier and Viola Tree’s The Dancers, produced in 1923 and adapted to film in 1925 and 1930. Co-authored by two generations from the theatrical elite, the play was produced originally under the pseudonym Hubert Parsons.62 The action takes place in old Etonian Tony Chievely’s commonwealth bar in Western Canada, peopled by an itinerant clientele of gamblers, settlers and those passing through. A disillusioned ex-commissioned officer and maverick, Tony introduces a cabaret and dancing girls/women who ‘cause havoc’ amongst his clientele.63 Managing to keep both the dancers and the customers in check, Tony returns to London to find his childhood sweetheart, Una, fallen prey to the adrenalin and drug-fuelled life of a London night-club dancer. Described by one reviewer as ‘one of the Corybantic, neurotic, almost sexless modern girls, who are obsessed by a mania for dancing’,64 Una commits suicide rather than marry Tony while she is pregnant with another man’s child (See Figure 6.21). Again, the plot is underpinned by a sense of moral panic at the possibility of bodily freedom and agency for single, independent women. These women earn a living directly from their bodies, outside legitimized urban spaces.

FIGURE 6.21

Gerald du Maurier as Tony Chievely discovering Una after she has taken an overdose in The Dancers, 1923 (author unknown)

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The play ran in the West End for almost a year, providing the London debut of American actress Tallulah Bankhead as Maxine, the dancer who falls in love with her boss but, rejected by him, goes on to find fame and fortune in Paris. A woman who ‘began life early and badly’, Maxine is described in racial terms not untypical of the age: ‘in looks she might be Indian or creole, rich without Jewishness […] of brave descent […] unafraid and single of purpose’.65 Indeed, references to essentialized notions of racial identity are scattered throughout the text, in an unapologetically colonialist play relying on an audience’s understanding of the markers of both social and racial difference. Its popularity was no doubt in large part due to its cast of star actors, with an appeal based on the promise of a vicarious experience of the twilight world of drinking and dancing it offered. Even though played by du Maurier, almost fifty by 1922 but still a box office draw, Tony Chievely’s is a new masculinity adapted for the age despite its reliance on a colonial outlook. He holds the moral ground in a world which has been fragmented. In production, the play capitalized on modernity’s newest visual form in its use of film: The Dancers opens with a stage within a stage setting and a film being projected by American film producer Seroza. The film depicts ‘pretty girls being caught in night clubs’. The audience then have a double exposure to club life: they watch the club depicted in the film and find themselves in a version of a similar location on the borders of respectability. The visuals are noted in great detail in the extant script: the aim was to replicate an ‘atmosphere of coarseness and great fellowship’66 and the producer was advised to have actors smoking and drinking on stage well before the curtains open so as to generate authenticity. The bar is a kind of liminal space, where classes and races mix, not always equitably, and where Tony’s chivalry is symptomatic of a kind of colonial outlook less questioned in 1923. My interest here, however, is the way the play reflects anxieties about women’s bodies as both working bodies and bodies over which they have control in a supposedly degenerate locale, the display of which draws us into the play. Performance cultures during the period relied more and more on the visual, on the possibilities of display and especially on the signifying potential of photography. The Dancers relies on theatre’s capacity to move its audience’s visual attention from location to location, to display the ‘hidden’ places of degenerate city spaces and the lives they produce. Indeed, performance cultures were arguably more shaped by innovations in the visual field than by language over the period as a whole. With silent film, the visual is the primary signifier and when the composition of degeneration in ‘clubland’ – the space between the legitimate and the forbidden – consists almost entirely of visual signifiers, the body is marked differently when recorded in celluloid, moving within a shifting geography of spaces that appear far more ‘real’ than they might on stage. Picking up on the habits of nineteenth century ‘poverty tourists’, Mrs Cecil Chesterton offered a stark view of the London underworld. A ‘voluntary down-and-out mixing with every type’, Chesterton describes London clubs as here ‘to-day and gone tomorrow […] [where] bad drink is sold in and out of legal hours, dance partners are debauched, and the whole dreary traffic is resumed’ (Chesterton, 1928: 60). I end this chapter by turning to E. A. Dupont’s 1929 film Piccadilly, which foregrounded the

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simultaneously repellent and attractive characteristics of bodies in such locations. These epitomize modernity’s reliance on the centrality of the repressed in terms of the generic voyeuristic attraction of the body, and here especially the racialized woman’s body marked as ‘other’. The film is constructed around the transformation of Shosho, played to great acclaim by Asian-American actress Anna May Wong, from kitchen dishwasher to glamourous performer, to murdered femme fatale and rival in love. Filmed in London, we move through different landscapes, each of which represent a different context in which we read the heroine’s body: from the Piccadilly Circus nightclub, to its squalid backroom kitchen; from the nostalgic ‘foreigness’ of Limehouse, with its own pre-war cultural signifiers of the forbidden or the repressed, to the pub which, Shosho informs nightclub owner Wilmot, is ‘our Piccadilly’. Here interracial dancing takes place amongst a group of inebriated clients, only some of whom directly echo the concerns for miscegenation present in the film’s underpinning narrative. Previously, Wilmot has caught Shosho dancing for her peers in his club’s steamy kitchen. She is sacked, only to be re-instated as the ‘exotic’ new act for the club, which she insists on performing in ‘national’ costume, with her own musician. Shosho replaces Mabel Greenfield in the affections of club owner Wilmot, and the plot moves between West End and East End: from the performed wealth of one to the hidden poverty and ‘forbidden’ spaces of another, towards its tragic end. Piccadilly offers a cross-class, cross-race version of London’s night club cultures: these are places of both work and leisure. Here, as Yumin Li has recently suggested, ‘the boundaries between deviant and acceptable sexuality are conflated with the racial boundaries associated with London’s urban structure’ (Li, 2018: 8). While Li notes Laura Mulvey’s reading of the film as centred on the legibility of feeling mediated through Anna May Wong as an actress in what she calls a ‘lingering cinema’ (Mulvey, 2012: 98), Li draws our attention to the function of performance in the film, a film built on masquerade, on dressing up and on dancing for onlookers (Li, 2018: 8). While Li suggests Shosho’s dancing ‘artistically speaking […] is rather unimpressive’ (ibid,: 9), in fact Anna May Wong’s loosely clad attire and light, modern and free improvisatory movement in the kitchen scene where we first see her dance, is set up in precise opposition to the stilted over-rehearsed dance by Mabel. Shosho’s outfit is that of a modern flapper girl and this is contrasted with the costume she wears for her formal Chinese dance performed later in the club. While Li warns us against reading Anna May Wong through a reductive lens of ‘processes of exoticisation’ (Li, 2018:1), she was a performer classed amongst those who were ‘undoubtedly exceptions’ (Staszak, 2015: 627). Wong’s performances brought an ‘authenticity’ to the familiar figure of a foreigner, often played by ‘non-foreign’ actors in costume. Audiences were used to the ‘look’ of such figures but not to the real thing (see Chapter 3). The film makes multiple references to the relationship between modes of seeing, and indeed to the use of looking at hidden spaces, the racial other, and to moving bodies. It also plays with the relationship between containment and emancipation noted in the opening pages of this chapter. Shosho’s ‘freedom’ from poverty, facilitated by her move to star performer, is contained by the limitations of racialized femininity: she is not allowed to ‘succeed’ outside of her identity as racial ‘other’.

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Coda Questions of the body, its presence, its transformation, containment or indeed emancipation were very much at the centre of processes of self-formation, as explored and displayed in the performance cultures of the day. The performance industries, rather than being the ‘historical hinterland’ noted at the beginning of this book and challenged throughout it, were both reflective of, and embedded within, a transformative moment in the making of the processes and products of culture. Just as society questioned forms of inequity, citizenship and agency, so too performance cultures proliferated and circulated such debates. The registers of engagement with calls for emancipation and change in performance, were not always ideologically clear cut. But they reveal, on the part of culture makers, a working knowledge of the complex nature of the relationship between performance, its socio-economic and political contexts and its audiences. As this last chapter stresses, the enhanced attention to the visual field and its potential signifiers is perhaps one of the more significant innovations in performance cultures, in a period traditionally viewed as one of predominantly literary innovation. Similarly, hybrid cross-overs between so called low-brow and high-brow culture, and between forms and genres of performance, were far more frequent and normalized than has perhaps been hitherto supposed. The emphasis in researching this book was to find ways of bringing archive holdings and popular publications – many of which have been left unused or dismissed – into the shaping and exploring of the narratives of performance history. In doing so, a differently nuanced story emerges and hopefully, then, A Social History of British Performance Cultures 1918–1939 has offered another, and a useful, way of reading the vibrant and complex interrelationship between theatre, film, performance and its makers and audiences in a time of significant social and political transformation.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

The Performer, December 26, 1912, p. 194. The Performer December 24, 1914, p. 40. The Performer February 18, 1915, p. 14. The Performer, December 23, 1914. Play Pictorial, November 10, 1915, vol. xcii/1189. Theatre World, December, 1961, n.p., Phyllis Dare, Biographical File, V & A, Theatre and Performance Collection. Ibid. See programme, Maud Allan, Biographical File, V & A, Theatre and Performance Collection. The Art of Maud Allan, publicity booklet, V & A, Theatre and Performance Collection GC/TBF Biog: Maud Allan, Box 6. See programme for ‘5th special Matinee’, March 15, 1911, V & A Theatre Collection GC/TBF Biog: Maud Allan, Box 6. The Performer Annual, December 1912, n.p. W. R. Titterton, ‘The Maud Allan Myth’, The New Age, June 27, 1908, pp. 171–172. See Harriet F. Coffin, ‘All Sorts and Kinds of Salomes’, The Theatre Magazine, April 1909, pp. 130–133.

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14 ‘The Drama: The New Dancer’, Times Literary Supplement, March 25, 1908, p. 102. 15 Julie Wheelwright notes that at least one child protection organization raised a formal complaint about the inclusion of semi-clad girls in the scene (see Wheelwright, 1992). 16 A militant activist often in positions of leadership, Florence Drummond (1878–1949) was also known as ‘The General’. The sketch used dramatic means to present an argument and would not necessarily have been performed publicly. 17 Referee, June 28, 1908, p. 13. 18 The Suffragette, August 7, 1914, p. 309. 19 Birmingham Gazette, June 13, 1914. 20 The Suffragette, January 23, 1914, p. 332. 21 The Performer, February 7, 1907, p. 175. 22 Ibid. 23 Western Daily Mercury, January 15, 1907. 24 Western Independent, January 20, 1907. 25 Southern Daily Echo, January 1907. 26 E. G. Crawley, The Suffragette LCP 1908/9 submitted for licence at the Metropole, Birmingham. 27 G. Dance, The Suffragette LCP 1907/6. 28 P. Nash, Suffrage Girl LCP 1911/04; Murray and Hilburn, Suffragette LCP 1912/06; M. Robson, Suffragette LCP 1914/3; J. Allan, Suffragette’s Redemption LCP 1909/18. 29 Mark Daly, Flannels and Flapper LCP 1919/27 and R. Guy Reeves, Flapper’s Night Out LCP 1917/12. 30 Ned Joyce Heaney (1913) When Women Rule, LCC 1764, unpaginated MS. 31 See, for example, the Manchester Courier, February 13, 1914, p.7 and the Nottingham Evening Post, February 13, 1914, n.p. 32 See The Suffragette, July 24, 1914, p. 266. 33 See LCC, January 21, 1914 for The Riot Act, LCP 1914/03. 34 The Sketch, December 1, 1909, p. 202. 35 The original script, rediscovered by Naomi Paxton, was unpublished: Might is Right, LCP 1909/24. The play has recently been printed for the first time a century after production: see Syrett, 2018 [1909]. 36 See Kate Flint, ‘Emily Morse Symonds (1860–1936)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/50684. Whilst Kate Flint suggests her dramas were more-light hearted in the 1920s, citing Clothes and the Woman, the play was from an earlier period. 37 The play was also produced in 1908 at Annie Horniman’s Gaiety theatre in Manchester, at the St James’s in June, 1919 and ran for 66 performances at the Ambassadors from December 1921 to the end of January 1922, produced by Robert Courtneidge. There were also provincial productions in 1922, including a run at the Nottingham Theatre Royal. 38 Originally produced by the Play Actors in 1908, it was revived in the commercial theatre at His Majesty’s in 1909 where it ran for 98 performances. 39 Most of these were sketches submitted for licence by music hall managers from venues such as the Tivoli, the Bedford Music-Hall or the Collins Music-Hall. A Woman of Two Lives (1910) LCC 600; A Woman Intervenes (1912) LCC 870; The Woman Who Didn’t Care (1912) LCC 321; A Woman in the Case (1913) LCC 1459; The Woman Who Wants (1912) LCC 924; The Woman Who Told (1913) LLC 2157; The Woman Who Wouldn’t (1914) LCC 3051; Woman Power (1916) LCC 602; The Woman Who Didn’t Want (1919) LCC 2128. 40 Mrs F. G. Kimberley, Women of the Night Club, LCP 1922/15. 41 Written in the 1890s, the play was banned because of its open discussion of the business of prostitution and not performed under licence until 1925. 42 Eva Elwer, A White Slave of the Streets (or A White Slave Victim) LCP 1913/14 licensed for performance at the Palace Theatre Rochdale (LCC April 17, 1913); A. MyddletonMyles, The White Slave Traffic, LCP 1913/100 (LCC 1515, March, 1913).

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43 Cicely Hamilton, Where Are you Going to? LCC unlicensed plays, ADD MS 68819, Correspondence File for July 1914. 44 Ibid., n.p. 45 Ibid., n.p. 46 Ibid., n.p. 47 Written by Constance Collier and Ivor Novello under the pseudonym ‘David L’Estrange’, the play opened at the Theatre Royal, Brighton and transferred to the West End where it ran for 282 performances. Ivor Novello starred as Pierre Boucheron, a jewel thief in both the stage and film productions of the play. The 1925 film was directed by Graham Cutts and starred Novello and Isabel Jeans, as did Cutts’s The Triumph of the Rat (1926) and The Return of the Rat (1929). Jack Raymond’s 1937 The Rat, was also based on the play. 48 Our Ostriches ran for 91 performances at the Court theatre in London in 1923, while Bert’s Girl ran for 20 performances at the same theatre in 1927, having premiered, like a number of other of Baker’s plays, at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. 49 The Era, September 7, 1927, p. 5. 50 Michael Orme, ‘At the Sign of the Cinema’, The Sketch, October 39, 1929, p. 240. Michael Orme was the pseudonym used by Alice Grein, actress, critic and author, married to theatre producer and critic J. T. Grein. 51 J. T. Grein, ‘Criticisms in Cameo’, The Sketch, January 28, 1925, p. 175. 52 See advert for Lanchester and Scott performing ‘Songs of the Early Music Hall’ in the Birmingham Gazette, February 24, 1926. 53 Ibid. 54 The Era, October 5, 1927, p. 7. 55 Yvonne Cloud, ‘Bohemia – Old and New: The Cave-Dwellers of Bloomsbury’, The Graphic, November 14, 1925, p. 35. 56 Ibid. 57 The play ran in the West End from June 1926 for 94 performances with Novello in the lead. Hitchcock directed the film version in 1927 and, like the screen version of The Rat, much of the nuance of the original staging was kept. 58 David L’Estrange, The Rat, LCP 1924/5263, p. 15. 59 Ibid., p. 26. 60 Ibid., p. 31. 61 Ibid., p. 34. 62 The Dancers was adapted for film in 1925, directed by Emmett J. Flynn (US), and in 1930, directed by Chandler Sprague. The first screen iteration moved Tony’s bar from Canada to South America, which had more ‘exotic’ connotations for the film’s US audience. While the play was never published, it was adapted to a popular novel by the authors (see Hubert Parsons (1923) The Dancers, LCP 1922/4531. 63 ‘The Dancers’, The London Magazine, n.d., pp. 407–410, Production File, V & A Theatre and Performance Collection. 64 Daily News, February 16, 1923, n.p., Production File, V & A Theatre and Performance Collection. 65 The Dancers, LCP 1922/4531, p. 9. 66 Ibid., p. ‘e’.

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INDEX

Achurch, Janet: 103 Ackerley, J.R.: Prisoners of War (1925), 163–165 Actresses’ Franchise League (AFL): 56, 153–156, 187, 193 Adelphi Theatre: 28, 89, 106 Agate, James: 16, 19, 32, 91, 165, 171–2 Alhambra Theatre: 30, 41, 102, 152, 154 Aliens Act (1905): 81–2 Aliens Restriction Act (1914): 148 Allan, Maud: x, 1, 28, 127, 183–9 My Life in Dance (1908): 186 ‘Vision of Salome’ (1908): 28, 184 Amateur: 6–7, 17–8, 24, 37, 50, 54, 56, 63–9, 79, 120, 129, 157, 160, 170, 206 anti-semitism: 8, 81, 90 Apachi Dance: 84, 102, 206 Appadurai, Arjun: 70–71 Archer, William: 16, 19, 29, 40 Armstrong, Cecil: 47, 65 Asche, Oscar: Chu Chin Chow (1916), 153–4, 158 Kismet (1911), 84–8, 91, 100, 106 Ashwell, Lena: 57, 61, 68, 153–5 Asquith, Herbert Henry: 115, 188–90 Baddeley, Angela: 156, 204 Baden-Powell, Robert (My Adventures as A Spy, 1915), 117 Bailey, Peter: 3–5, 8 Bailey, Terry: 66 Baker, Elizabeth: (Bert’s Girl, 1927), 202 Bamburg, Lilian: 66

Barbor, H. R. : 55, 76 Barrie, J. M.: 41, 72, 130, 137, 147, 157 A Kiss for Cinderella (1916): 130 The Admirable Crichton (1902) 72, 157, 166 Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up (1904), 72 Barry, Iris: 16, 36 Bason, Fred: 25, 40 BBC: 83, 123 Bennett, Arnold: 70, 74, 147 Benson, Constance: 62, 68–9, 78 Benson, Frank: 55, 62 Bergson, H: 38 Bernhardt, Sarah: 28, 40 Billing, Noel Pemberton (MP): 185–7 Blakeston, Oswell: Close Up, 34 Blame the Cinema (‘Martin Lane’): 33 Blow, Sydney: 17–8, 33 Boer War: 3, 139–40 Bourchier, Arthur: 47, 56, 183 Borsa, Mario: 18, 21–2 Braithewaite, Lillian, 59, 100–102, 158 Bratton, Jacky: 5, 14 Brayton, Lily: 84–8, 91, 153–8 Chu Chin Chow (1916), 153–4, 158 Kismet (1911): 84–8, 91, 100, 106 British Board of Film Censors (BBFC): 49–51 Burke, Thomas: Limehouse Nights (1916), 99 Burrows, Jon: 33, 36

Index 239

Butt, Alfred: 1, 26–9, 40, 52, 84, 154, 183–4, 188 Carey, John: 21, 23 Carey, Joyce: 62 Carlile, C. Douglas: The Yellow Peril (1913), 99 Carlton, Billie: 103–4 Carlton, Royce: The Secret Service Girl (1918): 133–4 Carr, Richard: 91 Carroll, Sydney: 27, 40, 52, 169 Carson, Kittie: 57 Carter, Huntly: 16, 19 Cecil Court, London: 70 Chambers, Colin: 91 Chang, Dongshin: 100 Chapin, Harold: 93 Chaplin, Charles: 66, 88–92, 105, 204 The Immigrant (1917), 88–92 charity (and charity performances): 58–9, 63, 76, 97, 107, 155–6 Charlot, André: 26–7, 30, 31, 71–2, 85, 102, 144, 178, 202 Kill that Fly (1912): 30–31, 41, 202 8d a Mile (1913): 85 Rats (1923): 85 Chisholm, Cecil: 20, 23 Churchill, Winston: 120, 167 The Cinema Girl: 34 Cixous, Helene: 113 Clarkson, Willie: 117–8 Cinemania (1913): 34 Cinematograph: 32, 34 Cinematograph Act (1909): 10, 44, 49 Cinematograph Act (1927): 51 Cinematograph Fund: 52 Cinematograph Trade Council: 51 Citizenship: 2, 7–8, 20, 39–44, 50–54, 58, 61–2, 64, 69–71, 74–5, 109, 139, 141, 192, 198 Cockin, Katharine: 175 Cochrane, C. B.: 14, 26, 27, 40, 52, 60, 154–5, 162 £150 (Walter Hackett, 1917): 154–5 Cochrane, Claire: 11, 55–6 Codd, Elsie: 66 Coliseum Theatre: 28, 35, 41, 70, 78, 85, 147, 157 Collier, Constance: 33, 39, 158, 203, 206–8 The Rat (1924) (pseud. David L’Estrange): 206–8 Collins, L. C.: 111 Compton, Fay: 59, 62–3, 78, 103

Fay Compton Studio of Dramatic Art: 62–3 Compton, Mackenzie: 59 Compton, Virginia: 59, 61, 77, 78 Constantine, Stephen: 167 Cooper, Gladys: 13, 22, 59, 152–3, 156, 180–181, 189 Copyright Act (1911): 44 Courtneidge, Robert: 23, 212 The Arcadians (1909): 23, 72–3 The Dairymaids (1906): 26, 186, 188 Courville, Albert de: 16, 26, 27, 29, 140 Cowan, Lawrence: The Hidden Hand (1918): 125–6 Coward, Noël: 71–5, 104–6, 120, 178, 195, 198–9, 203 Fallen Angels (1925): 195, 198–9 London Calling (1923): 71–2 Private Lives (1930): 195, 199 Craig, Edith: 94, 145 and the Pioneer Players: 94, 145 Crawley, E.G.: The Suffragette: A Quick Change Knockabout Farce (1908): 190 Croxton, Arthur: 35, 157 CSSD (Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art, 1906): 62 Cummings, Mansfield (Secret Intelligence Service [SIS] 1919): 110–11, 121–2 Curzon, Frank: 13, 153 Cutts, Graham: Cocaine (1922), 104 The Rat (1925), 104 Dance, George: The Suffragette (1907), 191 Dane, Clemence: 33, 41 Dangerfield, Fred: 67–8 Dangerfield, George: 42 Dangerous Drugs Act (1920): 103 Dare, Phyllis: 179–80, 188 Darlington, W. A.: 16 Davies, Andrew: 6 Davis, Tracy C.: 2, 6, 18, 27 Dean, Basil: 14, 16, 79, 161 Debord, Guy: 174 Defence of the Realm Act (DORA, 1914): 44, 103, 115, 119, 145–6, 149, 152, 155 -156, 170 Degray, Geo. A.: 132, 138 The Drug Slave (1919), 104 The Girl from Piccadilly (1919), 104 The Secret Service Spy (1913), 132 De’Monte, Rebecca: 111

240 Index

Derr Biggers, Earl: Inside the Lines (1915), 110–111 Druten, John Van: The Return of the Soldier (1928), (see also Rebecca West) 161–2 London Wall (1931), 74 Duke of York’s Theatre: 14 Duncan, Isadora: 127, 184, 204 Dupont, E.A.: Piccadilly (1929), 210–11 Eadie, Dennis: 13, 56, 123, 153 early film: 2, 5, 49 East End (of London): 82, 86, 89, 98–9, 201 Edwardian (home): 141 (London): 72–3 (period): 4, 70 (theatre): 5 Edwards, George: 48 Eltis, Sos: 129, 161, 198, 200 Elvey, Maurice: 28, 64, 99–100, 229 The Yellow Peril (1915), 99 Entertainment’s Tax (The Entertainments Duty, 1916): 52–3, 76, 149 Enthoven, Gabrielle: Monmartre (1913), 30 Ervine, St John: 16, 18–9, 22, 67, 68, 162 Eugenics (Eugenicist): 30, 82, 202 Farfan, Penny: 175 Farjeon, Herbert: 205 Fillipi, Rosina: 62 Film Society, The: 26 Findlater, Richard: 11 First World War (1914–1918) 6, 8, 18–9, 22, 42–4, 51, 57, 61, 63, 85, 87, 89, 91, 103, 110, 115, 116–7, 120, 129, 134, 139, 147–8, 156, 162, 165, 167, 186, 190, 194, 200, 203 Fitzmaurice, George: Mata Hari (1931), 111 Flitch, John: 174 Flynn, Nicole N.: 38 Frohman, Charles: 14, 29–31, 79 Freud, Sigmund: 79, 111–13, 218 The Uncanny (1919): 112 Fuller, Loie: 127, 184 Gaiety Girl: 33 Gaiety Theatre, London: 22, 28, 33, 70 Gaiety Theatre, Manchester (Annie Horniman): 96, 212 Gallery First-Nighter: 24–5 Galleryites: 1 Galsworthy, John: 147, 166 The Foundations (1917): 166 Gardner, Viv: 175 Garrick Club: 121

Garrick Theatre: 15, 87, 167, 169 General Strike (1926): 167 Gielgud, John: 62, 78 Gill, Maud: 70 Gledhill, Christine: 33, 39, 206 Glover, Evelyn: A Bit of Blighty (1917), 145–6 Goffman, Erving: 44, 53, 118 Goldwyn, Sam: 28 Gore, Patrick: The Girl and the Drug (1919), 104 Gow, Ronald and Greenwood, Walter: Love on the Dole (1935): 167–9, 174–5 Granville-Barker, Harley: 13, 19, 20, 45, 47, 50, 55, 62, 121 Graves, Robert: 24 Grayzel, Susan: 128 Grien, J. T.: 111, 130, 187, 204 Griffiths, D.W.: 153 Broken Blossoms (1919): 99, Grossmith, George: 120 Grossmith, George Jr: 120 Grossmith, Lawrence: 120 Haddon, Archibald: 123 Hadow, William: 43, 54 Hamilton, Cicely: 11, 153, 192, 195, 201 How the Vote was Won (with Christopher St John, 1909): 193 Marriage as A Trade (1909): 195 Just to Get Married (1911): 195–96 Where are You Going To (1914): 201–202 Hammond, Michael: 111–2, 150 Hardie, Keir: 95, 167 Hardwicke, Cedric: 22, 152 Hari, Mata: 127–9, 135, 186 Harris, Josie: 54 Harwood, H. M.: 143, 200–1 Honour Thy Father (1912): 200 Heaney, Ned Joyce: When Women Rule (1913), 191 Hegglund, Jon: 141 Hicks, Seymour: 12, 25, 66, 79, 121, 153 Highbrow: 10, 18, 211 highbrow/lowbrow: 4 Hiley, Nicholas: 11, 110, 114, 140–1 Hindson, Catherine: 58, 156 Hitchcock, Alfred: 33, 70, 120, 213 Downhill (1927): 33 (see also Constance Collier and Ivor Novello) The Farmer’s Wife (1928): 70 The Rat (1925): 213 The Secret Agent (1926): 120 Hoare, Philip: 103, 203 Hopson, Violet: 67, 137

Index 241

Houdini, Harry: 119–120 Hucks, B. C.: 35 Hueffer, Ford Maddox: 93 Huntington, Helen: 121 Hutchinson, Ernest: Right to Strike (1920), 167 Hynes, Samuel: 146 Industrial conflict/industrial action: 38, 165, 167 strike action: 56, 99, 125, 165–8, 192 Jeans, Ronald: 71, 85–6, 106 Jennings, Gertude E.: 93, 114, 143–4 Five Birds in a Cage (1915), 114 The German Plot (1908), 114 The New Poor (1920), 93 Poached Eggs and Pearls (1916), 114 Scraps (1928), 116 Waiting for the Bus (1917), 144 Jentsch, Ernst: On the Psychology of the Uncanny (1906), 111–13 John, Gwen: Edge O’Dark (1912): 92–3 Luck of War (1922): 145 Joint Select Committee on Stage Plays (1909): 45, 75 Jones, Henry Arthur: 20, 45, 147 Joynson-Hicks, William: 4 Kaplan, Joel: 196–8 Karno, Fred: 48–9, 106, 149 Kell, Vernon: 114 Kelly, Veronica: 6 Kempton, Freda: 103–4 Kimberley, Mrs. F.G.: Women of the Nightclub (1922), 200 Kingston, Gertrude: 195 Kingsway Theatre: 14 Knoblock, Edward (Knoblauch): 41, 70, 74, 86, 105, 121, 143, 147, Kismet (1911): 86–8, 91, 105–6, 153 London Life (with Arnold Bennett, 1924): 70–74 The War Committee (1915): 156 (see also A Charity Committee, 1938), 156 Knowles, Dorothy: 45, 50 Kohn, Marek: 103–4 Koritz, Amy: 185–6 Kosok, Heinz: 111 Lady Gregory: The Workhouse Ward (1909), 93 Lanchester, Elsa: 204–205 The Cave of Harmony: 204–5 Lang, Matheson: 100–102

Laughton, Charles: 162, 204 Le Bon, Gustave: 20–21 Lee, Norman: 71–2, 79 The London Review (1925), 71–3 Liberal Reforms: 4, 109 Lillie, Beatrice: 178–9 Lloyd George, David: 188, 189 Low, Rachael: 16–17, 49 Lowbrow: 4, 11, 18, 211 Lumley, R. Hope: Marie Sees It Through (1917), 13–2 Lyttleton, Edith: The Thumbscrew (1912), 94–6 Warp and Woof (1908), 94 Mack, Margaret (Margaret Macnamara): Unemployed (1909), 94–8 MacDonald, Ramsay: 165 MacNeice, Louis: 23 MacQueen-Pope, Walter: 14–5, 17, 21, 24, 33, 206 Maeterlinck, Maurice: 58 Mafeking (Boer War): 140 Malleson, Miles: Black’ Ell: 145–6 The Fanatics (1907), 160 Mallins, Geoffrey: 150 Mander and Mitchenson: 47 Manners, Lady Diana: 103, 157 Marcus, Laura: 14, 16 Marcus, Sharon: 38 Marinis, Marco de: 22 Marion, Kitty: 118 Marshall, Norman: 6 Mass Observation: 115–116 Massey, Doreen: 70 Masterman, C.F.G.: 147 Maude, Cyril: 59, 152–3 Maugham, Somerset: 120–21 Ashenden, 121 For Services Rendered: 161 Maunder, Andrew: 154 Maurier, Gerald du: 16, 59, 68, 130, 140, 157–8, 208, 209 The Dancers (1923): 208–9 Maurier, Guy du (An Englishman’s Home, 1909): 140, 147 Mayall, Laura E. Nym: 190 Mayer, David: 178 McCarthy, Lillah: 20, 40, 100, 121–2, 157 McKernan, Luke: 11 Melville, William: 119 ‘The Metropolitan Cabaret’: 30–31 MI5: 119 Middlebrow: 6, 11, 24

242 Index

Millar, Gertie: 30, 157 Miller, Ruby: 33 Mills, Florence: Blackbirds (1926), 14 Money, Chiozza: 94 Moody, Jane: 4–5 Moore, Colleen: 159 Moore, Eva: 57 Morris, Margaret: 62, 204 Morton, James: 119, 136 Moss Empires: 27 Motherhood Matinee (Women’s League of Service): 157–9 Music-Halls: 1, 24, 26–30, 32, 34, 37, 45–8, 52, 54–5, 83–5, 89–100, 105–6, 118–9, 127, 137, 148, 154, 170, 182, 186, 189–192, 205–6 Myddleton-Miles, A.: The White Slave Traffic (1913), 201 Napper, Lawrence: 52, 162 Nares, Owen: 59, 63, 153 National Council of Public Morals (NCPM): 51 National Theatre, campaign for: 20, 94 Nevinson, Margaret Wynne In the Workhouse (1911): 93 Workhouse Characters and Other Sketches of the Life of the Poor (1912), 93 Newey, Katherine: 200 Nicoll, Allardyce: 26, 47 Nicholson, Steve: 166 Novello, Ivor: 13, 33, 39, 78, 203, 206 The Rat (1924) 1, 206–8 Fifty Fifty Club (London), 215–8 Novello-Atlas-Renters, 206 O’Casey, Sean: 162 The Silver Tassie (1928), 162–3 Official Secrets Act (1911): 114–115, 120 Orme, Michael (Mrs J. T. Grein): The Woman on the Windowsill (1917), 130–131 O’Rourke, Chris: 64 Owen, Harold: 146–7 Page, Austin: By Pigeon Post (1918), 126, 135 Palace Theatre: 1, 28–9, 40, 47, 154, 158, 183, 185, 188, 190 Palmer, John: 23–4 Paul, Brenda Dean: 103 Paxton, Naomi: 153–5, 190, 212 Peel, Constance: 114, 148 Pélissier, H. G.: 48, 72, 141, 168, 186–7 Pellizi, Camillo: 19, 40 People’s Budget, The (1909–10): 42

Phillpotts, Eden: The Farmer’s Wife (1916, London production, 1924): 70 Pilcher, Velona: The Searcher (1929), 162 Platt, Agnes: 56, 67–68, 78 Platt, Len: 6 PMS 2: 116–117 Postlethwaite, Thomas: 12, 39 ‘Poverty Corner’ (London): 14 Priestley, J. B.: 13, 106 Queux, William Le: The Invasion of 1910 (1906), 114 Quigley, Marion Jessie: 63–4 racial stereotyping: 8, 83, 86, 88–90, 100, 105, 209, 210 RADA (The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, 1904): 59, 62 Raleigh, Cecil: 46, 55, 111 Rappaport, Erika D.: 31, 70 Redmond, G A.: 50 Reeve, Ada: 84, 160, 182 Pot Pourri: Reminiscences at Random (1913), 182 repertory theatre: 9, 20, 23, 26, 70, 191 Robins, Elizabeth: 201 Rojek, Chris: 18, 64 Royale, Nicholas: 113 Runtz, Ernest: 10 Samuel, Raphael: 6 Saville, Victor: Dark Journey (1937): 111 I Was A Spy (1933): 111 Schwartz, Bill: 42 Schweitzer, Marlis: 6, 12, 29, 185 Scott, Harold: 205 Scott, Malcolm: 186 Second World War (1939–1945): 3, 6, 63, 120, 139, 204 Secret Service Bureau (SSB): 114 Selfridge, Gordon: 28 Selfridges: 60, 158 Senelick, Laurence: 179 Seters, Deborah Van: 129 Sexton, James (MP): The Riot Act (1914): 192–3 Shaw, George Bernard: 18, 28, 36, 59, 95, 103, 121–122, 146–7, 161, 174, 189 Getting Married (1908), 161 Mrs Warren’s Profession (private production London, 1902), 201 Sherriff, R.C.: Journey’s End (1929), 162–4 Simmel, Georg: 1, 81–6, 91–2, 98, 105, 111–13, 131, 202, 221

Index 243

silent film: 5, (pictures) 33, 162 Singleton, Brian: 3, 5–6, 84–87, 100 Singer, Ben: 4, 111–113, 192 Sinophobia: 8, 98, 104 Spence, Richard: 121 St Denis, Ruth: 28 St John, Christopher: 26, 40, 172 How the Vote was Won (with Cicely Hamilton, 1909), 193 Stead, W. T.: 32, 41, 56 Stern, G.B.: The Man Who Pays the Piper (1931), 194 Stewart, Susan: 39 Stoll, Oswald: 14, 15, 18, 26–9, 35, 52, 64, 78, 157 Stoll Film Company: 99 Stoll Pictures: 14, 15 Stowell, Sheila: 196–7 Street, G. S.: 105, 143, 192 Strindberg, Frida (The Cave of the Golden Calf): 30, 41, 203 Suffrage / Suffragettes: 30, 42, 73, 89, 118, 156, 173, 186, 187–96, 200 Sunday Entertainments Act (1932): 52 Sutro, Alfred: 146–7, 153, 154 Swaffer, Hannen: 45, 76 Sweet, Matthew: 33, 104 Symonds, Emily Morse (pseud. George Paston) Clothes and the Woman (1907), 196–8 Tilda’s New Hat (1908), 198 Syrett, Netta: Might is Right (1909): 193–4 The Finding of Nancy (1902), 193 Two Domestics (1922): 193–4

Vanbrugh, Irene: 62, 157 Vanbrugh, Violet: 47, 62, 183 The Woman on the Windowsill (1971): 130–31 Variety Artistes Federation/VAF (1906): 37, 53–5, 76 Vedrenne, J. E.: 13, 170, 172 Vernon, H. M. and Owen, Harold Mr Wu (1913): 98, 100–102 Vernon, Frank: 19, 22, 64, 85, 100 Vernon, James: 82–3 Vezin, Herman: 67 Victoria Cinema College, The: 63 Vieyra, Leonard: 119 Vulcana (The Atlas and Vulcana Troupe): 175–6

Taylor, Frederick Winslow: 29 Tennyson-Jesse, Fryn: Billeted (1917), 143 Terry, Ellen: 59, 77, 175 Terry, Harold and Worrall, Lechmer: The Man Who Stayed at Home (1916): 123–4, 134 The Cinema Star (1914): 34 The Girl on the Film (1913): 34 Theatre Girls Club (1915, Virginia Compton)59–61, 77–8 Theatres Act (1843): 46 Theatre Royal, Drury Lane: 28, 79 Thompson, A. M. (The Clarion): 23, 72 (see also, The Arcadians, 1909): 23, 72–3 Thomson, Basil (New Scotland Yard): 114, 127 Thorne, Sarah: 62

Walkley, A. B.: 10, 16, 23 Walton, Gladys Hastings: A Woman in Khaki (1914): 132 Waugh, Evelyn: Scoop (1938), 115 Webster, Margaret: 62 Weininger, Otto: 173–4 West End (London): 1, 6, 9–14, 2–5, 38, 55, 65, 76–9, 98–106, 154, 168, 180, 198, 204, 209–10 West, Rebecca: The Return of the Soldier (1918), 161–2 Whale, James: The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), 204 Wheelwright: Julie: 127, 129 Wilde, Oscar: 185–7 Williams, Antonia: The Street (1907), 200 Williams, Gordon: 148, 162 Williams, Raymond: 139, 143

Three Arts Club (see also Lena Ashwell): 57–9, 77, 204 Tickner, Lisa: 31, 174, 206 Titterton, W. R.: 32, 83–4, 185 Townroe, Bernard S.: A Nation in Arms (1909), 141 Tree, Herbert Beerbohm: 12, 183 Tree, Maud: 59, 156 Tree, Viola: 165 The Dancers (1923): 208–9 The Swallow (1926): 165–6 Tree, Iris: 76 Trotter, Wilfred: 44, 53, 163 Union/unionization: 28, 37, 42–3, 53–6, 86, 96, 117, 146, 166–7, 182, 192 National Union of Women Workers (NUWW): 116

244 Index

Wilson, A. E.: 6 Wiseman, William: 120–122 Witty, May: 62 Witchard, Anne: 204 Women’s Emergency Corps (WEC): 156 Women’s Tribute Week (1916): 157 Wong, Anna May: 154, 210 Wood, Harry: 141

Woolf, Virginia: 34, 36 Worts, F. R.: 43 Yeoland, Edith and Ida: 103 Zangwill, Israel: 88–91, 98, 101, 106–7, 160 Children of the Ghetto (1899), 89 The Melting Pot (1908), 89–90, 101, 107 We Moderns (1925): 160