Good Nights Out: A History of Popular British Theatre 1940–2015 9781350046214, 9781350046245, 9781350046238

Citation preview

Good Nights Out

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Related Titles Adaptation in Contemporary Theatre: Performing Literature ISBN 9781472531421 Frances Babbage British Theatre and Performance 1900–1950 ISBN 9781408165652 Rebecca D’Monte British Musical Theatre since 1950 ISBN 9781472584366 Robert Gordon, Olaf Jubin, Millie Taylor Modern British Playwriting: The 1990s: Voices, Documents, New Interpretations ISBN 9781408129265 Aleks Sierz Popular Performance ISBN 9781350089686 Adam Ainsworth, Oliver Double and Louise Peacock Rewriting the Nation ISBN 9781408112380 Aleks Sierz

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Good Nights Out A History of Popular British Theatre Since the Second World War Aleks Sierz

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METHUEN DRAMA Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Methuen Drama logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in 2020 in Great Britain as Good Nights Out: A History of Popular British Theatre 1940–2015 by Methuen Drama This edition first published 2021 Copyright © Aleks Sierz, 2020, 2021 Aleks Sierz has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Charlotte James Photograph: Strand Theatre, London, England, UK c. 1980s © parkerphotography / Alamy Stock Photo All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: PB: ePDF: eBook:

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For Lia Ghilardi

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Contents Acknowledgements A Note on Sources

Introduction 1

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War: Comic, Tragic and Nostalgic While the Sun Shines (1943) Worm’s Eye View (1945) Seagulls over Sorrento (1950) Reluctant Heroes (1950) War Horse (2007)

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Crime: Classical, Farcical and Postmodern The Mousetrap (1952) Simple Spymen (1958) Sleuth (1970) The Business of Murder (1981)

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Sex: Comic, Episodic and Ironic There’s a Girl in My Soup (1966) Pyjama Tops (1969) Oh! Calcutta! (1969) No Sex Please, We’re British (1971)

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Family: Traditional, Redemptive and Fractured ‘Sailor, Beware!’ (1955) Spring and Port Wine (1965) The Man Most Likely To . . . (1968) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2012)

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Class: Musical, Parodic and Political Charlie Girl (1965) Daisy Pulls It Off (1983) Blood Brothers (1983) Billy Elliot the Musical (2005)

19 22 26 29 33

39 45 48 53

62 68 72 75

84 89 93 99 105 108 112 116 121

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Contents

History: Gothic, Edwardian and Pastiche The Phantom of the Opera (1986) The Woman in Black (1987) The 39 Steps (2006) One Man, Two Guvnors (2011)

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Fantasy: Whimsy, Camp and Sci-fi Salad Days (1954) The Rocky Horror Show (1973) Return to the Forbidden Planet (1989) Matilda the Musical (2010)

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Conclusion: Dream Life of the British People

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Appendix 1: List of New Shows from 1940 Until the End of 2015 with More Than 1,000 Performances (by Run Length) Appendix 2: List of New Shows from 1940 Until the End of 2015 with More Than 1,000 Performances (by Date) Notes Bibliography Index

130 135 140 144

149 154 160 166

181 185 189 211 221

Acknowledgements My profoundest thanks go to Lia Ghilardi, who was there for me at the beginning, the middle and the end. I would also like to thank the following for their helpful contributions to my thinking, and for their encouragement: Nick Awde, Michael Barfoot, Maggie Barker, John Barton, Gerald Berkowitz, Ellen Bianchini, Franco Bianchini, Michael Billington, Paul Buck, Dominic Cavendish, Anthony Clark, Martin Crimp, Maria Delgado, William Dixon, Kate Dorney, David Edgar, Clara Escoda, Shaalan Farouk, Philip Fisher, Richard Harris, Sue Healy, Nicholas Hytner, Nesta Jones, Steve Lewis, Henry Little, Antoni Malinowski, Chris Megson, Ros Merkin, Simon Murgatroyd, Esmaeil Najar, Heather Neill, Fabrizio Palmas, Andrea Peghinelli, Andrea Pitozzi, Michael Raab, Veronica Rodriguez, Daniel Rosenthal, Robert Sakula, Peter Paul Schnierer, Alistair Smith, Robert Tanitch and Matt Trueman. Ian Herbert was an immense help with the listings; Graham Saunders allowed me access to his archive. Jon Primrose of the Theatrecrafts website was exceptionally generous with his sharing of the dates of the runs of many shows. Thanks also to the staff at the V&A Performance Archives, the National Theatre Archives, the Royal Shakespeare Company archives, Cameron Mackintosh Ltd and the London Library. And also to Jennie Borzykh, Millie Brierley, Niamh Flanagan, Catherine Gerbrands, Jodie Gilliam, Erin Lee, Jessie Petheram, Philippa Vandome, Annie Waugh and Robert Whelan. At Methuen Drama, Mark Dudgeon, Lara Bateman, Charlotte James, Louise Dugdale, Merv Honeywood, Sara Bryant, Sue Hadden, and Elske Janssen have been exceptionally generous, helpful and efficient.

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A Note on Sources All statistics of performances are taken from Who’s Who in the Theatre, especially the 17th Edition, edited by Ian Herbert; with additional statistics from Edmund Whitehouse, London Lights; Daniel Rosenthal, The National Theatre Story; Terry Browne, Playwright’s Theatre; Theatre Record; the National Theatre archive; London Theatre Archive (online); SOLT; Theatrecrafts.com and Thisistheatre.com. N.B. Where the start dates and end dates of a run are known the total number of performances can be roughly calculated on the basis of eight performances a week, or, if available, the show report for the final performance of a run should give a total figure. Technically, an uninterrupted run is calculated on the basis that a mid-run transfer occurs over a weekend. The best example is The Mousetrap, which closed at the Ambassadors Theatre on Saturday 23 March 1974 and reopened at the St Martin’s Theatre on Monday 25 March 1974. However, this technicality is of little interest to a general audience, which doesn’t mind if there is gap in time between mid-run transfers so long as they have a chance to see the show. So in general I have ignored gaps between mid-run transfers. The best example of this is The Rocky Horror Show, which transferred, with some fortnight-long and week-long gaps, from the Royal Court to several other theatres (see page 3). All references to quotes from plays, as given in the text, are to the editions listed in the bibliography, and quotes from songs come mostly from the printed scores, also in the bibliography. Unless otherwise stated, all programme information, posters and those reviews that are dated before 1981 come from the Production Folders in the V&A Theatre and Performance Collections, at Blythe House in Kensington Olympia, London. All reviews from 1981 inclusive are taken from London Theatre Record, which was renamed Theatre Record from 1991. Where a particular show has two premiere dates, typically a smaller theatre of origin and then a longer West End transfer, the latter (West End) date is given.

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Introduction

London’s West End is a global success story, staging hit shows that have delighted millions of spectators and generated billions of pounds in revenue. The figures are simply staggering. In 2015, for example, the Society of London Theatres (SOLT) reported that overall attendance was almost 15 million in the West End, with gross revenue of more than £600 million, which generated VAT receipts of over £105 million. Despite five years of economic crisis and political austerity, London theatre has been experiencing a continuous boom. Not surprisingly, Caro Newling, President of SOLT, has stated that ‘Audiences have yet again demonstrated an ever-increasing appetite for theatre on a scale that plants London theatre front and centre of cultural life.’1 So much for the idea that theatre is an old-fashioned backwater: at its most successful, it triumphantly outperforms Hollywood.2 This is a book about popular British theatre: it is a survey of the most successful commercial shows of the seventy-five years after 1940. Popular theatre is theatre that people actually want to see; its spectators number millions. In London, you can’t avoid it: on the Underground, on the sides of buses and in the streets, posters proclaim its latest, its most must-see, offerings. The theatres themselves advertise their shows with bright neon signs and hoardings, plus exclamatory quotations from reviews – and one of the great things about very long runs is that members of the public, even if they have no interest in the show, become aware of its presence simply by sharing the same urban space. Like most other examples of popular culture, popular theatre is essentially democratic: you don’t have to have specialist knowledge to enjoy it, and everyone can have an opinion about it. Popular theatre is successful theatre; it is also overwhelmingly commercial theatre, created by artists and entrepreneurs, funded by investors and run on capitalist principles, using all means necessary to promote the show in a competitive market which is always teeming with rivals. It involves the hyping up of stars, the putting together of winning teams, and the delivery of an enjoyable show – with, of course, the risk of having a resounding flop.3 Popular 1

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theatre is entertaining theatre.4 Every commercial producer knows that. Entertainment is enjoyment, it fills a void, answers a need, fulfils a want. So, above all, popular theatre is the manufacture of fun, the creation of situations that flood the brains of the audience with endorphins. It makes people happy; it brings joy. At its best, it is a shared visceral experience. As often as not, the feeling in the auditorium is one of love. Popular entertainment gives audiences a shot of adrenaline – the most traditional and reliable legal high. The title of this book is partly a tribute to, and partly an inversion of, John McGrath’s 1981 polemic, A Good Night Out, which explores a different definition of popular theatre. For McGrath, who was a leftwing playwright, director and theatre activist, popular theatre is a kind of political performance in which groups of activists mount shows for audiences usually drawn from lower-class social strata in order to raise their consciousness of leftwing politics or to support their struggles against the powers that be.5 It’s all about changing traditional workingclass attitudes. The historical rollcall of such militant theatre-makers includes the Soviet revolutionaries Vsevolod Meyerhold and Vladimir Mayakovsky, German radicals Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht, the international Workers’ Theatre Movement, Dario Fo in Italy and Augusto Boal in Brazil, as well as groups such as the Bread and Puppet Theatre, Gay Sweatshop and McGrath’s own 7:84 company. The problem, of course, with political theatre is that it is rarely popular: political theatre is good for you, and therefore often to be avoided. But what activists sneeringly call ‘populist’ theatre is the real thing: people love it, enjoy it, clamour to see it – even when they know that elitist intellectuals don’t hold it in high regard. To study popular theatre is to explore the shows that not only have delighted millions of people across the world, but which also have something to say about the anxieties of their historical time. Often these shows are distinguished by what literary critic John Sutherland calls any bestseller’s ‘interesting peculiarity’, whether this is a quaintness acquired through the passage of time, or because they talk about subjects, such as National Service, which are no longer immediately relevant.6 Some shows are peculiar because their popularity seems inexplicable; others because they so perfectly exemplify a theatre genre, such as farce, whose heyday seems to have passed. In most cases, they are time capsules, whose singular quality tells us a lot about the tastes and attitudes of a section of the British public at the time of their original staging. In any case, they are a subject of interest. As the Guardian critic Michael Billington says, ‘Since the truly popular plays of any period are the ones that tend to get omitted from histories of drama, it is worth recalling some of the big crowd-pleasers.’7

Introduction

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Research Method This book is not just about hit shows, but about mega-hits, shows that are superlatively successful. My starting point is to define a show as a mega-hit when it achieves a continuous initial run of 1,000 performances in London (most producers would be happy with runs of much less). One thousand performances is a run of at least two and a half years. Most of the statistics of the total number of performances of West End plays and musicals can be found in Who’s Who in the Theatre, seventeen editions of which were published by Pitman between 1912 and 1981, edited by, among others, John Parker and Ian Herbert. In the final, seventeenth edition, the rather generous criterion of just 250 performances for inclusion in its list of bestsellers is justified on the grounds that ‘Nowadays a run of 100 performances is an economic necessity and the qualifying total for shows after 1940 is therefore 250 performances. It is a sad reflection that a growing number of shows in both London and New York will reach the 250-performance milestone and still not make a profit.’8 By contrast, the result of setting the bar at 1,000 performances is one of quite radical selectivity: in the entire postwar period, out of thousands and thousands of shows, only about one hundred reached the 1,000-performance threshold. Compared to the mega-hits of the commercial sector, a success from the subsidized sector can usually be counted in the low hundreds (unless, of course, it transfers to the West End). At its home base, the biggest successes of the National Theatre rarely go above 100, and 200 is exceptional: a hit such as Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus (1979) ran for 129 performances; another, Alan Bennett’s The History Boys (2004) for 281.9 But although the most successful shows have a continuous run of more than 1,000 performances, there are occasional anomalies: the classic case is that of Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show (1973). Although it achieved a total of some 2,960 performances, its original run at the tiny Royal Court Theatre Upstairs was barely a month between 19 June and 20 July 1973; it then transferred to the Chelsea Classic Cinema (14 August to 20 October 1973), then to the King’s Road Theatre (3 November 1973 to 31 March 1979), then to the Comedy Theatre (6 April 1979 to 13 September 1980). So the total run from June 1973 to September 1980 was punctuated by several gaps, and the longest continuous run, at King’s Road, was some 2,260 performances, 700 fewer than the grand total. The list of British theatre’s postwar mega-hits (see Appendices on pages 181–88) demonstrates the astounding triumph of one play in particular: Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap (1952). It is phenomenally popular, and way ahead of any competition, having already clocked up more than twice as many performances

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as its nearest rival. The other top spots are occupied by long-running musicals, led by Les Misérables (1985), and the works of Andrew Lloyd Webber. The Woman in Black (1989), a relatively straight play, and Blood Brothers (1988), a play with songs, are also in the top five, closely followed by the musicals Mamma Mia! (1999) and The Lion King (1999). All of the top nine shows – a kind of popular theatre plus plus plus – ran for more than 7,000 performances. Then going down in bands of 1,000 performances from 7,000-plus to 1,000-plus, it is fascinating to see not only how many shows are clustered at the bottom end of the range, but also which shows were outstanding mega-hits. Often, comedies have done better than serious plays. So the top of the 6,000-plus shows is the farce No Sex Please, We’re British (1971), followed by jukebox musicals and American musicals. Amazingly enough, The Black and White Minstrel Show (1962) was tremendously popular, in the 4,000-plus band, but then so was Oh! Calcutta! (1974) in the 3,000-plus band. Novelty shows are likewise in the 3,000plus band, as well as farces such as Ray Cooney’s Run for Your Wife (1983), which compete well with British musicals. Surprise hits include Richard Harris’s The Business of Murder (1981), and, just below the 3,000 threshold, The Rocky Horror Show and War Horse (2007). Unsurprisingly, Swinging London sex comedies, such as Terence Frisby’s There’s a Girl in My Soup (1966) and Mawby Green and Ed Feilbert’s Pyjama Tops (1969), sold well. But then so did postwar service comedies and crime plays. Musicals or revues make up just over 50 per cent of the total; foreign shows (mainly American or French) just over a third. This infusion of excellence from abroad has clearly stimulated and transformed British theatre, challenging its insularity and broadening its artistic horizons. Without this international contribution, British theatre would not only be unrecognizable, it would also be much less creative. The list of mega-hits has a conservative feel, its authors being overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male. Apart from Agatha Christie, the most popular creative by a mile is Andrew Lloyd Webber (eight mega-hits), with only a select few others having even one repeat mega-hit musical: Rodgers and Hammerstein, Schönberg and Boublil, Stephen Schwartz, the Sherman Brothers, Marc Shaiman, ABBA, Elton John and Tim Rice. Only a handful of playwrights get more than one mention: none had three mega-hits. The most successful are John Chapman, Ray Cooney and Richard Harris, as well as French playwright Marc Camoletti. By the 1990s, West End mega-hit playwrights were led by French writers Camoletti and Yasmina Reza. Other playwrights, those familiar from the postwar canon, such as Noël Coward, Terence Rattigan and Tom Stoppard, are in the lowest 1,000-plus band. So are Christopher Hampton and Simon Gray. Alan

Introduction

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Ayckbourn’s biggest West End successes only just miss out: Absurd Person Singular (1972) achieved 973 performances and How the Other Half Loves (1969) 869. You could call this popular theatre lite. Yet by the 1990s Ayckbourn’s work was easily the most popular in Britain (in terms of spread if not of runs).10 What’s interesting is that all of the plays that traditionally make up the narrative of postwar British theatre – Look Back in Anger, The Birthday Party, Saved, Plenty, Top Girls, Blasted – do not appear in the bestseller lists at all. My argument is that although the typical mega-hit has fewer literary qualities than the shows that make up the canon of postwar plays, it has enormous significance as an indicator of popular theatrical taste. Often, its qualities are more theatrical (involving the performance skills of physical theatre or spectacle) than literary, and its comparative absence from the established narratives of theatre history is a lacuna that cries out to be filled. Other genres that exemplify theatricality rather than literary quality include farce, pantomime and alternative comedy.11 Contributions by more unsung heroes include the creatives behind phenomena such as the jukebox musical. One of this genre’s early mega-hits, Alan Janes’s Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story (Victoria Palace, 1989) ran for some thirteen years and more than 5,000 performances. Other extremely popular examples are Ben Elton and Queen’s We Will Rock You (Dominion, 2002) and Adrian Grant and Michael Jackson’s Thriller: Live (Lyric, 2009). Thriller has apparently now been seen by more than 4 million people in some thirty countries and played over 5,400 performances worldwide, proving the aptness of Jackson’s song ‘Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough’. Last but not least come gimmicky novelty shows, such as the amazingly successful Stomp (Assembly Rooms, 1991), which ran for more than a decade, and the complete works of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, such as Complete Works of Shakespeare (Abridged) (Criterion, 1996), which ran for nine years. This trend continues with the recent The Play That Goes Wrong (Duchess, 2014) franchise. Of course, commercial theatre is not without its paradoxes. Commercial success is by itself no guarantee of aesthetic excellence; it cannot be that The Mousetrap is ten times as good as Sleuth simply because it has clocked up about ten times more performances. Nor are all mega-hits created equal: there are basically two kinds of mega-hit. Those which can slip the moorings of the circumstances of their original creation and become classics, revived over and over again; and those which belong so much to their time and place as to be unplayable ever after. In the first category you might find the best British musicals; in the second the service comedies of the early postwar years. Some mega-hits, rarely, are both of an era and for all time: The Mousetrap is the classic

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case. There is also something a bit disturbing about the most commercially successful shows, especially in the way they impose themselves on the wider culture. As George Orwell once wrote about bestselling novels, ‘Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.’12 At those moments when nothing succeeds like success, there is always the spectre of the excluded: all those individuals and social groups whose identities are not reflected in the most popular shows. When any particular mega-hit says something about Britishness, it is often a majoritarian view of national identity, a view which excludes minorities, whether ethnic, sexual or cultural. This sense of the tyranny of the majority hangs around many a megahit, at worst alienating some sections of the population, at best provoking the excluded to create their own mega-hits, ones that more accurately reflect the nation.

Numbers Game Of course, the numbers game is a very crude yardstick of commercial success. It is also an inexact science: even when stage management at a venue keep an accurate record of performances, anomalies might creep in. In 1960, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s My Fair Lady celebrated its 1,000th performance in September, but as a Daily Telegraph article pointed out, an extra performance for a NATO delegation, which also admitted members of the public, earlier in the year meant that another performance had to be added to the record. For that reason, although it was actually the 1,000th performance the tickets remained marked with the original number 999.13 Even apart from such anomalies, it has to be acknowledged that just counting the number of performances is never as simple as it looks. There are a number of complicating factors: 1.

Venue size. The disparities in capacity between theatres means that comparisons of the numbers of performances can be misleading. For example, in the West End, the Theatre Royal Drury Lane has more than 2,200 seats, while the Noël Coward (formerly the Albery) has 870, Wyndham’s 750 and the Duke of York’s 650. For this reason, a two-and-ahalf-year run at, say, the Criterion (600) reaches fewer customers than a similar success at the Old Vic (1,070). In the subsidized sector, the Royal Court has a capacity of about 400 seats, but the two largest auditoria of the National hold 900 and 1,100. Therefore a show would have to run at least

Introduction

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twice as long in the smaller venue to achieve anything like the audience reach of one in the larger venues.14 On the other hand, despite the variation in size of a venue, the length of a run remains important: when a show has been in the West End for a number of years, it asserts a presence in theatreland that, supported by publicity in the media and in public spaces, advertises its success. Simply by being in a theatre for a long time, a mega-hit demonstrates its popular impact. Ticket sales. Similarly, the number of performances does not tell you how many people saw a particular show unless you also know how many seats were occupied. For commercial theatre, this information is often a closely guarded secret, but state-subsidized theatre can be the source of some revealing statistics. At some venues, the National Theatre being the most obvious example, any show with attendance of 95 per cent is, in practical terms, sold out. (The other 5 per cent comprises complimentary tickets to press, actors, crew and house seats.) Long-running shows at the National, such as Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guvnors (2011), which clocked up 92 performances at 97 per cent capacity, transfer easily to the West End.15 Transfers and revivals. Another complicating factor is that one definition of a successful production is a show that is frequently revived. In its heyday, the Royal Court, for example, revived its most significant shows (Look Back in Anger, The Wesker Trilogy, Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance and Saved) several times over the decade and a half following their premieres. Look Back in Anger was not only revived at its home venue, but different versions toured and twenty-five local productions were staged in the years after its premiere. Yet even a fifteen-month Broadway run meant that the play fell short of the 1,000-plus performances of the typical mega-hit. More recently, transfers from the subsidized to the commercial sector, and nationwide tours, have become an essential part of a show’s global success. Cultural resonance. Some plays have had an enormous impact on society, despite the fact that the amount of people who saw them was relatively small. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot had a transfer from the small Arts Theatre to the Criterion in 1955, but failed to achieve even 250 performances: it was, however, one of the most talked about plays of the year. Most notoriously, Sarah Kane’s 1995 Royal Court debut Blasted played to about 1,000 people, but remains one of the most controversial plays of the decade. The cultural impact of plays is amplified by the media: in the case of Look Back in Anger, the coining of the phrase ‘Angry Young Man’ by George Fearon, the Royal Court’s press officer, sparked off a massive

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cultural phenomenon. The broadcast of the play on television, and its subsequent reincarnation as a film, meant that it was experienced by many more people on a screen than on a stage. Other media also play their part: parodies of innovative plays by comedians (such as Tony Hancock’s 1958 episode about John Eastbourne’s Look Back in Hunger at the East Cheam Drama Festival) and cartoonists (Beckett’s dustbins were a favourite) spread their cultural or symbolic message. But while the most significant plays of the postwar era were not necessarily big commercial successes, attention must also be paid to mega-hits, which have a different but equally significant cultural resonance. Multimedia. The mere fact that 1,000-plus mega-hits are so much more successful than their competitors does mean that they have their own cultural influence. Hoardings, film versions, television versions, books and merchandising have helped spread the word. Some, like There’s a Girl in My Soup and No Sex Please, We’re British, have contributed a catchphrase to the language. Others, like Oh! Calcutta! or The Rocky Horror Show have been controversial, and much talked about in the media. One sure sign of popularity is media crossover.

Popular Taste What are the aesthetics of popular theatre? The OED traditionally defines popular taste as ‘vulgar, coarse, ill-bred’, and such pejorative connotations have had a strong influence on the way that commercially successful shows have been seen in the past.16 But taste, and the way we think about distinctions of taste in any cultural context, are worth examining. In A Good Night Out, McGrath lists what he calls the ‘tastes of bourgeois and of working-class audiences’.17 In other words, their expectations of what makes a good show. In the past fifty years, these class-based distinctions between high and low culture have been put into question by postmodernist readings of society and culture, so the rigid division between ‘bourgeois’ and ‘working-class’ shows seems less relevant than ever. In place of binary class distinctions, society today is composed more of social groups, social tribes even, which are defined by their tastes, values and aspirations, as well as by the status of their jobs. Audiences for popular theatre tend to be drawn from all social classes, attracted not only by the desire to have a good night out, but also enjoying the sense of belonging that comes from experiencing

Introduction

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a show in the company of like-minded people. Mega-hits tend to draw their fans from several social groups, whose different points of view are embraced, albeit temporarily, by the collective joy of popular live performance. It’s a form of tribal gathering. Theatre is a communal experience and loving the same popular show validates a person’s sense of their own identity, gives them a feeling of mutual sharing and connects them to a much wider social network. It is one way of reaffirming your group identity, or even your national identity. The pleasure of the experience is often so intense that audience members commonly come back to see the same show, sometimes over and over again. In this way, it is a ritualistic reaffirmation of identity. Popular theatre is a mass phenomenon. McGrath spends several pages detailing his take on ‘working-class’ aesthetics, which today can be better defined as ‘popular’ (not necessarily working class or bourgeois), and the following is a brief summary.18 Firstly, popular audiences like clarity. They want to know what the performance is doing and saying; they are less interested in obliqueness and ambiguity. Secondly, popular audiences want to have a laugh; and they don’t care if laughter makes a play unserious. Thirdly, popular audiences like music, especially pop music. Fourthly, popular audiences like bold emotions, and have no problem with sentimentality. Fifthly, popular audiences like the traditional and conservative forms of the well-made play, plots that run like clockwork, and are not especially interested in modernistic innovations of form and content. Popular audiences love evenings of variety entertainment (the music-hall legacy of mixed bills of comedians, singers and musicians). To these characteristics, I would add that popular audiences like sex on stage, especially obvious sexual innuendo. Popular taste also tends to value fantasy and escape, sensation and spectacle, fun and farce, rather than realism and relevance. Mega-hits often tread the fine line between giving people just enough realism to provide a feeling of recognition, with just enough melodrama to satisfy the need for story, for narrative closure. Popular theatre tends to avoid artistic difficulty, excessive subtlety or work that requires specialist knowledge. Of course, while most mega-hits have most of these characteristics, very few are formulaic: if it were that easy, producers would never suffer a flop. Equally, most mega-hits are much more complex than this thumbnail summary suggests. In the 1970s, many exemplify the postmodern embrace of both high and low culture. Likewise, traditional distinctions of taste are not exclusive: although they describe broad patterns of behaviour, nothing prevents individuals from enjoying both popular and more niche types of theatre. Most mega-hits share these characteristics, but there are other reasons for their popularity. Many of the stories told by such shows are variants of powerful

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fairy tales, so popular theatre is a playground of instantly recognizable archetypes: as well as clear-cut heroes and dastardly villains, there are damsels in distress and femmes fatales. Cinderella makes a frequent appearance. There are charming princes and wicked step-mothers, guileless fools and wily tricksters, and fairy godmothers helping lost children. Babes in the wood even. Popular theatre has its share of Svengalis, Pygmalions, Sleeping Beauties and, more frequently, Beauty and the Beast. Not to forget Romeo and Juliet, Don Juan, and David and Goliath. Sometimes vengeful ghosts, occasionally even Satan. Christian images of sacrifice and redemption are common. There are love triangles and narratives of rags to riches, ugly ducklings turning into swans, intrepid adventurers overcoming the monster, and mistaken identities. Or questing narratives, and even descents into an underworld. Rom-coms, coming of age stories, mad scientists and feisty girls abound. National stereotypes and funny foreigners make numerous appearances. Even when these archetypes are merely suggested or quietly subverted, audiences are assumed to be instinctively familiar with them. Our affinity for archetypes might lie in human psychology, but the detail of the stories always depends on social reality: you can’t have an imaginary giant beanstalk if you’ve never cultivated legumes; a glass slipper, even a magic one, presupposes some kind of glassmaking industry. Of course, the place where fables are made and remade is fiction, culture. Each popular story adds more detail to an archetype, with, for example, Shakespeare’s plays providing a treasure chest of characters, situations and plots. Without Romeo and Juliet, there could be no West Side Story. In popular theatre the archetype provides audiences with powerful emotional experiences. If all art is political, then the most important political aspect of popular theatre is its capacity to be a contradictory cultural arena, a mental space where both conservative and liberal ideas can co-exist, often in the same show. So any mega-hit can be both reactionary and radical. In everything that matters – patriotic feeling, political assumptions and sexual morality – popular theatre attracts large audiences precisely because people of diverse opinions can find what they want in the show. A comedy about war can be both full of patriotic pride and sceptical of military authority; a sex comedy can be both prurient and puritanical; a musical can both assert and subvert traditional family values. Jokes that exploit traditional stereotypes can co-habit with progressive values. Such contradictions are often accepted by the public without a problem. Of course, the reason popular theatre is contradictory is because society is similarly divided. Culture always reveals social tensions.

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Affirmative Action This is a book about theatrical pleasure. It’s about what people find beautiful, enjoyable, satisfying and occasionally sublime. There are three key ingredients to popular theatre: a strong story, memorable characters and theatrical quality. In the past, as Jim Davis shows in Theatre & Entertainment, popular theatre entertainments were often dismissed by elitist intellectuals as mere escapism, sentimental, melodramatic, generic, and artificial.19 Musicals were once routinely devalued as an art form. In this book, these apparently negative judgements are, by a simple inversion, presented as positives. Let’s start with escapism: this is usually seen as a bad thing because it implies that the escapist play or musical is running away from reality, and that confronting the real world is better than avoiding it. But is this true? What’s wrong, in the end, with escape from quotidian drudgery? That escape can be an alternative lifestyle, or a complete fantasy. Because popular theatre is contradictory, its best examples mix realism with escapism. Escapism is often utopian because it always embodies some idea of a better place to be than the humdrum everyday reality that exists outside the theatre. It is also hedonistic because it prefers the emotions of pleasure to being informed, or educated, or talked down to. For a moment, it imagines that all shows could be as much fun as the joy you are experiencing, there in your seat. And even – more recklessly (such is pleasure) – that life itself could be this wonderful. No wonder it is such shows that the public want to see. Escapism is great – it transforms people. Popular theatre is usually sentimental, and a positive view of this would argue that it is blatantly and unreservedly emotional. Visceral and collective, rather than intellectual and solitary. Unbuttoned rather than uptight. For while many forms of niche theatre pride themselves on originality, ideas and cerebral appeal, popular entertainment is less interested in the mind and more in the body, in the convulsions of laughter and the much disparaged titillation of the senses, stimulation of the nerve ends and the joys of sensuality. Nor should its sex appeal be ignored. Because popular theatre is contradictory, its best examples mix stereotypical feelings with genuine emotion. Who cares if the result is sentimental? If it feels good in the moment, just embrace it. Popular theatre is also usually melodramatic, and a positive view of this would argue that it is well-plotted, having good stories with sharply drawn personages and an overt concern with justice. These shows are, like the genre of pantomime, often the direct heirs to the great tradition of Victorian melodrama, with its clear-cut characters, strong emotions, romantic feelings, crude comedy,

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Good Nights Out

exciting events and suspenseful plots, with an ending that is a resolution, and which sees vice punished and virtue rewarded. Popular theatre likes nothing better than to see justice done.20 And, because popular theatre is contradictory, some melodramas can question authority as well as upholding it. Great stage characters don’t have to be complicated, but they do have to be both individual and archetypal. Larger than life, and attractive even if villainous. The world of the stage, that imaginary place where the story is set, has to be both appealing and immersive. Popular theatre is usually generic. Shows that clearly belong to one genre – farce, murder mystery, spy story, family drama – are frequently undervalued compared to those that don’t. Yet, for audiences, genre is an essential way of knowing in advance what you are paying for, and what you will get. Genre is a series of conventions and expectations, which popular audiences clearly find satisfying and useful. It is also, in the words of playwright David Edgar, ‘theatre’s dirty little secret, which is that audiences know the ending of most plays (or certainly the sort of ending) before they begin’.21 Genre is also a way of inviting audiences to play an imaginative game. It assumes they know the rules, and there is a lot of pleasure to be derived from sticking to them – as well as occasionally breaking them. And, because popular theatre is contradictory, genre elements often blend with innovative moments. These games are fun. When, in December 1974, Michael Billington surveyed four of the main commercial long-running shows in the West End, he concluded that ‘they all make use of the idea of drama as game’.22 Popular theatre is usually artificial, and a positive view of this would argue that it is unapologetically theatrical. Audiences like theatricality. Unless they have a compelling cultural prejudice against farce, murder mysteries or plays with puppets or the doubling of actors, they respond well to these conventions, and sometimes instinctively exult in their artificiality. They know, without anyone explaining it to them, that theatre is about make-believe, about the creation of imaginary worlds, about celebrating the uses of the imagination to tell stories that thrill. Popular theatre, above all, is about dreams and made-up worlds. Musical theatre is one of the sites of the most intense cultural conflict: are musicals frivolous, fake, artificial and sentimental? Or are they intensely felt explorations of extreme feeling and heightened ideas? To its legions of fans, musical theatre is emotionally fulfilling and extremely enjoyable.23 Because popular theatre is contradictory, musicals can convey radical messages as well as conservative ones (often in the same show). Musicals rejoice in spectacle. At

Introduction

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their best they use theatre’s array of visual resources, from sets to lighting, to create fantasy worlds that are bigger, bolder and brighter than everyday life. Critics might sneer about audiences leaving the building ‘humming the sets’, but the appreciation of visual beauty is one of the most basic reasons for visiting the theatre.24 Then there’s the music: is there anything else in culture that is as haunting, as inspiring and as transformative as popular music? Yet popular music is also contradictory: a great song can be exhilarating and transformative, it can become the soundtrack of your very existence, but, at the same time, who hasn’t felt colonized by pop songs? Those tunes you can’t get out of your head. Those tunes that occupy your thoughts without your permission, unbidden, compulsive, irritating. What starts as a seduction ends up like an invasion. Like all of popular theatre at its best, musicals also often exemplify the most impetuous utopianism, the dream of a better world. This is especially true of the muchdecried happy ending: happy endings are not realistic analyses of the world as it is, but rather the optimistic dreamy wish of what it could be – like all good art, they are not only beautiful, they also help some of us survive the day-to-day.

Dream Life Rather than dismiss popular theatre as mere escapism, sentimental, melodramatic, generic, and artificial, perhaps we should instead appreciate its contribution to the dream life of the British people. Central to my argument is the idea that nations have a dream life. As a politician once said, ‘The life of nations no less than that of men is lived largely in the imagination.’25 The mass psychology of a society is made up of fantasies, longings and desires that are essential to its identity, and to its mental health: they create a sense of belonging and connection. The life of nations is lived in the imagination, and the imagination is nourished by popular culture, including popular theatre. Mega-hits reveal how ordinary people, often the socially disadvantaged, negotiate their fantasy lives. Popular culture is always highly significant because it is all-pervasive, and easily recognizable. Popular theatre is part of the wider popular culture and it exerts an influence because even if you personally have not seen any of its shows, it is part of your identity. Like an invisible fingerprint, we carry our cultural DNA as part of us. In order to absorb it, we don’t have to literally experience any particular example of the popular. It is simply part of our shared history, our communal heritage, our national identity. Even, perhaps especially, when we rebel against it, or feel

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Good Nights Out

excluded from it. At their best, mega-hits represent a picture not of Britain as it actually is, but as audiences might like it to be. That’s why entertainment is so often an act of magic. All books about popular theatre, the shows that people have actually queued up to see, must confront the snobbery of some intellectuals. Cultural snobbery involves a suspicion of commercial success, a denigration of ordinary people’s taste, a patronizing preference for the culturally significant over the popularly enjoyed. Although most common in the past, it is still alive today. As recently as October 2017, Dominic Cooke – who was directing a revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies at the National – pointed out that ‘the liberal intelligentsia have very subtle forms of snobbery’ and ‘their snobbery is that things that are popular are bad’, and he continued by pointing out that ‘people who think of themselves as politically correct often exhibit an awful elitism’: ‘I especially object to the snobbery about musical theatre.’26 And his view is nothing new. In 1986 Trevor Nunn, director of mega-hits such as Les Misérables and Starlight Express, noted that ‘every musical show I have directed has been attacked for its lack of intellectual content’; and that ‘I firmly believe that the distinction between serious theatre and popular theatre is false. They are formally different expressions of the same impulse. The musical can merit just as much serious attention as the straight play and the play can be as exuberant and lifeaffirming as the musical.’27 Similarly, Nicholas Hytner, the super successful artistic director of the National Theatre from 2003 to 2015, understands that even state-subsidized institutions should provide popular entertainment: ‘The occasional provision of what the public best like was part of the deal’, a fair exchange for state subsidy of the venue. ‘I liked giving it to them, though I knew that what they best like is rarely what they liked last time they came to the theatre.’28 One of the reasons for the longevity of snobbery is the surprising survival of what I call the literary gaze. The literary gaze is the habitual privileging of theatre as literature, of the text over other aspects of performance, such as acting, design and music. You can see why the literary gaze has proved so influential. Because all performances are ephemeral, unless they are recorded on film, they remain only in the memories of their audiences. Everything solid about a performance melts into air. What retains a physical presence is the printed text, which can be bought, studied and argued over. Performance is fleeting; the playtext permanent. As such, the irresistible temptation has been to focus on the printed literary word, and treat it not as a blueprint for a live event, but as a published book or novel. Under the intense glare of the literary gaze, the printed playtext is expected

Introduction

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to yield its secrets to the close-reading of the critic in the same way that a novel gives up its meanings, its metaphors and its significance. Many histories of postwar theatre look at events from the intellectual point of view exemplified by the literary gaze, which sees plays as examples primarily of English Literature, and the effect of this has been to give a lot of attention to new writing and to the canon of great playwrights. If what is needed is a new narrative of postwar British history then surely it should have the aim, to borrow a resonant phrase from another field of history, to rescue the popular ‘from the enormous condescension of posterity’.29 So this book intends, as George Orwell once wrote, to give ‘a fair hearing’ to the belly-laughing Sancho Panza side of our collective personality.30 It tells the story of postwar British theatre from the point of view of the mega-hit. In seven thematic chapters – which cover the topics of war, crime, sex, family, class, history and fantasy – it surveys a selection of the most popular shows that have energized British theatre between 1940 and 2015. If one of its aims is to analyse some of the most successful commercial shows of those seventy-five years, another is to inspire others to investigate this fascinating field still further.

16

1

War: Comic, Tragic and Nostalgic

The Brits are proud of their military might. Britain has a warlike history, and audiences have always loved plays about soldiers. In particular they love stories about the Second World War, which offer an easy patriotism, allowing spectators to feel part of a nation’s military effort, even if vicariously. In genre terms, a typical military play is a comedy about a group of ordinary soldiers – whether in the army, navy or air force – from different civilian backgrounds. They are mainly young, with one or two older hands. Each man is an individual and each represents a slightly different class, region or social type, the idea being that together they symbolize the whole nation. Cockney characters are common, as are Scots, Welshmen and Northerners. The story is usually set in a confined space such as a barracks or other living quarters, and shows how the men are oppressed by authority figures, who are usually spineless bullies or pettifogging bureaucrats. The injustice the men suffer is clear, and their resistance to authority is often the source of comedy. Frequently, another senior figure, an upper-class officer, has to intervene to restore order, and to see that justice is done. Women are either harridans or flirts – and always secondary to the men. For war is a man’s business. At least, that is the myth. At the outbreak of the Second World War, theatre critic J. C. Trewin noted that ‘London demanded light entertainment’.1 Audiences craved colourful spectacle, such as the musicals of Ivor Novello, as a distraction from more serious matters. The Times review of his mega-hit Perchance To Dream (Hippodrome, 1945) said: ‘The Ivor Novello show is by this time as familiar and almost as sure of popular favour as pantomime’, offering ‘a succession of glamorous spectacles’.2 But the most popular type of wartime entertainment was light comedy; laughter, as much as visual delight, being an escape from the cares of total war. Comedies did well, but only a handful – Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit (Piccadilly, 1941), Esther McCracken’s Quiet Week-End (Wyndham’s, 1941), Joseph Kesselring’s Arsenic and Old Lace (Strand, 1942) and Terence Rattigan’s While the Sun Shines (Globe, 1943) – enjoyed more than 1,000 performances. The disruptions of war, with the 17

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Good Nights Out

call-up and the blackout, adversely affected the runs of shows, but it didn’t dampen the enthusiasm of either audiences or of amateurs. It is estimated that there were a million amateur actors in Britain in the 1940s.3 In the metropolis, comedies did their work. For example, Vivian Tidmarsh’s Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary? (Duke of York’s, 1944), which managed 980 performances, led one audience member to record their verdict: ‘Damn silly, but a good night out.’4 Yet it was only when the conflict was over that plays about the war became really popular. War or no war, this was the era of the service comedy and the play about military life. The key figure was producer Hugh Binkie Beaumont, head of H. M. Tennent Ltd, who dominated the West End with his conservative ideals of good taste and artistic excellence. He had a good war. Later on, looking back, he was frank about it: ‘It may sound cynical, but the war has been the making of me. Can’t complain about a thing. Look at me and look at the Firm. And to think that I owe it all to Hitler.’5 He had a point: during the war, he had presented fiftynine plays in the West End, with only five failures. Two playwrights in particular were Beaumont’s box-office magic: Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan. And they exemplify two different ways of reacting to the wartime situation: the oblique and the direct. Coward took an oblique approach: his comedy Blithe Spirit opened at the Piccadilly Theatre in July 1941 and ran for 1,997 performances. Written in five days during the Blitz, it was easily the most popular play of the war. Coward was typically ironic about the problems of opening a show in wartime conditions: ‘The audience, socially impeccable from the journalistic point of view and mostly in uniform, had to walk across planks laid over the rubble caused by a recent air raid to see a light comedy about death.’6 Like most wartime fare, this comedy avoided the subject of actual fighting, and instead offered a witty entertainment. The plot concerns Charles Condomine, a novelist who invites the eccentric Madame Arcati to hold a séance. She inadvertently summons the ghost of Elvira, Charles’s first wife, who plays merry havoc with Ruth, his second spouse. Although it was a distraction from the serious issues of the day, one reason that audiences liked it was that it indirectly addressed feelings of wartime loss and the desire to be reunited with people who’d died. With its moments of farcical fun, it was also very entertaining. While the story is a familiar love triangle, albeit ghostly, Arcati is a fairy-tale crone, a spirit medium both archetypal and comic, and her supernatural powers give the play its zing. Clearly, Coward’s subtext about avoiding long-term emotional commitment chimed with audiences who appreciated the fragility of any long-term planning during war, but it also

War: Comic, Tragic and Nostalgic

19

radiated an image of a witty, classy and rich lifestyle which made people feel that being British was the best thing in the world.7

While the Sun Shines (1943) If Coward was the suave court jester of British theatre, then Rattigan at his most serious was its agony aunt. But he also had a comic side, and this proved much more commercially successful than his other work. Although less of a hit than the Master’s Blithe Spirit, Rattigan’s wartime comedy While the Sun Shines was a popular show which notched up 1,154 performances. This means that Rattigan’s most commercially successful play is perhaps his least well-known. It was also the one that Beaumont, with his instinct for what the public wanted, most ardently desired. Having staged Rattigan’s breakthrough mega-hit, French Without Tears, in 1936, he kept pestering the playwright for more of the same.8 Rattigan, however, was petrified of being seen as just a one-hit wonder. And he also wanted to shake off his image of being a purveyor of trivial comedy. Before he pleased Beaumont, he had to please himself – by writing at least one serious drama. This was Flare Path (Apollo, 1942), Rattigan’s second most popular wartime play, and one which exemplifies the stiff-upper-lip qualities of British wartime pluck.9 It tells the tangled love story of a serving RAF pilot, his actress wife and her former lover, now a film star, and features a notable scene in which the pilot realistically confesses to sometimes feeling afraid. ‘Do you know what’s the matter with me? Funk’ (66). And then he elaborates: ‘You don’t know what it’s like to feel frightened. You get a beastly, bitter taste in the mouth, and your tongue goes dry and you feel sick’ (68). Such truthful confessions upset the top brass of the air force, who were determined to preserve an image of cool heroic courage, but the general effect of Rattigan’s writing conveys both realistic emotions and a sense of stoicism. The atmosphere of common purpose in adversity includes brief moments of anti-authoritarian sentiment: ‘I hate all this patriotic bilge in the newspapers’ (53). Stoic, bolshy and realistic: these are characteristics that British audiences instantly recognized. When Winston Churchill, on a rare visit to the theatre, saw the play, he told the cast afterwards: ‘It is a masterpiece of understatement. But we are rather good at that, aren’t we?’10 Flare Path was a wartime hit, opening in August 1942 and running for eighteen months, but nothing like as popular as Coward’s comedy. Yet it did strike a chord with audiences. An unsigned review in The Times said that ‘a play

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Good Nights Out

on the subject of bomber pilots and of the women who wait for them to return from their raids can hardly fail to move a London audience today’.11 In The Sunday Times the veteran critic James Agate asked whether wartime dramatists were justified in using the conflict as subject matter for entertainment, and concluded that serious plays about war had the power to ‘jolt us out of our escapist rut’. He described Flare Path as ‘extraordinarily lively. A laugh every minute, a roar every five minutes, and a tear in every ten.’12 In other words, it was an emotional experience not a literary one. Like Blithe Spirit, there is a love triangle at the play’s heart – and this not only touched a chord of archetypal psychology, but also reflected the emotional complications of people’s experience of love in wartime. To underline the seriousness of the situation in 1942, the theatre programme prints an air raid warning: ‘Patrons are advised to remain in the Theatre, but those wishing to leave will be directed to the nearest official air raid shelter.’13 Stoicism was required offstage as well as on. By contrast with this essentially serious drama, While the Sun Shines is a slick romantic comedy of wartime entanglements: set in the Albany, the posh Piccadilly apartment of an English Earl, the hay being made in this case involves three young men chasing the same woman. The dialogues are witty, in the style of French Without Tears, and the characters familiar: Bobby the Earl is a refugee from P. G. Wodehouse, his fiancée Lady Elizabeth is a naïve English rose from an aristocratic family, while her father, the Duke of Ayr and Stirling, is the blustering Tory whose wartime job is liaising with the Polish army. Bobby’s rivals are the big, brash American Joe and the passionate Frenchman Colbert, while Mabel Crum, Bobby’s other woman, is a goodtime girl. The play’s bright comedy reflected the social conditions of wartime London, its mixture of lightly stereotypical nationalities and the class consciousness of the characters: some of the laughs come from the fact that the young aristocrats are military failures while the lower-class characters are successfully climbing up through the ranks.14 At the same time, the story was popular because it reflected once again the emotional and sexual tangles that many British people experienced during the long wartime years. Unlike Flare Path, While the Sun Shines is a comedy that stresses not the ennobling determination to grin and bear it, but the petty stupidities of wartime.15 Judging by the play’s success this was what London audiences wanted: to dream of muddling through rather than being heroic, and enjoying the chance of sexual adventure during a national emergency. Casual pick-ups during the blackout, whether homosexual or heterosexual, were a fact of life, and the play opens with a man sharing a bed with another man, albeit offstage. (By Act III, three men are

War: Comic, Tragic and Nostalgic

21

sharing one bed!) This rather sly joke about gay life was subtle enough to escape the censor, but the liberal-minded Rattigan did not neglect politics. Having served in the RAF, he was aware of the mood in the military and perceptive enough to include a sense of the coming new postwar order. In the play the French officer describes himself as ‘socialiste’ and refers to the aristocracy as a ‘doomed class’, while Bobby the Earl reads the New Statesman (57). There are jokes about Karl Marx and about the Communist Party. Rattigan later wrote that he ‘set out to try to create some purely escapist laughter for those dark days of the war’.16 Beaumont certainly loved its lightness and wit. After a short out-of-town try-out, it opened at the Globe on, extraordinarily enough, Christmas Eve 1943 because the wily Beaumont wanted the audience to be in a festive mood. It worked. Philip Page in the Daily Mail said the play ‘caused so much laughter’ that it was ‘likely to run even longer’ than Flare Path, which was next door in Shaftesbury Avenue.17 Likewise, the critic and MP Beverley Baxter commented in an article entitled ‘War Without Tears’ that ‘It is exactly what the customers want to-day. It is topical and does not attempt to pretend that there is not a war on.’18 Although the Daily Mirror kicked up a fuss about Rattigan’s use of the word ‘trollop’ (56) to describe Mable Crum, and insisted that the Lord Chamberlain investigate, the censor’s representative found no offence, and the resulting publicity helped sell tickets. As did Brenda Bruce, who played Crum. Unsurprisingly, she became very popular with the men in the audience: on stage, Crum even jokes about the ‘scores of Poles, Czechs, Norwegians and the rest’ who fancy her (71). And when the 7th Armoured Division, the Desert Rats, went to France on D-Day, the vehicle carrying the operations staff was named the Mabel Crum. The play was such a success that critic B. A. Young said it put Rattigan ‘into the so-far unchallenged position of having written two plays that had run for over a thousand performances’.19 By summer 1945, the atmosphere of the West End was one of people hungry for escape from grim reality, longing for colour amid the postwar drabness. In postwar Britain, the trauma of the Second World War had a lasting effect. Myths of wartime were reiterated, time after time, in popular culture, building up a dreamscape of a nation united, standing alone against the enemy and able to turn defeats into victories (the images of Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and D-Day remain strong despite the passing years). Well, that is the myth. In fact, the truth is more complicated: there is plenty of evidence of conscientious objectors, malingerers, criminals, spivs, people fleeing London and the royal family being booed by victims of air raids.20 One woman spoke for many: ‘The

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Good Nights Out

War wasn’t heroic, it was just a bloody bore.’21 After VE Day, with the shops half empty due to rationing, people sought out whatever amusements they could find. One diarist called it ‘the biggest entertainments boom ever known’, and commented: ‘Anything goes – good, bad or indifferent. Every theatre in the West End is packed out every night.’22 Among the great joys of the popular was its sheer variety. Examples include the Crazy Gang’s revue Together Again (Victoria Palace, 1947), one of producer George Black’s shows which played twice nightly for about two years. It was reviewed by the Observer as ‘a lusty, gusty evening, a rousing comic strip’, while The Sunday Times said: ‘This Crazy Gang review will delight lowbrows, and all highbrows with brains’.23 A couple of years after the opening, Tatler magazine ran a cartoon by Emmwood (John Musgrave-Wood) which showed the born-again Crazy Gang – Bud Flanagan, Jimmy Nervo, Teddy Knox, Charlie Naughton and Jimmy Gold – as puppeteers manipulating their stage personas. The caption notes that this long-running show ‘has now been seen by nearly a million-anda-half people’.24 Similarly successful were revues such as Alec Shanks and Joan Davis’s London Laughs (Adelphi, 1952). Although such shows were popular, some audience members were sceptical: in January 1948, the recently demobbed aspiring comic Kenneth Williams noted in his diary that the show at the London Palladium – the National Theatre of the popular – was ‘a rotten variety bill, with far too many acrobatic affairs – some of which were positively obscene.’ But, he added, ‘Sid Field was marvellous, and received terrific and well-merited applause – what camping! I simply roared!’25 As one academic account says, ‘The drama, as exemplified by the “well-made play”, is only a proportion of that which made up the dramatic and theatrical content of the London stage as a whole.’26 The 1940s and 1950s were the golden age of commercial theatre, and the key figures were impresarios. As well as Beaumont, there were other significant players such as Tom Arnold (Perchance To Dream), Emile Littler (Annie Get Your Gun), George Black (Crazy Gang) and Peter Saunders (The Mousetrap). Beaumont, having staged mega-hits by both Coward and Rattigan, was happy to keep packing them in. But the biggest success of 1945 was not by a big-name playwright, but by a relative unknown.

Worm’s Eye View (1945) Binkie Beaumont’s personality – suavely manipulative, silkily persuasive and capable of punishing those that crossed him with exile from his magic circle – is

War: Comic, Tragic and Nostalgic

23

so mesmerizing that it’s easy to forget that he had nothing whatsoever to do with some of the biggest postwar mega-hits. A good example is Ronald Frederick Delderfield’s Worm’s Eye View, a comedy which ran for 2,245 performances. Its author was tall, myopic, serious-looking, and disliked theatre people – he found them insincere, pretentious and too bohemian.27 He was born in London in 1912, but grew up in Surrey and Devon. His father William was a Liberal member of Bermondsey Council, and when the family moved west in 1923, he bought a newspaper, the Exmouth Chronicle. Ronald’s first job – after leaving boarding school at sixteen and training for a year at an Exeter commercial college – was as a junior reporter. Later he inherited the editorship. In the 1930s, he wrote more than a dozen plays, one of which, Twilight Call, was successfully staged at the Birmingham Rep in May 1939.28 Delderfield spent the war mainly in RAF training camps, doing undistinguished service. One day in 1943, returning from leave on an over-crowded bus, with rain-sodden soldiers sitting ‘on top of one another’, he was so cheered by their singing and sense of communal spirit that, after arriving at his base, he scribbled a synopsis of Worm’s Eye View in thirty minutes.29 About nine months later he completed the play and sent it to his friend Basil Thomas, manager of the Wolverhampton Grand Theatre. When Delderfield was posted to liberated France on various unimportant missions at the end of the war, Thomas staged his play for a week from 30 October 1944.30 Meanwhile, Delderfield’s agent, Juliet O’Hea, sold the touring rights of the play to H. J. Barlow, a Midlands manufacturer, who took it to Norwich, Westcliff, Preston, Bolton, Cambridge (during Victory Week) and finally to the Lyric Hammersmith.31 Meanwhile, Delderfield had met Ronald Shiner. Shiner, a popular stand-up comedian, was in his 40s in 1945. He was not only a theatre actor, but also a prolific film star, specializing in military roles, and became well known enough to earn a This Is Your Life television appearance in 1958. After months of meetings, he managed to organize a production of Worm’s Eye View at the Embassy Theatre, a north London venue run by Anthony Hawtrey, opening on 4 December 1945 and moving two weeks later to the 600seat Whitehall Theatre, where it ran as part of a double bill for 500 performances, a success that enabled it to be revived on 5 May 1947 at the same theatre after a short break, finally closing in 1951 after 2,245 performances. As well as starring in Worm’s Eye View, Shiner also directed the show and appeared, with Diana Dors, in the 1951 film version.32 Set in the large communal room of Albert House, in the fictional northern seaside town of Sandcombe, the three-act play is about a group of airmen who

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Good Nights Out

are billeted with the Bounty family. It is winter 1942–43, when victory hangs in the balance. The men, new recruits as well as an old hand, use the room for eating, smoking and talking on the telephone. The characters are clearly drawn: Mrs Bounty, the tyrannical landlady and her son Sydney, the Assistant Town Clerk (a petty bureaucrat), are contemptuous of the airmen, who are led by Corporal Mark, an educated teacher and thoroughly decent fellow, and include the Duke, a self-styled Romeo, and Pop, a wise older veteran. Much of the energy comes from two new recruits, the Cockney spiv Porter (played by Shiner) and Taffy, son of a Welsh miner. The plot shows how the recruits get the better of their landlady and her odious son, while the love interest is Mark’s attraction to Bella, Mrs Bounty’s step-daughter. The play is a comedy, with several moments of entertaining slapstick: bare feet in jelly, spilt cups of tea, a spilt foot wash, drunken singing and fighting, unwieldy kit bags, raids on the pantry and entrances through a window, as well as stage business involving underwear and snatched kisses. It also features discussions that most postwar Brits would immediately recognize. Taffy, who has worked as a miner, defends the right of miners to strike during the war on the basis that ‘how is a miner to get justice done him if he does not strike for better conditions?’ When Porter remonstrates: ‘Yes, but blimey, he didn’t oughter start striking in the middle of a war – ’ow the ’ell are we going to win the war without coal?’ Taffy replies by arguing that ‘If he didn’t threaten to strike now what notice would they take of him when the need for coal wasn’t so great?’ and then points out ‘You sell silk stockings on the sly and cheat the government taxes, and then condemn the miner for standing up for a decent wage’ (16). This argument attracts the attention of Mark, who asks Taffy if he’s a communist. Taffy replies: ‘No, no, indeed, I always thought they were too violent’ (17). Then when Porter suggests using a filed-down two-franc piece as a shilling in the gas meter, Taffy says ‘piously’ that this is ‘stealing’ (34–35). To which Porter replies: ‘Ain’t you Reds a bit cockeyed one way and another? Suppose I do pinch a bobsworth o’ gas – that juice is owned by the workers according to you ain’t it?’ while Taffy argues that ‘until the gas is the property of the State, the workers must pay for it as they use it’, and Porter says that ‘ruddy socialists in power’ will ‘slap blokes like me [spivs] in clink before I could so much as fill out one o’ their blinkin’ forms’ (35). This is popular theatre, but it’s the kind of discussion which could be found in the pages of Tribune or the New Statesman and Nation. Yet despite these different views all the airmen cooperate when threatened by that monster of pomposity, Sydney. A bit later on, Mark explains to Bella that ‘people are all right, I’ve met so many I’ve liked since I joined up – little, unimportant people with all the qualities

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one ought to associate with greatness – affection for one another, loyalty, courage, patience. But they don’t get much of a chance, it’s like you say, there’s always somebody there to spoil things’ (53–54). The experience of different social classes mixing in the army was a real driver of the widespread feeling in 1945 that a more egalitarian Labour government was needed. At the same time, the notion that ‘there’s always somebody there to spoil things’ plays into the latent antiauthoritarianism of British popular culture. To avoid bullies, Bella hopes that after the war she could ‘build a wall’ around herself and ‘only see what you wanted to see’, to which Mark says, ‘That’s what cynics call escapism’, and Bella cheerfully replies ‘I don’t care what they call it’ (54). Initial reviews, by Beverley Nichols of the Sunday Chronicle and W. A. Darlington of the Telegraph, were enthusiastic, praising the comedy and predicting a successful run.33 The Times’s unsigned review stated that ‘the play’s appeal is rather farcical than sentimental and depends almost entirely on the breezy humour of aircraftmen making the best of an uncomfortable billet run by an ogreish professional landlady and her odiously smug son’, with Shiner being described as having an ‘india-rubber face’ along with much praise for ‘an atmosphere of high spirits and innocent fun’.34 The physical humour was clearly more important than any of the play’s literary qualities. When Delderfield came to write his autobiography in 1968, he pointed out that what the critics missed was the emotional fuel of resentment that powered the comedy. This was due to the fact that while those in uniform, and in various industries, were committed to waging total war, there was a large minority of the population (represented by Mrs Bounty and Sydney) who ‘waxed fat and prosperous in an era of universal shortage’. He calls them the ‘uncommitted’ and states that they ‘were the group that prompted me to write Worm’s Eye View’. He challenges the myth that the country was united by pointing out that the ‘uncommitted’ did not engage wholeheartedly in the war effort, and that plenty of ‘tiresome little bastards’ used the excuse of war to abuse their power. He concludes by stressing his acute awareness of ‘these two Britains at war with one another’ and his belief that the play’s ‘ultimate success with audiences largely composed of recently-demobilized service people was due to their awareness of this cleavage’.35 The play’s huge popularity suggests that there was a large audience which craved not just the official myth of wartime heroism, but also its opposite: anti-authoritarianism. The play is certainly fun: it combines the pleasure of recognition, of instantly recognizable characters like the joker, the ogre and the young lovers, of laughter at familiar situations, and of seeing bullies get their comeuppance. As Orwell wrote of comic postcards, ‘they stand for the

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worm’s-eye view of life’, with every joke ‘ultimately a custard pie’, subversive as well as funny.36 The show’s music, the folk song ‘Coming Round the Mountain’ (used as a signature tune before each curtain up), had been, with various variations, a wartime standard. Likewise, the audience must have responded to the improvisations of the actors: Delderfield would sometimes quietly slip into a performance and ‘saw and heard so many variations of the script as the cast fought madly for more laughs’.37 And the audience loved Shiner, the rubber-faced star comedian, never minding his character’s black-market activities. In the play’s programme, there was a priggish joke about spivs: an advert for the North Thames Gas Board features a cartoon of a black-marketeer in army uniform talking to a housewife: ‘There are nylons and silk undies on the side for some; but ladies, gentlemen and other ranks plump honestly for a fine new gas cooker in the kitchen.’38 That ‘for some’ and that ‘honestly’ shows the limits of official tolerance, and, of course, class prejudice. Worm’s Eye View is a comedy, but it is a state-of-the-nation comedy. And Delderfield was soon to make another contribution, apart from his novels, to the nation’s store of popular culture. One of his many follow-ups was a script called The Bull Boys, which was turned into a film in 1958 by producer Peter Rogers, who changed the title to Carry On Sergeant, and thereby launched a series of thirty-one saucy comedies. ‘Carry on’, of course, was an army command. In the 1940s and 1950s, a large proportion of the population had a worm’s eye view of army life – and gloried in the funny side of it.

Seagulls over Sorrento (1950) Hugh Hastings’s Seagulls over Sorrento (Apollo, 1950) is a perfect illustration of how out of touch Binkie Beaumont could be. Although he was a major commercial producer, he was a bit of an elitist and much more of a snob. His problem was that he disliked plays about the working classes, and he wasn’t keen on plays about the armed forces either.39 Hastings’s play is about both, and reflects its author’s experiences. Born in Sydney, Australia, in 1917, he left school at fourteen to work on a farm. Finding the job tedious, he wrote his first play at fifteen, tore it up and amused himself by writing musical comedies, which were never staged, and working as an actor. In 1936, he decided to try his luck in Britain. He worked as engineering apprentice, advertizing salesman, band pianist, nightclub drummer, film extra, school teacher, refrigeration engineer and repertory producer in Dundee and St Andrews. He spent the war in the

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Royal Navy and made his West End acting debut in the long-running 1946 revue Sweetest and Lowest at the Ambassadors Theatre (791 performances). Despite a growing reputation for stealing scenes in which he was a minor character, he played Duke in a tour of Worm’s Eye View.40 Having completed Seagulls over Sorrento while on tour in Delderfield’s play, Hastings sent it to Eric Glass, his agent. Because his readers gave it the thumbs down, Glass didn’t read the play until his wife Blanche, by chance, picked it up. She read it in bed and, the following morning, told her husband that she found it ‘very compelling’.41 Glass read it, agreed and submitted it to Beaumont. Set not in sunny Sorrento, but in the windswept and seagull-infested Orkney islands of Scotland, the all-male play is about five naval ratings who volunteer to be part of a military experiment on a remote island in Scapa Flow. The title is an ironic joke about the classic Neapolitan song ‘Come Back to Sorrento’, and the experiment is both dangerous and top secret (even the base commander doesn’t know what’s going on).42 The main characters are sharply drawn and instantly familiar: Badger the bigmouth Cockney spiv, whose wife has run off with a sailor called Cleland; the older Lofty, whose love of women and drink have held back his promotion; Haggis the Scot, who has suffered the loss of his wife and child; Sprog the young new boy, who was brought up as an orphan; and Hudson, the middle-class, well-educated boffin who conducts radar experiments. They are ruled by Petty Officer Herbert, an archetypal bully. True to form, Beaumont rejected the play, and so did every other management although Glass spent two years lobbying for it. Meanwhile, a chance meeting resulted in Hastings giving the play to the Repertory Players, who put it on as a Sunday night production at the Comedy Theatre on 23 October 1949. Its success resulted in producers George and Alfred Black co-producing it with Beaumont, who by then had relented, in the West End. They cast Ronald Shiner as wideboy Badger and William Hartnell as the tyrannical Herbert.43 Directed by Wallace Douglas, the play was tried out in Portsmouth, with an audience of naval ratings who didn’t normally frequent theatres. A cast member remembers: ‘For the first twenty minutes it was sticky’, but ‘then the play grabbed them’.44 The West End opening night, on 14 June 1950, was a success – despite an electricity failure in the second act – with fifteen curtain calls, and the play ran for a record 1,551 performances. Only two other plays of the same decade had longer runs: Blithe Spirit and Worm’s Eye View. The secret duties which the ratings have to perform are presently revealed as the testing of a new and highly dangerous war-head for torpedoes used by midget submarines. Plot climaxes are the death of Hudson in an accident, the

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fraught meeting of Badger and Cleland, whose surprise arrival results in the revelation that he has also been left by Badger’s ex-wife, and the censure of the bully Herbert. In performance, Shiner once again showed off his ability to improvise and a highpoint was his character’s entrance in drag as a hip-wiggling Carmen Miranda, adorned with ‘two small saucepan lids on his chest, a few teatowels, a mop-head and other kitchen utensils’ (45). The production’s visual elements were key to its enjoyment. In the programme, there were photographs of the all-male cast in T-shirts, from the scene where the ratings are in bed, and their young muscular bodies carry a mildly erotic charge. But two of the most striking things about the play are emotional: the constant insubordination of the men, and the way that Badger and Cleland eventually bond by denigrating the woman that came between them. At the end, both agree that the woman was ‘dumb’, talked too much and laughed at the wrong times (80). The last lines of the play are a clichéd joke: Herbert tells them to stop cackling about their lady friend and Badger says: ‘Lady? That was no lady, mate!’ before both Badger and Cleland exclaim: ‘That was our wife!’ (80). Of the opening, the Evening Standard reported that the shining star Shiner, after playing an RAF Cockney in Worm’s Eye View, now ‘transferred to the Senior Service – accent and all.’ This news story noted the appeal of the play’s ‘racy, salty humour’ and its ‘high spirits’, with Shiner ‘firing off Cockney salvos with machinegun rapidity’, and the fact that the Admiralty had lent props to the production.45 Critics praised the ‘jolly patriotic melodrama’, but were less happy that ‘seriousness will keep breaking in’ on the comedy routines.46 The Stage reported that ‘One reason for the play’s direct appeal and poignancy is that we see it through the eyes of four ordinary able-seamen’.47 Although the plot contrivances were generally accepted, the ending, when Herbert gets a dressing down, was judged unsatisfactory because it happens offstage, thus denying the audience the sight of his just comeuppance. Meanwhile, The Tatler praised the realism of the men’s dialogue: ‘There are no women at this improvised naval base, and the ratings talk as sailors presumably do talk in the absence of women, mainly about women and rather freely. But it is excellent talk from a theatrical point of view – quarrelsome yet wonderfully good humoured’ and The Spectator opined: ‘My only criticism of the production is that they seemed to be having an unnaturally fine summer in the north of Scotland.’48 Actor Robin May remembers seeing a touring version in Southsea, in front of a 90 per cent working-class service audience, who listened to the serious passages in a ‘sort of living silence’ and laughed uproariously at the comedy: ‘I can never hope to be part of such an overwhelmingly responsive comedy audience again.’49

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In the early 1950s, audiences were still so alive to the central importance of the military in national life as to make this well-made play a mega-hit. At the same time, it successfully articulates popular ideas about justice and fair play. In Act Two, Lofty has a long speech in which he declares that ‘injustice is something I loathe and detest’. Identifying with ‘little blokes’ who ‘have no syrup in our accents or fancy edges to our handkerchiefs’, he argues passionately that there is no point fighting Fascism, ‘injustice on a large scale’, ‘if a man as an individual is not gonna defend himself against it on the smaller count’ (42). As with Victorian melodrama, the emotional core of this play is its awareness of class and of social justice. Along with the archetypal characters, jokers, tyrants and honest truthtellers, this was what made it so popular. But this British idea of fair play didn’t travel well. Seagulls over Sorrento failed on Broadway, closing after only twelve performances. Still, for the home audience the BBC did broadcast an excerpt of the play live from the Apollo in 1953, and three years later it was an ITV Play of the Week. In 1954, a film version, directed by the Boulting Brothers and with Gene Kelly as the now American scientist, was released. By then it was a rep standard. In May 1955 an unknown young actor got a small part in it for a one-week run at Morecambe. The part was so small that he only needed a day’s rehearsal so he spent his spare time sitting in a deckchair on the seafront, working on his new play. His name was John Osborne. The play was Look Back in Anger.50

Reluctant Heroes (1950) The institution of National Service, which extended conscription into peacetime for men aged between seventeen and twenty-one for eighteen months (amended because of the Korean War to two years in 1950), was an experience shared by millions, and ripe for parody, an ideal subject for critique by farce. Before the war, the Aldwych farces by Ben Travers had embodied what critic Ronald Bryden called ‘a great tradition’ and ‘the most successful’ British theatrical enterprise of ‘our time’.51 Farce has a low literary profile, yet its view of the world as a place where everything goes wrong, again and again and again, and hilariously, has proved to be immensely popular. English farce relies on eccentricity of character and playfulness of language, utilizing rapid entrances and exits, with people hiding in wardrobes and under beds, and losing items of clothing. Among the essential elements are archetypal funny foreigners but naughty puns, double meanings and sheer nonsense are the main ingredients. Farce depends on

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quickfire dialogue and split-second timing in physical comedy, rather than on a written playtext, so it is essentially theatrical rather than literary. This genre demands exceptional skill from performers: the Aldwych farces were created by a specialist regular ensemble. Their sheer theatrical panache was an inspiration to Brian Rix, Yorkshire-born son of a Hull shipping company owner, who went into acting because his mother ran an am-dram society. Having been a Bevin Boy (conscripted to work in the mines) and member of the RAF during the war, Rix became an actor-manager in 1947, when he set up Rix Theatrical Productions, which toured rep standards to small towns. Meanwhile, the Whitehall theatre, after hosting Worm’s Eye View, was empty following the departure of striptease artiste Phyllis Dixey and her Peek-a-Boo revue (one of the first West End nude shows). With the theatre looking for hits, here was an opportunity for Rix, and he took it by teaming up with an old acquaintance, Colin Morris. He first came across Morris, a Liverpool-born actor, while in Macbeth as a juvenile at Hull Rep before the war, a show which involved a hilarious incident when the actors accidentally demolished the scenery during the battle scene, and Rix was interested to discover that Morris had written Desert Rats, a wartime adventure staged by producer Henry Sherek in 1945 at the Adelphi.52 Rix then read Morris’s new play, Reluctant Heroes, a farce about army life, and staged it at Bridlington. Its immediate success with audiences emboldened him to try for a London run, but the Whitehall was already booked by The Dish Ran Away. Luckily for Rix this was a flop and Reluctant Heroes opened on 12 September 1950. It ran for 1,610 performances. Rix’s other Whitehall farces, which included John Chapman’s Dry Rot and Simple Spymen, occupied the venue for the next sixteen years. Reluctant Heroes is set in a bare barrack room, with three beds, and a chalked sign that reads ‘ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE’ (7). The plot concerns the induction into military life of three National Servicemen: public schoolboy Tone, Cockney Morgan and Lancashire lad Gregory. They are humiliated by a stentorian disciplinarian, Sergeant Bell (aka Tinkerbell). With the addition of three female soldiers – two WRAC privates and an officer called Gloria – the scenes of kit being issued, vaccinations, drill, inspection and manoeuvres at a farmhouse are full of wild physical comedy. Additional complications involve a Scottish PT instructor, Sergeant McKenzie (’Aggis), and an upper-class twit, Captain Percy (played by Morris). The result was both joyfully funny and satisfyingly ludicrous. Morris and director Frank Dermody did Rix a favour by discouraging him from playing the part of Gregory ‘with a false nose, a red wig and the speed of a leaden-footed tortoise’, and instead giving

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him George Robey eye-brows and suggesting a high-pitched falsetto.53 In performance some of the physical comedy came about by accident: in Act One, Rix turned some trouble with an excessively large pullover into a routine that Morris called ‘The Dance of the Seven Veils’, while an accidental collision with a bucket in Act Two developed into a hilarious bit of clowning.54 Other moments were staples of farce: at one point Gloria hides under a bed as the men take their clothes off. The play’s London opening was beset by problems. Dermody, who’d worked at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, became so obsessed with elaborate lighting effects that Rix sacked him during the dress rehearsal, and himself co-directed with Morris. The opening was delayed by twenty minutes because the critics were unwilling to leave the free bar, but the evening ended triumphantly with fourteen curtain calls. Morris took the stage and thanked ‘everyone for enjoying his elongated music-hall sketch of army life’, a throwaway line which encouraged critics to call the whole play ‘an expanded music hall sketch’.55 The Sunday Times compared it unfavourably to Worm’s Eye View and Seagulls over Sorrento, commenting that the army ‘is less like an army than a circus, and less like a circus than a pantomime.’56 In the Evening Standard, Beverley Baxter was more appreciative, noting that ‘beyond all the nonsense there is the incorrigible grumbling cheerfulness of the British soldier throughout the ages’.57 The Sunday Pictorial called the play a ‘mirthquake’, while the Morning Advertiser dubbed it ‘one of the most effective tonics now available against depression caused by conflict abroad and strikes and high taxation rumours at home’.58 By contrast, the Daily Worker thought the play was brainwashing audiences to accept rearmament in ‘the build-up towards a third [world] war’.59 Despite all reviews agreeing that the show was hilarious, the box office was sluggish until it became a multi-media event. On 28 June 1951, right in the middle of the Festival of Britain, the BBC broadcast a fifteen-minute extract on the radio, and the next day, remembers Rix, ‘the phones started ringing, people started queuing and by nightfall we had a packed house’.60 The play’s fame was bolstered by the release of the 1951 film version, starring Ronald Shiner and created at breakneck speed at the Riverside Studios. The next year, Rix met Cecil Madden, assistant controller of the BBC, who was unsuccessfully trying to broadcast extracts from West End shows on television. All producers thought this would lower demand for seats. Rix, seeing that ticket sales were down again, decided to risk it. On 14 May, an invited audience watched a broadcast of the first act of Reluctant Heroes at 9.20pm, right after the first performance of the evening had finished. ‘Next morning queues stretched out of the theatre and right down

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Whitehall.’61 On 28 October 1952, Rix pioneered the live transmission of West End comedy, with a whole play, an edited 90-minute version of Philip King’s farce Postman’s Knock, and a live audience instead of canned laughter. Over the next two decades, the BBC’s Laughter from the Whitehall broadcast some eighty productions. Rix had no doubt about the reasons for the popularity of Reluctant Heroes. First it has more than 500 laugh lines, with each joke asterisked in the 1951 English Theatre Guild edition of the playtext. Second, ‘it also has that indefinable quality of identification. EVERYONE who had ever been called to attention by a bawling NCO recognized something of their own lives – and as most of the male population (and much of the female too) had served in the war or been called up for National Service – we had a ready-made audience of millions.’62 But the play’s farcical nature also suggests that its audiences yearned to remember military life as a joke, rather than as depressing drudgery. Their fantasy was that the military could be fun. Doing your duty could be a laugh. Likewise, one of the appeals of Morris’s comedy is that it shows military life as including both men and women – it even has a perfunctory romantic subplot involving Tone and Gloria (played by Scottish actor Elspet Gray, Rix’s wife): at the end, when Tone tells Gloria to take shelter with the ‘other girls’ Gloria assertively points out (twice) that ‘I’m in charge here!’ (90). Just as the Seabees and Naval nurses in Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s South Pacific (Drury Lane, 1951) represent an idealized image of liberal American values, so Morris’s reluctant National Servicemen and women portray a picture of a laughably anarchic army – class conscious, anti-authoritarian and sexy – an implicit criticism of the myth of British military glory. In 1960, National Service was abolished and, in the absence of conscription, the experience of military life and of war became confined to members of the professional army. So while the Second World War still loomed large in the national imagination, being a point of reference, an obsession, a myth, fewer and fewer British citizens had any actual experience of conflict. Large audiences for plays about military life dwindled, and while the subject regularly occurred in comics, films and television, it was never as popular again in the theatre. By far the most popular representation of the Second World War was the BBC series Dad’s Army (1968–77), which showed the war as comic, class-conscious, eccentric, bumbling and domestic. Of course, theatre-makers continued to create successful war plays – from Theatre Workshop’s Oh! What a Lovely War! (1963) to Gregory Burke’s Black Watch (2006) – but these had a critical view of the army

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and never achieved the popularity of Worm’s Eye View or Reluctant Heroes. And then, one day, a South African company of puppet makers built a larger-thanlife-size model of a horse.

War Horse (2007) War Horse was the brainchild of Tom Morris, former artistic director of the Battersea Arts Centre and an associate director at the National Theatre during the artistic directorship of Nicholas Hytner. While looking for a follow up to the National’s highly successful dramatization of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (2003), Morris was told about Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse by his mother.63 The 1982 book – which tells the story of a young horse, Joey, his owner Albert, and their adventures in France during the First World War – is narrated from the point of view of the horse. For the stage version, Morris decided that, to avoid Disney-like sentimentality, the horse had to remain silent and be represented by a puppet so he approached Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler of the Handspring Puppet Company of Cape Town, with whom he had worked before. Playwright Nick Stafford and co-director Marianne Elliott then came on board and the challenge of the show was, in the words of Kohler, ‘to see if the horse could be articulate without speaking’.64 So although Joey knows nothing of human affairs, the play focuses on his journey and contrasts his feelings with those of the humans around him. Morris gave a thirteen-page synopsis of the story to Stafford, and the play emerged from a series of workshops involving the two directors, playwright and puppet makers. War Horse is an epic. In Hytner’s words, ‘a large-scale piece of populist theatre’, which needs ‘a well-structured, tense, and involving narrative’.65 Joey begins life as a foal in Devon two years before the First World War. He is auctioned and comes into the loving care of Albert, a farmer’s son, before being sold to the army. Shipped to France, he is trained as a cavalry animal, participates in charges and is captured and used by the German army. It’s an equine coming of age story. Meanwhile, Albert – despite being underage – volunteers for the British army and in an archetypal questing narrative searches for Joey. Finally, as the war comes to an end, boy and beast are reunited after both are wounded. From the small puppet’s first appearance as a foal, operated by three puppeteers, to the slightly larger than life hugeness of the full-grown horse, the production makes no attempt to hide the fact that these are puppets. Built and operated by puppeteers trained by Handspring, Joey is a creature of cane, gauze and wire. The

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puppet has a deliberately unfinished appearance, the only realistic thing about him being his glass eyes which reflect the stage lights. But although he doesn’t really look like a real horse, his movements effectively mimic those of an animal, enabling the puppet to communicate feelings such as curiosity, contentment and fear. The audience is invited to make believe that it is watching the actions and reactions of a real horse: it is the skill of the actor-puppeteers and the audience’s willingness to participate in this game of imagination that helps make this such a successful show.66 Putting Joey at the centre of the story also makes a political point: Morpurgo has stressed that his book was meant to be ‘a look at universal suffering’, on both sides (German and British), while Stafford says that Joey is neutral, and that the play ‘puts innocence at the heart of human depravity and duplicity – and hopes it survives.’67 Indeed the animals are presented as more noble and more heroic than the humans. Both the English-speaking Brits and the German-speaking Germans are equally nationalistic and equally doomed: most of the main human protagonists are killed. But Joey and Albert, although wounded, survive. Their reunion is a testament to the stoicism of both human and horse. The play had an initial National Theatre run of 92 performances, starting in October 2007, followed by a revival in September 2008 which spread over 114 performances. Attendance was 97–99 per cent so the show transferred to the New London Theatre, which seats 1,100 and became available after Imagine This, a musical about the Holocaust, was a resounding flop. War Horse ran from March 2009 to March 2016, seven years and more than 3,000 performances. Seen by more than 2.7 million people in London it made about £2.5 million a year profit, equivalent to half the National’s annual actors budget. With productions in New York, Toronto, Berlin and tours in the UK, Belgium, Netherlands, Australia, South Africa and China, it eventually played in eleven countries to more than 7 million people. Hytner’s directorship of the flagship National Theatre lasted from 2003 to 2015, and, with his producer Nick Starr, no one has done more to create megahits that are developed in the publicly subsidized sector and then go on to earn millions in the commercial West End. As Hytner once said, his ‘creative ethos’ is a ‘lifelong conviction that you can be ambitious and popular at the same time’, that ‘being popular and being good are, at their best, the same thing. You can make art that is also entertainment.’68 The Two Nicks made an enormous breakthrough when they realized there was no reason why the National could not transfer shows directly to the West End, without sharing the profits with a commercial producer. There was an unspoken convention that subsidized venues

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should not do this. But once they had satisfied their board, bearing in mind obligations to the Charity Commission and the Arts Council not to waste public money, they were free to set up National Angels, to transfer shows to the commercial sector. The trick is to transfer quickly so you don’t lose any expertise, either onstage or off.69 Some of these turned out to be exceptionally profitable. When Arts Council England imposed a 15 per cent cut to its subsidy between 2012 and 2015, the National was able to recoup this loss through profits from one show, War Horse. Other mega-hits from the same theatre include Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guvnors (2011) and Simon Stephens’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2012) (see pages 99–103, 144–48). The Two Nicks also pioneered NT Live, the transmission to cinemas of selected performances at the National. War Horse had positive reviews, and although a handful of critics complained about its sentimentality, no one thought it was biased against the Germans. Its popularity was due to the centrality of both animals and the First World War in British culture.70 Later, in 2011, when the show was turned into a film by Steven Spielberg, actress Emily Watson explained its appeal: ‘The Michael Morpurgo book is “Black Beauty goes to war”, [. . .] So if you’re English, two of the most emotive subjects you could touch on are Black Beauty and the First World War.’71 In the context of British involvement in Middle East wars in the 2000s, the play had extra resonance. As Morpurgo said: ‘Now we are seeing again, terribly, the bodies of young men coming home from a war for which they have no responsibility [. . .] When people cry for the war horses, for their suffering and death, they are really weeping for the men, for all of us, for all those who die in senseless wars.’72 But audience reactions were so enthusiastic as to suggest that something else was happening: a love cult for Joey, the horse puppet. One witness argued that schoolgirls in particular adore Joey: ‘The night I went, when the show ended, rows of them started screaming; some appeared to be close to passing out.’73 It was a visceral experience. Other young teens created an end-ofshow atmosphere that was ‘more like a rock concert than a middle-class family outing’.74 On Broadway, the adults were as emotional as their kids: ‘Where children accept the wonder of theatre, adults are transported back to childhood, when wonder is organic.’75 While War Horse became a mega-franchise – with a NT Live broadcast of the play, a film version, radio version, concert version and assorted spin-off exhibitions – the original play both spoke to the tradition of British service plays and subverted them. Although it has its fair share of traditional characters, such as the barking Sergeant Thunder and noble officers (both German and English),

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as well as a familiar streak of anti-authoritarianism, it was a mega-hit because it articulates a feeling that is central to British national identity: our passion for animals. As the Evening Standard put it: ‘It will achieve a rapt hold on audiences perhaps because the British are more comfortable lavishing emotion on animals than on fellow human beings.’76 One of the drama’s effects is that you end up feeling more for the horses than for the humans. As a show, it is a wonderful spectacle, with not only puppet horses, but also terrific representations of warfare, from cavalry charges to a tank bursting onto the stage, symbolic of the end of an era. The play’s long run was remarkable because it was not, despite its songs, a musical; it also ignored the main myth of the Great War – that the soldiers were working-class lions led by upper-class donkeys. War Horse does include, however, an undeniable streak of nostalgia for an age of hard-working, singing farm workers and brave Tommies. On a subliminal level, Joey is mixed race, being half farm horse, half thoroughbred hunter, and the mixed-race individual is often a symbol of hope in contemporary British theatre.77 There is something equally uplifting about the idea of the healing power of human and animal contact: Morpurgo decided to write the original book when he met a young boy called Billy, who had been fostered by ‘several different families’, and was withdrawn and ‘tormented by a stammer’. One day, the writer saw him talking fluently, without any problem, to a horse. ‘It was that extraordinary, inspirational moment that gave me the confidence I needed to begin writing War Horse.’78 And it’s the same inspirational feeling that the play conveys so well. In fiction, it’s possible to have both military might and healing power.

2

Crime: Classical, Farcical and Postmodern

In popular theatre, crime sells. The public’s fascination with plays about criminals, and especially murder mysteries, is all about the attraction of extremes. Few people are victims of murder, so the subject has all the allure of the unusual and the abnormal. There’s a cultural tradition of romanticizing criminals and an interest in explaining why crimes happened, as well as an intrinsic delight in knowing the rules of the murder mystery genre, and of playing the game of watching a clever detective, or a cunning murderer. Such plays mean that audiences can vicariously enjoy being part of a crime scene, or an investigation, sleuths for truth, and they can experience all this in perfect safety. After all, no one has actually been harmed – it’s all make-believe. Crime stories also raise the issue of justice and injustice, of right and wrong, of good and bad, and so encourage the exercise of our moral sensibilities. And the experience of a crime play, like that of a melodrama, can make audiences feel good in the knowledge that justice has been done. In genre terms, a typical crime play is a thriller, usually although not exclusively a mystery in which a group of characters are confined to one place, perhaps a country house or a courtroom, until the crime is solved. Classic forms feature a murder that either happens just before the start of the play, or at the end of the first act, and then an investigation, by either an official or unofficial detective figure, with an explanation of who committed the crime, and why, as the climax. The characters include easily recognized types, such as a pair of young lovers, a playboy, a woman with a past, an older military man, or perhaps a comic servant. Villains are cold and calculating, or downright psychopathic. The game has rules of fair play, meaning that the audience should be given enough information to guess the identity of the criminal, whose identity is then exposed. Since the arrival of Sherlock Holmes, English crime fiction is all about using human intelligence for detection rather than supernatural agency. The detective uses observation and reason to arrive at the identity of the murderer. Occasionally, the play is written from the point of view of the 37

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criminal. In any case, the moral is that crime doesn’t pay, and that virtue is rewarded.1 The 1940s and 1950s were the highpoint of murder mysteries and crime plays, the classical period of the genre. One mega-hit was American playwright Joseph Kesselring’s highly influential Arsenic and Old Lace (Strand, 1942), which ran for 1,332 performances. Instead of featuring a hardboiled private eye, this was a farcical black comedy about a pair of charming old spinster aunts who perform mercy killings on lonely old men by poisoning them with elderberry wine laced with arsenic, strychnine and cyanide. Praising its atmospheric mix of horror and humour, The Times called it ‘certainly the most amusing comedy on the London stage today’.2 As in the case of Blithe Spirit, Arsenic and Old Lace shows how the most popular wartime plays tackle the subject of death with a comic slant. Crime novelist Agatha Christie is central to the history of popular theatre, and a prime example of a great British success story. The undisputed Queen of Crime, no other dramatist in this genre was as popular or as prolific. Between 1944 and 1960, almost every year saw a West End production of either a new play, or an adaptation of one of her books: her biggest hits include Ten Little Niggers (St James’s, 1943), The Hollow (Fortune, 1951), The Mousetrap (Ambassadors, 1952), Witness for the Prosecution (Winter Garden, 1953), Spider’s Web (Savoy, 1954) and The Unexpected Guest (Duchess, 1958). In 1954, she became the only female playwright ever to have three West End plays running simultaneously.3 Some of Christie’s novels were adapted by herself and some by other writers: for example Murder at the Vicarage by Moie Charles and Barbara Toy (Playhouse, 1949).4 Although almost all her plays were relatively successful, only The Mousetrap and Murder at the Vicarage clocked up more than 1,000 performances. Murder at the Vicarage starred Barbara Mullen as Miss Marple in a classic whodunit, or who didn’t do it (lots of red herrings). One problem with such murder mysteries was highlighted by critic W. A. Darlington: ‘This is, you see, just simply a “whodunit”, and if I were inadvertently to let out who killed Colonel Protheroe in the Vicar’s study, there would be not very much reason left why you should go to see the play.’5 On the other hand, Christie novels were already so many in number that their stories tended to blend into one another and some audience members were happy to see the same story more than once. Several other Christie plays were staged around the country, and when her stage presence dwindled rapidly during the early 1960s, her cultural impact was soon reasserted by film and television.

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The Mousetrap (1952) Born in 1890, Christie exemplifies the continuing Victorian influence on postwar British theatre, manifest also in theatre buildings and the genre of the well-made play. She was already in her early sixties when her most phenomenally successful play, The Mousetrap, was first staged in 1952. By that time she had already sold some 50 million books worldwide, and was well on her way to becoming the most popular author in history, apart from Shakespeare and the translators of the Bible. Anyone who reads her crime novels can see why: they are more clever, more humorous and more conscious of the evil in human nature than she is often given credit for. And she is a compelling storyteller. Her extraordinary universal appeal is exemplified by The Mousetrap, the most popular and longest running play in world history. Now well into its sixth decade in the West End, there is no obvious reason why this play should ever close. Certainly, it would take enormous courage to predict that any other show on earth would ever run for as long. For once, hyperbole and exaggeration are too weak to satisfactorily describe the achievement of this extraordinarily creative woman. The play was originally a half-hour piece for radio called Three Blind Mice. The BBC wanted to honour Queen Mary (mother of George VI) with a special broadcast on her eightieth birthday and she requested a Christie play. Broadcast on 30 May 1947, the story had its origins in a real-life case: the death, while in the foster care of a Shropshire couple, of Dennis O’Neill, a twelve-year-old Welsh boy, in 1945. Subsequently, Christie turned the radio play into a novella, and finally into a stage play, produced by Peter Saunders, the impresario behind much of her best theatre. The title was changed because a rival producer, Emile Littler, had staged another play called Three Blind Mice before the war. Anthony Hicks, Christie’s son-in-law, suggested the new title. Saunders thought that it would look good on hoardings and be easy for tourists to pronounce. In fact, the programme for the original West End production did not even have the title on its cover: just a drawing of a mousetrap, complete with a morsel of cheese.6 The plot of The Mousetrap is that of a classic murder mystery. As the radio announces that a woman, Maureen Lyon, has been murdered in London, the curtain rises on Monkswell Manor, a country mansion converted into a guesthouse and run by Giles and Mollie Ralston, a young recently married couple. Four guests arrive: youngsters Christopher Wren and Miss Casewell, and the middle-aged Mrs Boyle and Major Metcalf. Then another guest, the Italian Mr Paravicini, appears unexpectedly to tell everyone that heavy snow has cut off the house. The next day, Sergeant Trotter, a local policeman, arrives on skis, and

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informs the guests that a notebook has been found at the scene of Lyon’s murder, containing the words ‘Three Blind Mice’ and the Monkswell Manor address. With one murder already committed, the guests worry who will be the next victim. It is Mrs Boyle. It turns out that she was the magistrate who fostered three children, the Corrigans, to the Stannings, a farming couple who went on to abuse them until one died. Clearly one of the surviving Corrigans is punishing the people responsible for their abuse. Lyon is revealed to be Mrs Stanning, Boyle is punished for her role in the scandal. But who’s next? When Trotter sets up a reenactment of Boyle’s murder, the identity of the murderer is revealed: it is Trotter himself, who is actually one of the surviving Corrigans. Mollie was to be his next victim because in a former job as a teacher she failed to save the children; Miss Casewell turns out to be Trotter’s sister, and Metcalf a real policeman, who tidies up the remaining loose ends. The Mousetrap opened at Nottingham Theatre Royal on 2 October 1952, with Richard Attenborough (who had starred as Pinkie in John and Roy Boulting’s crime film Brighton Rock in 1947) and his wife Sheila Sim as Trotter and Mollie. This celebrity couple had quite a following, and attracted customers to the play.7 The first director was Peter Cotes, older brother of the Boulting Brothers who had changed his name to avoid comparisons with his siblings. After Nottingham, Christie realized that the play was too humorous to be a thriller and did some hectic rewriting. On another pre-West End date, in Oxford, she still believed that she had ‘put in too many humorous situations; there was too much laughter in it; and that must take away from the thrill’. But Saunders reassured her: ‘It will run over a year – fourteen months I am going to give it.’ Christie was unconvinced. She thought it would run for ‘eight months perhaps’.8 Later on, she attributed its success to luck and to the fact ‘there is a bit of something in it for almost everybody’, while admitting that it was clearly plotted and well constructed.9 The Mousetrap opened at the Ambassadors on 25 November 1952. Reviews were polite, but hardly ecstatic. They pointed out the play’s improbable coincidences, its perfunctory characterization, while praising the storytelling. Harold Hobson wrote, ‘Everything the detective finds out is scrupulously communicated to the audience. It is this honesty of procedure that puts Mrs Christie so high in the ranks of police novel writers.’10 The Stage described the stars’ performances, with Richard Attenborough achieving ‘a clever performance’, combining deference with ‘ruthless determination’, and Sheila Sim offering ‘blood-curdling screams and much well-charged high-tension acting’.11 Anthony Head, a regular first-nighter who kept a diary, was at the London

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opening. He enjoyed ‘a nice entertaining evening of guessing, suspecting, trailing red herrings and coming to false conclusions, to our simple heart’s content’.12 The Sunday Express later noted that Saunders had the habit of arriving early at the theatre and asking members of the public queuing for the play whether they were attracted more by the Attenboroughs or Christie. Apparently, the answer was Christie. Audiences also said that the ‘other outstandingly popular’ plays in London all involved corpses: Frederick Knott’s Dial ‘M’ for Murder, Janet Green’s Murder Mistaken and Peter Cheyney and Gerald Verner’s Meet Mr Callaghan.13 But after the Attenboroughs left the cast in the play’s third year, business dropped. Yet instead of closing the show, Saunders took out a long lease on the theatre and invested in more publicity, and box office improved. His publicity stunts included putting advertisements on the back of score cards at Lords cricket ground, and on envelopes used by ticket agencies, holding highprofile anniversary parties, and encouraging newspaper cartoons of the show. Other publicity was accidental: the Morality Council deemed the play’s content unfit for children, while a show given for prisoners at Wormwood Scrubs gave two convicts the chance to escape. Publicity was ‘the vital factor in achieving the longevity that almost becomes perpetual motion’, concludes the producer.14 When, in September 1957, The Mousetrap broke the record for the longest run of a play in the West End, Christie received a telegram from Noël Coward, whose Blithe Spirit it now outperformed: ‘Much as it pains me I really must congratulate you . . .’15 Saunders’s continuous investment in the play, plus the small size of the Ambassadors theatre (419 seats at the time) enabled the production to break records. Gradually, it became a Great British Institution such as Buckingham Palace or Madame Tussauds. In 1974, Saunders transferred the play to the 550seat St Martin’s Theatre next door over one weekend, thereby keeping its run unbroken. Of the myriad examples of audience reactions to what has become a tourist destination here is one from the late 1990s: ‘A genuine “ooo” passes across the audience when the murderer is unmasked’ in this ‘eccentrically English tourist trap’.16 The Mousetrap is an excellent well-made thriller, one of the best of the decade. Adapting the technique that she honed in her novels, Christie expertly brings together a group of character types in an isolated situation, and then tells the story of a past crime crying out for vengeance. Contrary to the cosy image that some of her work has acquired, the crime is ghastly: of the three fostered siblings ‘One of the children died as a result of criminal neglect and persistent illtreatment’ (40). In the 1950s mention of the risks of fostering would have reminded audiences of the evacuation of young children from London during

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the war.17 The abuse is described in passing: ‘kicks, blows, starvation, and a thoroughly vicious couple’ (46), and it retains a contemporary resonance. For this reason the play was billed as ‘For Adults Only’ during its first decade. The revenge of the elder of the two surviving victims, by strangling Mrs Stanning after her release from prison (where her husband died), and then by strangling Mrs Boyle, not only raises the ethical issue of individual retribution, but is also a sly reference to the blood and thunder traditions of Jacobethan revenge drama. Monkswell Manor, with its Great Hall and wooden panelling, has a gothic atmosphere and the world of the play is clearly more compelling than any of its literary qualities. And there is something very creepy about the whistling of ‘Three Blind Mice’, the nursery rhyme with its apt refrain of ‘They all ran after the farmer’s wife,/ Who cut off their tails with a carving knife’. Christie fills her play with theatrical in-jokes. Her title refers to Hamlet (whose play-within-the-play, The Murder of Gonzago is also dubbed The Mousetrap), and also nods to Trotter’s re-enactment of the crime as well as the ‘Three Blind Mice’ rhyme used by the murderer. Other references include one to T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party (Paravicini calls himself ‘the unexpected guest’ (26)) and another to J. B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls (Paravicini repeatedly but incorrectly calls Trotter an Inspector (56)). And when Trotter says, ‘One might almost believe that you’re all guilty’ (89) the nod is to Christie’s own story, Murder on the Orient Express, published in 1934. She also makes a typically self-deprecating description of her own play when Mrs Boyle comments on the murderer’s signature tune: ‘Melodramatic rubbish’ (45). Christie’s use of the standard tropes of the wellmade play, the mislaid letter, the reunited siblings and the disguised detective (actually one real detective in disguise and another pretending to be a detective), are not so much naturalistic, as unashamedly fantastical.And it’s their exaggeration that makes them delightful. The moments of self-parody show a talent to amuse.18 Like many plot-driven dramas, there is little in the way of deep characterization. On the other hand, there are touches of mischief. In an era when gay men were subject to the full rigours of prejudice, there is something playfully liberal in Christie’s coded references to not one, but maybe three gay characters. Christopher Wren is a ‘wild-looking’, ‘neurotic young man’ with ‘long and untidy hair’ and ‘a woven artistic tie’ (12–13); Miss Casewell is ‘a young woman of a manly type’, with ‘no hat’ and ‘a deep, manly voice’ (20–21). Clearly, they are meant to be gay and lesbian. Giles even quips that Casewell is a ‘terrible female – if she is a female’ (24).19 Added to this, Paravicini is ‘foreign and dark and elderly with a rather flamboyant moustache’, dresses fastidiously and uses make up (24, 47). The fact that Paravicini looks like Hercule Poirot is also a deliberately

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jokey red herring: actually, he is not a detective but a spiv. Some of these gay references were picked up at the time: in his review, Hobson mentions ‘the too masculine young lady, the not masculine enough young man’.20 Like Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea, with which it shares coded references to gayness, The Mousetrap is partly a serious exploration of the difference between how we appear and who we really are. The young couple, Giles and Mollie Ralston, are revealed to be strangers to each other. Christie included some political points in her play, often giving her characters conservative views which contradict her own liberalism. Miss Casewell calls herself ‘not a Red – just pale pink’ (29) and Giles moans about ‘some tinpot regulation of some Ministry or another’ (33). As usual in British culture, class is an issue: Mrs Boyle offered the children to the Stannings for fostering because ‘they were very civilly spoken’ and ‘seemed very nice’ (46), clearly a satirical jibe by Christie against this kind of class prejudice. When Mrs Boyle complains that ‘one tries to do a public duty and all one gets is abuse’ (47), that last word is surely a deliberate reminder of what happened to the Corrigan children. Christie is subtly pointing out that what Mrs Boyle regards as disrespect is nowhere near as awful as what happened to the Corrigans. As Hobson wrote in the play’s fortieth anniversary brochure, its longevity is partly due to the fact that it is ‘a parable of the social outlook of our times’.21 As is typical in popular theatre, Christie invites her audience to play a game. The game is not one that involves psychological realism or literary relevance: the game is about feeling intrigued, enjoying the sense of puzzlement, and finally getting a totally unexpected solution to the mystery. The skill involved is similar to that of a magician: the sheer ingenuity of the storytelling means that audiences are distracted from all those things that might otherwise upset them. So coincidence doesn’t matter; unlikely twists don’t matter; loose ends don’t matter. What does matter is the skill of the game. In fact, this is why some critics of the first production accused Christie of cheating: the murderer is revealed by his own actions, when he pulls out a gun, rather than being unmasked by the detective. But such criticism misses the point: it is precisely because she breaks the so-called rules of the genre that the show is entertaining. The secret of The Mousetrap’s phenomenal success is that it is a game, both deceptively simple and complicated enough to be enjoyable. As Saunders said in 1958, ‘It has all the ingredients of the best quiz games, it is dramatic, it has comedy, suspense, and it can be understood by people of every age.’22 And the same applies to Christie’s other plays. The Times review of the first production of Christie’s Ten Little Niggers said: ‘This is not a play, it is a kind of theatrical game.’23

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Christie cleverly creates an ending which, if you think about it, is mildly disturbing. Trotter is a deranged killer. But he isn’t led off to the gallows; he doesn’t kill himself. He is sent upstairs to bed. As his sister says, he needs treatment – not punishment. Surely we must conclude that, for Christie, the worst crime is the abuse of children, and that revenge for that is justifiable. But while the murder of Mrs Stanning is understandable, what about the killing of Mrs Boyle, the magistrate? Because she is a figure of authority, her killing is not only an act of revenge it is also an instance of anti-authoritarianism. Christie was a quiet radical. What has delighted audiences for decades is not just the plotting, the sheer intricacy of which is a rebuke to the hegemony of naturalism in British mainstream theatre, but the atmosphere of the world of the play. The Mousetrap presents audiences with an unreal, but evocative world, and this is typical of Christie. When her play, The Hollow was staged, The Stage noted that its star, Jeanne de Casalis, said: ‘There is always a sense of unreality mixed in with the “natural”.’24 Christie-land is clearly a fantasy world, and increasingly so as the years have passed. Now it suggests a nostalgia for an Englishness of lost certainties and for a historical past of snowed-in winters, manor houses, panelled rooms and army majors. Like its author, it has a Victorian flavour. As does Christie’s deeply held view that evil resides in the most domestic of places. In her 1942 novel The Body in the Library, amateur sleuth Miss Marple’s bleak view of human nature is noted. Her nephew teases her about being a Victorian, with a ‘mind like a sink’. Her response sounds like the Victorian Christie’s own justification for writing about the emotional darkness of crime: ‘All I can say is that the Victorians knew a good deal about human nature.’25 Christie was the tip of a large iceberg. In the postwar era, the growing popularity of crime novels stimulated dramatists to create stage versions. Yet, however successful and seemingly pervasive, very few plays of this genre were mega-hits. Of the handful of highly successful crime plays, some of the greatest were farces, which provided opportunities for theatrical outsiders. One such actor, who had a couple of walk-on parts in Reluctant Heroes, was destined for even more fun. His name was John Chapman.26 Born in 1927, he trained at RADA in 1948–50, left early without a qualification and joined Brian Rix’s company as a stage manager and understudy. Having a lot of time on his hands during each performance, he began – like John Osborne – to write. At one point, Rix released him from his contract so he could acquire more experience in weekly rep, and he honed his skills in thrillers by Christie and in various farces. Chapman thought

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many of these were so inept that he could scarcely do worse and so wrote his first farce, Dry Rot. Rix, after insisting on rewrites to pump up the part he wanted to play, produced it in 1954 at the Whitehall Theatre, where it ran for 1,475 performances. The plot is about three bookies who run an illegal gambling ring and try to fix a race by kidnapping the favourite horse and its French jockey. The Stage noted that the performers used ‘a robust kind of knockabout music hall technique’ and that ‘the evening passed amid storms of gusty laughter’.27 Chapman also wrote a film version in 1956, which starred Rix, Ronald Shiner and Sid James.

Simple Spymen (1958) John Chapman’s follow up to Dry Rot was Simple Spymen, staged by Brian Rix at the Whitehall in 1958, where it ran for 1,404 performances. The farce opens with two blundering military men – Lieutenant Fosgrove and Colonel Gray-Balding (ludicrous names are de rigueur) – in the Whitehall War Office. They are asked by MI5 to instruct two of their best people to buy ‘an Atomic Pile Restorer’ from a shady Turkish character called Grobchick, while protecting him from foreign agents (the German Max’s gang), who also want to acquire the device. By accident they select two semi-criminal street buskers, George and Percy, who are sent to intercept the newly arrived Grobchick at a hotel in Dover. Once they get there, the pace accelerates when George and Percy adopt various disguises (French waiters, private detectives, a gardener, a vicar, a missionary, an organist, an army colonel), just as the War Office men, realizing their mistake, try to apprehend them, while simultaneously assuming their own disguises (as Smith and Brown) to deal with funny foreigners Grobchick and Max, and their henchman Crab. The delightful absurdity of this farce is exemplified when three Grobchicks – one genuine, two in disguise (complete with fez, moustache and dark glasses) – rush on and off the stage in a series of hectic chases. By the end of the show the stage is full of men and women on their knees, avoiding bullets while struggling to grab identical suitcases. The story ends with the revelation that, as in Graham Greene’s novel Our Man in Havana (published coincidentally in the same year), the Atomic Pile Restorer is not a nuclear secret, but a new clear (geddit?) liquid which ‘will restore the pile on your carpet’ (108). After swindling £30,000 out of the foreign agent, George and Percy go on the run. This is a knockabout entertainment with no pretentions to literary quality. In fact, the verbal banter is summed up when Smogs the waiter says: ‘Ask a silly

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question, you get a silly answer’ (94). The playtext relies heavily on puns such as Stand, the MI5 man, saying, ‘I’m Forster Stand.’ To which the cringe-worthy reply is ‘How very unfortunate for you’ (14). The pomposity of the military men is undercut by the public-school feyness of their nicknames: Flighty, Fussy and Hammy. There are countless silly voices, funny walks and jokes about anything and everything, including gays, nudity and peeping Toms. And there is plenty of stage business, expertly directed by West End veteran Wallace Douglas in the original production, with the farce’s lunatic logic taking the form of rapid shifts of names and identities, often involving quick changes of costume. Or misplaced false moustaches. Above all there is the vaudevillian rapport between George Chuffer, the ‘ripe cockney’, and Percy Pringle, ‘a nervous lad from up North’ (18). Played by Leo Franklyn (George) and Brian Rix (Percy), this double act depended on a classic contrast: George is the worldly-wise con man, clever, resourceful and manipulative, and Percy is the naïve sidekick, stupid, incapable and cowardly. The hapless Percy is troubled by a safe door that won’t close, his cigarette is whisked out of his mouth, his trousers fall down, he sits on knitting needles, he gets stuck in a piano stool, he clowns around with an officer’s stick. Some of the routines involve physical danger: Percy hangs out of the office window, with the frame smashing down on his hands, and later is stuck up a chimney, has a fire lit under him and then a poker thrust up the flue. Together, the pair perform a table waiting mime sequence, a pianola sketch and a jacket-swapping routine. Some of the stage business was created by the cast: during the pre-West End tour, for example, Rix was talking animatedly to Franklyn in Birmingham’s Midland Hotel one day when he slipped out of his chair while desperately holding onto his cup of coffee. That very night they added a routine based on this to Act III. Rix continued to use this in performance until the onset of ‘excruciating boils in the nether regions’ meant he had to give it up.28 The relentless inventiveness of the plot, plus the performance skills of timing, physical clowning and quickfire repartee were central to the farce’s success. As Rix remembered, the play ‘had a manic quality about it’, an unapologetic zaniness comparable to the best of the Marx Brothers films.29 And, talking of zany acting, Grobchick was originally played by Andrew Sachs, whose later career included the role of Manuel in John Cleese’s Fawlty Towers (1975–79). In the context of Cold War Britain, the theme of atomic secrets was highly topical. In 1957, the country had tested a hydrogen bomb, and news of the arrest of atomic spies such as Klaus Fuchs was still fresh. But the recent Suez Crisis had compromised the country’s image as a global power. So laughing at Britain’s military and security services reflected the disillusioned and sceptical attitudes

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of ordinary people to these changes. Farces such as Simple Spymen, together with the disrespectful attitudes expressed in radio programmes such as The Goon Show (1951–60), prepared the way for the satire boom of the 1960s and the end of the age of deference. In the opening minutes of the play, for example, a hapless War Office sentry drops his rifle as he struggles to open an officer’s pass, a comic comment on the incompetence of Britain’s much-lauded military might. Although the farce is full of funny voices, some of which mimic funny foreigners, others take the mickey out of the British upper classes. At one point, Percy pops a nut into his mouth to impersonate a plummy voiced colonel. And there are plenty of satirical swipes at national pretentions: when George persuades Percy to climb up the chimney he relies on the Second World War cliché of ‘You’re doing this for England’, and the MI5 man, when he finally gets the pile restorer liquid, concludes with unconscious irony: ‘With this in our possession the future of Britain is secure’ (107). The criminal acquisition of nuclear secrets and the conning of huge sums of money are represented in a spirit of cheerful amorality, encouraging spectators to smile rather than condemn. As usual, the content of popular farce is liberal and reactionary – both at the same time. Although the new wave critics, such as Kenneth Tynan in the Observer, disapproved of Simple Spymen as having ‘no plausibility, and no wit’, the genre itself had its defenders.30 In the Saturday Review of Literature of 24 March 1951, J. M. Brown explained that the business of farce ‘is to make us accept the impossible as possible, the deranged as normal, and silliness as a happy substitute for sense’, and that its sole justification is that it’s funny.31 At the press night of Simple Spymen on 19 March 1958 J. W. Lambert of The Sunday Times noted that the mainstream critics and some regular first-nighters sat ‘grim and aloof ’ while the rest of the audience fell about laughing.32 W. A. Darlington summed up the Whitehall Theatre’s project: ‘The policy is laughter, the recipe is knockabout farce and the public is that host of simple-hearted pleasure-seekers who just want to have their ribs tickled.’33 And Rix noted that the play’s success, helped by yet another television excerpt, was due to the fact that ‘the audience loved the slapstick, for it was probably the most knock-about farce I have ever done’.34 As the play’s run continued, Rix distributed leaflets which showed cartoons of ‘The Brian Rix Recipe for Laughter’, with ingredients which include farce, hilarity, delight and family fun, and this was followed by a one-shilling souvenir programme in 1959, which also advertised the BBC series Laughter from the Whitehall. In August 1960 the Daily Telegraph reported that Simple Spymen was about to have its 1,000th performance, making ‘a remarkable record’, the third successive Rix production to reach this milestone. The theatre, it noted, seated

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635 and the production had taken well over £1 million, at the rate of £2,000 a week.35 In the following year, another newspaper reported that Rix’s Whitehall had broken the Aldwych’s record as a venue for farces, and argued that the reason for this was changing notions of popular theatre. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Aldwych farces of Ben Travers were ‘plays about upper-middle class people for a lower middle-class audience’ while the Whitehall farces are ‘popular plays for the mass audiences, people who are not, generally, in any sense regular theatregoers but who like to see a show when they come up to town’.36 So while intellectuals once visited the Aldwych, they wouldn’t be seen dead at the Whitehall. ‘With the unpretentiousness of truly popular entertainment’ Rix offered his out-of-town working-class audiences, who didn’t follow theatre critics, recognizable character types in familiar social situations while elaborating ‘the incidents of the plot to a pitch of fantastic absurdity’.37 The key word is fantastic. Rix’s main achievement was to modernize farce. Instead of upper-crust silly asses, his productions featured criminal bookies, pompous civil servants, ludicrously incompetent military men and both funny foreigners and silly Northerners. It’s pointless to complain that these are stereotypes – instant recognizability is the whole point of fast-moving farce. And the public taste for this game of a make-believe world of ridiculous jokes and well-timed physical humour continued into the 1960s and beyond. Playing the minor role of a corporal in Simple Spymen was one Raymond Cooney, who had also played Flash Harry in a Rix touring version of Dry Rot. Having, like Chapman before him, time on his hands, Cooney began writing a series of farces in collaboration with Tony Hilton, who had also toured in Dry Rot. A quick name change to the more matey Ray Cooney and the result was the mega-hit One for the Pot (1961), jointly authored with Hilton. Plenty of other Cooney farces followed, culminating in Run for Your Wife (1983), one of the longest running comedies in West End history (see page 81).

Sleuth (1970) The arrival of television by the mid-1960s brought crime plays, police procedurals and serials into everyone’s living room, and this meant that theatre versions of the crime play and mystery drama declined rapidly. One response was to write stage parodies of the genre. Just as the traditional country house murder mysteries or crime farces began to seem old-fashioned because their well-made play structure looked too predictable in the era of innovative new writing so

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these plays got a new lease of life as parodies of their own genre. In fact, crime plays are infinitely adaptable.38 Sometimes called postmodern comedy thrillers, this trend was led by Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound (Criterion, 1968), a parodic entertainment broadly in the style of The Mousetrap.39 His play features two theatre critics, Moon and Birdboot, who at first watch, and then become mixed up in a typical country house murder mystery. Like the Christie play, Stoppard’s parody has an isolated house, the killer masquerading as a policeman, cut phone lines and the forces of law and order arriving despite the inclement weather; and there are red herrings galore. A flavour of the postmodern style can be appreciated by listening to Mrs Drudge, the stage play’s housekeeper, answering the telephone: ‘Hello, the drawing room of Lady Muldoon’s country residence one morning in early spring?’ (15). Instead of expecting audiences to play the familiar game of guessing the murderer, the postmodern comedy thriller expects them to play the new game of second-guessing the playwright. Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth is a brilliant example of this gamesmanship. It opened at St Martin’s Theatre in February 1970, ran for 2,359 performances and another 1,200 or so on Broadway, winning a Tony award in 1971. Its author was a reluctant playwright, born in Liverpool in 1926, and working as a lawyer, a journalist, then in advertising and as a television producer before his twin, Peter Shaffer, whose hit plays include Equus and Amadeus, persuaded him to collaborate on writing some detective stories. Anthony then tried his hand at playwriting. After his debut, The Savage Parade (King’s Head, 1963), he wrote the film script of Peter’s stage farce, Black Comedy (National Theatre, 1965), and then came up with Sleuth, ‘the main event’ of his life.40 Although rejected by Binkie Beaumont, it was taken up by producer Michael White and the play was a huge hit.41 His other theatre credits include Murderer (Garrick, 1975) and Whodunnit (Biltmore Theatre, New York, 1975), and he also scripted films such as Sleuth (1972), Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972), the cult movie The Wicker Man (1973) and screen versions of Christie’s Death on the Nile (1978) and Evil Under the Sun (1982), in which Peter Ustinov plays Hercule Poirot. Aptly enough for a postmodern thriller, Sleuth features Andrew Wyke, a fiftyseven-year-old crime writer who loves to play games. The set is the living room of his Norman Manor House in Wiltshire, which like The Mousetrap evokes the traditional country house – worn flagstones, high windows, dark corridors – as well as showing evidence of his obsession with games: board games, dice games and card games, and, as a final joke, a sailor manikin which, at the press of a button, shakes with laughter. The upper-class Andrew invites Milo Tindle, a younger travel agent, to his home. He says he knows that Milo is having an affair

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with his wife, Marguerite. At first taken aback, Milo is gradually convinced by Andrew’s claim that he’s tired of Marguerite and his idea of faking the robbery of Marguerite’s jewellery. Milo would then be able to support her lavish lifestyle, while her husband would claim the insurance money. Tricking Milo into wearing a clown costume for the break-in, Andrew turns on his guest and shoots him. In Act Two, Andrew is visited by Inspector Doppler, who is investigating Milo’s disappearance. The novelist claims that he shot Milo with a blank and only meant to scare him. But when, after a rigorous cross-examination, Andrew breaks down, Doppler reveals himself as Milo in disguise. He has won the second game. He then convinces Andrew that he has murdered his Finnish mistress Téa and has hidden three incriminating clues around the house: Andrew has to find these before the police arrive. When he succeeds he is delighted with Milo’s game-playing and wants to be his friend. Instead, Milo rejects him. Andrew then shoots him, this time for real, but is horribly surprised by the arrival of genuine policemen. Instead of a whodunit, Shaffer creates a whodunwhat.42 As befits a playfully postmodern piece, Andrew is a gamesman whose stately home is a toy museum. But the games he plays are cruel, and so are Milo’s. In the first one, Andrew aims (literally) to frighten Milo almost to death, while Milo’s disguise as Doppler (a joke on Inspector Plodder, and German for double) is a revenge that is intended to scare Andrew out of his wits. And the final game of clues to a murder is an elaborate variation on the others. All three games assume gullibility: that Milo would wear a clown’s outfit for the fake break-in; that Andrew wouldn’t recognize Milo in disguise; and that Andrew would believe the story about Téa’s murder. In each case, the audience is challenged to work out who is doing exactly what to whom. That is the game. In its published form, the play is dedicated to ten detectives, from G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown to Agatha Christie’s Poirot, ‘and all their omniscient, eccentric, amateur gentlemen colleagues’ (5). Further meta-theatrical meaning comes from the fact that the play’s original home, St Martin’s Theatre, is right next to the Ambassadors, where The Mousetrap was playing at the time. In Sleuth, tension is brilliantly generated through character. In the first production, directed by Clifford Williams, Anthony Quayle played Andrew while Keith Baxter was Milo. To add to the game, the actors playing the police (Inspector Doppler, Det. Sgt Tarrant and P. C. Higgs) are named in the programme, although of course they all turn out to be fictitious. Incidentally, it was the actors, especially Quayle, who objected to the play’s original title, Anyone for Tennis?, as ‘too puny’, and it took a while for Shaffer to come up with Sleuth.43

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Although Lawrence Olivier gatecrashed the first-night party, and asked Quayle what he, as a former artistic director of the august Royal Shakespeare Company was doing in ‘a piece of piss like this’, it was well received by the critics.44 R. B. Marriott of The Stage said, ‘a dozen kinds of detective melodrama are splendidly parodied’ and The Times’s Irving Wardle stated that ‘Mr Shaffer is at once offering a parody and moral criticism of English detective fiction while also supplying the direct thrills of the genre.’ Well aware of the postmodern aspect of the game, he also said, ‘Everything takes place as if between quotation marks.’45 Shaffer’s hugely entertaining masterpiece takes the form of a duel, and its main theme is male rivalry.46 Andrew, the older, paternal man, represents a particular form of traditional masculinity, cultivated yet boorish, while the younger Milo is softer around the edges, more sensitive, more mature. And the force of the play comes from the archetypal situation of the trickster tricked, of the worm that turns. Significantly, there is no trace of feminism in this play: the women – whether Marguerite or Téa – remain offstage, prizes to be won in the men’s game. As Andrew says, Marguerite is ‘mine whether I love her or not’ (50). Femininity is a mirror to male vanity. Women, like jewels, are there to be admired or stolen. The key emotional reversal of the play is the contrast between Andrew’s initial boast of being ‘pretty much of an Olympic sexual athlete’ (21) and Milo’s conclusive point that Téa is not really Andrew’s mistress: ‘She told me you were practically impotent – not at all, in fact, the selector’s choice for the next Olympics’ (89). For men, virility is a badge; women a possession. Yet the play’s triumphant masculinity ends in death. Milo beats Andrew not only in his game playing, but he also represents the victory of modernity over tradition: Shaffer parodies the old-fashioned school of detective fiction in the opening moments of the play when Andrew reads the denouement of his latest novel, which involves the wonderfully improbable coincidence that a character was once ‘a distinguished member of the Ballet Russe’ and therefore able to tip-toe along the white tape of the tennis court leaving no footprints (12), and then allows Milo at the story’s climax to condemn Andrew’s entire vision of the world: ‘the only place you can inhabit is a dead world’ – ‘it’s a world of coldness and class hatred, and two dimensional characters who are not expected to communicate; it’s a world where only amateurs win, and where foreigners are automatically figures of fun’ (90). In this play of class antagonism, Christie is not the only author being parodied. In an echo of Lady Bracknell, Andrew asks Milo ‘I know you won’t object if I ask you a few questions about your parents’ (16). Milo’s background, half Italian immigrant (family name Tindolini) and a quarter Jewish, antagonizes the resolutely Anglo-Saxon

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Andrew, who demonstrates his elite status by using deliberately obscure words ‘hebdomadal’ (weekly) and ‘coelacanth’ (obscure fish) (18, 19). As well as masculine rivalry and class hatred, there are numerous references to the state of early 1970s Britain, from Milo’s ‘It’s almost a national sport in this country – sneering at love’ (20) to Andrew’s racist epithets ‘spick’ and ‘wop’ (50). High rates of tax and a relaxed approach to sex likewise place the piece in its era, but its theatrical pleasure comes more from its familiar country house atmosphere and its visual jokes, from clown suits to hidden physical clues, than from any literary qualities. Sleuth ran for five and a half years in the West End. Despite Beaumont’s prediction that the public wouldn’t keep quiet about the central trick of the play (Milo being shot with a blank), people did keep the play’s secret. As Shaffer later recalled, Beaumont admitted his mistake by saying that ‘You can never underestimate the British sense of fair play’.47 But the play’s West End run was not entirely problem free. After about three years, the two Shaffer brothers had dinner at the Ivy restaurant with the aged Agatha Christie. It was a cordial affair, but afterwards the two men, somewhat the worse for drink, crossed the road to the Ambassadors, home of The Mousetrap, and scribbled irreverent comments on the billboards – and signed them in Christie’s name. Peter Saunders, Christie’s producer and owner of St Martin’s Theatre, was not amused and, using a clause about moral turpitude in their contract, effected their eviction. Still, the result was mutually advantageous: The Mousetrap moved into the St Martin’s, a larger theatre, and Sleuth went to the Garrick, likewise a larger venue.48 Film versions of the play also had some meta-theatrical aspects. Despite his initial sneers, Olivier played Andrew opposite Michael Caine’s Milo in the 1972 film version, faithfully directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and another film version was made in 2007 by Kenneth Branagh, this time with a new screenplay by Harold Pinter which emphasizes homoerotic desire, and Caine swapping roles and playing Andrew, with Jude Law as Milo. The popularity of Sleuth is easy to understand. Its plot is thrilling and satisfying, and it both flatters its audience by appealing to their awareness of its parodic qualities, while at the same time using the thriller elements of traditional detective fiction (sudden reversals and elaborate explanations) to entertain and delight. It delivers surprise rather than mere suspense.49 Its central, tolerably witty, ludic duel between two different males appeals to base instincts about emotional double-cross and personal rivalry. The play also offers a comforting worldview. In a discussion between Shaffer and Stephen Sondheim, a games fanatic as well as composer, Sondheim said: ‘To me, the connection between

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puzzles and detective stories is all about order and solution. The nice thing about them is that there’s a solution and all’s right with the world – as opposed to life. That, I think, is why detective stories continue to have a following.’ And Shaffer added, ‘I think that many audiences are on the side of the criminals, because there’s scarcely a man or woman in this world who has never had his or her hand in the jam. Provided the crime is not too horrendous, very often we want people to get away with it.’50 Sleuth delivers its genre’s classic contradictory message: it punishes crime, but also delights in it.

The Business of Murder (1981) One of the most remarkable features of the thriller genre is how this rather conservative form has refused to die. Among its most accomplished practitioners is Richard Harris, who not only penned one of the biggest mega-hit thrillers of all time (The Business of Murder), but also one of theatre’s most successful comedies (Stepping Out). Born into a working-class family in Shepherd’s Bush in 1934, he left school at sixteen, and, after National Service in the early 1950s, was living on a Thames barge in Chiswick, moored alongside another occupied by John Osborne and Anthony Creighton. He typed an early draft of their play, Epitaph for George Dillon. Then, to impress his actress wife, Harris wrote his first play, The Christmas Card, and it was broadcast on television in 1959. Its success enabled him to leave his office job and take up writing. In the 1960s, he found success as an all-rounder, regularly writing for Play for Today, Armchair Theatre and The Edgar Wallace Mystery Theatre. His 1989 script, Searching for Señor Duende (written for Maureen Lipman), won the New York Television Festival Gold Award. He also contributed dozens of scripts to some twenty television series. From the early 1970s he wrote play after play for the stage and contributed to the television crime series The Sweeney and Shoestring (which he co-created). Not only has he written in a variety of genres, but his output, as the programme note of the 2017 West End revival of Stepping Out says, has indeed been ‘phenomenal’.51 Harris’s The Business of Murder is conclusive proof that the much-despised thriller play was alive and well in the 1980s.52 The piece is set in a first-floor flat in a converted house in an inner London suburb. This belongs to Stone, a rather non-descript early-fortyish man who has persuaded Hallett, a Detective Superintendent of similar age, to visit him because of the disappearance of his son, Clive, who has been selling drugs and is involved with gangsters. After

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Hallett leaves, promising to investigate, Stone has another visitor: Dee, a woman in her late twenties. Stone knows that Dee is a successful television crime story writer, so he asks her advice about a crime play his wife has written. Dee tries to help him although she is unconvinced about the quality of the writing. When Stone pops out of the flat, Hallett arrives. It emerges that the policeman is in an adulterous relationship with Dee, and that both helped to ruin Stone’s life when, six years previously, he had been accused of murdering his first wife and their nine-year-old son. Hallett tried to force a confession from him and Dee wrote a popular television play based on the case. Stone – whose real name is Metcalfe – tells the couple that although he was innocent of killing his wife, his story about his current wife and grown-up son are fictions, designed to get the other two into his flat, and claims that he has been stalking both of them. He then reveals that he has murdered Mrs Hallett, and left clues incriminating Hallett and Dee. Dee is convinced, but Hallett realizes that this is just a revenge fantasy. In the end, there is a fight and Stone manipulates Hallett into stabbing him with a knife. The play ends with the arrival of a witness, arranged by Stone, who will probably assume that Hallett has deliberately killed Stone. Opening at the Duchess Theatre on 2 April 1981, The Business of Murder transferred to the May Fair on 10 May 1982, where it ended its long run on 15 July 1988, having clocked up some 3,035 performances. Critic Jack Tinker hailed it as ‘a modern morality play as well as the most ingenious murder mystery to have appeared on the London stage in a decade’.53 In a nice touch, director Hugh Goldie cast the charming Francis Matthews as Stone – Matthews was famous for playing Francis Durbridge’s eponymous amateur detective in the Paul Temple television series (BBC 1969–71). One of the innovative aspects of the play was that, in a reversal of common practice, it had already been screened on television, over two Sunday nights on London Weekend Television in February. This led critic Sheridan Morley to point out that ‘it really isn’t worth trudging through the whole thing again at West End prices’ and, equally sneeringly, Milton Shulman concluded: ‘Whether there are enough American or Japanese tourists to keep this TV squib going for very long, I very much doubt.’54 Both were totally wrong. In fact, when Richard Todd (famous from countless films, including The Dam Busters) took over from Francis Matthews in January 1982, he eventually won an entry in The Guinness Book of Records as the longestserving cast member in a West End play. The Business of Murder is a thriller based strongly on character and plotting. At first, the play seems to be an archetypal worm-that-turns story, before it flips into being a psycho-killer revenge drama, and then again into a tale of poetic

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justice.55 Stone initially appears to be a pitiful individual, but successive revelations show not only that he is furious about the injustice of being accused of murdering his wife, but also that he is a manipulative, controlled and controlling individual. Stone’s name suggests a man who gathers no moss, a drifter, but also his aim: to kill two in one go. As he explains, the business of murder is a pun that refers to Hallett and Dee’s occupations (detective and detective story writer) and to ‘the thing that concerns one’, meaning his own experience of being a murder suspect (27). We watch him execute a meticulously planned sting, which involves following Hallett and Dee, amassing information about their routines and about Hallett’s wife, and even entering Dee’s flat using a key from an estate agent. Gradually, from being pitiable, Stone grows into a rather creepy, rather scary individual. When, at the climax of the play, Hallett says that Stone’s wife and child are ‘dead because of you’ (51) you can see his point. In the end, although he has killed no one, he comes across as someone who might just as easily have done so. He is a damaged person driven by a passionate, but self-destructive desire for revenge. The final stabbing illustrates the depth of his hatred, as well as his complete despair. Likewise, Hallett and Dee both change during the unwinding of the plot. Hallett starts off as the familiar cynical copper, compulsively jokey, with a ‘flat smile’ and a habit of jingling change in his pocket (2). He is gradually revealed to be faithless not only to his wife, but to Dee, and he is both a corrupt cop and an almost-satanic manipulator whose skill matches Stone’s. Similarly, Dee is a hardheaded careerist, and arrives at Stone’s flat as a rather unwilling professional, grudgingly helping a hopeless case, and steeling herself through the ordeal with the aid of alcohol. Unlike Hallett, she has occasional flashes of sympathy, but she becomes genuinely scared and uncertain, with her guilt about her hopeless affair with Hallett colouring her responses. In this situation of suburban gothic horror, Stone psychologically tortures both Hallett and Dee by making them experience the same kind of fear, uncertainty and confusion as he did when he was originally suspected of murder. The playwriting is subtle and effective: in the opening minutes, Stone acts out the role of a man who lives alone because he has lost his wife, and his son Clive has gone off to, in the hippie jargon of the time, ‘do his own thing’ (4). This leads to Hallett naturally telling him, and us, that he has been married for fifteen years, but has no children, and Stone talking about the pressures of the job, and its opportunities for adulterous liaisons, all innocent remarks that will acquire increasing significance. One of the main pleasures of watching the play is its central double-bluff. Audiences can accept the unlikely idea that Hallett doesn’t

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recognize Stone because they know it has been several years since the pair last met and Stone is now slightly disguised and, anyway, it is a crime story convention that such things happen. But, of course, Harris plays a game with this conceit, and one of the main twists in the story occurs when Hallett says: ‘You really think I’d forget you? A copper whose whole game is knowing faces?’ (49). As in Sleuth, no murder has actually happened, but Stone as the central narrator plausibly presents the fictional killing in such a way that Dee is convinced, and so of course is the audience. For those familiar with this type of thriller, the expectation is double-edged: knowing the genre conventions suggests that these narrated murders are fake, but at the same time knowing the twists that playwrights give to these conventions, they might on this occasion be true.56 The central part of the play, and one of its chief pleasures, is the psychological duel in which the trickster Stone has to convince Hallett and Dee that not only has he really murdered Hallett’s wife, but also that he has framed them by leaving clues which implicate them both. In the process, the tensions in Hallett and Dee’s relationship are exposed. At the same time, this duel is also an extended commentary on detective fact and detective fiction. Hallett’s investigation of Stone in the past was based on circumstantial evidence – Stone’s recent divorce, his wife’s complaint about his obsessive behaviour, conflict over their nine-yearold child – but failing to find enough tangible evidence he resorted to violence in an attempt to force a confession. In Stone’s project of incriminating Hallett and Dee, he has created a series of incriminating clues – fingerprints on a knife, blood-stained clothes, a loose button – that have been inspired by fiction. ‘You make fact into fiction,’ he tells Dee, ‘Why not turn fiction into fact?’ (44). By contrast, there’s a note of triumph in Hallett’s revelation that he knew of Stone’s game all along: ‘All coppers are actors, didn’t you know sunshine?’ (50). While the audience has thought that Stone was playing a game with his two victims, Hallett has actually been playing a game with Stone. Early on, Hallett says to Dee: ‘He’s playing games with us’ and then ‘maybe we’ll have to play games’ (26), and he finally tells Stone: ‘Play games with me? I’ve been playing games with you ever since I came through that door’ (50). This is also a story about the nature of the crime play. When Dee arrives, Stone uses the charade of pretending that his wife is terminally ill to discuss the differences between real crime and fictionalized crime. Dee sees the pile of classic whodunits that Stone has borrowed from the library, and can barely conceal her contempt, while admitting that all authors rely on the past: ‘We all borrow ideas: it’s how you dress them up’ (17). Alluding to his own entrapment of Hallett, which Dee is not yet conscious of, Stone says he thinks the ‘idea of

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making the policeman not the hunter as it were . . . but the hunted’ is ‘rather good’ (17). Yet Dee stresses that writers can only do so much: ‘In the main – although I hate to admit it – it’s how good your actor is’ (17). Then when Stone explains how to use the telephone to fake an incoming call, or how to ensure that a phone is constantly engaged, it’s a good example of how technology can be creatively used in a thriller. Stone’s obvious fascination with people who plan meticulous murders comes across when he uses the analogy of the murderer as a ‘thief on the grand scale’, stealing a life (20). The Hitchcockian discussion of different methods of murder is genuinely creepy. In addition, the play questions ideas about innocence (how guilty are Hallett and Dee of exploiting Stone?) and responsibility (how guilty is Stone of his wife’s murder?). The play is a very rich text, with many references to ethical issues (adultery, police misconduct and how far can fiction be based on real life) as well as references to popular culture. The trunk that Stone claims belongs to his son Clive is a reference to Patrick Hamilton’s classic crime play Rope (1929) and there’s a name check for Detective Chief Inspector Barlow and Detective Inspector Watt from the BBC series Softly, Softly (1966–69) (32). There’s even an oblique reference to the Jeremy Thorpe scandal when Dee says that hit men are incompetent: ‘They invariably seem to miss and hit a dog’ (21). This refers to the career of Thorpe, leader of the Liberal Party, which ended in 1976 when he was suspected of hiring a hit man to silence his gay lover, Norman Scott. In the event, the hit man shot Rinka, Scott’s Great Dane. Yet the richness of the writing is secondary to the claustrophobia of the single-room setting and the twists of the story’s plotting. The Business of Murder exerts its fascination partly in its portrait of Stone, an extraordinarily vengeful person who at first appears so harmless. The play powerfully suggests that it might be a perverse pleasure to use your knowledge of fictional crime to plan a murder, especially as no one is actually killed, and that revenge on two rather unpleasant people (a cheating detective and an opportunistic writer) is sweet. Very sweet. Yet, in a contradiction typical of popular culture, this sweetness is soured by the realization that the central character is even more disturbed than his persecutors. During a kind of wry meta-theatrical passage, Stone’s loaded conversation with Dee about why people like detective stories, Harris gives good reasons for the genre’s popularity, and for his own play’s success. Although very few people are actually murdered every year, it is ‘because of that – we’re all fascinated by it’ (19). ‘We all love a good whodunit,’ says Stone, and Dee suggests that, while life is messy, fiction at least has a coherent shape and a strong moral ending, crime thrillers being satisfying

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like ‘a crossword puzzle where you know the ending will be supplied even if you get all the clues wrong’ (19). It’s a great analogy: while getting the clues wrong in a crossword puzzle means messing it up, getting them wrong in a work of fiction doesn’t matter: the author will provide the answer at the end of the story. The Business of Murder was the last great West End thriller. Other playwrights wrote crime plays in the 1980s and 1990s, but none of them broke the 1,000 performance barrier. As Sheridan Morley noted about the 1990s: ‘This is a lousy decade for thrillers.’57 Today, the long-running murder mystery or crime thriller is a thing of the past. The only exceptions are a farce, a musical and a spoof. One of the most popular plays of the 1980s was a farce: Ray Cooney’s Run for Your Wife (Shaftesbury, 1983), about a bigamist and which also features two policemen (see page 81). The musical is John Kander and Fred Ebb’s Chicago: The Musical. After originally opening at the Cambridge Theatre in April 1979, it ran for 600 performances, and was then revived at the Adelphi, in November 1997, staying in the West End for almost fifteen years. Set in the 1920s, and based on real-life criminal cases in Chicago, its theme is women – Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly in the musical – who commit murder. Although based on a play originally written by Maurine Dallas Watkins, who came to believe that her work glamorized a dissolute lifestyle, the phenomenal musical says as much about showbiz celebrity as about crime. The spoof is Patrick Barlow’s The 39 Steps (Criterion, 2006) (see pages 140–44). Crime continues to fascinate us, but it needs to find the right contemporary theatre form.

3

Sex: Comic, Episodic and Ironic

In popular theatre, sex sells. It can take a variety of forms: talking about sex, suggesting sex, showing sex itself or maybe indicating the emotional results of sex. Sex on stage is the great attention-grabber, making public an activity that is usually private. In its most popular forms, especially before the 1980s, it was usually there to entertain men by showing suggestive images of women. Often, its history is the history of juvenile jokes and childish stereotypes: the male idea of sexuality tends to be stuck in the playground. At its most innovative, it’s about breaking taboos and troubling preconceptions. The mild scent of the forbidden mixes with the damp tang of embarrassment. More than any other subject, the history of sex on stage follows the history of censorship, with a great dividing line between the era of censorship by the Lord Chamberlain until September 1968, and complete freedom afterwards. In the postwar era, before the Swinging Sixties, the pervading view of sexuality in the national consciousness was articulated by George Mikes, a Hungarian refugee who wrote the bestselling How To Be an Alien (1946). Chapter six is titled ‘Sex’ and reads, in its entirety, ‘Continental people have sex life; the English have hotwater bottles.’1 The absence of sex on the British stage, and its substitution by other activities, suggests that he was right. In 1950s Britain, to be sexual you had to be French. For example, Nancy Mitford’s popular version of French writer André Roussin’s The Little Hut (Lyric, 1950), is a gently amusing comedy about polygamy which ran for 1,261 performances. In it, Philip and his wife Susan are shipwrecked on a desert island. With them is Henry, Philip’s best friend and Susan’s secret lover of six years. The French provenance of this archetypal love triangle meant that the play had a relatively daring attitude to marriage, treating adultery with humour as both men agree to share Susan, who takes turns sleeping with each in the big hut, while the other man occupies the little hut of the play’s title. As Philip concludes, ‘It’s the routine of marriage that is so dangerous, dangerous and dull, like flying. Clearly we ought to get away from the formula, one wife, one 59

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husband – much to be said for polygamy’ (55). In this charming Continental play by the ‘Noël Coward of Paris’, an H. M. Tennent production directed by Peter Brook, Mitford catches the light mocking spirit of the original. Despite the setup, censorship meant that sex could only be suggested indirectly. For example, a physical game of dodgems between Philip and Susan, with much rushing around and panting, has to stand in for more direct expressions of physical love (43). And, of course, sleeping together is a synonym for sex. But critics were more excited by how the show’s design cheered up a drab London: ‘the wittiest thing of the evening was Oliver Messel’s colourful and amusing desert island’ whose visual delights included decorously draped coral strands, blooming banyan and breadfruit trees, bizarre bananas and colourful coconuts, ‘pumpkins fit for Cinderella’ and fish ‘like some ecstatic nightmare by Fabergé’.2 As an expression of French style, Joan Tetzel, who played Susan, was dressed by Balmain. Another example is Irma La Douce (Lyric, 1958), a highly successful musical comedy with music by Marguerite Monnot and words by Alexandre Breffort (translated into English by Julian More, David Heneker and Monty Norman), and directed again by Brook at the Lyric. It ran for 1,512 performances. ‘It takes the French to conceive a light-hearted musical in which, without a blush, the heroine is a street-walker, almost the entire chorus her customers, and the hero lives on her immoral earnings,’ opined the Evening Standard.3 Sentimental, absurd and light, Brook’s production was, said Harold Hobson, ‘completely without offence’.4 ‘It cooks up raw sex into a delicate dish’ agreed the Illustrated London News.5 In the 1950s, popular theatre could only represent sex if it was discreet, indirect or similarly inoffensive. Most middle-class West End audiences accepted the protection offered by the Lord Chamberlain, which shielded them from provocative or disturbing content. And the 1950s were full of examples of the censor wielding the blue pencil. In a list of 65 postwar plays that were refused a licence, the reason given for 25 was sexual content, while another 19 were banned because they mentioned homosexuality or lesbianism.6 Some banned plays had blatantly provocative titles, such as Howard Arundel’s The Brothel (1955) or Walter Saltoun’s Sex (1957). Stories involving salacity or the sex industry were refused a licence, and John Hill, the Lord Chamberlain’s Secretary, noted that some financially desperate theatres ‘in London and the provinces’ programmed ‘red hot’ nude shows to boost audiences.7 Such shows were also the subject of various media campaigns, like the one by the Daily Sketch in 1954, and all forms of sexual content regularly attracted the attention of the censorious Public Morality Council. Similarly, the BBC banned music hall comedian Max Miller from the

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radio for five years after he told a joke about a man meeting a nude woman on a mountain ledge, with the punchline ‘I didn’t know whether to block her passageway or toss myself off . . .’. 8 In 1953, the BBC also banned Cole Porter’s Love for Sale because it was about prostitution. Sometimes, in the early 1960s, the Lord Chamberlain allowed glimpses of forbidden fruit. Usually, the excuse was that there was some artistic merit in the enterprise: the only one to be a popular hit was, surprisingly, Iris Murdoch and J. B. Priestley’s A Severed Head (Criterion, 1963), which ran for 1,110 performances. Directed by Val May, and starring Robert Hardy, Heather Chasen, Sheila Burrell and Paul Eddington, this adaptation of Murdoch’s 1961 novel about a group of seven people who swap sexual partners had a scene in which Honor Klein, a doctor, is in bed with her half-brother Palmer Anderson, a psychiatrist, and quickly covers her exposed breasts.9 The play attracted mixed reviews, but no critic complained about this brief moment of nudity. Its success suggested that there was a market for work which felt mature and broadminded, and middle-class audiences were comfortable watching middle-class marriage being criticized, as long as there were some jokes. A Severed Head mixes farcical elements with a moral tale. As Harold Hobson wrote, ‘Miss Murdoch’s three principal fools are emancipated; but they are not free.’10 When W. A. Darlington of the Daily Telegraph saw the recast and trimmed version of the play in June 1964, he noted that it had a ‘well-filled house and a responsive audience’ and correctly predicted that it would run ‘for many months yet’.11 Away from the respectable West End, striptease – an entertainment which was clearly more popular with men than with women – thrived in the darker corners of popular culture. While critics such as Philip Hope-Wallace nostalgically associated the Whitehall Theatre ‘with cheerful salacity ever since the wartime days when the stately Miss Phyllis Dixey used to expose her rigidly motionless hindquarters for 10 seconds at a time in the light of a Bengal Flare’, entrepreneurs such as Paul Raymond mounted extravaganzas that turned nudity into a cultural industry.12 Meanwhile, strip clubs came under the control of local authorities: in 1953, for example, the London County Council banned striptease shows from music halls, thus confining them to private clubs, such as the Irving, the Raymond Review Bar and the Casino de Paris. By the following decade, the image of the stripper as a woman for hire can be glimpsed in William DouglasHome’s hit comedy, The Secretary Bird (Savoy, 1968), when a husband proposes to divorce his wife on the then necessary grounds of adultery. His wife asks him if he will fake this adultery by pretending to have sex with another woman: ‘Who will you choose?’ she asks, ‘A lady from some strip club?’ (13). Although during

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the 1960s sex shows in Continental Europe were becoming increasingly explicit, the British versions were constrained by traditional ideas about the threat of moral corruption.

There’s a Girl in My Soup (1966) Cultural change can happen very rapidly. On the cover of Time magazine’s 15 April 1966 issue, London was redefined as ‘The Swinging City’, and Britain’s grim and gloomy postwar metropolis was suddenly on the way to becoming a capital of cool. Pop music, pop fashion, pop slang, pop adverts and pop art were rapidly being placed before the public eye.13 A new sense of sexual morality, labelled free love or permissiveness, was also widely popularized. The theatre version of this Swinging London phenomenon was Terence Frisby’s 1966 comedy There’s a Girl in My Soup. ‘The whole world was a smile,’ he later remembered, talking about his marriage to Christine, a model he met while filming an Alka-Seltzer advert in 1963. ‘Open marriage was being talked about all around us in the middle of that decade of sexual liberation.’14 Frisby’s play subverted the established order of sex comedies by making the woman both brighter and more ruthless than the man. Frisby was an actor, director and writer who was born in 1932 in New Cross, London, and educated at Dartford Grammar School. He trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama, and worked as an actor in rep under the name of Terence Holland from 1957 onwards, as well as being a night club entertainer. In 1964, he directed his own play, The Subtopians, at the Arts Theatre.15 While playing small parts in film and television, he wrote There’s a Girl in My Soup, which he followed up with other plays, including The Bandwagon (Mermaid, 1969) and much later Rough Justice (Apollo, 1994). He also produced the Market Theatre’s 1981 play, Woza Albert! (Criterion, 2003), a South African satire which imagines Jesus coming to the land of Apartheid. After a messy divorce, which got bogged down in extensive litigation, he became an early member of the fathers’ rights group Families Need Fathers.16 There’s a Girl in My Soup is set in the posh London flat of fortysomething Robert Danvers, a self-satisfied epicure and celebrity chef who fancies himself as a playboy. Unmarried, ‘vain and pompous – especially pompous’, this modern Don Juan is snogging Clare as the curtain rises (1). When she tells him she’s thinking of accepting a proposal of marriage from a rival, he decides to let her go. Soon after, on the suggestion of his best friend Andrew, Robert goes to a party

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in the groovy King’s Road, but stumbles into the wrong flat and returns with Marion, a nineteen-year-old who has just walked out on her boyfriend Jimmy, a drummer with a pop group. When Robert attempts to seduce Marion with his well-polished charm, he is taken aback by her practical intelligence and cynicism. At one point, when he uses his regular chat-up line, ‘My God, but you’re lovely’, she replies, ‘My God, but you’re corny’ (42). Although Marion is not really keen on sex with Robert, she wants to stay in his flat because Jimmy has been carrying on with another woman, Julie. So she accompanies Robert on a wine-tasting trip to France and, by the time they return, he is clearly smitten. Marion, however, remains cool. She soon finds out that Jimmy has missed her and she decides to move back in with him. Although Andrew suggests that Robert and Jimmy should share Marion’s affections, her heart is with the younger man. Robert loses out, but remains unperturbed, saying – to a mirror this time – ‘My God, but you’re lovely’ (68). This comedy was produced by Michael Codron, and opened at the Globe Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue on 15 June 1966.17 It ran for a record-breaking 2,547 performances. Directed by Robert Chetwyn, it starred Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) actor Donald Sinden as Robert, Royal Court actor Barbara Ferris as Marion, Jon Pertwee (a future Doctor Who) as Andrew and Clive Francis as Jimmy. The critics reacted favourably, although Peter Lewis in the Daily Mail commented that the Lord Chamberlain had thrown in the towel, and that ‘Sex is part of the British way of life to him now’.18 As an unsigned review in The Times argued, ‘Sparring matches between the switched-on girl and the square lover are a favourite spectacle’ in the West End, and the play was aided by Ferris’s ‘blend of erotic candour and classless Cockney assurance’.19 A Sunday Times advert for the play quotes the Daily Mirror: ‘The teaming up of suave Donald Sinden and saucy Barbara Ferris produces sparkling comedy. Together they fizz like champagne’, while the Sun wrote that ‘Audacious Barbara Ferris flashing her legs around like she was making semaphore signals, gives a slick, commercial play that extra dimension’.20 By November 1966, when the Queen and Prince Philip saw the play, it was ‘breaking all box-office records since it opened’.21 Frisby also wrote the screenplay of the 1970 film version, which starred Peter Sellers and Goldie Hawn. Frisby’s comedy is a well-made play, tightly constructed and full of pointed one-liners about sex and social mores. But it took a long time to get right. Originally titled Mr Danver’s Downfall, it was written for the BBC, but rejected because, in the words of the producer, ‘Well it’s quite glossy’ but ‘who in Sheffield for instance, who’d be interested in this food and wine expert living in Chelsea?’.22

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Codron took it up, but a disastrous initial reading forced Frisby to rewrite it completely. Director Chetwyn came up with the new title, condemned by many as too flippant, and Frisby continued doing evening rewrites throughout rehearsals while at the same time working on a BBC children’s television show. During the pre-West End tour, there were more frantic rewrites as both Sinden and Chetwyn contributed some lines. Also, there were some unexpected hitches: at Wolverhampton, the Mayor walked out on the first act because he thought the play was disgusting, although his wife apparently liked it. At one point, Sinden had to be persuaded not to explore Robert’s lines too deeply, but just play them straight – for laughs. At another, he developed the crowd-pleasing knack of cracking an egg with one hand in mid-air by the dexterous use of one of his thumbnails.23 In Nottingham he forgot to act the door slamming that gives him a black eye and thus made nonsense of the whole episode in what Codron calls ‘a grisly accident-jinxed performance’.24 In the same audience was John Perry, Binkie Beaumont’s lover and associate, and his verdict on the play was: ‘It’ll keep the Globe warm for six weeks’ (while the firm waited for Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple to come in from Broadway).25 It was a gross underestimate. Finally, the press night was almost a disaster because the June evening was hot and the theatre became unbearably stuff y. So during the second interval, Frisby, Chetwyn and the house manager ‘ran round and opened all the doors’ trying to fan as much fresh air in as possible.26 On that occasion, hardened first-nighters in the gallery booed the ending because the girl flouted tradition by not marrying the man.27 Despite these portents of doom, the play was a commercial success and earned Frisby £100,000 in its first year, going up to £120,000 as productions opened overseas. Investors got back £60 for every pound invested, an amazing profit. Most of the comedy comes from the sparring between the older Robert and the younger Marion. On stage the contrast between them – two such different bodies – pervades the whole show. Their conflict crosses three areas: sex, generation and class. Robert is a self-satisfied middle-aged upper-class man who loves himself to the exclusion of anyone else, and his vanity is exemplified by the final image of him addressing his catch phrase to a mirror. Andrew characterizes his friend’s mix of culinary interest and sexual predation: ‘You treat your sex life like a continuous wine tasting – roll ’em round and spit ’em out’ (6). But for all his confidence and avoidance of commitment, Robert meets his match in Marion. Shockingly for him, Marion is a young working-class woman whose attitude to sex is equally casual. She is younger, more attractive and cleverer than he. As Frisby says, ‘He was full of his own vanity and he was an absolute peacock and

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she was the needle, the pin, that pricked him again and again and that was the machinery of the comedy in the play’; she was ‘a sort of fatalistic, modern, everybody-wants-to-screw-me-and-I-don’t-care-if-they-do-or-they-don’t, that very much reflected that sort of girl then.’28 In terms of sex war, generational conflict and class antagonism, the giant-killing Marion wins on all three counts (the only thing she lacks is money). If the play had been a Restoration comedy Robert would be the archetypal fop and she the wit. The initial Act One skirmish offers a powerful image of sexual liberation, yet without feminist ideology. Marion not only grimaces whenever Robert attempts to chat her up, she also times his attempts at seduction in a parody of time-andmotion studies: ‘When you got me back here it took you nine minutes thirty two seconds’ (18) to mention sex, she says, then another twenty seconds to sit next to her. She also emphasizes Robert’s age: his chat reminds her of her father: ‘You’re quite Olde Worlde really, aren’t you? When you saw me snogging with Brian in the kitchen your face was a picture. A dirty one, too’ (18). And: ‘There’s always a bit of chat about sex before the actual pass. I suppose it’s to get you in the mood.’ ‘To get who in the mood?’ asks Robert. ‘The girl. You’re already in it. That’s why you mentioned about me snogging Brian. To jog my sexual memory’ (18). Robert is outmanoeuvred. Then he offers: ‘If I were to make a pass at you now, what would your reaction be?’ To which she replies: ‘Ha. Now you’re really playing it safe. You want to know the result before you’ve placed your bet’ (19). She perfectly understands the power game, adding a metaphor from economics: ‘Supply and demand, I suppose. When something’s in demand it’s a seller’s market. The person who’s got it is one up. I’m in demand and until I supply I’m one up’ (19). Later she argues: ‘If I go to bed with someone for nothing, that’s wasting my capital assets’ (31). But Marion’s ability to fence is not completely cold. When she describes the young crowd that she moves in, where men pass their girlfriends around among each other, she compares herself to ‘a tray of cakes – have a nibble – then pass it on. It’s not very nice – being passed around’ (22). By now, she’s crying, which encourages Robert to play the protective older man – for a while. Although it’s a comedy which makes spiky references to the sex war, the play inhabits a nevernever land where no one mentions contraception, nor sexually transmitted diseases, and there is little explicitness.29 There is a taste, subtle but recognizable, of loneliness and low self-esteem behind the sexual bravado of both Marion and Robert. The play makes several statements about youth and class. Marion comments that ‘Most of the fellas I know would have made a grab as we walked through the

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door. They’re too lazy to chat you up. They go around wearing jeans and all the tight gear, and you’re expected to have a good look at the goods’ (19). Later, Robert tells Andrew of his shock that Marion thinks that Brigitte Bardot is ‘an old woman’ (68). In 1966, she was thirty-two. John, a walk-on caricature who is Robert’s older working-class porter, spends his time ogling Robert’s conquests, saying things like, ‘Lovely legs on her.’ Adding, ‘And long, whawh, right up to her bum’ (6). The working-class Marion is even tougher on him than Robert, his patronizing boss. And although Robert’s wealth suggests enough leisure to explore a more languorous sexuality – including on the offstage wine-tasting trip – this is never dwelt on. Finally, there’s an echo of 1960s open-mindedness in the two occasions when polygamy is a plot point. In the first, Jimmy says that he would like to live with both Marion and Julie, sharing their sexual favours, and that since ‘most of the blokes I know are having it away with different birds’, so ‘I just want to get mine all under one roof ’ (39). Marion shouldn’t be upset because ‘Julie’d be company for her’ (39). Adding ‘With two of ’em to look after me they can cut the housework in half ’ (39). Needless to say, Marion finds the prospect of sharing Jimmy with Julie unappealing. Later, when Jimmy and Marion are reconciled, Andrew suggests that since ‘Robert isn’t going to live happily ever after without you. Why don’t you divide yourself up and make them both happy?’ (66). Marion points out that this was exactly Jimmy’s idea, ‘only the other way round’ (66), with two women instead of two men, only to find that Jimmy gets angry and ‘hauls her out of the flat’ (66). In popular theatre, the Swinging Sixties hadn’t quite got around to tackling sexual jealousy. Frisby probably got the polygamy idea from Joe Orton’s more subversive, if less popular, Entertaining Mr Sloane (Arts, 1964), in which the young Sloane is shared by the middle-aged siblings Kath and Ed. Of course, there’s also a distant echo of The Little Hut. The success of There’s a Girl in My Soup can be attributed not only to its humour, but also to the clever way in which it manages to appear to be of the moment, while making its radical representation of female independence palatable. In the end, Marion walks away, a gesture as decisive in its way as Nora’s slamming of the door in Henrik Ibsen’s The Doll’s House (1879). The show reflects the Swinging London atmosphere of the mid-1960s, while avoiding too explicit an articulation of casual sex. Because it’s a comedy, it is more about laughs than literary quality, and the emotional emptiness of both the main characters is alluded to, without being dwelt on. Laughter soothes away the contradictions. After the 1968 Theatres Act, as the censors made their exit, nudes made their entrances. On the day after censorship was abolished, 27 September 1968, the

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American tribal love-rock musical, Hair, opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre. Written by James Rado and Gerome Ragni, with music by Galt MacDermot, this was a youthful celebration of freedom and a protest against the Vietnam War. Although the hype promised nudity, the moment when the cast strip was short and discreetly lit. The Evening News headline complained: ‘The Orgy That Never Was’.30 The nudity, said critic Jeremy Kingston, was ‘intended neither to affront nor to turn us one and all into sex maniacs but expressing the gentle, earnest, pathetic attempt to recapture primal innocence.’31 Philip Hope-Wallace was less shocked by the nudity than by the lyrics of the song beginning ‘Sodomy, fellatio . . .’ while John Barber put its popularity down not to ‘a brief scene showing naked bodies – so dimly lit as to be hardly visible’, but to its representation of rebellious youth (as much of interest to parents as to youngsters).32 Hair ran for 1,999 performances. ‘In the first flush of freedom for nudity,’ said one author in the 1973 Theatre Review, ‘I believe it was indeed an attraction in itself.’33 One forgotten mega-hit of gay and lesbian theatre is Earl Wilson Jr’s Let My People Come (Regent Theatre, 1974), which played for 1,245 performances. Subtitled ‘A Sexual Musical’, it was created in New York by Wilson and director Phil Oesterman as a response to Oh! Calcutta!, which they regarded as smug and unrealistic in its exclusive attention to heterosexuality. Let My People Come embraced and celebrated a far wider range of sexual practices. And it was gloriously and unapologetically filthy too. Other plays about sex were frankly more reactionary. William Douglas Home’s The Secretary Bird, which clocked up 1,463 performances after opening at the Savoy in October 1968, is a traditional country house comedy about Hugh and Liz Walford, a middle-class married couple. In the opening minute, Hugh – played by Kenneth More – reveals that he knows that his wife has been having an affair. She confesses that she is in love with John, a thrice-married stockbroker Don Juan who is good in bed, explaining that she is ‘much younger than you are’ (7). She wants passion, while her older husband is content with a slower pace of life. He illustrates his view of sex: ‘I once knew a don at Oxford who couldn’t understand all the fuss about sex, as he said it only took place about three times a year’ (15). In order to keep Liz, Hugh invites John down to their home, as well as Molly, his young, promiscuous secretary, on the pretext that he will spend the night with her and thus provide his wife with legal grounds for divorce. Instead, he eventually manipulates Liz into staying with him. Critic Irving Wardle welcomed the play as a relief from avant-garde provocation: ‘Well,’ remarked a colleague of his, ‘it gives people a change from Hair.’ Wardle continued, tongue in cheek: ‘The Secretary Bird is a sex comedy, and I suppose it is the sort of thing the

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Open Space Theatre has in mind in its programme note this week on plays for “tired businessmen”’.34 The message of the play is to show ‘sex as the implacable enemy of marriage’.35 The Guardian also reviewed this ‘light comedy set in a lounge drawing room’, with its ‘faint whiff of the real P G Wodehouse world’, and concluded: ‘It is the sort of play many audiences enjoy.’36 Which only goes to show that, in the 1960s, not everyone was swinging.

Pyjama Tops (1969) Pornographer Paul Raymond is central to the history of popular theatre, and an excellent example of the British way of sex. Born Geoffrey Anthony Quinn in Liverpool in 1925, he and his siblings were brought up by his Roman Catholic mother after his father left the family. Finishing school at fifteen, he worked in the black market until called up during the war as a Bevin Boy. After deserting his post, he was conscripted into the RAF and ended up in entertainment. Then, having changed his name, he toured various vaudeville shows, including a stint as a mind-reader, before stumbling on the idea of producing nude shows. His crude formula was ‘the comic, the conjurer and the girl with her tits out’.37 Arriving in London in 1951 with 1s 6d in his pocket, the aspiring impresario was soon running several companies, and in 1958 he transformed Soho’s Doric Ballroom into the Raymond Revuebar, staging large-scale variety shows with nude tableaux and, after the abolition of censorship, striptease acts. Raymond’s skill lay in providing nudity without illegal obscenity. The key to his success was the realization that nude shows would do better business in the plush world of theatres, with a veneer of sophistication, than in seedy dives. He expanded his empire into property, pornography (magazines such as Men Only) and took over the legendary Windmill Theatre. By the 1970s, he was king of Soho soft-porn, and eventually clocked up forty years in the trade, ousting the Duke of Westminster as Britain’s richest man in 1992, with a burgeoning fortune of more than £1.5 billion.38 Aptly enough, it was a Raymond production which followed Brian Rix’s sixteen-year occupation of the Whitehall Theatre. This was Paul Raymond’s own version of Pyjama Tops (Whitehall, 1969), a mega-hit running for 2,498 performances. Adapted by Mawby Green and Ed Feilbert from Jean de Létraz’s 1944 French farce, Moumou, the English-language adaptation of this three-act play opened in Los Angeles in 1956 and had a short New York run in 1963.39 You can see why it had instant appeal for Raymond: on the first page of the playtext, young Claudine ‘comes bouncing’ onstage and

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‘bounces across the room’ – apparently, she ‘has a lot to bounce with’ (5). So much for the literary quality of the text. Green and Feilbert’s sex farce is full of puns, double entendres and breast jokes. Many of the other laughs are groan-worthy classics, like the one about ‘If you’ll walk this way . . .’ (41) or the variation on ‘from bed to verse’ (84). Its attempts at wit are scarcely more impressive: ‘Well, if a husband cheats on his wife first, he doesn’t look like a fool if she cheats on him later’ (15). Raymond’s version anglicized the names and changed the setting, the villa of fortysomething businessman George, from indoor living room to outdoor patio, adding the crucially important swimming pool. The play opens by establishing lothario George’s domestic set-up: Yvonne, his young wife, and Claudine, her young maid, who aspires to be a courtesan. George is often away on business, attempting to seduce the ostensibly single Barbara who lives in a nearby town. When Yvonne innocently invites her to stay, George persuades his old friend Leonard – nicknamed Moumou in the original – to play the role of Barbara’s husband. When her real husband, Jack, turns up, he is persuaded to play the part of the butler, called Leonard. Add a police inspector, Grindle, to the mix and soon the farce is cooking. At the climax, Leonard claims that he has been visited in the night by a woman, but because the lights were off he doesn’t know which one. What he can remember is that all she was wearing was a pyjama top: it turns out that Yvonne, Claudine and Barbara all just wear pyjama tops. Raymond turned this material into a spectacle. He boasted that he invested more than £25,000 to produce the show, building a 14ft-wide by 7ft-deep swimming pool with a transparent wall at a cost of £10,500. By trimming the text, adding a nude female swimmer to the cast, and providing more opportunities for the women to shed their clothes, he created a nightclub entertainment more like his Revuebar than a conventional play. As it says in the programme, ‘It is part of his own deliberate policy that attractive young girls in equally attractive miniuniforms greet his patrons.’40 During the two-month audition and rehearsal process, the Daily Telegraph reported that eighty actresses applied for four nude roles in the play, with Raymond quoted as saying, ‘Most of the those who applied were not show girls but highly experienced actresses, and a number were so thin that no matter how good they were as actresses it was just impossible. Some men like thin women, I know, but I have to think of entertainment.’41 The show was a late-night affair, with the curtain going up at 8.30pm and two shows (7.30 and 10pm) on Fridays and Saturdays. Patrons were allowed to smoke in the auditorium and this gave it the atmosphere of a nightclub. So confident was Raymond that he hiked prices by 50 per cent, with top seat prices rising

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from 27s. 6d. to 42s. Opening on 22 September 1969, Pyjama Tops was directed by Alexander Doré, and received a critical drubbing. John Barber said that it was ‘abysmal entertainment’ and that ‘the evening only proved, if it had to be proved, that not even the prettiest of naked ladies can save a poor play from being a bore’.42 Barry Norman confessed he was at a loss for words to describe how bad it was. ‘The main object of the evening is to present four girls in various stages of undress from bare breasts to bare all.’43 Still, the show’s commercial success was immune from criticism. The Evening Standard reported that, ‘in spite of harsh reviews, the [660-seat] Whitehall Theatre was packing them in’, with a ‘strangely mixed audience, largely middle-aged businessmen (the faithful from Soho strip?). Many had brought their wives.’44 After four months, the show repayed its costs. While its popularity was undiminished by negative reviews, Raymond was conscious of the adverse criticism. The programme note for the recast June 1970 version includes the statement: ‘He doesn’t place much stock in what the critics or professional type of playgoer think.’ And it adds, Pyjama Tops ‘is intended to be a light hearted romp where the girls lose their clothes instead of the boys their trousers’.45 Nor was the run entirely without incident. In December 1969 a performance had to be cancelled because all four leading ladies had caught ‘Hong Kong flu’: Raymond blamed their nightly swimming for their lowered immunity. In August 1970, twenty-five-year-old Julia Harrison, a former air stewardess and Playboy Club croupier, joined the cast as one of the nude swimmers. She stayed until 1974, soon becoming Raymond’s lover as well as an international porn star under a new name (Fiona Richmond). In 1974, power cuts caused by a miners’ strike disrupted this and other West End shows. But, despite such setbacks, Raymond’s verdict on Pyjama Tops was clear: ‘What the critics fail to realise was that while it may not be the greatest play ever written, it is a good night’s relaxed entertainment. People come up to me and say they have not had such a good escapist night for years.’46 The play earned him more than £800,000. The most trenchant criticism of the venture came from feminist playwright Michelene Wandor. In 1975, she wrote: ‘Far from being simply a consoling, lighthearted entertaining evening out, some very solid messages are being put across under the glamorous veneer.’ She argued that the show can only be understood as a complete experience: ‘The occasion is given an air of excitement, gloss, comfort and security.’ And this works. ‘The bars apparently do very well; Men Only apparently sells very well.’ Pointing out the contradiction between the well-dressed audience and the naked performers, Wandor argues that the plot of

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Pyjama Tops is ‘irrelevant’. What’s important is the message, which is ‘a sexual prurience that dismisses the possibility of anything except heterosexuality within marriage.’ Stereotypes rule: ‘The women are all shown as obsessed with fucking, the men are both terrified of, and excited by them.’ This ideology is exemplified especially by the camp performance of the Leonard character, who shows horror whenever a naked woman comes near him. ‘At one point his hand accidentally touches a naked female thigh and he “wipes” it off in mock-horror.’47 In the end, after a lot of nasty things are said about both men and women, this effeminate character is turned into a ‘real man’ by a night of sex. But the popularity of Pyjama Tops lay precisely in its conventionality. And in its reactionary ideology. At a time when the feminist challenge to traditional sexual relations was beginning to ripple through society, the play reasserted a vision of a world in which men were men. Men act, the evening asserts, while women strip. And this view had its stout defenders. Playwright John Osborne, who saw the show three times, called it ‘the best entertainment in London – a hundred minutes not wasted.’48 For people who were made uncomfortable by social change, especially by the redefinition of male and female roles, shows like this offered the consolations of tradition, clothing their prurience and vulgarity in a cloak of faux sophistication. While nakedness tended to carry the shock of the new, implying liberation, criticism from feminists and gay activists focused on the power relations behind the display. Sex became increasingly politicized. Yet the contradictions retained their own half-life. With its blatant nudity, Pyjama Tops was both overtly sexist and mildly liberatory. Raymond was also successful at his Windmill Theatre, where Let’s Get Laid (1974), written by Victor Spinetti, a veteran of the Theatre Royal Stratford East, clocked up 1,095 performances with its series of sketches about two innocents flat-sitting for a lothario (Richmond was joined by John Inman in the cast). The former publicized the show by riding naked on a horse down Shaftesbury Avenue, deliberately getting arrested. This was followed by Raymond’s Rip-Off (1976), a variety show featuring several modern dance numbers, which completed another 1,940 performances at the same venue. He also leased the Royalty theatre in 1970, where he staged Birds of a Feather, a £75,000 drag show extravaganza compered by Larry Grayson (who had also performed at Stratford East). It flopped, costing Raymond some £10,000. Next came The Bed, a sex comedy directed by Spinetti. It was similarly unpopular. After these disappointments, Raymond, ever the energetic showman, finally found a new entertainment for the Royalty that would match Pyjama Tops for popularity. It had an odd name: Oh! Calcutta!

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Oh! Calcutta! (1969) Oh! Calcutta! is perhaps the most notorious of the sex plays of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The paradox is that this hugely commercial venture – a mega-hit with 3,918 performances – was the brainchild of a highly intellectual theatre critic and literary manager who had spent his career extolling the virtues of state-subsidized theatre. His name was Kenneth Tynan. After a meteoric rise as a young and flamboyant Oxford-university penman, he served as the Observer’s critic from 1954 to 1963, and since then had been primarily employed as dramaturg at the new National Theatre. Ever since his adolescence, Tynan had courted controversy: as a schoolboy, during a debate on ‘This House Thinks the Present Generation Has Lost the Ability to Entertain Itself ’, he’d argued in favour of masturbation. Likewise, he’d achieved nationwide notoriety in 1965 when he became one of the first people to say ‘fuck’ on BBC television. By 1969, however, the 42-year-old’s star was well on the wane. He’d failed to convince Laurence Olivier and the board of the National to stage Rolf Hochhuth’s Soldiers, a controversial play that accused Winston Churchill of war crimes. And his record of discovering other new plays was patchy. But he was still determined to smash taboos and ruffle feathers. In the summer of 1966 Tynan had the idea of using ‘artistic means to achieve erotic stimulation’ by creating a show of sexually explicit sketches.49 He chose the title Oh! Calcutta! from a 1960 painting by the transgressive French artist Clovis Trouille, which shows a recumbent woman with her bum exposed, decorated with fortissimo symbols: the title of the picture is phonetically similar to the French phrase ‘Quel cul t’as’ (‘What an arse you’ve got’). In collaboration with producer Michael White and playwright Harold Pinter (who soon pulled out), he solicited contributions. Because of delays in the abolition of the Lord Chamberlain, he decided to avoid censorship by staging it in New York. Although based in London, he tried to keep control, for example by objecting to the American publicity campaign in which giant billboards of nudes on a screen outside the theatre resulted in protests from religious groups as well as distracted motorists crashing their cars. When the show, directed by Jacques Levy, finally opened on 17 June 1969, the critics, led by Clive Barnes of the New York Times, who called Tynan ‘dirty-minded’, hated the whole thing.50 But it proved phenomenally popular, running for 1,314 performances, with a further 5,959 in a 1976 Broadway revival. Although Tynan’s share was tiny, the show earned its investors a 600 per cent return over ten years.

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The revue – which consists of a hotchpotch of songs, sketches and dance pieces – began with Samuel Beckett’s Breath, which at about 40 seconds is the shortest play in history, and continued with the cast coming on stage in white robes before stripping off. The material was provided by Jules Feiffer, John Lennon, Edna O’Brien, Sam Shepard and Tynan (although, apart from Beckett, none of the pieces is ascribed to any specific author). Music was by Johnny Dankworth and design by pop artist Allen Jones. The sketches include Jack and Jill, a seduction scene which ends in rape; Will Answer All Sincere Replies, about a Kansas couple’s first experience of swinging; Delicious Indignities, a Victorian piece subtitled ‘The Deflowering of Helen Axminster’; One on One, a nude ‘funky country blues pas de deux’ (91); Rock Garden, in which a man talks about gardening, while his son tells him about his sex life; and Four in Hand, a brief skit on masturbation fantasies. The show ends with the naked all-singing cast lined up in a ‘“daisy chain” – belly to belly, back to belly, back to back, humping in rhythm to the blues rock’ (125). The London version of the play, directed by the RSC’s Clifford Williams, opened at the Roundhouse in July 1970 amid fears of being prosecuted for obscenity because of the numerous references to oral sex and sado-masochism. These fears proved groundless only because the Attorney General of Edward Heath’s newly elected Conservative government wanted to avoid an immediate conflict with the liberal press. The London version of the show had several changes: Beckett refused to give permission for Breath to be used as the Prologue on the grounds that Tynan had changed some of the text and added ‘naked people’ to the stage directions.51 The order of the sketches was changed and a new one called ‘The Empress’ New Clothes’, about the history of knickers, was added, with Tynan contributing some costume design ideas. (A 1970 Birmingham Evening Mail cartoon by Colin Whittock shows a couple leaving the show, with the husband saying, ‘I didn’t think much of the costumes.’)52 Another addition was ‘Until She Screams’, a sketch by Joe Orton about a sexually frustrated dowager and a butler with a radioactive penis (with references to abuse, incest and bestiality).53 Finally, a new sketch called ‘To His Black Mistress’, performed by Brenda Arnau, was added.54 Because the Roundhouse received state subsidy, the Arts Council was attacked for allowing ‘state handouts for filth’, the Archbishop of Canterbury called on Christians to mobilize against depravity, and the show helped stoke an anti-liberal backlash.55 But its popularity can be gauged by stories of £3 tickets being resold for £50, and although Tynan was denounced as a pornographer, White argued that the show had ‘a healthy effect on public consciousness’.56 Director Michael Blakemore, Tynan’s colleague at the National Theatre, agreed.57

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In September 1970 Oh! Calcutta! transferred to Paul Raymond’s Royalty Theatre. Unsurprisingly, the programme carried ads for the Raymond Revuebar and Men Only. In November, the cast threatened to strike if the theatre’s heating was not improved. Linda Marlowe said, ‘We’re blue enough already without being blue with cold.’58 After a bit of bluster, Raymond acquiesced, although some audience members complained that the super-heated atmosphere was ‘like the tropics’.59 During its long run, the show was seen by the high-minded Lord Longford, a 65-year-old Labour peer, Catholic convert, liberal prison reformer and naïve eccentric. He left at the interval and later said that the experience provoked him to start his anti-porn crusade. In January 1974, the show transferred to the Duchess Theatre, closing in 1980. Blakemore noted that the show’s clientele became ‘sleazier with each year of the run’.60 As intended, the event tested the freedoms granted by the abolition of stage censorship and succeeded in becoming a phenomenon: it claims to have played to over 80 million people in more than 140 cities in fifteen countries worldwide.61 The original London cast included Bill Macy, Linda Marlowe and Tony Booth (Cherie Blair’s father). Various attempts by moralists to stir up public outrage against the show came to nothing, yet reviews were lukewarm.62 Critic John Elsom later commented that although the show had aspirations to be transatlantic in its sensibility and have ‘Madison Avenue good taste’, its big-name team aroused critical expectations which it utterly failed to meet – it was a ‘complete disappointment’.63 Several critics pointed out that the best bit was the pas de deux, One on One, and that the general tone was unpleasantly chauvinistic. But its popularity grew regardless. In 1971, a Daily Mail article reported that it was a favourite with coach parties, and ‘was being seen by a coachload of young marrieds from a Southend council estate, old people from a Portsmouth social club, a factory outing from Biggleswade and a coachload of lorry drivers from Chelmsford’. There was some frisson at seeing Booth because of his role in the BBC’s Till Death Us Do Part, but most of the reactions were downbeat: one of the men interviewed said, ‘It was the women laughed most of all’, while one of the women said, ‘It was funny in some parts, but I wouldn’t go again.’64 Disturbingly enough, although not surprising given Tynan’s interest in sadism and his predilection for spanking, many of the sketches include elements of sexual violence (21, 54, 62–68, 105–9). There’s an inescapably nasty tone of archetypal sexism that clashes with the liberatory intent of the show. Michelene Wandor, who saw it in 1975, wrote: ‘The twin points are made again [as in Pyjama Tops]: firstly, the fact that sex dominates our lives, and secondly that it does so in impossibly problematic ways.’ While admiring the fact that Tynan’s show was

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‘better written, directed and presented’, having ‘relative theatrical sophistication’, Wandor points out its sexist bias: ‘the female rather than the male body is the butt of most of the genital jokes’ and ‘even the dances display the women’s bodies more than the men’s’. Although more sophisticated than an ordinary strip show, Oh! Calcutta! still positions its audiences as passive voyeurs, consumers of images of impossibly desirable people. These images obscure the reality of sexual relationships by promoting ‘the myth that the stereotype female is swooningly desirable and sexually insatiable – a convenient male double-think’.65 Audiences were sold not a cathartic belly laugh, but their own insecurities in a caricatured form, glossy, escapist, but also ugly. It is sex seen through the eyes of a men’s magazine.66 Few shows are as synonymous with an era as Oh! Calcutta!, a place where Soho sleaze met high art. On the one hand, it was radical enough to suggest the possibility of a kind of 1960s armchair liberation, the spectacle of sexual freedom; on the other, it was conventional enough not to scare away customers. This contradiction sums up its appeal: it offered stage images of liberation lite. And it’s a reminder of George Orwell’s point that ‘A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack upon morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion’.67 At the same time a lot of the show’s content proved the adage that, when sexual restraint is removed, the first result is misogyny. So the show’s main attraction was simple: White remembers American producer David Merrick, who once remarked, ‘Of course, half the people who go to the theatre just go for sex.’68 The show’s longevity proved him right.

No Sex Please, We’re British (1971) If a title can by itself summarize a whole sensibility then top marks must go to Anthony Marriott and Alistair Foot’s comic masterpiece. Even the punctuation, which throws the emphasis both on the ‘please’ and on the ‘British’, suggests a state of the erotic nation. Marriott, the play’s main author, was born in London in 1931, son of an army officer. His parents were stationed in India, so he was raised by grandparents. After studying at the Central School of Speech and Drama, he began his career as an actor, associated in the mid-1950s with the BBC Drama Repertory Company, before writing film, television and radio drama, as well as plays, often in collaboration with other writers. His West End debut, written with Foot, was Uproar in the House (Garrick, 1967), a farce about selling an unsuitable property, which was produced by Brian Rix, who transferred

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it to the Whitehall Theatre. Then followed No Sex Please, We’re British. He later collaborated with John Chapman on Shut Your Eyes and Think of England (Apollo, 1977), which starred Donald Sinden. Originally sporting the dismally downbeat title of The Secret Sex Life of a SubBranch Bank Manager, No Sex Please, We’re British is Britain’s most commercially successful comedy, running for more than sixteen years and 6,761 performances. After a three-month tour around the country, during which the show’s vital physical comedy was honed, it premiered at the Strand Theatre on 3 June 1971, shortly after the death from a heart attack of Marriott’s co-author, Foot. Later it transferred to the Garrick, finally closing on 5 September 1987. Ticket sales exceeded £8 million, although by the show’s tenth anniversary its producer, John Gale, said he had given up counting. The show’s investors received a staggering return of 6,000 per cent. The piece is a finely crafted British farce, a comedy which has enormous resonance because it explores anxieties not only about sex, but also about what our parents and bosses might think about us. Set in the living room of a flat which is located above a sub-branch of the fictional National United Bank in a ‘respectable town in the Thames Valley’ (1), the play opens with a breakfast scene in which Peter and Frances, who have been married for three-and-a-half weeks, prepare for the day: he is the bank’s manager and his mother, Eleanor, is coming to lunch. Things begin to go wrong when she arrives early, along with enough suitcases to suggest a prolonged stay. Then the post starts delivering consignments of pornography from the Scandinavian Import Company (Frances, eager to earn some money and thinking that the work would involve design goods, has unwisely answered an advert for a job in sales). First pornographic postcards arrive, then pornographic films and finally large pornographic books. As Peter and Frances frantically try to get rid of this material, they conscript Brian, a lowly bank clerk, to do the dirty work of disposing of it. And preventing the older, more straitlaced visitors – not only Eleanor, but also Mr Bromhead, the bank’s district manager, Mr Needham, a bank inspector, and Superintendent Paul of the local constabulary – from seeing it. Things reach a climax when Susan and Barbara, two prostitutes, arrive to help out. The first production, directed by Allan Davis, included Linda Thorson, a glamorous ex-Avengers star, as Frances, and launched the career of Michael Crawford, who was later to achieve fame as the accident-prone Frank Spencer in the BBC sitcom Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em. Much of the play’s success was down to his portrayal of the hopeless Brian, and the perfect timing of his physical comedy. Some of this involved the set’s wooden serving hatch which separates

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the kitchen from the living room: in true farcical style, the hatch has a mind of its own, frequently dropping down at inopportune moments. At one point, Brian gets his arm trapped by the hatch, and draws attention to his distress by twisting his fist around and knocking on it.69 At the show’s crowd-pleasing climax the now-trouserless Brian leaps headfirst through the hatch – just as it closes. There is also a wonderful sequence in which pornographic books are passed, with precise timing, between the characters, finally arriving at Brian, who has to hide them. This was so well performed that it got a round of applause every night. Another favourite moment was when a groggy Brian emerges, carried on the shoulders of one of the prostitutes, and is left hanging from a picture over the lintel when she goes through a door that is not tall enough to accommodate them both.70 When, after about a year, David Jason (later to play Del Boy in the BBC’s Only Fools and Horses) took over the role, he kept all of Crawford’s stage business and added some of his own comedy, which he called ‘business à la Jason’.71 In 1975, Andrew Sachs took on the role and reportedly said, ‘I draw blood at least once a fortnight, getting jammed between doors and so on.’72 Some critics vigorously attacked the show: Philip Hope-Wallace, for example, denounced its ‘total witlessness’.73 But many praised Crawford. John Barber said, ‘He has an astonishing acrobatic agility and can dive through a door, or frog-leap through a serving hatch, with the alacrity of a frightened bat’, while Colin Frame added, ‘With a forlorn expression, a pansy voice and a surprisingly athletic body Mr Crawford makes a real joy of his role.’74 Marriott and Foot’s very well-made comedy combines a touch of sexual titillation with a broad armful of farce. Its most hilarious moments are those in which their two straitlaced characters, Brian and Needham, are brought face-toface with the prostitutes. By using the device of a double sleeping draught, whose effects make both men whoozy, they create a handful of classic laughs in which Susan and Barbara pursue the men under the mistaken impression that they are their clients. Cue dropped trousers, deranged clothing and hectic rushing in and out of the set’s eight doors. It is at the height of one of these chases that an exasperated Needham utters the plea: ‘I can’t stand it any more. Ladies. Ladies. No sex, please – we’re British!’ (60). Marriott and Foot’s technique involves setting up audience expectations and then, rather slyly and gently, giving them a slight twist. The central trick in the first act is not showing any of the pornographic images. This means that the audience has to use its imagination to picture the apparently explicit material. When the first batch arrives, Frances and the hapless Brian open the package,

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and he exclaims, ‘Oh, my God! It’s a dirty photo!’ (12). He tries to hide this from Frances, who says, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Brian. They can’t be that bad.’ She has a look and adds, ‘Good lord, they are, too!’ And then she laughs (12). The idea that Continental pornography, this time from Scandinavia rather than France, is more shockingly explicit than any homegrown variety plays into notions of national character and national ideas about sexuality. Although the fictional export company embodies the stereotype of liberal Scandinavian sex laws (at a time when it was still illegal to send pornographic materials through the Royal Mail), the company is actually based in Hounslow and its head has a Greek name: Mr Nikolaides. But just as the audience is settling into the idea that explicit sex is some kind of Continental aberration, Susan and Barbara arrive, dressed in tartan and leopard-skin bikinis and wielding rubber sex toys. And they are both very English. At first, all the attitudes expressed – to sex, to marriage and to mothers-in-law – are highly conventional, even stereotypical, but Marriott and Foot realize that a little twist will add spice. So although Eleanor at first is the archetypal interfering mother-in-law, by the end of the play she is moving on, having fallen for Mr Bromhead, who now looks certain to become Peter’s stepfather as well as his boss. In fact, all of the respectable characters, paragons of authority, are revealed as customers of the sex industry: Bromhead is a regular client of Susan and Barbara; Superintendent Paul hosts stag nights where porn films are shown. The show also makes some contemporary references, about the new decimal currency, and several jokes about the arts. Arnold Goodman, chairman of the Arts Council, is name-checked in a joke about subsidy when Eleanor says that some ‘marvellous’ productions ‘lose an awful lot of that nice Lord Goodman’s money’ (44). Crucial to the plotting is Bromhead and Eleanor’s trip to see a West End show, Voices of Valhalla, and their early departure and return. It turns out to have been ‘disgusting’, with an opening number in which the cast were ‘prancing naked in the fjord’ (57–58). This satire on the new freedoms of the stage continues as the matronly Eleanor comments: ‘I still don’t see how they can call it a virile, contemporary musical when it’s full of effeminate Vikings’ (57). She then goes on to attack the permissive society: ‘Nobody ever says who gave them permission’ (58). Like the show’s attitude to class, and the smug pecking order of managers and inferiors (where the humble Brian has to clean up the mess of his superiors), this is blatantly conservative. Marriott believed the play’s success derived from ‘a Puritan streak in the British middle class’, which made it sympathetic to the show’s implicit moral

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disapproval of sexual pleasure, but also prurient about its suggestiveness.75 Its main audience was a mixture of middle-class people, often in coach parties from out of town, and American tourists, who, as John Gale pointed out, found it accessible and innocent. ‘If they’ve been out sightseeing all day it’s easy to watch.’76 By the time it ended its run, an American tourist told a reporter, ‘Leaving London without seeing it would be like missing Trafalgar Square or Buckingham Palace.’77 The title became a catchphrase, and one newspaper marked the final week with the headline ‘No Sex Please, We’re Finished’. The show was a popular success in more than fifty other countries, although it was unsuccessful in New York, closing after only six weeks in 1973. In the same year, a film version starring Ronnie Corbett, Arthur Lowe and Beryl Reid, was released. It’s easy to see why this farce was a massive success. For a start, it is more in the tradition of saucy seaside postcards and Carry On films than raunchy porn. Compared to Oh! Calcutta!, it is very clean: there is no swearing and the seminudity is hardly upsetting. It is a play that both amuses its audience with standard farcical situations, showing them the chaos of a world out of control, and then flatters them into feeling that they are grown up enough to discuss contemporary sexual mores without embarrassment. Its fantasy world is one in which no one is abused, or harmed by porn or prostitution. The reality of the sex industry remains firmly off stage. But perhaps the show also carries an unconscious frisson. As the Evening Standard said in 1978: ‘Perhaps the young couple are afraid, not only of what the neighbours will say, but of the subversive power of porn itself.’78 Perhaps. Some immensely popular plays took other approaches to sexuality. Starting in the 1970s, a number of playwrights – dubbed the new mainstream – had commercial West End successes with plays that challenged the ideologically driven state-ofthe-nation plays of the generation of 1968 radicals.79 They included Alan Ayckbourn, Michael Frayn, Christopher Hampton and Alan Bennett. Hampton’s surprise hit, The Philanthropist (Royal Court, 1970), ran for 1,114 performances at the Mayfair Theatre. Its central character, Philip, an Oxbridge don, thinks the best of everybody, but is so ineffectual that he wrecks his relationship with Celia, his fiancée, when he flaccidly agrees to spend the night with Araminta, a student. In keeping with the spirit of the times, she is portrayed as promiscuous, but troubled. Hampton gives her a backstory of abuse to explain, in pop psychology, her sexual liberality. She says, ‘They tell me I’m a classic case, because my uncle raped me when I was twelve’ (50).80 It is a line that has not aged well.

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But it is Tom Stoppard’s mega-hit Dirty Linen (1976) that offers the most satirical approach to changes in sexual mores. Written for Ed Berman’s Almost Free Theatre, in Soho, the play is about six MPs and a Home Secretary, who are members of the Select Committee on Promiscuity in High Places. They are investigating media reports of the low moral standards of politicians. Gradually, it emerges that Maddie Gotobed, their new secretary, has had sex with most of them, and during the course of the play she loses her clothes and poses as a pinup girl. As the MPs flounder in a cascade of double meanings, witty quips and wild illogicality, only Maddie keeps her head, arguing that they should ignore media reports of sex scandals: ‘The more you accuse them of malice and inaccuracy, the more you’re admitting that they’ve got a right to poke their noses into your private life’ (41). Written as a mix of highbrow comedy and low farce, Dirty Linen is – unusually for a mega-hit – a very literary play, and one that continually subverts expectations: the moralizing MPs turn out to be lechers, and the dumb blonde turns out to have more sense than any of them. Directed by Berman, it opened on 6 April 1976, with Peter Bowles as the committee chairman. Its lunchtime run enabled Bowles to appear in Alan Ayckbourn’s Absent Friends in the evenings. After that show closed, Dirty Linen transferred to the Arts Theatre on 16 June 1976. The press night was disrupted by ‘women’s rights’ activists who, remembers Bowles, ‘threw flour bombs at us’ because ‘they thought it sexist’.81 Male critics were more positive: John Barber called it ‘a new verbal meringue’ and praised its cleverness, while J. C. Trewin called it ‘Utter nonsense, of course; but brisk theatrical fun’.82 Celebrities who saw the show included John Cleese, who fell out of his seat laughing, Margot Fonteyn and Natalie Wood. As winter brought cold weather, Luan Peters (Maddie) once came on stage carrying a paraffin heater to keep her semi-naked body warm. In April 1977, Bowles asked Stoppard to change an allusion to Princess Anne and Mark Phillips (as subjects that help sell newspapers) because it made audiences uncomfortable (30). The playwright suggested Margaret Thatcher, but that got no better response so he asked the public for suggestions. Some two hundred ideas flooded in, with Prince Charles being the favourite.83 Another publicity stunt, which appeared in the Guardian, celebrated the show’s 1,000th performance by picturing Sally Farmiloe and Linda Regan, actor and understudy playing Maddie, putting on their knickers outside the theatre.84 Stunts apart, the political barbs of Dirty Linen are a reminder that theatre was a commercially successful part of the 1960s satire boom. The most influential classic of the genre, Beyond the Fringe, by Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller, had two London outings: at

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the Fortune in 1961, where it ran for 1,184 performances, and a revival at the May Fair Theatre in 1964, which ran for 1,016. The persistence in the popular mind of both sex comedy and traditional farce carried on well into the 1980s. Ray Cooney’s Run for Your Wife (1983) combined both and ran for an amazing total of 3,650 performances, starting at the Shaftesbury Theatre. The set-up is simple: John Smith, a London cabbie, has two households, one in Wimbledon and the other in Streatham, with two wives, Mary and Barbara. He keeps control by having a tight schedule. When he intervenes in a mugging, and ends up in hospital, his schedule gets out of kilter. With his friend Stanley he tries with increasing desperation to keep his wives apart, and to placate two police officers, who have been sent to interview him at his two separate addresses. Like Alan Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce, Cooney uses a divided set in which both households are visible. As the fun escalates, John claims that one of his wives is a transvestite and the other a nun, and pretends that Stanley is gay to a genuinely gay neighbour. Amid the crazy acceleration of the finale, when Mary begins to think she is trapped in a flat full to bursting point with gays and transvestites (in desperation she dares Barbara to ‘show us your boobs’), the two cops erroneously believe they’ve stumbled on a ‘porno place’ (74). Already old-fashioned in the 1980s, the predictable ‘limp wrist’ jokes (73) and homophobic attitudes were picked up and condemned by most critics. ‘The one miscalculation,’ said the Sunday Telegraph, ‘is the stereotype of a limpwristed dress maker’ while the Financial Times complained of ‘a quite nauseating accumulation of queer jokes’.85 John comes across as an archetypal bemused bigamist who clearly enjoys sex with both his wives, and although the play suggests that sex, transvestism and homosexual desire are just one big laugh, it also conveys the panicky feeling that our secret sexual desires might one day be exposed for all to see.86 By the mid-1980s, the main reason for the popularity of sex shows and nudity – the chance for men to ogle nude women – began to wane. Porn videos, porn DVDs, porn television channels and finally porn on the internet killed off the live performance as a source of salacious entertainment. As porn became domesticated, it seemed pointless to pay to catch a glimpse of buttock, nipple or pubic hair. Likewise, nude shows were increasingly challenged by feminism. After the initial scandal of Pyjama Tops and Oh! Calcutta! wore off, the megahits of the 1980s suggest a public appetite more for romance than for sex and nudity: the clearest example is Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Aspects of Love (Prince of Wales, 1989), which with its signature song ‘Love Changes Everything’, ran for

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1,325 performances. Yet even in the romantic sweep of Webber’s lush music the keynote is amorality and disruptive sexual desire: one critic described the musical as being ‘about the bed-hopping antics of an aristocratic Englishman, his French wife, Italian mistress, nephew and daughter’.87 Amusingly enough, the setting is France – just like all those 1950s plays about sex. In the next decade, the resounding failure of producer Michael White’s lipstick-lesbian rock musical, Voyeurz, in 1996, marked the end of an entire era. The titillation-seekers had finally abandoned British theatre.

4

Family: Traditional, Redemptive and Fractured

In popular theatre, family drama sells. On stage, there are few happy families, and audience interest is generated by showing unhappy families, the conflicts within a household. Family plays have to involve at least two generations, and they usually explore two types of tension: one is the balance of power between the parents, mother and father; the other is the generational struggle between the older family members and the younger ones. The archetypal situations involve either a tyrannical father or a domineering mother, with the figure of the overbearing mother-in-law being a standard traditional feature. Most families have a secret or secrets, which divides the characters into those who know the truth and those that don’t. The revelation of this secret, or lie, is inherently dramatic and provides the fuel for emotional change. While families in conflict are a staple of theatre, most of the popular plays of the early postwar period end with a show of reconciliation and redemption when a dictatorial parent sees the error of their ways. In these fictions, there’s a feeling of emotional healing and a very British sense of fair play. In the 1960s, there’s a gradual shift as sexual liberation puts increasing pressure on traditional families and, by the new millennium, there’s a further shift to stories in which families are shown to be riven with irreconcilable conflict. The stable family is superseded by the fractured family. During wartime, the most successful plays about the family were set in prewar times, and saw life through rose-tinted spectacles. Esther McCracken’s Quiet Weekend (Wyndham’s, 1941), which ran for 1,059 performances, is a good example.1 A sequel to her Quiet Wedding (Wyndham’s, 1938), which was a much more moderate success, this light comedy was produced by Howard Wyndham and Bronson Albery. In it, the upper-middle-class Arthur and Mildred Royd attempt to spend a quiet weekend in their spacious pre-war cottage in the English village of Throppleton, but surprise visits from family and friends keep interrupting them. A celebration of simple country pursuits, such as jam-making and fish-poaching, it has an idealized sense of community in which families, 83

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servants and neighbours can all co-exist together. Theatre World called it a ‘simple story of a united family’s peace time week-end’.2 In wartime, family unity was a potent metaphor for national unity. This idealized togetherness, however, is bought at the cost of various disagreements between the generations. At one point, Arthur asks rhetorically: ‘D’you think the week-end will ever come when we can have the place to ourselves for a change?’ (9). About eighteen months into its run, Tatler magazine ran a feature which explained the play’s middle-class appeal: ‘For just over two hours, it gives complete relief and relaxation from war and thoughts of war’, bringing back ‘nostalgic memories of week-ends in the country’ in a world now burdened with rationing. A large part of its success was due to repeat visits by audience members ‘ten visits being by no means phenomenal’.3 But if this play represented a feeling of wartime nostalgia for a memory of middle-class peace, the typical postwar family play was one in which the tensions of a working-class family are eased by a spirit of reconciliation, a kind of redemption that suggests the healing of wartime wounds (the experience of many families torn apart during the conflict).

‘Sailor, Beware!’ (1955) Philip King and Falkland Cary’s ‘Sailor, Beware!’ is one of the quintessential family plays of the postwar period. Opening at the Strand Theatre in the West End on 16 February 1955, it ran for 1,231 performances and is an example of a play whose purpose is the reconciliation of an archetypal conflict: new husband versus mother-in-law. With its question-begging title (is it the sailor who should beware, or us?), it explores the tensions arising from parental control of newlyweds and argues that a younger generation values independence from family ties above material rewards. Some of the original audience members would also have known that the play’s title was an echo of an American Second World War poster, designed by John Falter, in the ‘Loose talk can cost lives’ series. Showing a serviceman being embraced by a seductive woman, dressed in scarlet and with her blonde hair loose, its caption is ‘Sailor beware! Loose talk can cost lives’.4 Although the wartime anxiety was that ‘good-time girls’ would corrupt innocent army personnel, the play inverts this by showing how in peacetime innocent girls might be at risk from masterless men. Born in 1904, Philip King was a Yorkshire rep actor who collaborated with Irish playwright Falkland Cary, a former doctor, on five plays. He also wrote the farce See How They Run (1944), with its immortal line: ‘Sergeant, arrest most of

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these vicars!’. Like so many legendary lines, this one is not in the original text, which actually says: ‘Sergeant, arrest most of these people!’ (62). In the 1950s, King lived in Brighton and many of his plays were first put on in nearby Worthing by a local theatre company. So ‘Sailor, Beware!’ was first staged at the Connaught Theatre in Worthing, directed by Melville Gillam with a cast headed by Peggy Mount. It was seen there by impresario Jack Waller, who immediately decided to transfer it with the same cast to the Strand Theatre. Aged thirty-eight, Mount was delighted that, after eighteen years in the business, she was finally making her London debut. By the end of her long career, she was known as ‘the last of the time-honoured British battleaxes, equally at home in the broadest of farces or in Brecht’.5 Although King was snootily mocked by Observer critic Kenneth Tynan as ‘the sound journeyman playwright on whom we can depend while genius snoozes and the lunatic fringe has dandruff ’, the play grossed £525,000 from its three-year West End run.6 The popular film version, directed by Gordon Parry in 1956, saw Mount using her foghorn-voice to reprise her stage role. Set in the living room of the Hornetts’ house ‘in a small inland town’ (1), the plot concerns the respectable working-class household’s arrangement of the wedding, due the next day, of their daughter to an Able Seaman. The family is dominated by Emma, the loud and bossy wife of Henry, and mother of their daughter Shirley. Also living in the house is Edie, Henry’s sister, a single woman who was jilted at the altar some years previously and has never recovered from her Great Sorrow. She specializes in reading tea-leaves and making gloomy prognostications. Albert Tuffnell, Shirley’s fiancé, arrives, ready to marry her the next day, accompanied by fellow sailor Carnoustie Bligh, a Scot and his best man. While Carnoustie and Shirley’s cousin Daphne Pink, the chief bridesmaid, are attracted to each other, Albert – an orphan who has never known home life – doesn’t like the way Emma bullies Henry, Edie and Shirley. When Edie accidentally mentions plans for the couple to live in a house three doors away, Albert is angry because he hasn’t been consulted. He gives Shirley a chance to tell him, but she fails to do so. The next day, Albert doesn’t appear in church, and the Hornetts return home in distress. When he finally shows up, along with the Reverend Purefoy, who was to perform the ceremony, Albert explains that the example of Shirley’s family life, especially the fact that he wasn’t consulted about where the couple would live, has put him off. By the end, Emma is duly chastened, and all ends happily in contrition and reconciliation as Albert marries Shirley. As a picture of a respectable working-class family, ‘Sailor Beware!’ is unashamedly popular. The cliché of the bulky and overbearing mother-in-law

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and the image of the lost boy combine to create a family drama that is both instantly recognizable and has great resonance. Most of the critics loved it. Harold Hobson called it ‘a theatrical miracle’ while even Kenneth Tynan praised the dialogue as ‘authentic suburban poetry’.7 Milton Shulman commented that it presented ‘an encyclopedia of laughter’, marvelling how a show ‘with hardly an original thought or line’ is ‘a very funny play’.8 Everyone praised the star, Peggy Mount, who achieved success not with glamour, but with an imposing physique, terrific energy and sheer stage presence. The Tatler recorded that ‘Miss Mount sweeps through the performance, dominating it like an angry hurricane’ while actor Robin May recalled ‘the surge and thunder of Peggy Mount’, and Ivor Brown later remembered the show as thawing ‘London’s frozen February of 1955’, played by a company ‘mainly from Worthing’, who triumphantly revitalized the ‘old Ma-in-law joke’ so ‘that even those who sniff at any writing which is not either translated from a foreign tongue or so profound in its symbolism as to be completely unintelligible, withdrew their frowns and were compelled submissively to grin, if not vulgarly to guffaw’.9 Late in the run, Binkie Beaumont popped into the Strand Theatre and, during the interval, demanded to see the company manager. The show had deteriorated, he said, ‘the acting was tired and mechanical, the audience was bored and restless’. He demanded a rehearsal first thing in the morning. ‘But, Mr Beaumont,’ replied the manager, ‘I agree with every word you say but this is not your play.’ Really? No, it’s Jack Waller’s. ‘Well . . . that explains everything,’ said Beaumont and flounced off.10 Evidently he didn’t think much of his rival producer. Although matriarchal Emma arrives on stage as something of a clichéd harridan, dressed in a floral print housecoat, and described in one stage direction as ‘masterful and sharp tongued’ (1), King and Cary are at pains to humanize her. She is shown to be house proud, efficiently organizing the wedding, coping with Edie’s rather histrionic outpourings about her Great Sorrow, and generally managing all the family’s domestic business. As she says at the start, ‘There’s a lot to be done tonight, yet’ (2). In fact, the cosy visual image of this tidy workingclass home is central to the play’s meaning. And although she is a bossy character, she is often right: her husband Henry does show little interest in his daughter’s wedding. ‘Not a scrap of interest has he taken in Shirley’s wedding, he hasn’t. Left it all to me’ (6). In fact, Henry is more excited by the birth of six kits to Rosie, his pet ferret. Daphne’s youthful verdict on people like Emma, ‘That’s how they get their happiness – making everybody’s life a hell’ (45), is correct as far as it goes, but it doesn’t appreciate the fact that all the family members depend on her hard work, organizational skills and dutiful stoicism for a comfortable life.

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By contrast, Albert, the twenty-three-year-old clean-cut sailor, is an energetic and witty presence from his first appearance. He introduces himself to Daphne, the daughter of Emma’s sister, in this way: ‘I’m Albert. The bridegroom. You know, the human sacrifice’ (17). He is an orphan, a little boy lost, and does not feel at home in any family. Because he grew up in an orphanage, outside of a nuclear family, he is a figure of mystery and suspicion, especially given the reputation of sailors, a lad who Emma scornfully calls ‘poor sailor boy’ and ‘Jolly Jack Tar’ (70). Shirley romantically calls him ‘an orphan of the storm’ (29), but his own analysis is more down-to-earth: whenever he hears anyone talking about their homes, ‘it sort – of made me “homesick” for – for the home I never had’ (82). After the wedding, his plan is to ‘get away from the family’ so that the two lovers can get to know each other better (50). In this rom-com, their budding love has to overcome obstacles, but is at heart a thing of tenderness. For most of the play, marriage is seen in a negative light, with something resembling a resigned sigh. Henry says that it is Albert’s ‘last night of freedom’ before he ties the knot, which provokes his wife to comment: ‘Anyone would think he was going to prison, to hear you talk’ (31). When Carnoustie talks about the wedding, he calls it ‘going through the hoop’, as if it was an acrobatic trick (56). Emma’s advice to her daughter Shirley is simple: ‘You can’t reason with men. You’ve just got to train ’em’ (35). At another point, when Henry says, ‘It isn’t me that’s gettin’ married’, Emma mutters: ‘I wish it was – and to somebody else’ (60). When Emma finds her daughter Shirley crying after a tiff with Albert, she says icily, ‘If he has you crying your eyes out on your wedding eve, what’s he going to do when he’s been married to you for five years?’ (24). At the same time, there is a warm idealistic glow about the play’s ending. Before then, for light comic relief, there’s some jolly physical comedy, especially when Albert picks up the newly arrived Daphne’s suitcase and its lid falls open, spilling underwear on the floor. As the young people gather it up, Daphne ladders her stocking, draws up her skirt and embarrasses the rather shy Carnoustie. He picks up her bra and Shirley, arriving in the middle of this sequence, laughs and pretends that he is about to wear it: ‘It’s all right, Mr Bligh – you can finish dressing’ (21). Other moments of physical comedy include the rebelliously drunken Henry dancing a hornpipe around the room, flicking ornaments from the mantelpiece while Albert and Carnoustie try, often unsuccessfully, to catch them. The stereotypically hen-pecked husband becomes a worm that turns. The play’s ending, when Albert returns after failing to turn up to his own wedding ceremony, is staged with the middle-class Reverend Oliver Purefoy acting as a kind of family therapist. After asking the rest of the family and their

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nosy neighbour, Mrs Lack, to leave the room, he counsels the young couple, asking Albert why he jilted Shirley at the altar. Albert talks about being brought up in an orphanage – ‘So – I’ve never had any – real – “home life” ’ (82) – and about finding the Hornetts’ family life really off-putting. The final straw is not just that that Emma has put down a deposit on a house three doors away, but that Shirley didn’t tell him that her mother had done this. This is the explosive lie, the family secret, that threatens the young couple’s future. When Shirley admits she played a ‘dirty trick’, and was wrong not to tell him, the final reconciliation gets under way (83). Henry, who has been eavesdropping, comes in and advises Shirley to marry Albert but to live at a distance, while simultaneously proudly praising his wife: ‘She’s done a lot that I have to be thankful for’, keeping a good house and looking after him (85). Then Emma, who has also been eavesdropping, comes in: ‘They say listeners never hear any good of themselves – and I’ve been punished’ (86). She is contrite about ‘All the misery I’ve caused. Making Henry’s life a hell on earth’ (86). With the minister facilitating, and quietly admitting that he himself has a mother-in-law, her heartfelt confession of being a bully has a religious flavour and the family is healed through a moving mutual reconciliation. In 1955, ten years after the war, this crowd-pleasing redemptive feeling also suggests that a good family life can cure the pains of war. Once again, comedy soothes the troubled brow. But there were other ways of being popular. A hardy perennial in the 1950s and 1960s was the Whitehall farce. Ray Cooney, a member of Brian Rix’s virtuoso company, co-authored One for the Pot with Tony Hilton. The play, whose title with its reference to making a pot of tea is so British, ran for 1,221 performances at the Whitehall Theatre, from August 1961 until June 1964. The plot gave the family drama of inheritance a comical twist; old wheelchair bound Jonathan Hardcastle decides to give £10,000 to Hickory Wood, the son of a former associate who lost all his money to a bunch of spendthrift relatives, but on condition that he proves he is the only surviving relative so that no one can swindle him out of the cash. But Hickory has a twin brother. The twins, separated at birth, differ in class (one working class, the other posh), and then another twin brother arrives. The result was that Rix played several slightly different looking young men, and the farce takes off as he dashes on and off the stage in different guises.11 It’s a beautifully farcical account of an archetypal family secret – the unknown siblings. As the Whitehall theatre programme says, Rix’s credo was: ‘We are concerned with basic humour. We go back to the spirit of pantomime. We don’t have sex. That’s not our style.’12 What was popular was family

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entertainment. And as The Times rightly predicted, ‘The paying public will love it.’13

Spring and Port Wine (1965) Set in Bolton, Lancashire, Bill Naughton’s Spring and Port Wine is a classic Northern working-class family play. And it was clearly written from the heart. Born in Ireland in 1910, Naughton arrived in Bolton at the age of four. His father was a miner and Bill’s first job, at age fourteen, was in a mill. He then worked as a truck driver and coal bagger in the 1930s. On the outbreak of war, he became a conscientious objector and, starting in 1943, a prolific writer of novels, short stories, children’s books and plays. He specialized in working-class comedies, the most well-known of which is Alfie (1963), a story about an archetypal womanizer which was filmed twice (with Michael Caine in 1966 and Jude Law in 2004). His greatest West End success, Spring and Port Wine, was one of those plays that took constant rewriting before it reached perfection. It started off as a BBC radio play in 1957 with a different title, My Flesh, My Blood, one of the Saturday Night Theatre shows, and was then broadcast on BBC television in 1960 as a Sunday Night Play. In October 1959 a stage adaptation was presented at the Bolton Hippodrome. The story was then retitled Spring and Port Wine, and staged in Birmingham prior to opening at London’s Mermaid Theatre in November 1965, co-produced by Allan Davis (who also directed) and Memorial Enterprises, run by producer Michael Medwin and actor Albert Finney. Finney was crucial to its success: he used his contacts at the BBC to arrange a live television extract, with himself compering from a box in the theatre.14 In January 1966, after a recordbreaking run, it transferred to the Apollo Theatre, where it ran for another 1,236 performances.15 (It was later rewritten for an American audience, renamed Keep It in the Family and performed on Broadway in 1967.) In 1970, a film version by Peter Hammond starred James Mason. Spring and Port Wine is set in working-class Bolton, which, as the first production’s programme explains, ‘lies 11 miles north-west of Manchester’ and ‘is the centre of the fine-cotton spinning area of Lancashire’s textile industry’.16 Rafe Crompton is an experienced cotton-mill worker and union man, selfeducated, financially strict, an old-fashioned father who lives with his wife Daisy and their grown-up children: twentysomethings Florence (teacher) and Harold (mill worker), plus teenagers Hilda (weaver) and Wilfred (mechanic). Their visitors include Arthur, who wants to marry Florence and Betsy Jane, a neighbour

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who pops around to borrow money. Rafe has strong opinions, and insists on a family meal every Friday, when he checks his wife’s household accounts and collects the contributions of his children to the family kitty. When Hilda, his youngest daughter, turns up her nose at the pickled herring her mother serves, Rafe orders it to be offered to her at each meal until she eats it. In the end, Rafe relents while Hilda simultaneously submits, but Wilfred, her younger brother, has already fed the fish to the cat. The disappearance of the herring leads Rafe to hold an inquisition, complete with Bible oath. He wants to prove his point, but when Wilfred collapses because of the pressure, his other children are horrified and resolve to leave home. Hilda plans to go to London, while Florence will marry Arthur. The crisis is smoothed over because Rafe softens, the children realize that he can be kind, and that they need their family. Reviews stressed the warmth of Naughton’s picture of family life, with some comparing it to Harold Brighouse’s 1916 Salford-set classic, Hobson’s Choice. The unsigned review in The Times said: ‘As a Boltonian I can vouch for the accuracy of all of this’: the family meals, with their ‘solid meat teas and prying neighbours’.17 Not only was the rhythm of the dialogue authentic, but this well-made play was well plotted. Clearly this was only achieved after a lot of hard work, and the Daily Mail correctly pointed out that a ‘deleted character [Tony] in the programme suggests there has been a good deal of last-minute tinkering’.18 The Evening Standard thought the play’s ‘moralising is as thick as clog boots and its homilies are as obvious as its accent’, but that its authenticity saved the day, as ‘it boldly plugs the merits of home, family, loyalty and thrift’. Indeed, the audience ‘lapped it up’, which ‘indicates that there is still a future for plays with an unabashed faith in the simple virtues’.19 The Guardian critic recorded that the audience kept ‘breaking out in applause – annoying to the superior person but providing irrefutable evidence that feelings were being played on successfully’.20 Other reviews praised Alfred Marks’s performance as the bluff, blunt and direct Rafe and noted the West End debut of John Alderton, who gave a witty performance as the cynical older son Harold. More generally, J. W. Lambert pointed out that, in the wake of the controversy about violence in Edward Bond’s Saved, ‘it would be possible’ for Naughton to ‘rewrite this play (or any of his plays) in the manner of Saved’. They were, after all, working-class stories and controversy was good for ticket sales. But if he had done so it would be a betrayal of the ‘basic goodwill’ of his vision.21 The play’s image of the northern working-class family, in the era of the more matriarchal Coronation Street (which was first broadcast on ITV in December 1960), is traditional and patriarchal, with Daisy clearly subordinate to Rafe, and

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its plot is powered by a tug of wills, especially between Rafe and Hilda. Although the father is a man of firm standards, it is clear that not only Hilda, but Harold as well are starting to question them, if not yet openly. Hilda’s puckish gesture of defiance, in refusing to eat the herring, is such a shock to the family that they debate its cause, concluding that it is a mixture of reasons: her boyfriend Donald has left her, she’s been drinking port wine at a works party – and it’s spring. Hence the play’s title. Hilda’s rebellion also precipitates the generational conflict, and eventually raises the more serious question – as both Rafe and Daisy, the troubled parents, acknowledge – that she might be pregnant. Near the end of the play, while Rafe and Daisy renew their mutual understanding, he mentions that ‘something’s been troubling me all weekend’ about ‘our Hilda’. ‘Now think back’, he says, talking about fish, ‘wasn’t there a certain time when you went off them?’ And then: ‘I mean when you were pregnant’. Although Daisy admits that this idea ‘has crossed my mind’, she says she’s ‘shut it out’ (63). That this dreaded social catastrophe is averted is down to Naughton’s rather sentimental view of family reconciliation – after Rafe proclaims that ‘I’ll see to it the child is born under my roof and not in some dump in London’, the subject is quietly dropped (63). This deliberate ambiguity means that the pregnancy is the family secret that never was. An unexploded bomb. The strict figure of Rafe the father dominates the play. With his sayings – ‘Money can be a good servant – but a very poor master’ (14) and his vision of family life: a home that is ‘not just a furnished place to live in, but a home, mark you, with some culture’ (16) – Rafe has opinions that seem to come straight from Richard Hoggart’s enormously influential The Uses of Literacy (1957), a partly autobiographical and partly sociological enquiry that evokes the working-class culture of pre-war Leeds. Like Hoggart, Rafe, who remembers the Hunger Marches of the 1930s, regrets the passing of a working-class culture built on solidarity and true community feeling. He values classical music – Handel’s Messiah – and enjoys singing songs around the family piano. The first thing he does when he gets in from work is to turn off the telly. His view of Hilda’s Weekend magazine, with its headline ‘Teenagers’ night of sex and drugs’ is that the publication is ‘trash’ and ‘muck’ (11). He is nostalgic about what Florence calls ‘lovely concerts at St Saviour’s Hall’, and is sorry that the town has become ‘a hive of bingo halls and bettin’ shops’ (42). When he has a chance to see a performance of the Messiah, he compares this live event to a televised version: ‘Seeing’s nothing – hearing’s nothing. It’s the participation. You’ve got to enter into the Messiah’: a live performance transports you into a ‘new world’ (58). His view is that ‘people are starved in their souls’ and ‘it breaks my heart to see what moral decay a bit of

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prosperity brings with it’ (42), and, again like Hoggart, he looks back to a time when ‘the old and the young shared a world in common’ (40). If Rafe sets the standards for family life, it is Daisy, his wife, who does most of the work. Naughton highlights the economic difficulties of working-class families by stressing Daisy’s problems with managing the housekeeping money. She has to present accounts to Rafe every week, and this means chasing her neighbour, Betsy Jane, who by contrast is depicted as always borrowing money. When Betsy Jane fails to repay her debt, and Hilda needs money for her trip to London, Daisy has to resort to desperate measures: she lets Betsy Jane break open Rafe’s desk and then pawn his new coat, his pride and joy. But when Rafe discovers this, he is not angry, but sad that his wife didn’t trust him enough to confide in him, a situation that reminds him of the relationship between his own father and mother. The first reconciliation of the evening is thus between husband and wife. Before this happens, various negative ideas about family life have to get an airing. When Rafe forces Wilfred to swear on the Bible, and he collapses, Hilda calls her father a ‘brute’ and walks out with a door slam, saying ‘I’ll never come back to this rotten prison’ (47). This sentiment is echoed by Rafe at the end of the play when he says ‘A home can be a prison where there isn’t love’ (73). Likewise, Arthur, the prospective son-in-law, has to stand up to Rafe, protesting against his actions, calling him a ‘bully’ and a ‘tyrant’ (48). Although the courage of this impresses Daisy, she does not share her neighbour Betsy Jane’s poor view of men: ‘Damn fools, men. You can tell ’em anything. I always feel it’s a pity to tell ’em the truth’ (53). Although patriarchal Rafe’s intransigence precipitates the mass walkout of his children, he is also responsible for the play’s harmonious resolution.22 When he realizes how serious the situation has become, he allows himself to show a softer side, cleverly manipulating his children into thinking that he is leaving home, and allowing them to move out whenever they want. ‘Think of the freedom! How I envy you all! I only wish I could leave home!’ After all, he says: ‘I’m only human – I wasn’t born married’ (69). When he ‘smells rebellion in the air’, his mission is ‘to protect the young from themselves’ (63). This works because at the end of the play his children all acknowledge that, in Arthur’s words, ‘there’s any God’s amount of love in this house!’ and Daisy is left to conclude: ‘Happen we’re a funny lot’ and ‘But when you get down to it, what family isn’t?’ (73). After the revelation of several family secrets – about the fish, the money and the coat – a play that began by showing a family in conflict finishes by affirming family virtues. The tyrannical father is revealed to be the protective father, and the home

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as a kind of eternal haven. It is a deeply affectionate view of family, who are tactile and friendly, with a profound sense of belonging as well a sense of rootedness in a Lancashire way of life. During the late 1950s, the female point of view about family life was gradually becoming more evident. Scottish playwright Lesley Storm, pen-name of Mabel Cowie, had already had a moderate success with the crime play Black Chiffon (Westminster, 1949), a psychological thriller about a dysfunctional family, when her comedy Roar Like a Dove (Phoenix, 1957) was staged. It clocked up 1,007 performances, with the BBC broadcasting an extract in March 1958.23 Set in the library of Dungavel Castle, a farm in the Western Highlands, this tartan romcom is about Lord Dungavel and Emma, his spirited twenty-nine-year-old American wife. She has produced six daughters, and longs for a wider social life, while he is still determined to have a male heir. Her father’s solution is to invite Lord Dungavel’s young cousin Bernard, hoping he will become the heir. This doesn’t work because he is a fay aesthete with a horror of farming so Emma takes her kids, and her mother, to America, leaving both her husband and her father. In the end they are all reconciled, with the women getting better terms in their relationships, and Emma gives birth to a son symbolically on Christmas Day. To roar like a dove, Storm argues, is not to rant ineffectually, but to negotiate the terms of your marriage with intelligence and wit. The play was so popular, critic J. C. Trewin pointed out, because it ‘is largely about women’s duties and women’s rights’.24 Another critic described the play as ‘a kind of fertility rite’.25 At a time when British theatre was dominated by Angry Young Men, Storm’s plays were particularly successful with women. As the years passed, female playwrights saw traditional family arrangements as increasingly problematic. And in the 1960s the family play began seeking new ways of portraying the strain placed on traditional relationships by new ideas about sexual liberation.

The Man Most Likely To . . . (1968) A typical example of this is Joyce Rayburn’s The Man Most Likely To . . . (Vaudeville, 1968), a 1,023-performance success which was advertised in the third year of its time in the West End with a poster showing a mini-skirted young woman, arms akimbo and legs apart, standing above a reclining older male. She is teenage Shirley, and he is fiftysomething Victor, the father of her boyfriend. As an image it not only sums up the Swinging Sixties, but suggests an inversion of

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the traditional balance of power between older men and younger women. Females, it implies, are now taking the initiative. A strapline boasts: ‘Already seen by over a million people in London alone.’26 West End success apart, not much is known about the playwright, who had a cluster of comedies produced in the 1960s and early 1970s, and then vanished from sight. But the play’s main attraction, Leslie Phillips, was well on his way to becoming a household name. By 1968, Phillips – who funded, directed and starred in the first production – was an established West End, film and television star who specialized in upper-class twits and whose trademark silky voice could whisper chat-up lines that were both seductive and amusing. His particular way of purring the greeting ‘Hello’ has been much imitated, and provided the title for his autobiography. In it, he tells the story of The Man Most Likely To . . .. He’d been sent a script by ‘novice playwright’ Rayburn, and appreciated its potential despite its ‘substantial flaws’, so he and producer Henry Sherwood went down to the Theatre Royal, Windsor, to see the play’s first run in November 1967.27 Sherwood thought the play was ‘terrible’, but Phillips glimpsed its potential: ‘Yes, I know, but it’s got the germ of an idea that could be very commercial.’28 The next day, Phillips rang Rayburn’s agent offering to option the play if he was allowed to rewrite it. At first, Rayburn wasn’t keen, but within a week the allure of the West End proved too hard to resist. Phillips and his lover Caroline Mortimer, the daughter of writers Penelope and John Mortimer, then spent some time bashing the play into shape. Rayburn accepted the changes, but disagreed with Phillips’s choice of Ciaran Madden, an attractive actress straight out of RADA, for the part of Shirley. (Phillips’s first choice had been Angela Scoular, who had played the role in Windsor, but she had already committed to the part of Carol in the 1968 West End revival of Peter Shaffer’s Black Comedy.) Phillips insisted on Madden, and, after some acrimony, Rayburn gave in. In spring 1968, on the regional tour prior to its West End opening, the play was a success with Phillips’s loyal fans (at the York Theatre Royal every performance sold out three weeks in advance). During the tour, Madden, according to Phillips, once tried to seduce him. Apparently, he protested: ‘Do you seriously think the only way to get on in this business is to drop your knickers?’ ‘Why – isn’t it?’ she replied.29 He resisted temptation, and, although he admired the energy of her acting, he wasn’t blind to her faults, especially her poor timekeeping. Once, with ten minutes to go before curtain up for a matinee, he had to ring her hotel to get her out of bed. She’d simply overslept. But she rushed out, grabbed a taxi, managed to arrive on time, gave a ‘zingy performance’ and the audience simply ‘loved her’.30

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After much re-writing, The Man Most Likely To . . . retained its awkward if memorable title, and its debt to plays such as Terence Frisby’s There’s a Girl in My Soup. It is set in the lounge of Victor Cadwallader’s country cottage in Berkshire, which he, a successful industrialist, shares with his wife Joan. The couple frequently host Martin, a civil servant and former boyfriend of hers who loves cooking. When Victor and Joan’s son, Giles, a nineteen-year-old drifter, comes to stay for a weekend, he brings his Yorkshire-born eighteen-year-old girlfriend Shirley. Father and son don’t get on, and this is the first time he has been home for six months. When he is delayed because his motorbike breaks down, Shirley goes on ahead and meets Victor. Their flirtatious encounter is interrupted by Joan and Martin, who mistake the young woman for one of Victor’s extramarital flings. The misunderstanding is fixed when Giles arrives, but another misapprehension follows: in the middle of the night, Shirley leaves Giles in his bedroom and comes down to sleep in the lounge, where Victor is still up. In a farcical mix up, he refuses her advances but then returns, by which time his son has taken her place. In the resulting commotion, Joan lets slip that Giles is not really Victor’s son. So a conflict about sexuality turns into a conflict about paternity (is Giles the son of Martin?) before everything is resolved, more or less. The play opened at the Vaudeville on 4 July 1968. Reviews were generally hostile, mainly because it was seen as an old-fashioned sex-comedy, a well-made play complete with French windows. Among the critics there was a stampede to attack the show’s implausibilities, its clichés and its jokes. Barry Norman commented ‘Old friends I welcome, old jokes I tend to cut dead’ while Eric Shorter said that the play exemplified ‘the indulgent undemanding and uninspiring style of old light comedy which basically depends on nothing happening at all’, and that although ‘Phillips is a comedian of resource, charm and an admirable sense of timing he cannot disguise the play’s essential silliness’.31 One female critic’s review, Phillips remembers, was headlined: ‘Oh, Leslie, why did you do it?’.32 But Madden’s debut was widely praised and eventually the public came in. Phillips, who – in order to nurse the production – took no salary for the first four months, managed to get an excerpt screened on BBC television, and that improved box office. During the run, the Vaudeville theatre, owned by Peter Saunders, was being renovated and the cast had to work in conditions that were not ideal.33 On stage, meanwhile, Phillips accidentally discovered a piece of comic business which livened up the play’s ending. Wearing a short dressing gown, he scratched his behind, inadvertently exposing a bare buttock. The audience howled with laughter, although Saunders, who could be prudish, thought it was gratuitous and threatened to take the play off. In the end, he was

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persuaded to see the play again and agreed that the incident was funny rather than lewd, and it stayed in the show.34 In May 1969, Phillips decided he needed a holiday and instead of getting a stand-in for a fortnight, closed the show for two weeks to give the whole cast a rest. After 665 performances, he left the production to make a film and his place was taken by Jack Watling in March 1970. Watling was an old acquaintance who had created the role of Teddy Graham in the original 1942 production of Terence Rattigan’s Flare Path. After the Vaudeville run, Phillips revived the show at the Duke of York’s theatre in March 1973, where it ran for another 700 performances. The Man Most Likely To . . . clearly had a place in his heart: over the next two decades, in between other jobs, he toured the play to South Africa (attracting criticism because this defied the embargo on cultural exchanges with the Apartheid regime), Australia, the Middle East and the Far East. He played the part so often that Victor became his alter ego. And whatever the play’s shortcomings in terms of originality, it does give a timely picture of family life in the late 1960s. At the start of Act Two, Victor and Joan discuss changing sexual mores. She is puzzled by the argumentative name-calling and aggression of Giles and Shirley, and he mansplains: ‘It’s the new, trendy, swinging sixties love-talk’ (21). Both parents are taken aback that the youngsters want to share a bed, without being married, a legal status which Giles calls ‘some archaic ceremony’ and dismisses as ‘the formalities’ (23). Giles perceives that the older generation’s disapproval is based on jealousy: ‘Because the last generation were so frustrated, they can’t bear to see us getting any fun’ (23). His statement that ‘The whole concept of sin is out. Fini. Kaput’ (24) underlines the generational shift in ideas. If these attitudes to sex were newish, the relations between father and son were traditional. Early on, Martin comes up with a good image of Victor and Giles’s arguments: ‘two stags with their antlers locked in the age-old combat’ (6). Later, Victor explains Martin’s role in the family set-up: ‘He enjoys family life without any of the responsibilities. He sits on the sidelines making mental notes of my failings and thinking what a magnificent husband and father he would have been’ (12). But although Victor and Joan seem to be out of touch with Giles’s Swinging Sixties attitudes, they both care about his well-being. Victor, as his name suggests, is used to getting his own way: he is a rude, argumentative and self-confident Don Juan. The play’s title suggests that this suave philanderer is most likely to succeed. What’s less appealing, especially in a play written by a woman, is Joan’s resignation to her husband’s infidelities. Although at one point she complains that life is unfair because ‘he’s in favour of

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love, liberty and licence for himself, but I’m expected to toe the line’ (46), her usual tone is one of submission. She characterizes Victor as ‘simply promiscuous’ (47). This picture of a shaky marriage is balanced by a lively portrait of Shirley as a highly acute young woman who instantly understands that she is attractive to men. When she arrives, with a bright ‘hallo’, this budding femme fatale immediately takes off her motorbike gear to reveal ‘a dolly dress’ (8); as Victor politely turns away, she says, ‘It’s all right. You can look’ (8). When Victor realizes that she is Giles’s girlfriend, she says, ‘Don’t look so downcast, as if it ruled out all further possibilities’ (8). Moments later she ‘looks at him in a meaningful way’ and says that ‘the spark. Instant ignition’ (9) has taken place – they are attracted to each other. And indeed their flirtatious and comic rapport continues throughout the play. The main plot revelation – the questioning of Giles’s paternity – is a metaphor for the shakiness of contemporary marriage. After all, the institution of marriage is meant to guarantee legitimacy, and provide a state of stability and certainty. Rayburn subverts this image through the comic device of putting Giles’s parentage in doubt. Suddenly, nothing is certain; the family has to rethink its own history. Rayburn also questions the idea that marriage is threatened by Victor’s infidelity by showing that actually it is undermined by Joan’s apparent fling with Martin. It is female faithlessness and not masculine philandering that puts Victor’s fatherhood in doubt, sowing comic confusion along the way. If the question of paternity that is the worm in the bud of this family turns out in fact not to exist, it still retains its usefulness as a MacGuffin. The ending is a false reconciliation: although Victor is ‘the man most likely to’ (49) be Giles’s father, and Joan asks him to forgive her ‘awful joke’ (53) about his paternity, he continues in his old ways, manipulating the departure of his wife, son and Martin in order to have Shirley to himself. Depending on its stage images of an old couple which contrasts with a young couple, and especially its fantasy of an older lothario and a feisty young woman, The Man Most Likely To . . . offered an audience experience whose mildness appealed mainly to those who, in the words of critic Eric Shorter, ‘want their social and sexual prejudices comfortably confirmed’.35 In the 1970s, there were plenty of mega-hits about sex, but comparatively few about the family. Occasionally, however, there were glimpses of misery. For example, Simon Gray’s Otherwise Engaged (Queen’s, 1975), which achieved 1,029 performances, came up with a potent picture of family life in crisis: a successful but solitary publisher, Simon Hench, at his smart London address is alone on

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stage with his Scotch and a new recording of Wagner’s Parsifal. Although he wants to be alone, he keeps being interrupted. At one point, he has an excruciating meeting with his resentful brother; at another, his wife tells him she’s leaving him. The fact that the couple are childless is another indicator of the crisis in this disintegrating family.36 But the stage image of a psychologically armoured solitude, as English as the public-school education of the main character, is a visible index of a damaged masculinity whose future is less than certain. Lower down the social scale, the master of lower-middle-class family angst is Alan Ayckbourn. But although his website states that: ‘Alan had an extraordinary presence in London’s theatre-land for 30 years with more than 40 productions of his plays in major London venues’, his work never managed to break the singlerun 1,000-performance barrier.37 Still, his plays have been revived all over the country so often by professional and amateur companies that, in 1983, the Arts Council said that between 1981 and 1983 there had been 1,034 professional productions of his work in the UK playing to 327,000 people (compared to 1,060 professional Shakespeare productions performed to 318,000 people). This led The Stage newspaper to report that ‘Alan Ayckbourn had upstaged William Shakespeare to take top billing in the first regional theatre popularity charts’.38 Certainly, Ayckbourn is routinely cited as Britain’s most produced living playwright. His biggest West End successes include How the Other Half Loves (Lyric, 1970), Absurd Person Singular (Criterion, 1973), Bedroom Farce (Prince of Wales, 1978), The Norman Conquests trilogy (Globe, 1974) and A Chorus of Disapproval (Lyric, 1986). Even when these plays include more than one generation, they are not about families so much as about dysfunctional couples. These quintessentially English comedies are about unhappy marriages and usually end up with sex being off the agenda. In the absence of family plays, recent musicals have taken up the theme of generational tensions. Catherine Johnson’s Mamma Mia! (Prince Edward, 1999), for example, is typical of 1990s British drama in that it pictures, however joyously, a dysfunctional family. Sophie, daughter of single mother Donna and engaged to Sky, wants to know who her father is. She discovers there are three possible men – Sam, Bill and Harry – and invites all of them to her wedding. So the musical provides a vivid image of a lone feminist mother, a spirited daughter and three fathers – no nuclear family in sight. In the end, no one knows who the real father is and Sophie’s wedding is called off (although her mother marries Sam). Mamma Mia! can be seen as a chick pop opera, created by women – writer Catherine Johnson, director Phyllida Lloyd and producer Judy Craymer – and a great example of the ‘good night out for the girls’. Other examples of this genre include

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Eleanor Bergstein’s mega-hit Dirty Dancing (Aldwych, 2006), as well as less successful shows such as Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Palace, 2009), Legally Blonde the Musical (Savoy, 2009), Calendar Girls (Noël Coward, 2009) and Flashdance: The Musical (Shaftesbury, 2010).39 Advertised as ‘the prefect ticket for a feel-good night out’, Mamma Mia! has the wonderful sense of a holiday in the Med, glorying in the music of ABBA and, incidentally, reminding audiences of 1970s utopian feminism.40 It became a real phenomenon, with fourteen different language versions and audience numbers in excess of 40 million, a tribute to Lloyd’s intention to create ‘an extraordinarily festive, witty, ironic’ show of ‘pure pleasure’.41 It’s another example of how uncertain paternity is a symbol of an untraditional, yet in this case reasonably happy, family.42 It is also something of a hymn to single motherhood, and, for many, an expression of sheer joy.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2012) If Mamma Mia! triumphantly demonstrates the possibilities of single motherhood, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (National, 2012) illustrates the problems of single fathers. By the new millennium, the idea of the good family – a safe place which, despite its problems, could be warmed by the glow of reconciliation – was definitely passé. Instead, the image of the troubled family, riven by conflict and split by irreconcilable differences, came to dominate British stages. A good example is this show, Simon Stephens’s thrilling adaptation of Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel about Christopher Boone, a fifteen-year-old boy who is ‘a mathematician with some behavioural difficulties’.43 It came about because playwright and novelist met at the National Theatre Studio, where both had short residencies. Haddon invited Stephens to adapt his book, and the playwright agreed, completing the work without a commission. He then showed it to director Marianne Elliott, who helped convince the National’s boss, Nicholas Hytner, to stage it. First performed in August 2012, 26,000 people watched it during its run, with a remarkable further 73,000 seeing the show in cinemas as a result of the NT Live project of broadcasting productions.44 The show transferred to the Apollo Theatre in the West End from 12 March 2013 and won a record seven Olivier awards in that year (equalling the number that Matilda the Musical garnered in 2012). But not everything went smoothly. During the performance on 19 December 2013, the old Edwardian theatre’s ceiling collapsed, which resulted in the closure of the production and its reopening on 9 July 2014 at the nearby Gielgud Theatre, where it ran for another three years.

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The story is about the teenage Christopher who lives with his father Ed in Swindon, after the sudden death of his mother. He has behavioural problems, but is exceptional at maths and fascinated by astronomy. He has a pet rat, Toby, and loves dogs. One night, he discovers the body of Wellington, a dog belonging to their neighbour Mrs Shears. The animal has been killed with a garden fork and left on the lawn. He decides to find out who committed this crime. But Ed is unhappy with his son’s meddling in the grown-up world and asks him to stop his detective work. When Christopher ignores him, he confiscates the book in which his son is recording events. This provokes Christopher to search the house, and to discover letters that prove that Judy, his mother, is not dead, but has left her husband and is now living in London with Roger, the husband of Mrs Shears. Despite his behavioural difficulties, Christopher confronts his father, who has been having an affair with Mrs Shears since his wife and her husband left them. After an argument with Mrs Shears, his father killed her dog. Shocked, and afraid for his own safety, Christopher makes the journey to London, and finds his mother Judy, and Roger. After staying with them for a while, he achieves his ambition of sitting his A-Level maths exam early and is finally reconciled to his father, who gives him a puppy. What is striking about the National’s production, directed by Elliott and designed by Bunny Christie, is its sheer theatrical virtuosity. Imagine a dark bare stage as a blue-lit box criss-crossed with a graph-paper grid, and lights that suggest neural pathways, with numbers scattering across the ground and in the sky glowing stars forming the Zodiac constellations. On this visually powerful background, Christopher’s thoughts are scribbled, his routes through panic attacks, as well as unwelcome images from the outside world. He draws on the floor with chalk, builds a model railway and grabs props from trapdoors. Whenever things get too much for him, as on his train journey to London and on the Underground system, blinding lights flash and the music roars. It is visually spectacular, highly emotional but not at all literary. With movement by physical theatre company Frantic Assembly, the play came alive thanks to Luke Treadaway’s performance as Christopher, along with a supporting cast that included Nicola Walker (Judy), Niamh Cusack (Siobhan, Christopher’s special needs teacher) and Paul Ritter (Ed). In Stephens’s version, the first-person narrative of the novel is replaced by Siobhan – who is a kind of educational fairy godmother – reading from Christopher’s book, a diary in which he records his investigation. This framing device, along with Siobhan’s magical desire to turn the story into a play, allows for plenty of meta-theatrical moments, all of which give the narrative a forward

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thrust and increase its emotional intensity. Instead of the original book’s appendix, in which Christopher writes his solution to a difficult maths problem, Stephens’s adaptation has the boy return to the stage after the curtain call to demonstrate his solution on stage. It’s a superb theatrical moment in a production that buzzes with energy. The critics responded positively. Henry Hitchings, for example, enjoyed the theatricality of the show and pointed out that ‘Stephens exults in imagining misfits – in all their sincerity and weirdness’, while Andrzej Lukowski described Treadaway’s performance as ‘astonishing’, noting ‘his ramrod straight posture, nervously twitching hands and high, precise voice’, making the character seem ‘strange, funny, brave and sympathetic’ if also a bit ‘pitiless’.45 Michael Billington recorded that although ‘last night it was greeted with a great roar of approval’, he was not completely enthusiastic: ‘I flinch from manipulative touches such as miniaturised trains and a live dog: two things calculated to send audiences into swooning raptures’.46 Although the figure of Christopher is usually seen as a teen who has Asperger’s syndrome, or high-functioning autism, in the original book Haddon declines to label him. He didn’t want to make it too easy to dismiss him as a medical case study. And Stephens also leaves his condition vague. Instead, Christopher is represented both as an archetypal savant and as a highly individual boy, who doesn’t like being touched, gets distressed by too much noise, hates the colour yellow, and has what one critic calls ‘a relentlessly singular view of reality’.47 He finds numbers easy, but people difficult. He says he never lies, and explains that he distrusts metaphors because they are not literally true. His instinctive truthtelling is a neat contrast to the more fuzzy morality of adult life, and provides humorous as well as incisive moments. He is brilliant at maths, highly observant and constantly thoughtful. When the policeman arrives at the start of the show, Christopher notices the ‘big orange leaf stuck to the bottom of his shoe which was poking out from one side’ (4). When he speaks to Reverend Peters, an incidental character, he discusses the location of heaven, trying to square it with his knowledge of astronomy. At his special school, he is disparaging of the other pupils: ‘All the other children at my school are stupid. Except I’m not meant to call them stupid, even though that is what they are’ (27). When he undertakes his epic journey to London, he is brave and resourceful, despite his anxiety due to never having travelled by train on his own. The play is Christopher’s journey of self-discovery, self-definition and self-realization: a solitary coming of age story, with a questing narrative attached (his journey to find his mother). At the end, his question to Siobhan, ‘Does that mean I can do anything?’ (99), is both a tentative assertion of his progress and a warmhearted statement of hope.

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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is also a drama about family life in contemporary Britain. When, at the start of the play, Christopher is arrested, suspected of having killed Wellington, the duty sergeant at the police station asks him about his family. He replies, ‘Father and Mother but Mother’s dead. And also Uncle Terry who is in Sunderland’ (8), and then enumerates his grandparents. On a more everyday level, his relationship with his father illustrates some typical parent–teen dynamics, with Ed insisting on obedience and Christopher evading his father’s injunctions. Ed is often bad tempered, but is there for his son when it matters most. When Christopher moves from Swindon to London, to stay with his mother, the strains of family life are once again emphasized. Judy has left home, but, as her letters show, she still loves Christopher. Both pictures of family life, the single-parent household and the mother and step-father home, are shown as challenging, but realistic. They are also the stuff of daily life, created from the normal stresses of everyone’s parenthood. Christopher’s family changes as he discovers the truth, and one of the things he finds most challenging is change. Because he can’t stand to be touched, Christopher connects with both parents by stretching out his hand and touching all five fingers – on stage this tender moment looks like a metaphor for the fragility of his family life. As the title of the play suggests, this is a Sherlock Holmes story of detection, and the twist is that the solution of the murder mystery (who killed Wellington?) is intimately entwined with the family drama (both of Christopher’s parents have relationships with Mr and Mrs Shears). The rage of Ed, which results in the death of the dog, is the accumulation of the conflicts that have characterized his marriage, and the demands of bringing up Christopher have intensified these tensions. Fierce arguments also underline the idea that the family is a dangerous place. During his detective work, Christopher notes that ‘most murders are committed by someone who is known to the victim. In fact, you are most likely to murdered by a member of your own family on Christmas Day’ (21), and he correctly deduces that Wellington has been killed ‘by someone known to him’ (21). When he discovers that this person is not Mr Shears, but his father, he no longer feels safe, and runs away from his home. There is something very English about the fact that Christopher not only sees the killing of a dog as a terrible crime, but feels that it endangers him. Anyone who kills a dog in England is a danger to everyone else.48 Clearly, Christopher’s condition is a metaphor for how hard it is to love and to connect with any family members. As Nicholas Hytner says, ‘one of the play’s many new perspectives was its acknowledgement of how difficult Christopher

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was to live with. It asked us to identify with his parents’ mistakes, the collapse of their marriage, his mother’s disappearance, his father’s violence and dishonesty.’49 If families are built around lies, with parents keeping secrets from children, from each other, and vice versa, then the play uses the suspense of the detective story to uncover those secrets and, by doing so, expose the truth.50 Secrets are protected by lies, so Christopher’s compulsive truth-telling puts the whole idea of the family into question. The play’s popularity is due to the fact that it asks its audiences to enjoy the visual spectacle of its lighting, music and movement effects, while simultaneously appreciating how uncomfortable Christopher’s life is, and how hard it must be to love someone who doesn’t really know how to love. By the end of the play, his fractured family is partially healed: Judy, who puts Christopher before Roger without hesitation, has the chance to renew their relationship; Ed is reconciled with his son. As well as the production’s wonderful video projections, the play is vividly theatrical, with most of the cast doubling as members of the ensemble, who add density to the show by being bystanders or, for example, crowding around Christopher with envelopes in their hands when he discovers the cache of letters. This, says Stephens, is ‘fundamental’ to audience enjoyment of the evening because ‘it acknowledges the imagined and the make-believe’ and indeed the play, like War Horse, is a ‘celebration of the imaginary’ – it is a ‘delight’.51 Such delight suggests that, in the fictional world of theatre, even fractured families can find a touch of redemption. If most mega-hits struggle to show the complexities of contemporary family life, they can at least succeed in producing powerful images of emotional conflict.

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5

Class: Musical, Parodic and Political

One key aspect of British national identity is class. Class is alive in British people’s minds even when they are told that they are living in a classless society. It is how the British understand their society. It is us. Whether we see class as an elaborate hierarchy (hereditary ranks, ancestry, accent, dress, profession and lifestyle) or a triad (upper, middle and lower) or as a simple polarized confrontation (us and them), it is a powerful part of the popular imagination. In theatre, George Bernard Shaw’s refashioning of the Pygmalion myth, in which the artist falls in love with his creation, is all about class: in British culture, the upper-class male creator sculpts the lower-class female creation into an artificial, but convincing, model of a classy woman. Most mega-hits about class picture either a Romeoand-Juliet-style romance in which an upper-class girl falls for a lower-class boy, or stage the fantasy that a lower-class child turns out to be upper-class after all: in fairy tale terms the low-class ugly duckling turns into the upper-class swan. Musicals about class have produced some of the greatest West End mega-hits. One turning point in the history of postwar popular theatre is the arrival of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (Drury Lane, 1947), with its tale of the frontier conflict between cowmen and farmers. From its gloriously optimistic opening song to the anthem title number (staged by choreographer Agnes de Mille with the cast singing straight at the audience from the front of the stage), its ebullient music and its innovative technique of using songs and dance to tell the story captured the imagination of British audiences, who responded wholeheartedly to its spectacle. Its songs span the emotions from comic flirtation (I Cain’t Say No’) to wry romance (‘People Will Say We’re in Love) and macabre fantasy (‘Pore Jud Is Daid’), and its content is fuelled by sex, desire and passion. There is violent obsession as well as innocent flirting; porn as well as sunshine; the stench of decay as well as the perfume of love. In 1947 it was both revelatory and highly entertaining, bringing an irrepressible joy and undeniable glamour to the London stage. One account recorded that the press night audience refused to go home, ‘clapping away and shouting and whistling, 105

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increasingly clamant for more’.1 Critic Beverley Baxter explained its appeal to war-weary, ‘undernourished, over-taxed, ill-clad’ Brits. It was ‘a sub-conscious realisation of the unbounded, unexpended vitality of this new world power’.2 Oklahoma! ran for 1,543 performances and was the first of a wave of Broadway musicals to delight postwar audiences. By summer 1950, West End theatre programmes were advertising the show, saying ‘Seen by 2½ million at Drury Lane’ and ‘heard by 10 million on the radio’.3 While American musicals gave vigorous accounts of new frontiers, their English counterparts were set in more debonair, class-ridden and nostalgic milieus. Old Harrovian Sandy Wilson’s The Boy Friend (Wyndham’s, 1954) is an archetypal upper-class girl meets lower-class boy story, and its first production ran for 2,084 performances. In Wilson’s words, it was ‘a loving salute to those faroff days of the cloche hat and the short skirt, a valentine from one postwar period to another’.4 Set in Madame Dubonnet’s School for Young Ladies in the South of France in the 1920s, the plot explores posh girl Polly’s love for Tony, a mere errand boy. In order not to discourage him, Polly pretends to be poor. By the end, it turns out that Tony is actually the son of Lord and Lady Brockhurst, and has left home to make his own way in the world. When Polly reveals her deception, the two rich kids are free to marry. With its memorably romantic and wryly humorous songs, such as ‘I Could be Happy with You’ and ‘Room in Bloomsbury’, it is refreshingly idealistic: when Tony sings ‘A life of wealth does not appeal to me at all/ Do you agree at all?’, Polly says, ‘I do’, and when he says, ‘The mere idea of living in a palace is/ So full of fallacies’, she responds: ‘That’s true’. Not for the first time, or the last, class privilege is banished by love. It is, after all, fiction. The show’s massive success was captured by critic John Barber’s first night report: ‘The audience at Wyndham’s Theatre last night clapped everything everybody did. And at the end the roar that that went up scared me. It reminded me of the end of the war.’5 The most exemplary entertainment about class is, of course, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s My Fair Lady (Drury Lane, 1958). This musical version of George Bernard Shaw’s classic Pygmalion (His Majesty’s, 1914) ran for five and a half years (2,281 performances). Having been a huge hit on Broadway, it repeated its success in the West End, being the first show for which people had to book six months ahead.6 Eagerly anticipated for years, due mainly to the availability of the Broadway cast recording, it was rapturously celebrated. Punch commented: ‘It is so gloriously certain of itself that it can afford to combine gentleness with clash of class, and social satire with neat high spirits.’7 The media went crazy, with hundreds of articles about its stars – Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews and Stanley

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Holloway – as well as about its effects on fashion: Cecil Beaton’s black-and-white Ascot scenes were melodies for the eye. Tatler described the moment when Eliza masters the phrase ‘The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain’ as a ‘miracle’ while The Times praised the show’s wit and ‘pointed mockery of period social distinctions’.8 In the same year, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s West Side Story (Her Majesty’s, 1958) was that rare beast, a contemporary musical about the working class. It shows the tensions within working-class communities, especially among teenagers (adults are few and far between). Set in Manhattan its update on Romeo and Juliet features the tensions between two migrant communities, Polish New Yorkers and the more recently arrived Puerto Ricans. As the teen gangs from the two communities face off, Bernstein’s music (both edgy and glorious), Sondheim’s words (satirical and lyrical) were boosted by Jerome Robbins’s streetwise choreography. ‘America’ is the definitive song about migration, ‘Gee, Officer Krupke’ explores juvenile delinquency in a way that is still relevant, and ‘I Feel Pretty’ is sheer joy, while the romantic numbers ‘One Hand, One Heart’ and ‘Maria’ elevate teen love to the condition of religion. At the end, the tentative truce between the two gangs soberly suggests that tensions within the working class are hard to resolve. West Side Story ran for 1,040 performances in London. When it opened, the Daily Telegraph ran an article which asked, in the words of its headline, ‘Does Stage Violence Really Have So Serious an Effect on Children?’, before reassuring its readers, while another article reported from New York on the social conditions of ‘The Real “West Side Story” ’.9 By contrast, Lionel Bart’s Oliver! (New, 1960) is a superlative example of the rags to riches archetype, in which a low-class boy is finally recognized as an upper-class youth, an almost magical transformation. One of those rare turning points, when the British musical suddenly seemed to be both socially relevant and enormously popular, this adaptation of Dickens’s Oliver Twist reached 2,618 performances, and another 1,152 in a 1977 revival (produced by Cameron Mackintosh at the Albery, the same but now renamed venue as its original outing, and using the same set). With his experience of being an East-End Jewish boy, and then working at Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Royal Stratford East, Bart – along with director Peter Coe and designer Sean Kenny – created a Brechtian-style musical in which the set, made of solid timber, gave the whole show an ominously dark colour palette. Reinvigorating the popular cultural imagination by adapting Dickens’s parable of childhood injustice, Bart created an iconic example of Englishness that both condemned Victorian attitudes to poverty and exemplified

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1960s aspirations to social mobility. It implicitly argues that crime is a reasonable response to the exploitation of the working classes, and offered a warning from history in the gradually escalating climate of strike action that characterized the decade.10 This was working-class entertainment that redefined the notion of popular culture. Opening on 30 June 1960, Oliver! boasted a brilliant score – ‘Food, Glorious Food’, ‘Consider Yourself ’, ‘You’ve Got To Pick a Pocket or Two’, ‘I’d Do Anything’, ‘As Long as He Needs Me’ and ‘Reviewing the Situation’ – full of memorable tunes that were moving as well as charming, conveying a touch of music-hall nostalgia. With a singing style that uses pub singalong as well as raucous belted notes, this was an entertainment which ransacked working-class cultural styles and changed the British musical for ever.11 Donald Albery invested about £15,000 in the show, and after the first night did a ticket-agency deal worth £22,000, while Bart got £700,000 for the film rights within a month.12 Ron Moody as Fagin created a career-defining performance, its archetypal features praised in the Daily Mail as ‘a Jewish Santa Claus, with touches of Popeye, Peter Sellers and Grock’, ‘a dustbin Boris Goudunov [sic], a kitchen-sink Rasputin’, while the murder of Nancy was particularly scary.13 Reviews noted that, like the book on which it is based, the musical has moments that are both wonderfully melodramatic and heartfelt (offering a rather sanitized version of Victorian underclass life). Critic Robert Tanitch concludes: ‘Fagin was sentimentalized too much; but the musical’s broad humour and broad pathos complemented Dickens perfectly.’14 In the new world of welfare, past indigence could seem charming and Oliver! showed a world of painless poverty where crime is a game. It was popular because it is fun, but also because it showed audiences that life had improved for ordinary people, that progress was possible.

Charlie Girl (1965) If Oliver! represents a highpoint of genius, the same cannot, alas, be said about John Taylor and David Heneker’s Charlie Girl. Still, it is a good example of a Romeo and Juliet musical in which the lovers come from different social classes. This warmhearted if tonally unoriginal story opened at the Adelphi Theatre on 15 December 1965 and ran for more than five years, clocking up 2,202 performances. Taylor and Heneker wrote the music and lyrics, and the book was by Hugh and Margaret Williams, with a bit of help from Ray Cooney, all based on a story by Ross Taylor. This was a team of tried-and-tested veterans. Born in 1906,

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Heneker had had a career as a soldier, reaching the rank of brigadier, before becoming a singer at the Embassy Club and writing popular songs. After the Second World War, he enjoyed success with the musicals Expresso Bongo (1958), Irma La Douce (1958) and Half a Sixpence (1963). These were satirical, socially critical and class-conscious.15 Two years older than Heneker, Hugh Williams was an actor with more than fifty British film credits, as well as working as a playwright, collaborating with his second wife Margaret on dramas such as The Grass Is Greener (St Martin’s, 1956). Born in 1932, Cooney was the junior collaborator. The show’s cast included Joe Brown (Cockney entertainer voted top UK vocal personality by NME in 1962), Anna Neagle (glamorous film actress who specialized in historical roles) and Derek Nimmo (archetypal upper-class twit). Charlie Girl was brought to life by producer Harold Fielding, a supremo of family entertainment who, having staged Half a Sixpence with Tommy Steele successfully in the West End and Broadway, was looking for another hit featuring a middle-of-the-road pop star. The concept of the show, however, was originally that of another producer, Larry Parnes, who presented seaside summer shows at Great Yarmouth starring Joe Brown, a pop star capable of bridging the generation gap. Brown also played Buttons in Parnes’s Christmas show, Cinderella. Its success gave Parnes the idea of making a musical which set the Cinderella story in the Swinging Sixties, and subverted the traditional class ending by having Buttons, instead of the Prince, win Cinderella’s hand. Cooney was to write the book, but when Fielding took over the project, he brought Anna Neagle into the show, downplayed the farcical elements and got the Williamses in to write the storyline. Although reviews were poor, the show was a mega-hit, with Neagle eventually replaced by Evelyn Laye, a musical theatre veteran who later also starred in No Sex Please, We’re British, and Brown by Gerry Marsden, lead singer of the Merseybeat band Gerry and the Pacemakers. When Variety magazine described the show as a ‘disastrous flop’, Fielding sued for libel and got £15,000 damages in October 1966.16 The show’s advance booking was so healthy that, in 1966, he put prices in decimal currency on its billboards, five years before the currency became legal tender. During the run, in 1969, Neagle was created a dame and on the day of this announcement her curtain call was taken to the tune of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘There’s Nothing Like a Dame’, with the audience joining the cast in singing. When the musical’s run ended it had been seen by 1,500,000 people and taken £2,400,000 at the box office.17 In Charlie Girl, the widowed Lady Hadwell and her daughters (the ladies Penelope, Fiona and Charlotte aka Charlie) have fallen on tough times and run

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Hadwell Hall, their stately home, as a visitor attraction with a private zoo and donkey rides. Helping them is Joe Studholme, a young lower-class manager. With their cut-glass accents, Penelope and Fiona act as guides, but tomboy Charlie prefers to work as a mechanic in the vintage car museum. Charlie is seeking love: when the right man comes along she knows that bells will ring. But if Joe is crazy about Charlie, he is unable to express his feelings. Class is a barrier. Things are not improved when, in a rags to riches moment, he gets a surprise win on the pools: he thinks that, now that he’s rich, Charlie will feel obliged to marry him not for love, but in order to save the family fortunes. Then the American Kay Connor, an oil heiress and Lady Hadwell’s friend from the days when they were both chorus girls, arrives, along with her playboy son Jack. Mrs Connor wants Jack to marry a titled, classy English girl, one of her old friend’s daughters, although he isn’t keen on marriage. To celebrate their visit, Lady Hadwell decides to throw a ball. When Charlie – who likes the look of Jack – realizes that she doesn’t have a dress to wear to the occasion, Joe helps her hire one. As the party starts, her dazzling costume arrives and she is transformed from an ugly duckling into a princess. When midnight comes, however, it is time to return the hired dress. Unfazed, Charlie simply takes it off and carries on as if nothing has happened, clad in her underwear. The other girls decide to undress as well – and create a new fashion. But while Charlie discovers that no bells ring when she kisses the suave Jack, they do when she kisses Joe. Charlie finds true love, and Hadwell Hall is saved. If Charlie is Cinderella, a young woman who does get to go to the ball, she is also an image of female independence. A bit of a tomboy, she prefers cars to clothes, and condemns the way her sisters approach love: ‘My darling sisters, with due respects,/ Love, to you, means S-E-X’ (18). But apart from her confidence that love will arrive to the sound of bells ringing, we don’t find out much about her character. Yet she does manage to completely invert the stereotype of the fairytale romance: instead of choosing the American Prince Charming (Jack) she plumps for the working-class Mr Ordinary (Joe). And, as proof of her independence, it is she who suggests that Joe should kiss her. Joe, painfully tongue-tied in the presence of the girl he loves, is an example of vulnerable masculinity. At first, his view of Charlie is ‘The girl with glasses, with oil on her face,/ The girl with hair all over the place’ (25). He might think she’s ‘great and wonderful’, but admits he’s a ‘tongue-tied, awkward kind of a fella’ (26). In the song ‘I ’Ates Money’, he is uncomfortable with his unexpected windfall and wants to ‘give it away to anyone you can find’ because ‘people ’oo are short of it [money]/ Get by’ (92). His idea of social mobility is summed up during the ‘Fish and Chips’

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song, which became a Cockney standard. The song tells the story of his Uncle ’Enry, who had a fish and chip in the High Street that was so popular people ‘flocked to Uncle’s like it was a football ground’ (139), but mainly because of his ability to sing. His fame spreads and he gets a record contract (very 1960s) and gigs at the Albert Hall. But he keeps his shop open, and his clientele now includes ‘eleven Ministers an’ one MP/ Dukes and their Duchesses in numbers quite enormous’ (143–44). In the opening number, ‘The Most Ancestral Home of All’, the parlous state of Lady Hadwell and her daughters is summed up by the offer ‘For an extra fee/ Visitors can see the family/ While they dine!’ (13). The English Lady Hadwell and the American Mrs Connor – both former performers in the musicals of impresario C. B. Cochran – contemplate an alliance between the youngsters of both families.18 It is a classic transatlantic exchange: Lady H. says, ‘You’ve got the cash, dear’, to which Mrs C. says, ‘You’ve got the class’ (58). Class, in both senses of the word, is hereditary: ‘I’ve got the blue blood,’ says Lady Hadwell simply (58). The highpoint of the production was the fabulous ball scene, illustrated in souvenir programmes with full-page pictures of the female cast members wearing underwear, both contemporary (knickers) and retro (bloomers). As the dance turns into a 1960s twist, the marriage of past and present is complete. At the end, Lady H. cries, ‘Isn’t everything absolutely flippin’ well marvelous’, a nice mixture of upper-class and Cockney idiom, and Joe is accepted as the low-class, but rich and warmhearted saviour of the family. Despite the fun, the critics were merciless: ‘This harmless trash,’ wrote Bernard Levin, sneering at the set’s mix of architectural styles, ‘is somewhere between perfectly frightful and dead ’orrible’.19 Other critics said that ‘Mr Brown’s friendly performance’ is ‘small compensation for the sagging story line and confidently mediocre score’, calling the show a ‘vacuous piece of cardboard’.20 If the casting of Neagle conveyed a sense of nostalgia, the ‘best things’ about the evening, according to The Sunday Times, ‘are the gormless aristocratic twins’, clearly a popular favourite.21 Milton Shulman summed up: ‘This is an artificial, laboriously constructed excuse for a musical and there are enough bits and pieces in it to please undemanding audiences whose taste aspires no higher. I suspect that it will run much longer than it deserves.’22 But widespread opprobrium did not remain unanswered. Godfrey Winn of SW1 wrote a letter to London Life magazine complaining about the critics, who ‘too often spend their time at first nights, either sleeping behind their programmes when they are bored or thinking up devastating witty cracks’. He and his party enjoyed the show, ‘a relaxed, escapist evening in the theatre’, and he condemned the ‘self-important group of highbrows

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who condemn everyone else’s taste in the theatre as being only fit for the “coach trade” ’.23 As critic Sheridan Morley once said, ‘Charlie Girl is the quick two-word answer to anyone who still believes that critics have any real power in the West End.’24 Usually dismissed for being blander than bland, it is precisely these qualities that have made Charlie Girl so popular (a 1986 West End revival ran for six months). There is something deeply reassuring about entertainment which gently suggests that even the most unprepossessing man can get the girl, and that love overcomes all obstacles. In this Cinderella story, the archetypal personages are significantly modified: the role of fairy godmother is taken by Wainwright the Pools man, and the Ugly Sisters become attractive young women. Charlie Girl was attacked by elitists because it was seen as undemanding fodder for ‘coach parties’, meaning that the tastes of visitors from outside London were less sophisticated than those of metropolitan audiences. But the show’s fairytale suggestion that good-natured characters can dissolve class differences has an appealingly utopian side. It offers a pleasurable escape. As Charlie sings, in lilting lines from her Act Two love song ‘Like Love’, it is an experience of feeling ‘warm and tender’ and ‘bright and sparkling’ (118–19). And its central image of aristocrats cavorting with Americans and servants was ample consolation to anyone worried about 1960s class war and social change. Charlie Girl understood such anxieties and did its best to calm them.

Daisy Pulls It Off (1983) From The Boy Friend to the Harry Potter saga, the English public school has always been an extensive terrain on which to explore ideas about class and national identity. Denise Deegan’s Daisy Pulls It Off is a great example. Seeing a revival at the Lyric of this 1983 show in June 2002, novelist Beryl Bainbridge thought it was so good it should ‘become a cult show, in the manner of The Mousetrap, though it’s far superior’.25 That’s as may be, but the politics of the show suggest that, as far as images of class in popular theatre are concerned, the 1980s were no different from the 1960s. Deegan was born in 1952 and worked as a stage manager after training at East 15 theatre school. She began writing plays in the 1970s because she wanted to rectify the gender imbalance on stage. ‘Then, as now,’ she says, ‘there were far fewer roles for women than men, so interesting parts and stories for women were at the front of my mind.’ Then, one day, at the bottom of an old cardboard box on

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a market stall, ‘I found a School Girl’s Own Annual from 1927.’26 This chance discovery reminded her of her own childhood reading of fiction for girls, and she began to research girls’ school stories from the interwar years. Inspired by these, and especially by the books of Angela Brazil (pronounced ‘brazzle’), who wrote some fifty boarding school novels in the first half of the twentieth century, she began writing Daisy Pulls It Off in 1980. It tells the archetypal story of Daisy, an East End scholarship girl who gets a place at the exclusive Grangewood school for girls (modelled on establishments such as Roedean), and is mercilessly bullied, but triumphs in the end. According to a preview piece in The Times, Deegan’s experience as a stage manager was crucial: ‘watching audience reaction from backstage taught her that clever, literary writing did not work’.27 She sent the play to several venues, and it was first staged at the Nuffield Theatre in Southampton. On the day she heard news of its transfer to the West End, where it ran for 1,180 performances, she ‘received a rejection slip from the Royal Court Theatre’.28 Daisy Pulls It Off opened at the Globe on 18 April 1983, and was produced by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Julian Mitchell’s Another Country was playing next door at the Queen’s Theatre, making this stretch of Shaftesbury Avenue a landscape dotted with public school fictions. Lloyd Webber spent some £150,000 on the production, fitting a revolving stage to the Globe to speed up the transitions between scenes. The production was directed by David Gilmore, artistic director of the Nuffield, who had accepted the script after signing up to the Women Live initiative, a UK-wide women’s network which showcased female talent. The Globe programme features a fictional note by Grangewood’s formidable Beryl Waddle-Brown, who says she’s delighted that the Annual School Play has been invited to the West End. (Beryl Waddle-Brown is an anagram of Andrew Lloyd Webber, and ‘she’ is also credited with composing the music for the school song.) The programme is illustrated with pictures from interwar girls’ comics, with a reproduction of an advert for ‘The New School Knicker’ (‘Lastex Yarn in waist and legs’), and school tuck boxes, plus examples of school magazines from the era. In his autobiography, Lloyd Webber notes that his production was not only a West End mega-hit, but also toured for two years and that, among the numerous revivals, he has seen a version in drag at Eton College. He also posed for photographs as the Beryl Waddle-Brown character.29 Daisy Pulls It Off, a mildly suggestive title that predicts the heroine’s eventual success, takes the form of the Grangewood school play, introduced by Miss Gibson, the headmistress. This framing device enables the characters to narrate and comment on events, and also means that all the characters speak in the same

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upper-class accent and use the same slang. The plot follows Daisy, the new scholarship girl from a modest background, as she stands up to the class prejudices of the other pupils. Her main antagonists are the snobbish Sybil and Monica, the class bullies, who try to make life as awkward as possible for her. Her best friend is Trixie Martin. Together, Daisy and Trixie, our intrepid duo, go on a quest to solve the mystery of the Beaumont treasure. This, as Head Girl Clare Beaumont – whose family owns Grangewood and leases it to the school because they have fallen on hard times – explains, is concealed somewhere in the country house school building. In the end, of course, Daisy wins over the girls, cracks a secret code to find the hidden treasure, rescues some girls from certain death – and saves the school honour when she scores the deciding goal in a hockey match. The class bullies confess their misdeeds and Daisy is reunited with her long-lost father, who turns out to be the amnesiac assistant school gardener. As Trixie concludes, ‘How perfectly scrummy everything has turned out to be!’ (83). This is a story about class, about a girl from an underprivileged background who is upwardly mobile due to her talents and ends up in a place that is almost another world to her. Daisy has to make her way in the hostile environment of class privilege, where the Grangewood school Latin motto Honesta Quam Magna (how great are noble things) belies the way that upper-class gals disparage the lower orders. In this school, the superiority of the upper classes and the inferiority of the common people is taken for granted, so Daisy has to work twice as hard to be a success. But, luckily, she is academically bright, gifted at music and displays great prowess on the playing field, where the slogan ‘Play up and play the game’ reminds us that the myth of British fair play was born on the sports fields of public schools. And the public school is explicitly an emblem of the nation: when Trixie says they have to oppose Bolshevism ‘for the sake of the school’, Daisy adds ‘and England’ (49). Deegan’s play is also a feminist tribute to young women, who are represented here as independent, resourceful, brave and with a keen sense of justice and morality. (Boys and sex are almost completely absent from this fantasy world.)30 Not only does the schoolgirl code disapprove of sneaking and telling tales, but the plot also shows how even the nastiest of the girls are finally convinced to do the right thing. Justice, in the end, prevails – it is fiction, after all. Most of the reviews of the West End transfer were favourable, and praised the entertaining theatricality of a show rich in asides to the audience, switches between narrative and direct address, and between dialogue and singing. Set pieces include school assemblies, midnight expeditions, a hot water bottle fight, the hockey match and a daring clifftop rescue. However, Michael Billington noted that since its first outing in Southampton the production had been

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shortened, but had ‘also been somewhat coarsened. A production I previously praised as “poker-faced” now seems a positive anthology of funny walks, jutting jaws, comic grimaces, and nudge-and-winkery.’ Its appeal was a ‘woozy, English nostalgia’, but he thought its ‘spirit of ironic mockery’ pointless, and the sense that we are superior to the piece’s values of honour, decency and national pride unearned.31 Once again, some readers took issue with the judgement of critics: when Milton Shulman doubted if ‘Brazil would ever have involved herself in the class implications of Miss Deegan’s play’, a letter from Mary Cadogan of Beckenham argued the opposite: in fact, she wrote, Brazil ‘came out firmly on the side of underdogs like scholarship girls’, and was contemptuous of ‘favouritism’ based on wealth and class.32 Every review praised the cast.33 A more critical view is offered by Michelene Wandor. She argues that Daisy is shown as ‘good and honest’, which proves that with such qualities ‘a poor girl can reach the heights of social status and money’. This is ‘a good Thatcherite play, in that Daisy is accepted, and accepts, a magical class mobility, which leaves her in the position of the rich, feminine young woman, presumably waiting for marriage’.34 It’s a mythical approach to class politics. Daisy is, once again, really just another Cinderella, making a supernatural rags to riches transformation. Deegan’s text has vitality and is affectionately comic. Daisy introduces herself as ‘Daisy Meredith, daredevil, tomboy, possessed of a brilliant mind, exuberant, quick-witted, fond of practical jokes, honourable, honest, courageous, straight in all things and . . . an elementary school pupil’ (2). Yet, like all the other characters, she doesn’t speak Cockney despite her East End roots, but uses upper-class expressions: ‘topping’, ‘jolly’, ‘chums’ (all in her first speech). Indeed, Deegan’s writing includes lashings of 1920s schoolgirl slang, Latin tags and it positively delights in its exaggerated expressions of snobbery. The prejudices of the upperclass girls are clearly and hilariously articulated. In the first few minutes, Sybil opposes elementary schoolgirls, who bring ‘their dishonesty, filth and guttersnipe ways with them [. . .] generally lowering the tone of the place’ (3), while Belinda, Captain of the Upper Fourth and best sportswoman of that year, chides her: ‘not all elementary school kids live in filthy hovels with thieving fathers and drunken sluttish mothers. Take a walk through Esher any day’ (4). As Trixie observes, ‘You’re an unspeakable snob, Sybil’ (13). Some of the comic effects come from the heightened exchanges, but others from the theatrical mix of narrative and dialogue. At one point, Clare interrogates two wrong-doers, then turns to the audience and says, ‘the corners of Clare’s mouth twitched’ (28). Then the actress (Kate Buffery in the original production) suited the action to the words. Deegan’s trick is simultaneously to parody and celebrate the public-school virtues of

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honesty, pluck and fair play – Clare, for instance, is introduced as ‘a shining example of true British girlhood’ (5) – while also revelling in the pleasure of youthful female friendship. Daisy and Trixie enjoy the most excited dialogues, they form the Dark Horse Secret Society, adopt a Latin motto Hic spes effulget (Hence hope shines forth) and embark on a series of adventures, often after lights out, to find the treasure, clashing with Mr Scoblowski, the enigmatic Russian music teacher, and culminating in Daisy rescuing her tormentors, Sybil and Monica, from a watery grave. In the end, it is revealed that Daisy is not a low-born suburbanite, but is in fact an aristocrat, the daughter of the gardener, who is actually Clare’s Uncle David. (During the war he enlisted in the Navy, was torpedoed, lost his memory and was saved by Scoblowski, who got him a job at the school.) Like the ending of Oliver Twist, it is wonderfully unlikely and typically traditional: blood, it suggests, carries the essence of class, and the poor child of an aristocrat has a natural nobility that will inevitably shine forth. Merit counts for nothing; heredity is all. As Trixie would say, ‘O Jubilate’ (12).

Blood Brothers (1983) But not every 1980s play had this message. It was the Thatcher era, and a time of increased class struggle. While the government attacked the working class, both by passing anti-union laws and by provoking the great Miners’ Strike of 1984–85, as well as by pursuing monetarist economic policies that resulted in millions on the dole, popular theatre had a ready response. Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers is the classic example of this rebuttal. Commissioned by Paul Harman’s Merseyside Young People’s Theatre Company and first performed at Fazakerley Comprehensive, Liverpool, in November 1981, the story, dialogue, lyrics and music were all written by Russell. He then developed it into a good night out that was staged at the Liverpool Playhouse in 1983, transferring to the Lyric Theatre in London for eight months, then touring the country, and coming in to the Albery in 1988, and finally to the Phoenix Theatre in the West End for twentyone years and more than 10,000 performances from November 1991. Its massive popular success is a reminder that a group of northern playwrights have played a significant role in popular entertainment since the 1970s: Alan Ayckbourn, Willy Russell and John Godber.35 And more often than not their subject has been class. Russell was born into a working-class family in Whiston, just outside Liverpool, in 1947. He left school at the age of fifteen, with one O-level in English

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Literature, and became a women’s hairdresser, while performing in his spare time as a singer-songwriter in clubs and pubs. Encouraged by Annie, a student friend who later became his wife, he gave up hairdressing at the age of twentyone and, after studying for O-Levels and A-Levels for a year, became a student at St Katharine’s College, a teacher-training college in Liverpool, and then a comprehensive-school teacher. In 1972, his first theatre work, the Blind Scouse trilogy of shorts, was put on at the Edinburgh Festival, and his subsequent plays, such as Educating Rita (RSC, 1980) and Shirley Valentine (1986), all won awards, although none of them were as successful as Blood Brothers. Just as in the opening scene of Oliver! the workhouse urchins contrast the poverty of their food with the feast consumed by their betters, so Russell remembers being appalled that, while he was working in a warehouse to raise money to fund his return to college, the workers were served tea, while the bosses got champagne. ‘I didn’t object to them having champagne but I did object to the insensitivity of them having it served by a waiter who walked past us every afternoon.’36 Like many working-class kids, he was aware of class prejudice: ‘I was brought up as a member of a class whose members were treated like secondclass citizens’; ‘we were told every day of our lives that we were thick, daft, stupid and unworthy’; ‘I was aware from a very early age of the injustice of it’.37 This feeling is the emotional fuel behind Blood Brothers. Set in Liverpool, the two-act play with songs spans three decades and tells the story of Mrs Johnstone, who first appears as a harassed working-class wife and cleaner in the late 1950s, with seven children and twins on the way. Because she can’t afford to keep both, and her wealthy employer, Mrs Lyons, is childless, the two women make a bargain: Mickey will stay with his birth mother, but his twin, Edward, is given away to Mrs Lyons. The boys grow up in separate parts of town, but they meet at the age of seven and become best friends, mingling their blood to become blood brothers. In their teenage years, they both fall in love with Linda, the daughter of Mickey’s neighbour. When Edward goes to university, Mickey marries Linda, now pregnant, and gets a factory job. He then loses the job, becomes involved in an armed robbery (with his brother Sammy) and is sent to prison. After his release, he discovers that Linda and Edward are becoming close. Although it’s ‘just a light romance’ (77), he flies into a jealous rage and takes Sammy’s gun, and threatens Edward. Mrs Johnstone and the police arrive, and she tells her sons that they are brothers, but when Mickey’s gun accidentally goes off, killing Edward, the police shoot him. Both twins die. At the end, with two bodies on stage, the Narrator asks, in a deliberate emulation of Bertolt Brecht, ‘And do we blame superstition for what came to

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pass/ Or could it be what we, the English have come to know as class?’ (99).38 But as well as showing how nurture rather than nature, and especially the social environment, creates inequality, Russell’s play is also a deeper folkloric account of human relationships. Using a Narrator to make the introduction – ‘So did y’ hear the story of the Johnstone twins?’ (5) – he stresses the role of fate, coincidence and superstition. The deaths of Mickey and Edward are presented, right from the start, as inevitable, as a malign destiny. The devil is mentioned. The image of Marilyn Monroe, a tragic celebrity that poor people aspire to imitate, hovers over the play. And the Narrator frequently reminds us of the power of fate. Because Mrs Johnstone is poor, she is also superstitious. It’s a working-class thing. When Mrs Lyons puts a pair of new shoes on the table, she stops her with the exclamation ‘Jesus Christ’, before explaining ‘Oh God, Mrs Lyons, never put new shoes on the table’ (8). The Narrator explains that doing this brings bad luck, while mentioning other superstitions such as smashed mirrors and spilt salt (8). Doing the wrong thing can be fatal: the Narrator reminds us that ‘The Devil’s got your number’ (53). Mrs Lyons exploits Mrs Johnstone’s credulity when she tells her that if separated twins are reunited they will die: ‘They say if either twin learns that he was once a pair, they shall both immediately die’ (19). So Russell both presents fate as a supernatural force, and implicitly questions it by showing how the crafty rich manipulate the poor. As the kids grow up, Mrs Lyons wants to keep Edward apart from Mickey – she fears contamination of her son by his working-class brother. Yet, because this is a tragedy, her opportunistic invention proves to be right – the moment the twins learn their true identity they both die. The play is like a Greek tragedy, in that the audience knows how the story will end before it even begins, and this sense of inevitability allows Russell to emphasize his points about class and social inequality. By presenting twins who share DNA – although not identical they are ‘As like each other as two new pins’ (5) – he illustrates how life chances are affected by class. Mickey’s final cry of anguish – ‘I could have been him!’ (82) – shows that he understands this.39 The Johnstones are not only individuals, but also representatives of the northern working class, distinguished by their accents, vocabulary and attitudes, a social group negatively affected by Thatcherism, while the Lyonses are the respectable middle class, who are doing quite well. When they first meet, the prim Edward is fascinated by Mickey’s charm and especially by his swearing. When they later get into trouble, the police treat them differently, threatening Mickey’s mum, but being more conciliatory with the Lyonses. As a young adult, the rags to riches Edward has all the opportunities while Mickey, no matter how hard he tries, is doomed to poverty. Russell also shows how violence, from boys playing with toy

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guns to adults using real guns, is part of the escalation of desperation. In this context, violent acts result from having no power, and Sammy and Mickey inevitably resort to aggression to make their way. With little control over their lives, they get angry, they become violent. When it opened in London, critics were less than enthusiastic about the show, deriding its sentimentality, its limited musical range and its coincidences. Summarizing the reviews of the original 1983 production, Steve Grant argues that ‘London critics and theatregoers are apt to find provincial shows unsophisticated and politically naïve. Supporters will reply that the North has put the working classes back into the theatre.’40 When the show returned in 1988, Mark Steyn in the Independent said that Russell’s ‘story has pretension to a grand theme – Class’, but is ‘suffused in the sentimentality with which so many English playwrights treat the working class’.41 In the Sunday Telegraph, Francis King pointed out that when at the end the ‘Voice of Nemesis narrator announces that the class system has been to blame all along’, actually the reason for the deaths is ‘merely the fact that one twin has suspected the other of carrying on with his wife’.42 But Blood Brothers did have its advocates: Sheridan Morley argued that it ‘gave us England’s only true rival to The Threepenny Opera’ and was ‘the most exciting thing to have happened to the English musical theatre in years’.43 Like other critics, he also praised Barbara Dickson’s blazing performance as Mrs Johnstone in what he felt was a satisfyingly ‘grainy, tough and very black show’.44 Other critics point out that Blood Brothers, in its various recastings, helped revive the careers of pop singers such as Kiki Dee and David Cassidy, and also brought in a new audience. In 1988, Bill Williamson of Midweek magazine saw a Thursday matinee and noted the ‘large teenage presence, [which] soaked up the story like Brookside on speed’.45 Ten years later, Benedict Nightingale analysed the show’s appeal, concluding that it was popular not because it blamed class, but because Russell ‘is exploiting the myths and legends about the eerie symbiosis of twins’.46 The idea of two male twins who are separated by circumstance and then fated to die because of supernatural forces is certainly at the core of the play’s popularity. The universality of this theme is confirmed by the fact that the show was also successful in Europe. When it finally transferred to Broadway in 1993, British producer Bill Kenwright was relieved that Frank Rich, the New York Times critic known as the Butcher of Broadway, spared the show, although his review did point out that ‘less class-conscious Americans’ might find it hard to endure three hours of a working-class musical that is not called West Side Story.47 Kenwright invested £2.6 million of his money in the transatlantic transfer and it ran for two years (with English singer Petula Clark making her Broadway debut).

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With its Brechtian Narrator, direct address to the audience, small cast who often play several roles, and often humorous asides, Blood Brothers is an example of working-class entertainment that is unafraid of being theatrically sophisticated. As directed by Chris Bond and Danny Hiller, it urges the audience to accept the fact that grown actors can play children, and Russell’s music has a simplicity and clarity that deepens our understanding of the characters, propels the storytelling and gives the tragedy a lyricism beyond words.48 As in most popular theatre, the ballads are folksy, poppy and easy on the ear. There are references to rock ’n’ roll, rock, Two-Tone and reggae, which wink at the general musical knowledge of the audience. The journalist Jasper Rees summarizes the show’s appeal by saying that ‘no one understands escapism like Willy Russell’.49 But what is striking about the play is not just its elements of fantasy and song, but also its hard-nosed view of our nation. As critic Irving Wardle, reviewing the 1983 production, argued, this is ‘a fable of the two nations’, meaning rich and poor, south and north, privileged and dispossessed.50 In the Thatcher years, this image of a divided country became deeply etched on the popular consciousness. The central contradiction of Blood Brothers is that it is both radical in its image of working-class endurance, and conservative in its fatalistic picture of a doomed generation of powerless youngsters: Mickey really doesn’t stand a chance. At the same time, the popularity of the play shows that the resistance of many people to the dominance of the Tories in the 1980s was expressed culturally as well as politically. In the West End, the 1980s were dominated by mega-hit musicals such as ClaudeMichel Schönberg and Alain Boublil’s Les Misérables (Palace, 1985/Queen’s, 2004), whose historical setting and uplifting music tend to romanticize their representation of class struggle. Les Mis is, of course, completely French, a French historical drama based on a French novel and created by two Frenchmen. Or is it? Well, it certainly was originally: the 1980 Parisian version, which played in a massive arena, was a series of songs without a strong narrative, and assumed that local audiences were familiar with the story of this French literary classic. But the English language version, developed over about three years by the RSC, with the help of Schönberg and Boublil, had to be reimagined for audiences who didn’t know the original story. The result is a thorough anglicization of the musical, with about a third of the material rewritten, substituting narrative clarity for the French version’s spectacle.51 By the next decade the West End stage seems to have abandoned the theme of class. Commercial theatre was content to reflect the illusory idea that we were living in a classless society. Instead of class, we got the rather different

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discriminations of culture. A good example is Yasmina Reza’s Art (Wyndham’s, 1996), which in Christopher Hampton’s translation ran for 2,509 performances. This show has been well contextualized by Beryl Bainbridge: ‘Though its plot may not be as easy to follow as that of The Mousetrap, or as profound as An Inspector Calls, it outshines both if you believe that a play should provoke as well as entertain.’52 In it, three men find that their long friendship is compromised when one of them buys an abstract painting for a huge amount of money. Their attitudes to the painting, which looks like a blank white canvas, are shown to be dependent on their financial, social and career success – or lack of it. Here cultural discrimination signals a new class system.

Billy Elliot the Musical (2005) More than twenty years after Blood Brothers, another musical about class finally took its place among the new millennium’s mega-hits. Elton John and Lee Hall’s gloriously enjoyable and emotionally heartfelt Billy Elliot the Musical (Victoria Palace, 2005) is a really remarkable work of popular culture. Based on a surprisingly successful film, with music by one of the most phenomenal pop stars of the postwar era, the show has clear links with the postwar tradition of distinctly British musicals such as Oliver! The original 2000 film was directed by Stephen Daldry, and written by Lee Hall, a playwright born and bred in Newcastle whose project has always been to unite high and low culture. It was a sleeper hit: made for £1 million, it gradually grossed a hundred times that amount worldwide. And it achieved this success because it moved people. Elton John, whose records in the 1970s easily outsold the offerings of iconic figures such as David Bowie and Johnny Rotten, saw the film at the Cannes festival and was reported to have left the cinema in tears.53 He was so moved that he approached Hall and Daldry with the idea of turning the story into a stage musical. At first sceptical, Hall and Daldry eventually agreed and joined John and choreographer Peter Darling to produce Billy Elliot the Musical, an outstanding mega-hit that ran for 4,566 performances. With numerous stagings overseas, it has been seen by some 11 million people. Daldry, who in the mid-1990s had been artistic director of the Royal Court, was well equipped with the theatrical imagination to helm this show about a miner’s son who discovers ballet as a form of artistic self-fulfilment. Yes, this is an archetypal coming of age story, in which a boy discovers his identity through conflict with authority. Daldry was the ideal person to articulate it. Not only had

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he spent the Miners’ Strike of 1984–85 with a community-based theatre touring company going around South Yorkshire pit villages with a show about miners’ wives, but he also had the experience of directing a hugely popular revival of J. B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls for the National Theatre in 1992. Designed by Ian MacNeil, its set featured an expressionistic crooked dolls house home, and Daldry brought its Edwardian story into the 1940s, a decision which emphasized its status as an account of class exploitation as well as its call to vote Labour.54 On its West End transfer, the mega-hit revival ran for about nine years. When it came to making the Billy Elliot film, Hall’s screenplay also tapped into a broadly leftwing working-class culture: it was inspired in part by A. J. Cronin’s 1935 popular novel about miners, The Stars Look Down, which is referred to in the musical’s opening song. The novel is about an individual who is in conflict with his community. Like the film, Billy Elliot the Musical is set in the mining town of Easington, County Durham, during the Miners’ Strike. Billy is a motherless eleven-year-old from a mining family who goes to after-school boxing classes in the village hall. One night he has to stay late to give the keys to Mrs Wilkinson, who runs a ballet class for girls. He stays on to watch and although he’s the only boy in the room he is attracted to the idea of dancing, so while his Dad, brother Tony and their workmates clash with police during the strike, he goes secretly to ballet class. When Dad finds out he forbids his son from dancing, but Billy – helped by his best mate Michael, who likes dressing up in women’s clothing – accepts Mrs Wilkinson’s offer of free lessons to prepare for an audition to the Royal Ballet School in London. Although Billy’s father and brother prevent him from attending this audition, his interest in dance is not eradicated. When Dad accidentally sees him practise he is overcome with emotion and agrees to help him. Despite the hardships of the strike, Billy is aided by other miners and eventually succeeds in going to London. But although he is successful, the strike ends in failure and the destruction of the mining industry. The show is not only about class, but the issue of class was raised during its creation. Daldry says that the show was ‘a bit rough around the edges. It’s not slick. That’s a tradition that comes more out of Joan Littlewood’s work at Stratford East than anywhere else.’55 In this way he aligned his West End project with a notable past practitioner of left-wing theatre. When his show was being cast, newspapers reported on the auditions of 3,000 hopefuls which yielded three actors – James Lomas (14), George Maguire (13) and Liam Mower (12) – who shared the title role, stepping into the shoes of thirteen-year-old Jamie Bell who created the film version. Significantly enough, all came ‘from modest

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backgrounds’.56 In 2006, the first colourblind casting for the show resulted in a Black-British Billy and a Chinese-British Billy. The musical begins with newsreel footage of Herbert Morrison, the 1945 Labour government’s deputy PM who supervised its programme of nationalization, and celebrates the public ownership of the coal industry.57 From the beginning the images are of working men marching, and the tone is of nostalgia for the socialism of the past. Class pride and northern accents are the keynote: the first song, ‘The Stars Look Down’, aches with the miners’ optimism, and is indebted to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s hymn-like ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ from Carousel (1945), as evident from Billy’s proud recitation of the line: ‘And we will stand there proudly, and we will never walk alone’ (10–11). Class is defined politically, with the miners being fiercely anti-Tory (unlike the real-life 1980s miners whose ranks were split between strikers and non-strikers). Even the little girls in the dance class are anti-Tory. At one point, with typical brazenness, one says, ‘There’s more life in Maggie Thatcher’s knickers.’58 And, for most of the story, Tony’s declaration that ‘This isn’t a strike anymore – it’s a class war’ is accepted at face value. But the biggest gesture of class solidarity is the Christmas pantomime that opens the second act, with its Spitting Image-style puppet effigies of Thatcher and blatant anti-Tory lyrics. When Thatcher died in April 2013, the show’s audience was given the chance to vote on whether the cast should include the song ‘Merry Christmas Maggie Thatcher’, with its lyric ‘We all celebrate today ’cause it’s one day closer to your death’ (58): only three audience members voted against this. Like Liza’s in My Fair Lady, Billy’s story is one of transformation. In a fable that is a working-class version of the ugly duckling being transformed into a swan, and in this case actually dancing Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, Billy must not only leave his working-class roots, but also the traditional, and narrow, class definitions of masculinity. Although he goes to college rather than a ball, Billy is a Cinderella in boxer shorts. Although he is not gay, he is not cut out to be the all-boxing, all-fighting and heavy drinking mine worker either. During the course of the musical, both Dad and Tony are prised away from their prejudices and even Billy’s Grandma adds her voice to this new, if rather blurred, vision of masculinity by criticizing her abusive dead husband: ‘I hated the sod’ (22). For this personal transformation Billy gets support from Michael, his gay crossdressing friend. In ‘Expressing Yourself ’, Michael sings, ‘Get some ear-rings, some mascara, heels and a fan; pretty soon you will start to feel a different man’ (38–39). In the ensuing dance, giant dresses cavort with the boys. Meanwhile, in the world outside, the set-piece battles between pickets and police, performed

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during the testosterone-heavy song ‘Solidarity’, embody traditional definitions of competitive masculinity – ‘Really get stuck in. It’s not a bloody tea dance’ (43) – with the added twist that both sides are mainly working class: southern cops enjoying their overtime earnings while northern workers are impoverished. The melding of personal expression and collective solidarity is exemplified by ‘Angry Dance’, when Billy throws himself against the riot shields of the massed ranks of the cops: he is both an angry young man and part of the mining community. Staged in the West End in 2005, the musical got positive reviews, some of which were ecstatic. Lauded by Charles Spencer as ‘the greatest British musical I have ever seen’ and by Sheridan Morley as ‘unique’ and ‘the best British musical of the decade’ – the play was even positively reviewed in the Sun newspaper.59 Michael Billington pointed out that ‘the musical, even more than the film, counterpoints Billy’s personal triumph with the community’s decline’ and Nicholas de Jongh noted that ‘no modern musical has struck such rebellious, old Labour, workingclass conscious notes’ and commented that ‘Hall’s songs hark back to old workingclass culture’.60 Only Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail condemned the musical’s ‘dismally trite, Socialist Worker angle on the miners’ strike’.61 Although some critics expressed doubts about the blandness of John’s music, which is derivative and generic, they all appreciated Hall’s lyrics and Darling’s choreography, and were especially enthusiastic about a cast led by Liam Mower. Hall explains that ‘because of what happened after the miners’ strike, we have gone through this accelerated process of deindustrialization which has profoundly changed how we see ourselves as a nation. Somehow the show we have made grasps that moment of the death of the community and the rise of the individual.’62 Although this is a story of an individual who leaves their workingclass community – and by its end shows the defeat of that community – Hall is careful to introduce some mitigating factors. In the musical, Dad is persuaded not to join the scabs wholeheartedly so his class betrayal is fudged somewhat. Likewise, although Billy is sent to London after a whip round of striking workers, his main costs are paid for by the much better off scabs, who contribute a huge pile of notes. And compared to the crude attacks on Tories such as Thatcher and Michael Heseltine, who is abused as ‘a tosser’, ‘a wanker’ and ‘swine’ (62), Hall’s criticism of local class attitudes is more complicated: Mrs Wilkinson says to Dad: ‘When are you going to get over your pig-ignorant working-class pride? [. . .] You’re fighting a battle that was lost years ago. I’m not the enemy, Mr Elliot. We’re all in it together.’63 Billy Elliot the Musical is both deeply felt in its depiction of an individual’s struggle with their family – Billy is motivated by the love expressed by his dead

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mother and has to work hard to get support from his father and older brother – and intensely political. The songs that express the solidarity of the miners as a class are not only inspiring, but also draw on what Hall calls ‘a particularly British heritage going back to music hall’, with male choirs, marching bands, folk song and ‘the kind of rock and roll beloved of working men’s clubs’.64 With its foulmouthed little girls, gobby grannie, traditional ‘blue’ humour, and Punch and Judy battles, it is also essentially English in its attitudes to class and to personal liberation. In a perfectly apt metaphor for this liberation, when Billy sings about flying the young actor playing him is lifted high into the air in a wire-flying episode. Nevertheless, this show has its conservative side. Although not fatalistic like Blood Brothers, it still celebrates the ability of the uniquely talented individual to rise above their background. Ironically, this is quite a Thatcherite message. It is also a contradictory message: Billy is finally able to attend his audition because of financial support from the whole community and you could argue that he represents not only himself, but also the aspirations of all young people who will not be able to work in the jobs their fathers once did. At a pinch, Billy’s success unites his family and inspires his community. As Hall once said, ‘In the bravery, sensitivity and pure glee and energy of the boys I think there is a poignant image that there is hope for our future.’65 The defeat of the miners was, in some senses, a liberation from a hard and unhealthy lifestyle, and the show celebrates the new opportunities that this suggests. Its powerful emotional charge comes from Billy’s heroic ability to use his anger to fuel his dancing – to turn setbacks into success. It is also worth noting that the last figure left on stage is not Billy, but Michael, the cross-dressing gay boy, who is thus a defiant question mark over the images of traditional masculinity embodied by the miners. Likewise, although the song ‘Expressing Yourself ’ celebrates the fact that ‘What we need is individuality’ (42), the fact that Dad and Tony both appear in tutus during the curtain call suggests a more complex, even utopian, reading of this show.66 This utopianism is underlined by the lyrics of the marching song ‘Once We Were Kings’: ‘Once we built visions on ground we hewed. We dreamed of justice, and of men renewed, all people equal in all things’ (81). Because of this complexity, Billy Elliot the Musical is exemplary in its vision of class struggle as entertainment. It offers a highly emotional dream of a different world, of a better future. It also proves that stories about class in popular theatre are usually fairy tales, and that, despite major social changes, they have remained remarkably similar over the decades.

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History: Gothic, Edwardian and Pastiche

One key aspect of British national identity is our love of history. This is an old country proud of its past, and constantly visiting and revisiting it in fiction. The past is an attractive place because it usually seems to be charmingly quaint, both unchanging and stable. It makes no demands on the present; it’s always simply there. And there’s an exotic quality about seeing recognizable characters in fancy dress occasionally reminding us that the past is, as the cliché goes, a foreign country whose customs, speech and values are different from our own. The past also suggests a place from which we all have come, and the almost subliminal sense of an ancestral history is particularly strong in an ancient country such as Britain. Audiences might easily feel a connection to scenes which they might associate with their own family narrative, whether it transports them back to distant pre-industrial times, or to the much closer Victorian era. Yes, history can be felt as well as imagined. Nevertheless, popular plays about the past don’t really give a true insight into real factual history (which is always complex and contradictory). Instead they offer something arguably more valuable: an escape into another world. And the most successful plays and musicals are anything but insular; they are not confined to British history. No, the mega-hits of postwar theatre not only time-travel to episodes of the past of these islands, but they also roam with enormous panache over the whole of world history. They escape to almost every corner of the globe. To take two obvious examples of phenomenally popular musicals: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita (Prince Edward, 1978), which travels to Argentina in the 1930s–50s, and Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil’s Miss Saigon (Drury Lane, 1989), which transposes Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (1904) to 1970s Saigon and the Vietnam War. There is plenty of evidence that audiences love musicals set in the past. With a title that summons up the ghost of Hamlet, Ivor Novello’s musical romance Perchance To Dream (Hippodrome, 1945) ran for 1,022 performances, evoking in one show the Regency period, the Victorian age and finally the 1930s. It was 127

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set in one location, Huntersmoon, an old Georgian country house, and appealed to the public’s love of lavish romance in historical settings. Of Novello, who played all three star parts, one for each of the historical settings, Beverley Baxter wrote appreciatively that ‘his voice possesses a gentle melancholy, and when he moves it is as one who treads on flowers’.1 Novello was king of the Ruritanian style of operetta, a genre that harked back with nostalgia to the pre-war era.2 The show’s hit song ‘We’ll Gather Lilacs’ is full of yearning, as expressed by its opening lines: ‘We’ll gather lilacs in the spring again/ And walk together down an English lane./ Until our hearts have learned to sing again./ When you come home once more.’ In 1945, to feel like this was to be quintessentially English. A more contemporary style of musical is stage adaptations of famous works of fiction, with the aim of relating them to present-day concerns, and with the added bonus that a familiar title from literature can be a useful marketing device. Lionel Bart’s Oliver! and Nevill Coghill and Martin Starkie’s Canterbury Tales (Phoenix, 1968) are obvious examples. The longest-running mega-hit in musical history, Schönberg and Boublil’s Les Misérables, combines literary adaptation with time-travel to nineteenth-century France. This version of Victor Hugo’s 1862 epic about the French Revolution of 1832 has been playing continuously since its opening in 1985. Its songs (greatly aided by Herbert Kretzmer’s consistently clear and powerful lyrics) span the emotions from that paean to romantic disillusionment, ‘I Dreamed a Dream’, to the rollicking comedy of ‘Master of the House’, from the stirring glory of ‘At the End of the Day’, ‘On My Own’ and ‘One Day More’ to the pugnacious comedy of ‘Little People’ or the poignancy of ‘Empty Chairs and Empty Tables’, and finally the heroic hymn to social justice, the inspirational marching song to end all marching songs, ‘Do You Hear the People Sing?’. Producer Cameron Mackintosh’s image of the waif Cossette became an iconic marketing device. At the time, critics were underwhelmed, with Robert Tanitch calling it a ‘triumph of spectacle over content’, while acknowledging the theatrical power of the scene ‘when the two sections of John Napier’s towering slum keeled over to form an enormous barricade right across the width of the Barbican stage’.3 Contrary to received wisdom, however, this musical is not a cute-ification of a stern story of revolution.4 It’s about justice, love and belief, both fully heartwarming and distressingly malign. There is violent obsession as well as social comedy; death as well as desire; the stench of despair as well as the intoxication of revolt. Despite its heart-wrenching suffering, the tone is phenomenally uplifting and the finale, in which the surviving characters are joined by the dead ones, is an emotionally overwhelming moment of redemption.

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The success of Les Mis testifies to popular theatre’s ability to articulate the human desire for social justice. It also brilliantly demonstrates the continued centrality, in our culture, of the New Testament equation of God with love as well as the idea of life as a quest. When novelist Beryl Bainbridge saw the show in its ninth year she attributed its ‘enormous’ success to its ‘stunning theatricality [. . .] dramatic storyline, wonderful sets, stirring songs, and a cast positively jumping with energy’. At the end, she witnessed a standing ovation: ‘We wouldn’t let the cast go.’5 Many musicals are sung versions of popular films. Once again, the market leader is Lloyd Webber, with Sunset Boulevard (Adelphi, 1993), a 1,529performance adaptation of the 1950 film by Billy Wilder, as well as Whistle Down the Wind (Aldwych, 1998), a 1,044-performance version of Bryan Forbes’s 1961 original. Even more successful has been Mark Bramble and Harry Warren’s 42nd Street (Drury Lane, 1984), which transposed the 1933 Busby Berkeleychoreographed tap-dancing extravaganza to the stage, where it ran for an amazing 3,550 performances. Several musicals combine religion with history. Apart from Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s The Sound of Music (Palace, 1961), with the Mother Abbess’s ‘Climb Ev’ry Mountain’ and the nuns’ song, ‘Maria’, there was Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar (Palace, 1972), which enjoyed a run of 3,358 West End performances after early outings as a concept album, rock concert tour and Broadway version. It was the first mega-hit of a career of unparalleled global success.6 At its worst, in this instance, Lloyd Webber’s music has a pomposity, a clichéd poppy bounciness and a quality of pastiche that is instantly irritating; at its best, it is highly effective: the figure of the questioning Judas and Mary Magdalene’s ‘I Don’t Know How To Love Him’ are emotionally rich, and the psychedelically jazzy rock ‘Overture’ and the complex anthem ‘Superstar’, as well as the satirical ‘Herod’s Song’, are unforgettable highpoints. Shortly before this came Stephen Schwartz’s Godspell (Roundhouse, 1971), a series of parables taken mainly from the gospel of Saint Matthew, which ran for an impressive 1,128 performances. Recently, Trey Parker, Robert Lopez and Matt Stone’s The Book of Mormon (Prince of Wales, 2013) confirms the longevity of this genre. Occasionally, a history mega-hit is about theatre history. Michael Frayn’s Noises Off, which opened at the Lyric Hammersmith and transferred to the West End, where it almost reached 2,000 performances, is a farce about an age of farce which on its opening in 1982 was receding rapidly into the past.7 In a typically postmodern way it shows a company of actors putting on a sex farce, Nothing On, and rapidly finding themselves in farcical situations of their own making. By

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the end, a collapsing curtain buries them all in a floundering heap. Billington called it a mix of ‘the thinking man’s No Sex Please We’re British and slapstick Pirandello’.8 Such a postmodern combination was clearly effective, but it could never be as popular as heady gothic fantasy.

The Phantom of the Opera (1986) One of the most attractive of the many historical worlds is the gothic: here Victoriana meets the older tradition of supernatural horror to create an instantly familiar environment of creepy shadows, dripping candles and heightened feelings. And this is the ambience of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera (Her Majesty’s, 1986), an unsurpassed musical whose success has been staggering: after more than thirty years, it is still running in the West End and is the most successful British musical ever, as well as the third most popular show in the world. According to its website, it’s a mega-hit par excellence. Here we have not only one of the most successful entertainments ever produced, in any medium, but also one that continues to give pleasure to masses of people all over the world.9 It has played to more than 140 million people in 166 cities in thirtyfive countries with an estimated gross of $6 billion. The box office revenues are far higher than those of any film. It has won more than seventy theatre awards, including three Oliviers and seven Tonys. The original cast recording was the first in British musical history to enter the charts at number one. Album sales now exceed 40 million. In the face of figures such as these, it is impossible to remain unimpressed. Like Les Mis, this musical not only defines what a theatre mega-hit can be, it also redefines what any cultural artefact can do in the world. Lloyd Webber’s career has easily been the most successful in postwar British theatre history, and The Phantom of the Opera marks a highpoint of achievement. Its creation was part passion, part chance. On 22 March 1984 he married singer Sarah Brightman, and was looking for a project which would show off her considerable vocal skills as well as realizing his ambition to write a big romantic score in the style of Rodgers and Hammerstein. He became interested in The Phantom of the Opera because he knew the classic 1925 Lon Chaney silent movie based on Gaston Leroux’s 1911 novel Le Fantôme de l’Opéra. His enthusiasm for this story about a masked, deformed Phantom who haunts the Paris Opera and creates beautiful music for a young soprano, Christine, was shared by Cameron Mackintosh, the most successful West End producer of the postwar era.10 By chance, Brightman was invited to audition for the part of Christine in Ken Hill’s

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1984 revival of his 1976 adaptation of the story, which had a run at Stratford East, although she declined. Her husband – after considering a collaboration with Hill – then decided to write his own musical version. When by chance he came across a second-hand copy of a translation of Leroux’s novel on a Fifth Avenue bookstall in New York, he thought it a good omen.11 He then produced a rock video of the theme song with a Pre-Raphaelite Brightman and Steve Harley of Cockney Rebel, whose 1970s hits included ‘Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)’, as the Phantom, a gothicky Victorian and ancient Egyptian fantasia directed by Ken Russell. It reached number seven in the British charts in 1986. Having completed the score, Lloyd Webber and Mackintosh chose Broadway director Hal Prince for his abilities as a showman, and opera designer Maria Bjornson created the show’s distinctive gothic look, with Gillian Lynne choreographing, and magician Paul Daniels providing the special effects. Lloyd Webber and Mackintosh also replaced the first librettist Richard Stilgoe with a twenty-five-year-old Guildhall graduate, Charles Hart, who wrote the show’s lush romantic lyrics. Realizing that Harley would be unable to sustain eight shows a week, they followed up Brightman’s suggestion to ask Michael Crawford, best known as Frank Spencer in the BBC’s Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em and for his clowning in No Sex Please, We’re British!. Brightman knew Crawford because they shared the same music teacher. All of them put together one of the most memorable postwar British mega-hits. The musical begins in 1905 with an auction of old theatre props at the Paris Opera House, a place once ruled over by the ‘Phantom’, a reclusive masked figure who was apparently possessed of magical powers. Among the items for sale are a music box and a restored chandelier. As the porters unveil the chandelier, it lights up and is hauled up to the ceiling as we time-travel back to 1881. A rehearsal of a new opera, Hannibal, is taking place, but when Carlotta, the soprano diva, is almost hit by a falling backcloth, she angrily walks out. The chorus girls claim that such accidents are the work of the evil Phantom, who haunts the building. One of them, Christine, orphaned child of a first violinist, steps up as Carlotta’s understudy and makes a triumphant debut. As she does so, she is watched by Raoul – an enthralled aristocratic patron – and by the Phantom. Later, when the Phantom appears in her dressing-room mirror, she assumes he has been sent by her late father, and follows him down into his hidden subterranean world, where curiosity leads her to unmask him and see his disfigured face. Later, during the performance of another opera, Il Muto, the Phantom sabotages Carlotta’s performance. Afraid of his power, Christine and Raoul escape to the opera house roof, where he tells her he loves her. The

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Phantom overhears them and, enraged, brings down the chandelier on the audience. Six months later, during a masked ball at the opera, the Phantom appears as the Red Death and demands that Christine stars in his new opera, Don Juan Triumphant. Raoul, by now her secret fiancé, plans to capture him and end his dominion. When, during the performance of the opera, the Phantom appears on stage in disguise to sing opposite Christine, she unmasks him, shaming him in front of the whole audience – and in a fit of anger he kidnaps her. Yet when she, stirred by his disfigurement, shows him compassion, he releases her, free to marry Raoul, and then, as a mob storms his hiding place, the Phantom simply vanishes. On stage, the musical is a triumph of spectacle. To many this is the show where the chandelier comes crashing down. Lloyd Webber’s rich music found a perfect match in Bjornson’s sumptuous sets, which manage to give the impression of huge magnificence more by suggestion than literal representation. Her invention of the iconic half mask, which suggests that the Phantom is partially handsome, was both a brilliant stage device and an extraordinary marketing image. Likewise, Prince’s immense showmanship is evident in the stage pictures: from the chandelier that comes alive with electricity as the chords of the Phantom’s theme are first heard and then rises above the audience, before later crashing down, to the flamboyant exoticism of the elephant statues in Hannibal. Then there’s the Phantom’s appearance in the mirror, and the spectacular descent into his lair, bearing the mesmerized Christine, and his rowing of her across a subterranean lake, lit by hundreds of candles, like a cloaked Charon. And who can forget the ensemble masquerade scene with its staircase, lavishly costumed cast, or the final moment when the Phantom suddenly disappears? When the audience see the Phantom’s cape whisked away from his throne and it is revealed as empty, with only a wisp of smoke and his mask on the seat, it is a bit of sheer theatrical magic. In performance, of course, not everything always ran smoothly. Crawford remembers some initial technical hitches, with the remote-controlled gondola developing a mind of its own and disobedient trap doors, but records that from the beginning audiences adored the spectacle of the show.12 When it opened on 9 October 1986, the critical response was mixed. Fans, such as Jack Tinker, praised the ‘stars, spectacle, score and story’ and argued that the Phantom is ‘one of the enduring tragic figures of the modern musical; a man with a tender, gifted, loving soul whose only crime was to have been born a freak’.13 City Limits suggested that ‘the myth of youth and beauty (female) in thrall to power and ugliness (male) is an abiding and compulsive one’ while the New Statesman presciently advised: ‘Get used to it now, it will probably still be

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running when your children are grown up.’14 Other critics were less enthusiastic: they thought the music was derivative, the lyrics banal, the characterization thin and the plot confused.15 For them, this was spectacle rather than feeling, and one which humourlessly offered the mere illusion of passion. The public disagreed. John Barber wrote about the ‘outbursts of sudden applause, and a standing ovation at the end’ while Crawford remembers the first night audience, which ‘seemed genuinely thirsty for the romantic spectacle they were witnessing’, and the final ‘cheering, stamping, standing ovation’ lasted ‘nearly ten minutes’.16 Despite its background as a tale of gothic horror, in performance the musical is essentially an archetypal love triangle.17 And there’s a real erotic charge in the music. Original cast members Brightman and Crawford, along with Steve Barton as Raoul, rose sublimely to the expressive demands of singing the lush romantic music – ‘The Phantom of the Opera’, ‘The Music of the Night’, ‘All I Ask of You’ and ‘The Point of No Return’. Because the three main characters have the simplicity of archetypes their characterization has the clarity of myth. We get two compelling portraits of masculine power and one of feminine saintliness. Although he is on stage for less than half of the show’s running time, the Phantom is a constant presence, feared, talked about and haunting. Disfigured from birth, he is a musical genius with a terrific will to power. As the lyrics make clear, he desires above all to possess Christine: to let his music, in his words, ‘secretly possess you’ and for her to ‘surrender to your darkest dreams’ (33–34). A creature of the night, a self-styled ‘Angel of Music’, he enjoys his evil actions as much as his capacity for the tender adoration of beauty. By drawing on both the Pygmalion myth and the Beauty and the Beast story, Lloyd Webber turned the Erik of the original novel into a larger-than-life character reminiscent of Professor Higgins as well as Svengali, King Kong as well as Frankenstein, Bluebeard as well as Don Giovanni, The Flying Dutchman as well as Faust. He knows he is a ‘repulsive carcass, who seems a beast, but secretly dreams of beauty’.18 And, despite his crimes, at the end he admits his loneliness and his sexual frustrations – then he frees Christine and himself walks free. This is a powerful story of redemption.19 Powerful as the Phantom is, he is well matched by Raoul, Vicomte de Chagny, who is noble, handsome, young and sophisticated.20 A man of the light rather than the dark, he is romantic, honest and heroic, the archetypal knight in shining armour devoted to rescuing his damsel in distress. By contrast with these images of strong masculinity, Christine is a picture of distressed femininity, around which the whole story revolves. She is vulnerable, but full of aspirations to be free. When Raoul, who has known her since childhood, first sees her on stage he marvels at how she has been transformed from ugly duckling to beautiful swan:

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‘What a change, you’re really not a bit the gawkish girl that once you were’ (14). Gawky no, but childlike yes. Having a ‘weak’ soul (20), she starts off by being possessed by the Angel of Music because she thinks it’s the spirit of her dead father. And she submits to the disturbingly ravishing dream-like experience of ventriloquizing the Phantom’s music: like something out of Wuthering Heights, she sings, ‘I am the mask you wear [. . .] the phantom of the opera is there inside my mind’ (25–26). This is both demonic possession and freedom through transgression. But she grows into a more plucky character as she tears away the Phantom’s mask, learning to be independent through this encounter, as well as through her work as an opera singer. She visits the grave of her father, a symbolic farewell to him and adolescence in ‘Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again’. Then, in ‘The Point of No Return’, she accepts the Phantom’s ring and in her final confrontation with the disfigured man she points out that it is his soul’s deformity that upsets her, not his looks. Accepting that her illusions are shattered, and forced to choose between the Phantom and Raoul, she takes pity on the monster and kisses him, a self-sacrifice to save Raoul’s life. When he releases her, she quickly returns to give him back his ring, a symbolic moment which suggests redemption. From the glorious cathedral gothic of its opening organ chords, and the thumping rock of its central theme song, The Phantom of the Opera presents a vision of the past that is suffused with both the grandeur and the pain of romantic love. Love’s passion, whether possessive or youthful, saturates the show: it’s the feeling behind the music, its sheer gutsy romance. In ‘The Music of the Night’ the Phantom exalts the power of music – ‘Close your eyes [and] let your spirit start to soar’ and ‘music shall caress you. Hear it, feel it, secretly possess you’ (33–34) – in a way that seems to describe Lloyd Webber’s own score, a composition that offers sweet intoxication. And the musical also expresses a love of musical history. The various pastiches of old opera – Hannibal, Il Muto and Don Juan Triumphant – and the comedy of bewildered opera managers, skimpily clad dancing girls and histrionic divas is diverting, musically exciting, and creates an atmosphere full of Continental operatic splendour, with claustrophobic settings, inexplicable events and heightened emotions, while the Byronic figure of the Phantom, solitary, vengeful and unpredictable, links the story to Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But behind the mask of horror the human being, deformed, lonely and full of longing, comes into view. In the whirlwind of passionate feeling, the past feels as if it’s the right and only place for these melodramatic and hyper-sensual sensations, these lavish costumes and soaring melodies. In this world, erotic madness, big gestures and passionate

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feelings are positively hypnotic. As Crawford remembers, during the first run, ‘We were blessed with such supercharged audiences that the feeling of exhilaration in Her Majesty’s Theatre was an almost tangible thing.’21 After all, the show seems to be saying, our own cynical age can no longer offer big emotions. All that is in the past. To behave like this today would be ridiculous, and yet the need to experience great emotions remains. This is what Lloyd Webber taps into. The Phantom of the Opera was part of the 1980s trend towards event theatre, big productions that highlighted the liveness of performance. One critic called it ‘a new religion of musicals which supplied spiritual nourishment to the masses craving something bigger and better than a diet of television soap opera.’22 Both conservative and affirmative in its gender politics, spectacular in its staging and thrilling in its compulsively forward-moving music, the musical has attracted legions of fans. Two decades after its opening, the Guardian saw the secret of its success in simple terms: ‘It thrills audiences without making them uncomfortable.’23 Lloyd Webber agrees that the key is keeping things simple: in 2006 he said audiences like to find themselves in ‘an escapist, romantic world’.24 On the musical’s 25th anniversary in 2011, the Daily Telegraph noted that ‘there is a hunger for musical theatre – something beautiful and shared and better because it is shared – that runs deep in the human psyche’, before concluding ‘Sometimes the spoken word is not enough: language must sing’.25

The Woman in Black (1989) It’s a short step from a phantom to a ghost. Stephen Mallatratt’s The Woman in Black (Fortune, 1989) has a minimalist aesthetic that avoids spectacle while embracing a series of pleasing theatrical effects. It has been running in the West End since its premiere in the year the Berlin Wall came down, and is second only to The Mousetrap in terms of long West End runs. Its mega-hit status and theatricality means that it has become a school curriculum set book, as well as beloved of audiences. The Act Two scene in which a child’s sudden onstage scream regularly produces screams from the audience is now something of a cultural legend.26 All the gasps and shocks are achieved without spilling buckets of stage blood, but rather by the ratcheting up of suspense to breaking point. Actors who have performed in the show include Edward Petherbridge, Pip Donaghy, Joseph Fiennes, Martin Freeman and Steven Mackintosh. Seeing a performance in June 1992, Beryl Bainbridge thought ‘it is a cracking night out’,

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and, on her way home, her taxi driver told her ‘he’d enjoyed it so much he’d recommended it to his parents and then his in-laws’.27 Her verdict on the play’s success was the sense of ‘elation’ she felt at its end: ‘What the man on the Clapham omnibus with an Old Age Pensioner’s pass requires is to be taken out of himself. Life being what it is and all things being equal, it’s rather refreshing to jump out of one’s skin’.28 The story, originally a popular 1983 horror novel by Susan Hill, has been twice filmed: first by Herbert Wise for ITV, aired on Christmas Eve 1989, and then in 2012 by James Watkins and starring Daniel Radcliffe. Neither has affected the play’s continuing popularity. The Woman in Black was commissioned in summer 1987 by Robin Herford, artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough (home of the Alan Ayckbourn company). At the time, Ayckbourn was working at the National Theatre in London and Herford was told to spend the last of the year’s budget to avoid a reduction of the venue’s Arts Council grant. He decided that an extra Christmas show for adults, staged in the theatre bar area with 70 seats, would be a good way of broadening his audience. So he turned to Stephen Mallatratt, his resident playwright. Born in 1947, Mallatratt was an actor (The Brontës of Howarth, Brideshead Revisited and Chariots of Fire), television writer (Coronation Street and The Forsyte Saga) and playwright with a particular feel for Edwardian and historical themes. Herford asked him to write a ghost story on a £1,000 design budget and no more than four actors. Mallatratt suggested an adaptation of The Woman in Black. Due to financial constraints he wrote it as a two-hander (plus an extra female who plays the ghost, but, in order to maintain an element of surprise, is not included in the programme). Mallatratt’s masterstroke was to make the story a play within a play: the framing device concerns an elderly Arthur Kipps who asks a professional young actor to help him stage a ghost story, something that happened to him many years previously. The older man doesn’t play himself, but about half a dozen characters, while the actor plays the young Kipps. The show first opened in Scarborough on 12 December 1987 and was, by all accounts, quite a scary experience, partly due to the fact that up to 85 people were crammed into a small space and partly due to the story depending on people using their imaginations. It was such a runaway success that Herford put on extra ‘midnight matinées’.29 After this, he brought the show down to the Lyric Hammersmith in 1989, and then transferred it to the West End, first at the Strand Theatre, then the Playhouse and finally, on 7 June 1989, to the 430-seat Fortune Theatre. The story is about young Arthur Kipps, a junior solicitor in London, who visits the seaside market town of Crythin Gifford to attend the funeral of Mrs

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Alice Drablow, a client of his firm. At the churchyard burial, he notices a young woman with a wasted face, dressed in black. He then goes to Eel Marsh House, Mrs Drablow’s residence, which is in the middle of a marsh and linked by a tidebound causeway to the mainland. After sorting through some of her papers, he sees the mystery woman again in a nearby burial ground and then realizes that a thick fog prevents him from leaving. In the fog he is shocked to hear a pony and trap crash and fall into the marsh. He spends an anxious night, then leaves and returns another day, this time with a dog, Spider, for company. When he searches the house he discovers a locked door that conceals a nursery. At night, he hears a knocking sound and, when he forces the door, finds that the room has been wrecked, with an empty rocking chair going back and forth by itself. The next day, Kipps reads Mrs Drablow’s old letters, which tell of her sister, Jennet, who was pregnant but unmarried. Pressurized by her family, Jennet gave the baby boy to her sister. When the child, his dog and a servant went out in the trap and were drowned in the marsh Jennet went mad with grief and contracted a wasting disease and, after her death, returned as the Woman in Black. Whoever sees her is cursed and will lose a child. Upset by these stories, Arthur returns to London, marries his fiancée Stella, and the couple have a son, Joseph. Soon after, Stella and Joseph go for a ride in a trap when the Woman in Black appears to Arthur. His wife and son are instantly killed in a crash. The critics were positive about the show’s spookiness, and especially its grim ending: Martin Hoyle said that ‘a gripping tale grippingly told is all you need to set the imagination racing’ and Milton Shulman acknowledged its effectiveness: ‘Even telly addicts could find it pleasantly frightening’.30 Michael Billington hailed ‘a brilliantly effective spine-chiller without a trace of self-mocking absurdity’, one that ‘plays on all our primal fears concerning loss of children’, and ‘reminds us of the theatrical power of narrative’.31 Jack Tinker concluded: ‘What this superb production does so confidently, is to make the very elements of theatre work by stealth on our susceptibilities’, while Billington also praised the sound design ‘with its reverberant footsteps, nocturnal wails, neighing ponies and sighing breezes’.32 Critics noted the play’s debt to classics such as Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and the ghost stories of M. R. James. When the show transferred to the Strand Theatre in February 1989, its producer Peter Wilson maximized audiences by the innovation of putting on Sunday matinees.33 The Woman in Black is a ghost story that derives much of its power by its use of well-worn tactics: slow screwing up of tension, ghostly presences, sudden screams and unexpected appearances. As the programme says, ghosts ‘seen, or

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sensed, from the darkened auditorium can be doubly haunting and disturbing’.34 Critic Susannah Clapp praised the show’s ‘bounce-out-of-your-seat impact’; ‘it has produced sounds – gasps, squeals, shudders, muffled screams – that are rarely heard in the stalls’.35 Indeed, the show depends on the atmosphere not just of the stage, but of the theatre: Herford has always thought of it as an immersive event in which the whole venue is the set. The air-con is cooler than comfortable. When the actor appears from the aisle, the audience become conscious that anything could creep up on them. And less is more: one scary moment happens when Kipps enters the nursery to find the empty rocking chair. Likewise, the Woman in Black character speaks no lines; she is just a haunting presence. When she appears, audiences scream. The twist at the very end of the play is that a real ghost has been present all along and that her next victim will be the actor. The play ends with the rhythmic knocking of the rocking chair as the lights fade to black. An image of her face lingers on the gauze. Although the play is set in the past, there is a deliberate ambiguity about when the story takes place. In Mallatratt’s ‘Adaptor’s Note’ in the playtext he says, ‘There are anachronisms and geographical inconsistencies within the text. They are not mistakes, but indications of the neverland we inhabit when involved with the WOMAN [sic] in Black.’36 Inconsistencies include anachronistic cars and torches; a geographical vagueness which locates the play anywhere between the Fenlands and the North-East of England. The framing device is probably set in the early 1950s, which means that the main story is set many years earlier, in the Edwardian era. It is distant enough from us to have a traditionally inflexible moral code, in which Jennet can be punished for her out-of-wedlock pregnancy. The play’s vague historical location, and its atmospheric haunted house setting, offer audiences a place where their primal fears can be indulged. The brisk pacing of the storytelling and the fact that the ghost is not just a casual apparition, but a harbinger of the death of children, creates dramatic tension. At the climax of the play, the death of a child provides a chilling ending. From the beginning, Kipps insists that he is staging the story as a form of therapy, to ‘relive it through the telling’ and thus ‘be forever purged of it’ (8). Describing a Christmas family gathering in which ghost stories are told, Kipps uses vivid language to remind the audience of the tradition of gothic horror: ‘They told of dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight’ – ‘ghoulish, lurid inventions’ (6). The opening of the play is comic, as Kipps struggles to fulfil the actor’s instructions, and this seduces the audience; they relax into the tale. Then comes the tension. ‘The fear,’ wrote Mallatratt, ‘is not on a visual or visceral level, but an imaginative one.’37 When the actor tells Kipps

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that the performance will take place ‘with imagination, Mr Kipps. Ours, and the audience’s’ (15), it is an instruction. He argues that the play happens inside our heads. And indeed it does – the set is extremely simple, bare with a few drapes, a door, a stool, a chair and a laundry basket, and, of course, some dry ice. Designer Michael Holt’s use of sharkstooth gauze facilitates rapid revelations, including that of the Woman in Black at the show’s climax, while Rod Mead’s sound design enhances the spooky atmosphere, and some of the shocks. Although the young Kipps repeatedly insists that he doesn’t believe in ghosts, the crepuscular gloom that envelopes the stage, occasionally broken by tiny torch lights or a storm lamp, effectively provides a dark canvas which can be peopled by our own fears. As well as being a ghost story, this is also a show about theatre, a two-hander that foregrounds its own theatricality. The storytelling is repeatedly interrupted to remind the audience that we are watching a performance, and the small surprises of Act One prepare us for the bigger shocks of Act Two. At one point, the actor says, ‘One must appreciate the magic, one must not ask how the magic works’ (29). This line sums up the show, which works best in a small theatre such as the Fortune, where the venue’s size adds to the claustrophobia. To keep things fresh, Herford recasts every nine months. If the economy of the production kept it going during its early years, its mega-hit status is due to its spookiness, its satisfying twists, the horror of its deaths and its moral core: Hill, who is a Christian, argues that ‘It’s all very well to be frightened, but there has to be a point . . . I do think that there is a moral point to The Woman in Black.’38 It is a story about loss, grief and a deep desire for vengeance. But the moral is that repeated revenge is senseless – ‘You have to let go . . . The grief and the blame have to stop.’39 In the programme for the show’s 5,000th performance, twelve years into its run at the Fortune, producer Peter Wilson wrote that the scream on the soundtrack had originally been provided by Herford’s son Oliver, a child at the time, and that in the final dress rehearsal at the Lyric Hammersmith the show’s publicists Joy Sapieka and Toni Racklin were ‘crouching between the rows in terror’. He also estimated that 2 million people had seen the show and that, on an initial investment of £5,000 of Arts Council money in the Stephen Joseph Theatre in 1987, the Treasury has made a return of more than 40,000 per cent from taxes. That’s over £2 million.40 The show continues to be popular, especially with school groups. In 2012, journalist Alex Needham found the Fortune ‘full of screaming 14-year-olds, but the play is easily capable of terrifying older viewers’: Ken Drury, who once played Kipps, remembers ‘a man who gasped “Fuck’s sake!” as a mysteriously locked door, central to the plot, swung open’.41 Terror can be

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both unsettling and pleasurable. And the play’s reputation means that audiences now come expecting to be frightened – and they will themselves to scream. Like The Woman in Black, Marie Jones’s Stones in His Pockets, (New Ambassadors, 2000), is a two-hander that depends on overt theatricality for its effects. First staged by West Belfast theatre company Dubbeljoint in 1996, before arriving four years later in the West End, it played for 1,640 performances. Performed by two actors, originally Conleth Hill and Sean Campion, who play all the parts, the piece is about the contrast between history and the multinational heritage industry, which dazzles two ordinary men with dreams of success at the dizzy heights of celebrity culture. Set in County Kerry, the story is about Charlie and Jake, who find temporary work as extras on a Hollywood film. The film is set in the historical past, and the extras play the parts of local poverty-stricken and peat-cutting peasants. Since today’s locals are also very poor, they have little choice except for participating in Hollywood’s rewriting of their history, which sanitizes and sentimentalizes them. Their depressing and jobless landscape becomes a glorious natural backdrop to the film. A note of realism arrives when Sean, Jake’s young druggy cousin, is rejected by the casting director, and commits suicide by wading into a lake with nothing in his pockets but stones to weigh him down. As Michael Billington noted, ‘Hollywood lands in Ireland and ignores social reality to peddle antique myths. In the movie the aristocratic heroine weds the peasant who restores the land to the people’, while Time Out concluded: ‘American film-makers are preoccupied with their own fake, sentimental view of the Emerald Isle and indifferent to the real community that surrounds them.’42 Here is a play about history that offers realism rather than escape. What makes the piece a success is not only its satirical content, which laughs at the artistic pretentions of the American film industry, but also the fact that it is a humorous entertainment in which an archetypal failure (Jake) and a similarly symbolic outsider (Charlie) banter with wit and insight, their very stage presence a tribute to the joys of live performance.

The 39 Steps (2006) Like these other shows, Patrick Barlow’s The 39 Steps exploits live performance’s inherent theatricality by using a tiny cast to tell an epic story. It ran at the Criterion theatre for 3,784 performances, the fifth longest running play in West End history and not only lasted nine years there, but also two years on Broadway,

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as well as spawning a dozen international productions. There have been no fewer than eight different productions in Germany, including one with an all-female cast. In 2011 Barlow was the most performed playwright in the United States. But this level of success took a long time to achieve. Born in 1947, he was a jobbing actor until, in 1980, he created the National Theatre of Brent, a two-man company that specialized in epic comedy shows. Developing the stage persona of Desmond Olivier Dingle, with actors such as Julian Hough, Jim Broadbent and John Ramm as his sidekicks, the duo performed stage and radio plays – anything from The Messiah to The Wonder of Sex – for more than thirty years, clocking up a similar number of deliberately awful spoofs. The 39 Steps was originally the idea of Nobby Dimon and Simon Corble, who toured a four-actor version in the North of England in 1995. Producer Edward Snape saw their production and liked the concept, but felt that the story needed refreshing. So he asked Barlow to take a look. Barlow thought that the problem with The 39 Steps was that it was based too closely on John Buchan’s 1915 book, despite the fact that most people know and love Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 film version, which completely reimagined the original. So his version, which kept the cast of three males and one female, was based on the film and not the book. At first, in 2005, it was produced at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, directed by Fiona Buffini, and then restaged at the Tricycle Theatre, directed this time by Maria Aitken, in August 2006, before transferring to the Criterion. The result of this honing, in the words of the theatre’s education pack, is ‘an incredibly fast-paced romp through the story of Hitchcock’s film’.43 Like similar shows, such as the hugely successful work of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, The 39 Steps appeals to theatre audiences who love both comedy spoofs and frantic physical theatricality, as well as enjoying the typically postmodern mix of high and low culture. Beginning with strobe lights that suggest the era of silent film, the cast assemble the set, and the story begins in 1935 with the upper-class Richard Hannay, about forty years old and sporting a pencil moustache, alone in his central London flat, drinking whisky. He has just returned from the colonies, and he’s bored. Pulling himself together, he goes to an East End music hall and catches a performance by Mr Memory, a man able to store and recall vast amounts of facts. During the show, a beautiful young woman sits next to Hannay, becoming increasingly nervous until suddenly she fires a gunshot at the ceiling. In the confusion she asks Hannay to take her to his home, where she tells him that she is Annabella Schmidt, a spy, and warns him about a secret foreign network, called the 39 Steps, which is trying to smuggle state secrets out of the

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country (presumably to aid the Nazis). When she is killed in the night, Hannay is suspected and goes on the run to Scotland, where the network is based. His train is searched, but he eludes the police, first by kissing Pamela, a fellow passenger, then by escaping over the roof of the train and across the Forth Bridge. After meeting some Highland crofters, and getting help from Margaret the wife but being betrayed by her Presbyterian husband, he is chased again across the glens until he arrives at At-Na-Shellach, where he meets the Professor, a master spy. Arrested again, Hannay is reunited by chance with Pamela and convinces her of his innocence while escaping once more. The story’s climax comes at the London Palladium, where Hannay asks Mr Memory for a definition of the 39 Steps, and the Professor is finally foiled. Hannay marries Pamela. The end. This pocket-sized West End hit was well received by the critics, who generally thought it was funny, if a bit superficial. Sarah Hemming called it ‘affectionately tongue-in-cheek’ and ‘daft and drolly amusing’, while Sam Marlowe concluded, ‘But if the show remains slight, the ride is rollicking fun.’44 Robert Gore-Langton rightly saw the show as ‘an attractive, tongue-in-cheek tribute not just to Hitchcock’s thriller but to a vanished era. One in which heroes were heroes and sinister spies stood under street lamps.’45 The Observer hailed it as ‘a cleverly calculated mix of the commercial and the experimental’.46 Four actors play an estimated 139 characters, plus some inanimate objects such as Highland gorse bushes. One actor (originally Charles Edwards) played Hannay; another (Catherine McCormack) all three women; the other two actors (Simon Gregor, Rupert Degas) played all the rest. This involved the classic quick-change tactics of swapping caps and hats, wearing a different costume for different sides of the body, and general feverish speeding around the set. Directed by Maria Aitken, who sharpened up much of the stage business, making it funnier and cleverer, the show became a classic good night out. As Barlow said, ‘People love watching the ingenuity.’47 Visual gags abound: when Hannay looks out of his flat window, two cast members quickly come on and pose as rain-coated spies standing under a lamp post; when he hesitates again at the window, there they are again, then, as he changes his mind and doesn’t look, they rush off stage. When the cleaner discovers Annabella’s dead body, her scream turns into a train whistle and rapid scene change. The Forth Bridge from which Hannay dangles is created by means of a ladder suspended between two step-ladders; the train roof is built from three upturned trunks; a length of cloth creates a stream. The Highland chase sequence is told using shadow puppets and features guest appearances by the Loch Ness Monster, Hitchcock, a bi-plane and some deer. The Professor shows Hannay the missing top of his small left-hand

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finger by artfully tucking the top of it into his jacket lapel. Some women characters are played by men in drag. Gorse is created by bent fingers. Fogs billow. Mime rules. The story is powered by Hannay, who is a familiar historical character, the archetypal strong and upright British hero of yesteryear. Speaking in his characteristically clipped way, he is introduced as bored with life, and alienated from society: ‘The weather made me liverish, no exercise to speak of and the talk of the ordinary Englishman made me sick’ (1). But when he gets going, he is a gung-ho adventurer, public-school, colonial and fearless. His sense of right and wrong is as impeccable as his class background. In his speech to a political rally, which he accidentally stumbles into, he says, ‘Let’s just all set ourselves resolutely to make this world a happier place! A decent world! A good world!’ (49). But the emotional core of the play, which occasionally peaks out from behind its restless action and relentless jokes, is Hannay’s psychological emptiness, his loneliness, which is finally filled by his love for Pamela, who turns into an angel of redemption. It’s a comedy, but it is also a rom com. Such clichés offer the consolations of familiarity and Barlow’s text both honours them – and sends them up. The world of the play is that of a well-loved spy genre which reminds some of us of a fantasy England where men were men, women either dangerous foreign femme fatales or jolly decent gals, and where dastardly villains could be ultimately defeated by sheer British pluck. Full of Hitchcock references, from Psycho music to mentions of The Lady Vanishes, North by Northwest and Rear Window, the show is not only funny in its clowning, but also nostalgic and postmodern in its knowingness. When, at the start, Hannay, uses ‘English humour’ to joke that Annabella’s tale ‘Sounds like a spy story’, she replies ‘That’s exactly what it is’ (8, 9). Setting the show in the 1930s allows the audience to relax into a world of clear class divisions, where everyone knows their place, a land of funny foreigners who have silly accents, and of fogs and steam trains: it is a spoof after all, what Pamela calls a ‘penny novelette spy story’ (56). However, there are some brief references to more serious subjects. For example, Hannay’s hatred of any idea of racial superiority: ‘Master race? I despise you!!!’ (41). He also makes the point that evil can hide, like the Professor, behind an urbane, charming and cultured exterior, where respectability is a cloak that conceals criminal intent. In this case Nazism. Today, spoofs of traditional genres, such as the thriller, are extremely popular. Some 3 million people have seen this mega-hit, and audiences have varied in composition. Barlow says, ‘The audience is a real mix of tourists, families, couples, school parties, people seeing it for the second or third time. I met somebody

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recently who’d seen it eight times.’48 In his foreword to the playtext, which is more comic than literary, he says that although the play was written for four actors, he’s seen a school production which ‘skilfully re-cast this’ for ‘over 50 actors’.49 Producer Edward Snape is clear about the reasons for its popularity: ‘You can take a six-year-old or [your] mother-in-law because it’s wholesome and great fun. But it’s also clever, physical theatre with all these references that younger film noir fans love. It’s something for everyone.’50 And Barlow sees it as an archetypal quest narrative: ‘Like a fairy story. Someone lacks something. They go on a journey. They find it. They are healed.’51

One Man, Two Guvnors (2011) In the popular imagination, 1960s Britain is a world of pop music, mini-skirts and Swinging London, as well as a world of skiffle bands, scandal and gangsters. When Richard Bean decided to set his adaptation of Carlo Goldoni’s 1746 Commedia dell’Arte classic Il servitore di due padroni (The Servant of Two Masters) in 1963, he was using the past to create a distant world where knockabout farce could credibly once again be comedy’s best theatrical form. Opening at the National Theatre on 17 May 2011, the show starred versatile television comedian James Corden and transferred to the Adelphi on 8 November 2011, and then to Theatre Royal Haymarket on 2 March 2012. It ran for 1,052 performances. A boisterous farce full of physical comedy and hilarious one-liners, the show had music by Grant Olding and a band called The Craze, which played at the start and during the scene changes, charting the history of pop from washboard skiffle to 1960s pop. The evening also involved some audience participation, with Corden inviting members of the public on stage. When the original cast took the show to Broadway in 2012, one of the audience members that Corden selected to bring on was Donald Trump. When he left the stage, Corden gave his bottom a playful squeeze – the audience loved it.52 It’s that kind of show. The production originated with National Theatre boss Nicholas Hytner’s desire to bring Corden back to his theatre (he’d previously been in Alan Bennett’s 2004 hit The History Boys), and Sebastian Born of the Literary Department suggested the Goldoni comedy. Hytner reread the play, in which he himself had acted at school, and, not wishing to recreate a Commedia dell’Arte museum piece, asked himself what is ‘the English low-comedy equivalent of Italian low comedy?’53 The answer is farce, Ealing comedies and the Carry On films, contemporary equivalents of which were incorporated by the initially reluctant

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Bean into his final script. Hytner’s masterstrokes consisted not only in casting Corden and commissioning the verbally dexterous Bean, but also in employing director Cal McCrystal, of the surrealistic clown troupe Spymonkey, to create the physical comedy for the show. Brighton 1963: Francis Henshall, a failed washboard player, now works as a minder for Roscoe Crabbe, a psychotic minor East End gangster who arrives in Brighton to collect money from his fiancée Pauline’s father, Charlie Clench. But Roscoe is actually his sister Rachel, who has fled to the seaside from London posing as her dead brother who has been killed by her posh boyfriend Stanley Stubbers in a gangland brawl. She is disguised in a black mop wig, looking like Beatle Ringo Starr. As well as being perennially short of cash, Francis is constantly ravenous. He is staying at The Cricketers Arms and when Stanley, who is hiding from the police and waiting for Rachel, offers to employ him, he sees the chance of extra cash. The problem is that he finds it hilariously hard to juggle both jobs. In the climax to Act One, he has to serve dinner to both of his employers, who are staying at the same pub, but are unaware of each other’s whereabouts. In the end, the confused love stories all resolve themselves so that Rachel and Stanley are reunited, Pauline gets her true love Alan and Francis goes on holiday with Dolly, Clench’s bookkeeper. For pedants, the playtext gives all the English characters their commedia identities. For example, Francis is the Harlequin Truffaldino. The cast is full of character types: as well as the wily Rachel and Stanley the toff (Rasponi and Florindo), there is gangster Clench (Pantalone), sidekick Lloyd (Brighella), lawyer Dangle (Lombardi), would-be actor Alan (Silvio), clever Dolly (Smeraldina) and dim Pauline (Clarice). The funniest addition to the original is Alfie the octogenarian waiter, whose clowning lights up the Act One dinner scene. Like all farce, One Man, Two Guvnors depends for its effects on its physical comedy. Corden’s Francis, who Hytner sums up as ‘hapless, bewildered, hungry, stupid’, wears a crumpled check suit and trousers too short for his legs.54 From the start, he is presented as an archetypal failure – the bodyguard who failed to protect his boss, Roscoe, from being killed. One of his first jobs is to bring a heavy trunk into the pub. After unsuccessful attempts to lift it, he recruits two volunteers from the audience to help. In the NT Live performance he ad-libs a joke about premature ejaculation. Later, having acquired two employers, he argues with himself about how easily he gets confused, slapping himself, punching himself and beating himself up, with the aid of a dustbin lid, until he ends up on the floor (27–28). Having not eaten for more than a day, he asks audience members for a sandwich, improvising responses. Trying to eat the

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cheese in a mousetrap he gets his tongue caught in the mechanism. Then, in the centrepiece of the play, he serves dinner to both his employers in an exhilarating twenty-minute sequence full of mad clowning, helped by Alfie the ancient waiter, who keeps falling down the stairs (43–58). In the middle of this, he calls on an audience volunteer. A woman comes on stage (50). She is plainly nervous, can barely speak and has to hold a soup tureen, then hide in various corners of the set. The audience love her, and support her. At the climax, while Francis is preparing the crepe suzette, she is set on fire – and then completely covered in foam from a fire extinguisher. (Of course, she’s a plant.) These scenes are McCrystal’s triumphs. But as well as riotous physical clowning, Bean’s text injects a series of humorous exchanges and one-liners that light up the show. Unusually for a mega-hit, the text has a literary quality. As critic Henry Hitchings put it, ‘His writing luxuriates in the copiousness of the comic tradition and honours the possibilities of improvisation, but is also packed with brilliantly original lines.’55 Bean evokes the louche, smutty Brighton of the early 1960s with a postmodern mix of traditional humour and a more contemporary sensibility. When trousers drop in this show, it is no accident: it is because of sexual desire. The jokes come fast and furious: Dangle is introduced as the man ‘who got the Mau Mau off ’ (11) and Charlie’s ‘love passes through marriage quicker than shit through a small dog’ (37), a phrase which deliberately avoids a rhyme but surely alludes to the classic 1956 Frank Sinatra song about love and marriage going together like a horse and carriage. There are many knowing winks about our shared knowledge of history. Bean’s game here is to raise a smile by juxtaposing the make-believe past with our current understanding of it. So, for example, a Mile End nightclub is called ‘rough’ because it is patronized by ‘Criminals, gangsters, Princess Margaret’ (19). In Act Two, Dolly has several feminist speeches, most of which depend on an ironic distance from the past: ‘I predict in twenty years’ time there’ll be a woman in ten Downing Street, yeah, and she won’t be doing the washing up’ (63–64), which she follows by a second prediction that, because of this, ‘the feminine voice of compassion for the poor will be the guiding principle of government, and there’ll be an end to foreign wars’ (64). History is a place that allows for knowing laughter. In one scene, Pauline cries, ‘It’s 1963 dad! You can’t force me to marry a dead homosexual’ (19); in another, Alan exclaims, ‘It’s 1963, there’s a bloody revolution in the theatre and angry young men are writing plays about Alans’ (30). The repeated mentions of the now-closed Woolworths stores suggest a nostalgia for the past. But there are also jokes that have a much more edgy

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sensibility: at one point, Francis reminds Stanley that his public-school upbringing meant that ‘You also gang raped eleven-year-old boys’ (32), and Stanley alludes to lesbians as ‘a bit girls-only-Greek-island’ (33). There are fart jokes, nun jokes, masturbation jokes, Irish jokes, bad-actor jokes, and a modern battle of the sexes between Francis and Dolly. And national identity is constantly satirized: Stanley the ex-public schoolboy says that Britain won two world wars because: ‘The Germans had superior technology, but our officers showered together’ (73). Reviews of the show were universally admiring. Typical responses include Michael Billington, who called it ‘one of the funniest productions in the National’s history’ and Charles Spencer, who hailed it as ‘the feelgood hit of the summer’.56 Paul Taylor correctly characterized the show as ‘a cross between pantomime for adults and an exercise in drolly knowing hindsight about pre-Chatterley trial “innocence” ’, while the general effect of the lively evening was summed up by Kate Bassett as ‘terrifically bouncy and often howlingly funny’.57 Amid the praise of the show’s mixture of high and low culture, everyone adored Corden’s star turn, extolling his physical nimbleness and his genial personality, his grace with audience members and his comically oafish stage presence. As the first run continued, the cast sometimes got carried away. In July 2011, the Observer reported that Hytner had ‘issued a rather stern note’, and had to ‘rein in’ some of the cast’s ad-libbing by reminding his actors to stick to rehearsed stage business.58 When Corden took the original cast to New York, his understudy, Owain Arthur, took over the central role in London, followed by Rufus Hound. For Broadway, Bean rewrote the text, taking out some local references to cricket and yellow traffic lines. He also added a mention of a Hostess Twinkie, an American sugary snack. Most of the humour crossed the Atlantic without a problem, and Corden’s clowning was appreciated, although some audience members were more politically correct than their British counterparts. Alice Pifer, from Harlem, thought that Alfie’s tremors suggested ‘cerebral palsy’ and said that ‘laughing at a disabled person is not nice’.59 One Man, Two Guvnors is quintessentially British in its comedy. But what does that mean? In the programme, McCrystal explains how ‘the British have never really lost their relish for smut’, and situates Bean’s mega-hit in the long tradition of Restoration explicitness, high-speed farce, camp pantomime, Victorian music hall innuendo, Carry On films, Benny Hill, cross-dressing and stand-up comedy. ‘It cannot be denied that we have always had a fascination with bodily functions’ and, of course, groan-worthy puns.60 Given that Bean began his career as a stand-up, it is hardly surprising that many of these elements arrive on

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stage as ironic stereotypes: Dolly at first appears to be the witless buxom female, but soon become the most perceptive person in the cast; Pauline is the dumb virgin, but also the sincerest character. Both Bean and McCrystal equate Britishness with audience familiarity with the clichés of traditional genres. And the game involves more than just popular comedy: when Rachel – who in a running joke is ‘identical twins’ with her brother (86) (although of course she’s female and he’s male) – says she’s in mourning ‘for a brother, and, a husband’ (77), there’s a nod to Shakespearean tragedy as well as to the bard’s comedy. In interviews, Hytner has stressed that there is ‘Nothing deep whatsoever’ in the show, and suggests that the National’s audience loved it because its slapstick comedy ‘was the kind of old rubbish they secretly liked better than Ibsen’.61 Of course, this comment is given entirely in the spirit of the show: ‘old rubbish’ is an ironic tribute to a whole tradition of comedy that the show succeeded both in reviving, and in bringing up to date. One Man, Two Guvnors is not a historical account of social conditions in early 1960s Brighton; it is a triumphant revisiting of the history of British comedy. Once again, what is important is not documentary, but escapist fantasy.

7

Fantasy: Whimsy, Camp and Sci-fi

In popular theatre, fantasy sells. After all, there is nothing quite so escapist as loosening the bounds of all reality, and plunging wholeheartedly into the marvellous and the fantastical. Indeed, theatre itself is surely a piece of fantasy, a place to dream of other worlds and other realities. Whether the source is gothic imagery, science fiction, absurdist humour or children’s literature, the allure of such alternative universes exercises a powerful pull on our imaginations. And, of course, all of these genres can easily blend into each other. The very definition of imagination is the absence of boundaries and the polymorphous nature of these kinds of shows illustrates how culture is a place of mixing and fruition. It is also a world of universal archetypes and deeply felt myths. At the same time, fantasy is a great space for subversion: having abandoned all pretence of reality, it is easy to question social norms, accepted morality and gender identities. Imaginary worlds can help you reorder your sense of priorities. In musicals, for example, singing and dancing are much more important as a means of expression than banal everyday dialogues. In these cases, fun is of the essence. Fantasy is a place where pleasure knows no bounds.

Salad Days (1954) Musicals are particularly suited to conveying a fantastical vision of the world. After all, if audiences accept that characters can, at any moment, burst into song, then they are already quite far down the road of a willing suspension of disbelief. Musicals can also be an assertion of national identity, and of national pride. In the mid-1950s, two mega-hit shows boosted the confidence of British theatre and offered a response to American imports: Sandy Wilson’s The Boy Friend ran for five years, but even more successful was Julian Slade and Dorothy Reynolds’s Salad Days (Vaudeville, 1954), with 2,283 performances. Both were by upperclass composers and both were nostalgic. Like Wilson, Slade had a privileged 149

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background: he was the son of a barrister and educated at Eton and Cambridge, where the budding composer wrote undergraduate revues. After university, he went to the Bristol Old Vic Drama School, where he and his older leading lady, the experienced rep actress and author Dorothy Reynolds, began composing Christmas musicals designed to give this classical acting company a bit of fun around the piano. Salad Days was their third show, commissioned to fill a gap in the end-of-season schedule and created in haste, with only two and a half weeks for rehearsal and preparations. It was an eccentric, one-off fantasy which featured a tramp and a magic piano. Breaking from the more opulent Coward and Novello tradition, it used the company’s talents to their best effect, and its immediate success after opening in June 1954 for a brief three-week run was, in 24-year-old Slade’s words, due to ‘word-of-mouth’.1 On 5 August 1954, the production, directed by Denis Carey, transferred to the Vaudeville in the West End, keeping most of its original cast – which included Reynolds and Slade, who played piano for the first eighteen months. In total, it ran for longer than any other British musical until this record was broken by Oliver! in 1960.2 The title Salad Days means a time of youthful high jinks and idealism, which is apt for what is a quintessential summer show, a mixture of undergraduate zaniness and sunny brightness.3 It’s a loose musical fantasy which takes the form of a series of revue sketches featuring Timothy and Jane, both Cambridge graduates who want to wriggle out of the plans their parents have made for them (he has to meet his four uncles, all bastions of the Establishment, in search of a career; she has to get married). Instead, they decide to wed in the hope of falling in love later, and then, in a London park, bump into a tramp, who employs them for a month to look after his magic piano, which has the effect of making anyone who hears it start dancing. Having nicknamed the piano Minnie and teamed up with Troppo, a mute, the young couple create havoc by forcing various authority figures to dance. Along the way, Jane meets Nigel, a university friend, who is conducting a campaign to subvert the policies of the killjoy Minister for Pleasure and Pastime, another of Timothy’s uncles. Other sketches include scenes in a beauty parlour, a police station, the Cleopatra night-club and Ambrose’s dress shop – and to keep it topical, there’s even a flying saucer. After their month is up, the tramp is revealed to be Timothy’s Uncle Ba-Ba, the black sheep of the family, and the piano is passed to Nigel and Fiona, another of Jane’s friends. As the show’s Pictorial Brochure, printed for the West End transfer, makes clear, this was a thoroughly clean-cut production, a lark full of happy caricatures. Written for a June slot, the show’s fantasy of summer sunniness pervades both music and words. Because of the show’s hasty creation, the score was more of a

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prompt than a definitive composition, with Slade freely improvising and the small band playfully following suit. Although its music recalls the tunes of Gilbert and Sullivan and the Roaring Twenties, its word play is eccentric and gloriously dotty, as was the main prop, Minnie the Magic Piano. The first version of this was assembled from parts of old pianos mounted on pram wheels, but Reynolds rejected it as too large. It needed to be small, a mini piano with a five and a half octave keyboard, so Tom Lovell built a second version under the supervision of Patrick Robertson, the production designer. Apparently some thirteen people helped to make it, painting it, adding lamps, fitting its fringe and pasting theatrical prints on its back.4 But not everyone involved in the transfer was equally enthusiastic. Apparently, after matinee performances, while Slade was recovering from playing piano and preparing for the evening performance, he and Jack Gatti, the Vaudeville’s owner, would sit chatting in the stalls. Once, when Gatti told the composer that the opening number, ‘The Things That Are Done by a Don’, was a work of genius, Slade raised an eyebrow: ‘Really, Jack?’ ‘Oh, yes. It’s the most wonderful opening number. Sheer brilliance. I mean, after hearing it the audience can only think it’s got to get better than this.’5 Critical reaction emphasized the show’s youthful high spirits, while pointing out some aspects of its superficiality. While it was rapturously applauded by Cecil Smith with ‘clap hands!’, ‘British musical comedy came back to life last night’, Philip Hope-Wallace called it ‘a little fantasy’ whose effect is ‘one of genuine high spirits’ with ‘the brashness of a students’ rag but a true professional touch in the timing’.6 Cecil Wilson hailed Slade as ‘theatre’s new wonder boy’ and said the musical was full of ‘rather precious high jinks’, but noted that ‘the audience lapped up every moment with the relish of parents at an end-of-term concert’, although Milton Shulman acidly characterized its target audience as ‘an aunt, an uncle, or some other fond relative of a member of the cast’.7 Yet he complained in vain. As W. A. Darlington noted, ‘There are some shows which defy solemn criticism.’8 The musical’s success made it a social phenomenon: the October 1954 issue of Vanity Fair magazine publicized its Lancôme make-up offer with photographs from the salon scene in the show, pointing out that this comic skit is ‘not . . . repeat not’ the way to apply a facial.9 And when the Observer reported in February 1955 that the young Queen had seen the show, its serious-minded writer remarked that ‘it isn’t easy to account for its success’, decrying its naïvety while acknowledging the fact that it was ‘extremely good-tempered and free of malice’. Finally, this report concluded that ‘Salad Days is deliberately slight and escapist’.10 Despite its impeccably well-spoken good manners, Salad Days has a mildly subversive theme: as an antidote to middle-class conformity, it advocates dancing

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in the streets, and in the parks and in the office. Although the text describes some of the dancing in almost ecstatic terms, with stage directions such as ‘they are all dancing with Bacchic abandon’ (3) and the show’s songs include numbers such as ‘Oh Look at Me, I’m Dancing’ with lines like ‘I’m going backwards instead of forwards,/ I’m spinning like a top’ (69), the satire is gentle rather than savage. And yet some moments were more edgy. For example, in the diplomatic service song, ‘It’s Hush-Hush’ (which parodies the British state’s obsession with secrecy), the line ‘Don’t ever ask who won the war/ It’s Hush-Hush’ could have been greeted with a smile, but the following line, ‘Don’t ever ask what the war was for’ (25), was more troubling: were these young people suggesting that there was no reason for war in 1950, or in 1939? There’s also something more than a touch naughty about the constant use of the word gay, which was definitely a signal to gays in the audience that straight sexuality was not the only way to live. More obviously humorous is the scene in which the police constable Boot finds himself dancing with the Inspector: there’s a joke about which of them is the ‘lady’ and which the ‘gentleman’ (28), before the Inspector takes out ‘a pair of ballet shoes’ (29). So the show’s central contradiction is the tension between its subversive satire and the conventional middle-class decorum of its worldview. If this summer musical’s conventionality is upturned by the liberating sensations of irrepressible dance, the symbols of authority, whether parents, politicians or policemen, are softly mocked, but they are also made to mock themselves, as if to say: look at us, we might appear grim, but we’re all fun at heart. Timothy’s uncles work in the Foreign Office, Parliament, Army and Space Science, but none are immune to the appeal of madcap dancing. There’s an almost sublime innocence about this affectionate evocation of recognizably English stereotypes and familiar situations. Lightly entertaining in its poise, clearly inoffensive in its message and joyfully youthful in its singing and dancing, the musical features ‘The Time of My Life’, a song in which Jane sings, ‘Look at the weather and look at me/ We’re both in a summery haze/ We’re young and we’re green as the leaf on the tree/ For these are our salad days’ (54), and, as she ends up by admitting her love for Timothy, she concludes, ‘I am having the time of my life’ (55). Yet the chief feeling of Salad Days is not sunny optimism, or sweet satire, but rather sheer eccentricity. There’s an uncontrollable whimsy and campness about its fun, its larky questing narrative, and it wears its craziness on its constantly flapping sleeve. The opening number emphatically characterizes university dons as doing ‘mad, mad things’ (3), and other surreal scenes include Electrode, a visitor from outer space, who Jane greets by telling Timothy to ‘Look at his lovely

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hair and his wonderful smooth skin’ (57). He accompanies the ‘astral navigator’ Uncle Zed, a ‘high-up scientist’ (61, 58), and they arrive in a flying saucer which is an actual king-size saucer. Zed’s discovery of a new planet provokes Jane to ask if she and Timothy could go there for their honeymoon (61). The central fantasy, that of escaping from the constraints of archetypal middle-class life by embracing a completely casual attitude to career and marriage while throwing oneself into happy melodies and thrilling dances, is brilliantly vivid, and even a touch inspiring. Salad Days dares to imagine a better and a freer world, in which political and psychological repression is sloughed off, more than a decade before the arrival of the hippy counterculture of the late 1960s. And it effortlessly performs the populist trick of being both wryly subversive and thoroughly nostalgic about a simpler world, the sunny summers of privileged Cambridge students. A key song, Timothy and Jane’s ‘We Said We Wouldn’t Look Back’, is ironic in its message that, in our early twenties, we shouldn’t be tempted to look back, expressing in its melody exactly what its lyrics argue we should avoid. It is all so English. The Englishness of Salad Days can best be demonstrated by the reaction of French audiences to a Parisian production at the Théâtre en Rond in 1957. The Times reported that this ‘bold and partially successful attempt to translate the peculiarly English quality of Salad Days’ was ‘promptly misunderstood and derided by most of the French press’; ‘the critic of Le Monde even accuses it of Puritanism, presumably because no mention is made of the young lovers’ sex life.’ The article concludes with the observation that ‘The French find Englishness as comic and endearing as the English find Frenchness, but they keep strict reservations as to how far they can share in our joke against ourselves.’11 Likewise, a 1958 Off-Broadway version closed after only eighty performances. In Britain, meanwhile, the show’s financial success helped the Bristol Old Vic buy some villas near Clifton Downs, which became the new premises of the theatre’s drama school in 1956. And it had a wider and more unexpected impact: it provoked a controversially violent Monty Python sketch, ‘Sam Peckinpah’s Salad Days’, as well as inspiring ‘a quite intelligent seven-year-old’ to pursue a love of musicals – his name was Cameron Mackintosh.12 Sometimes fantasy has a highly charged and troubling edge. This is most clearly seen in those entertainments that feature race and racial issues. A good example is the Black and White Minstrels. For over a decade, and seen by an estimated 25 million people in this country and overseas, they were hailed as ‘an outstanding theatrical phenomenon of our time’.13 Originally produced by George Inns on

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BBC television in 1957, the show included the George Mitchell Singers, who performed in blackface, with Mitchell conducting. A stage version, The Black and White Minstrel Show, produced by Robert Luff, toured summer resorts in 1960 and came into London at the Victoria Palace in 1962, where it ran for seven years. Seven years! However racially insensitive, the show’s popularity was down to, said Luff, ‘nostalgia and memory’.14 The two-hour performance had snatches of dozens of songs, old tunes with soothing melodies. The stage picture featured glamorous girls (Minstrel Maids) and the ensemble projected a smiling face to the world. More than half the sketches were visual comedy, sight gags, which allowed tourists with little knowledge of English to enjoy themselves. Luff ’s policy was ‘Entertainment for the millions at a price within their pockets’.15 The Black and White Minstrel Show’s success can be gauged by the fact that it was revived at the Victoria Palace in 1969, running for another 1,047 performances. But, as Mitchell’s obituary observed, ‘by the late 1960s, the show faced criticism that the idea of “blacking-up” was offensive to black people’.16 Similar criticism of cultural insensitivity was attracted by Bertha Egnos Godfrey and Gail Lakier’s musical Ipi Tombi (1975), which ran for 1,879 performances at Her Majesty’s Theatre. Characterized by one critic as ‘basically a tits ’n’ feathers show for the tourists’, the piece was attacked by anti-Apartheid protesters and vilified for giving a rose-tinted fantasy image of life for black people in South Africa.17 In fact, it took a couple of decades for a mega-hit to arrive which treated black culture with dignity: this was Clarke Peters and Louis Jordan’s enjoyably fantastical Five Guys Named Moe (Lyric, 1990), which clocked up 2,073 performances and had, in the words of Time Out, ‘all of the fizz and none of the cynicism of the jukebox musicals that would follow in its wake’.18

The Rocky Horror Show (1973) If Salad Days shows how subversive, if sexless, fantasy could quietly inspire audiences in the conformist 1950s, The Rocky Horror Show (Royal Court, 1973) is a unique example of the cult phenomenon of a mega-hit spoof in the wildly provocative and highly sexed early 1970s. Its creator, Richard O’Brien, was an unlikely success story: he started off as a teenage dropout, before becoming a stuntman and then drifting into acting. In 1970, he joined the cast of Hair. Two years later, Australian director Jim Sharman gave him a minor role in Jesus Christ Superstar, and then the part of Willie, an extraterrestrial, in his 1973 production of Sam Shepard’s The Unseen Hand at the Royal Court’s tiny Theatre Upstairs, at

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a time when this black-box 63-seat studio was only four years old and home to experimental and countercultural theatre – such as Heathcote Williams’s crazily imaginative AC/DC and the militantly alternative Come Together festival (both 1970). In between jobs, O’Brien wrote the book, music and lyrics of They Came from Denton High, a gothic-style, schlock-horror comic-book fantasy. He then teamed up with Sharman to fill a slot at Theatre Upstairs to stage this as a throwaway evening of musical fun. Sharman suggested changing the title to The Rocky Horror Show and it ran for a month in June 1973, with a cast including O’Brien, Tim Curry (who’d also been in Hair), Julie Covington and Patricia Quinn. Following an encouraging response, the show then transferred in August to the Chelsea Classic, a 230-seat former cinema in the King’s Road, and, after the scheduled demolition of this venue, to the 500-seat King’s Road Theatre, another former cinema (The Essoldo), in November. As music producer Jonathan King released an LP of the original cast recording, the show ran for more than five years and finally transferred to the Comedy Theatre in the West End in 1979, where it was staged for the first time in a traditional proscenium arch venue, acquiring an interval on the way. Closing just over a year later, it clocked up some 2,960 performances in total.19 The 1975 film version, titled The Rocky Horror Picture Show, retained the original director, Sharman, and producer, Michael White, as well as Curry and some other members of its original cast, who were joined by Meatloaf and Susan Sarandon. Set within the framing device of a cinema, where the movie is a postmodern spoof of 1950s American sci-fi and horror double features, the plot shows what happens when Brad Majors and his fiancée Janet Weiss, two clean-cut all-American virgins, find themselves at the home of Frank-n-Furter, a crazed transvestite doctor who hails from Transexual, a planet in the galaxy of Transylvania. He is staying there with his acolytes, the servile Riff-Raff, Magenta and Columbia. Like Victor Frankenstein, Frank is busy creating human life. When Brad and Janet arrive, he is about to host a party to unveil Rocky Horror, a sex toy who despite his name is actually a beautifully blond muscular youth. Later Frank seduces both Brad and Janet, and then Janet has sex with Rocky too. The orgiastic atmosphere continues until the underlings Riff-Raff and Magenta rebel, shooting Frank, Rocky and Columbia with a ray gun and returning to planet Transexual, while Brad and Janet are set free. Since this is performed as a spoof of a film, Magenta doubles as an usherette, and the figure of the Narrator, an Edgar Lustgarten type, comments with humorous portentousness on the story.20 The original production at the Royal Court was, according to Sharman, ‘done very modestly, with a lot of sense of fun’, enjoyable to stage, rough and ready and

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super campy, and all on a budget of about £2,000.21 Such constraints didn’t hinder the show: some of the costumes were acquired half-price from a sexaccessory mail-order firm.22 Its publicity imagery was alternative, hippy: the poster is hand-drawn and its picture of Rocky suggests nudity, while the cover of the 1973 LP looks like an issue of OZ magazine. The production itself was an early example of immersive theatre with its faded plush cinema seats, masked ghoul ushers and free sweets handed out to audience members, who were welcomed with a large placard which read: ‘The Sloane Cinema regrets the inconvenience caused to patrons during renovations. A modern 3-screen cinema will open shortly.’23 The 90-minute one-act show involved the cast swinging from gantries, running along catwalks and tumbling down ramps, in a place which smelt of ‘grume, gunpowder and gusset’.24 From the start, Curry’s star performance as, in the words of one critic, the ‘writhing, cajoling, sulking, letching, bumping, grinding, bawling and lisping’ Frank, was oddly believable and even touching, while O’Brien played the Igor-like Riff-Raff.25 Curry’s accent, which he calls ‘the sort-of Belgravia Hostess with the mostest’, was Sharman’s idea, and Curry based his perfectly artificial enunciation on upper-class Mitford-style ladies.26 The proceedings had the feel of a cheap but cheerfully tongue-in-cheek cabaret nightclub. The show opened on 16 June 1973, and, when she attended some ten days later, Naseem Khan noted that the evening was ‘marked by thunder, lightning and torrential rain’, which were ‘aptly sinister off-stage noises’.27 Most critics were quite enthusiastic: Michael Billington mentioned the masked ushers and hailed the show as ‘witty and erotic at the same time’, calling Sharman’s audienceenveloping production ‘a deft piece of Pop-Artaud’, with Curry giving a ‘garishly Bowiesque performance’, while Irving Wardle welcomed the event as ‘the first home-grown specimen’ of American-style camp theatre, taking ‘elements which once conveyed violence and danger, and converting them into decoration’.28 Legend has it that the show sold out and that even Mick Jagger couldn’t get a ticket, although Hammer Horror actor Vincent Price did manage to attend. Seats were scarce partly because the final performance was cancelled after Rayner Bourton, the actor playing Rocky, was sick due to an infection caused by ‘glitter down his silver briefs’.29 The mind boggles. Talking of the transfer to the Classic Cinema, Roderick Gilchrist said: ‘Not since Hair arrived on the scene five years ago and revolutionized stage musicals has a show generated so much excitement’, while Time Out reported that ‘There’s never a dull moment and some of the new visual effects are stunning. And there’s not a bad number in it anywhere: instantly singable eclectic Rock which leans heavily on nostalgia. Mr Paul Raymond

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should be taking a few notes.’30 Another Daily Mail article noted: ‘No stage nudity but an exciting array of other people’s underwear.’31 Each transfer generated more media coverage: at the King’s Road Theatre, the Guardian reported that ‘its celebration of transvestite, homosexual, bisexual, and fellatio’ ‘does not flag’, although the amplified music was too loud.32 In February 1978, the Evening Standard reported that The Rocky Horror Show, like Jesus Christ Superstar, was enjoying years of success and that ‘No one can quite explain their longevity’, while also noting the youth of their audiences and their ‘hard core of faithfuls who return again and again’: ‘Both are pulling in teenagers by the hundred.’33 Another article said that the muscular Miles Fothergill, who had taken over the role of Rocky, was so popular with teenage girls that they gather outside the stage door and proposition him: ‘He demurs; the girls are very young and carry about them the whiff of prosecution.’ Fothergill was also quoted as saying that ‘We get letters from people who have seen Rocky Horror ten times. The young, especially, have got very attached to the show.’34 By the late 1970s, the punk phenomenon showed how prescient O’Brien’s show had been and performances became meeting places for young people as well as a magnet for tourists. During the West End transfer, Sharman said, ‘It’s become a sort of minor classic – like Salad Days.’35 And a souvenir publication, The Rocky Horror Picture Book, was published, including song lyrics and photographs. Anticipating the vogue for retro 1950s culture, O’Brien’s score recalls the sounds and words of rockers such as Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, a result of his long love of rock ’n’ roll music.36 One number, ‘The Time Warp’, evokes the dance crazes of the late 1950s and early 1960s, while the ‘Sha la la la’ chorus of ‘The Sword of Damocles’ is pure tribute band stuff. In a subplot which involves Eddie, one of Frank’s previous and unsuccessful creations, the style is biker-chic with ‘Hot Patootie’ a parody of Little Richard’s ‘Tootie-Fruitie’; unsurprisingly, the line ‘I really love that rock ’n’ roll’ (17) is repeated a total of twelve times. Most of the other songs, however, are a mixture of rock ballad and spaciness which brings to mind the decadent allure and extravagant camp of Glam Rock. In fact, David Bowie had toured throughout Britain in 1972 in his Ziggy Stardust persona, and O’Brien and his cast were clearly inspired by the performance style of this and other glam rockers such as Marc Bolan. At various moments, such as Riff-Raff ’s lines about ‘Your mission is a failure’ or ‘I’m your new commander’ (30), the music sounds like out-takes from early Pink Floyd or Hawkwind albums. As with the music so with 1950s American B-movies, O’Brien’s loving parody creates a text dense with allusion. From the start, Magenta’s song ‘Science Fiction’

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(1–2) has references to a dozen films: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), with English actor Michael Rennie; It Came from Outer Space (1953), one of the first 3-D films; Forbidden Planet (1956), with Anne Francis; Tarantula (1955), with Leo G. Carroll; When Worlds Collide (1951) and its producer George Pal; The Day of the Triffids (1962), with Janette Scott; and Hollywood actor Dana Andrews. Mention of androids might refer to any number of films, such as The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and there are also references to an earlier decade: 1930s Flash Gordon space adventure comics, Claude Rains and The Invisible Man (1933), RKO Pictures 1933 version of King Kong starring Fay Wray, and 1932’s Doctor X (also with Fay Wray) – all in one song. Likewise, Frank’s later line about ‘Whatever happened to Fay Wray’ (29) recalls Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), the Bette Davis and Joan Crawford classic. Despite the density of such allusions (and there are many more), what’s great about the parody is that it can be understood by people with only the sketchiest knowledge of American movies. It is the atmosphere of sci-fi fantasy that is so beguiling. And the humour of the text is perfectly accessible, being wry and often deliciously kooky: Magenta’s lines about ‘Dana Andrews said prunes/ Gave him the runes/ And passing them used lots of skills’ (3) has an unexpectedly surreal rhyme (prunes/ runes) which conjures up an image of absurd digestive problems. The rest of the text is full of pelvic thrusts, sweet transvestites, beautiful creatures, sonic oscillators, forbidden fruit and groovy freak outs – pure jouissance. Above all, The Rocky Horror Show is a joyous hymn to sexual liberation. Reflecting the experimental and often radical early days of both Women’s Liberation and the Gay Liberation Front, the project is one of total freedom. In a way that is dizzyingly pleasurable, the multi-sexual transsexual transvestite Frank and his cronies smash any taboo they can lay their hands on, while headily advocating sexual experimentation and adventure – but it’s all done in a supremely fun way. Instead of sucking the blood of his victims, which anyway was always a metaphor for sex, Frank seduces them (amusingly using the same dialogue for both Janet and Brad). Later, Janet’s joyful discovery of sexual pleasure, as she embraces the muscle-man Rocky, has the chorus ‘Touch-a touch-a touch-a – touch me/ I want to be dirty’, and she enthusiastically describes her journey from virginal anxiety, worried about ‘heavy petting’ and ‘seat wetting’, to the blissful ‘I’ve got an itch to scratch’ (21). Her conclusion that ‘My mind has been expanded’ (29) contrasts with Brad’s admission that he is ‘bleeding’ inside (32). If he is startled by the discovery of his gay side, she is reborn as a sexual being. For her, metaphorically, the ‘beast’ is still ‘feeding’ (33).

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The sexual fallout affects all the characters. Rocky in ‘Rose Tint My World’ is clear that ‘My libido hasn’t been controlled/ Now the only thing I’ve come to trust/ Is an orgasmic rush of lust’ (29). Riff-Raff and Magenta are brother and sister so their closeness is provocatively incestuous; Magenta and Columbia might also be lesbians; there’s an allusion to gay marriage (18) and to the burlesque stripper Lili St Cyr (30). Even Eddie’s uncle, Dr Scott, who makes a late appearance and is confined to a wheelchair, ends up by revealing his ‘stockingclad legs’ (30). Apart from the random sexual imagery of sausages, basques and suspenders, the key message of the play, Frank’s anthem-like ‘Don’t dream it – Be it’ (30) follows straight on from his admonition to ‘Give yourself over to absolute pleasure/ Swim the warm waters of sins of the flesh/ Erotic nightmares beyond any measure/ And sensual dreams to treasure forever’ (29–30). You can’t get much clearer than that. Not only are the sexual politics radical, but so is the show’s insurrectionary attitude: in the end Riff-Raff and Magenta, like servants in a play by Jean Genet, rise up and kill their oppressors. But the show succeeds not just because of its fun politics, but also because it taps into the popular subcultural desire, especially in the early 1970s, to make a punk gesture of defiance. The Narrator’s last words, evoking an insect-like humanity ‘Lost in time/ And lost in space/ And meaning’ (33) is both portentous and nihilistic. Added to the show’s generally anarchic feeling, the popular affection for parodies of gothic stories also evokes archetypal myths, such as Frankenstein and Dracula – when Janet calls Rocky ‘Creature of the night’ (21) she is surely alluding to Bela Lugosi’s Count Dracula and his ‘Children of the night’ line in the Hollywood film of 1931. The Rocky Horror Show drinks from the same deep well as Beauty and the Beast (especially in the Fay Wray and King Kong references) and O’Brien himself saw it as ‘a fairy-tale, a reworking of Babes in the Wood’ or even ‘Brad and Janet as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden’.37 Especially in its early years, the show offered the chance not only to revisit powerful cultural myths, but also an opportunity to make a rebellious statement by adopting its gothic style, and its punk attitude. It was identity politics in fishnet stockings. At first the show delivered the fantasy of subcultural identity – with its pose of enjoyably defiant decadence – and then it morphed into an international cult phenomenon.38 The Rocky Horror Show became a massive cult not only because of its film version, but also due to the embrace by its fans of audience participation. Originating in New York’s Waverly Theater cinema showings, audiences began to join in the show by shouting out responses to the film’s dialogue, putting on horror make-up, dressing up as their favourite characters, and bringing props,

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from rice to throw for the wedding scene to water pistols to simulate rain, and surgical rubber gloves to snap in time with Frank when he dons his mad scientist medical gear. As it became the queen of the midnight movie circuit, this cult following ensured that audience members made repeat visits to both late-night showings of the film, whose early screenings had been mainly flops, and to the play. The Rocky Horror brand is now a huge subcultural phenomenon involving a specific dress code, a standardization of responses – with Brad being heckled as ‘Arsehole’ and Janet as ‘slut’ – and film events where members of the public, shadow casts, lip-sync and mimic the acting as the movie plays. Audiences become co-creators and their participation includes dancing the Time Warp, throwing objects such as toast at the screen and, apparently on one occasion, driving a motor bike (as the film’s biker character Eddie) down the aisle. Ironically enough, popular responses to The Rocky Horror Show, which began as gestures of non-conformity, are now extremely conformist and standardized.39 Musicals are factories of the imagination. Not for the first time, the most exceptional figure in this field is Andrew Lloyd Webber. The wonderful fantasy parable Cats (New London, 1981), in which the poems of T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats were turned into songs to be sung by a furry-costumed cast, expertly choreographed by the late Gillian Lynne, ran for exactly twentyone years, while Starlight Express (Apollo Victoria, 1984), which saw a rollerskating cast performing a race between an old steam engine and new ones, had a similarly astonishing 7,406 performances. Lloyd Webber’s achievement has been to create and animate stage worlds which liberate the imaginations of the audience and offer material which can be transformed and digested as dreamscapes. As one of his most enthusiastic biographers says, the sun ‘never sets’ on the composer: ‘At virtually any hour of the day or night, somewhere the curtain goes up on one of his musicals.’40 His brand of fantasy is truly global.

Return to the Forbidden Planet (1989) If The Rocky Horror Show was a carnivalesque celebration of polysexual identity, then Return to the Forbidden Planet (Cambridge, 1989) was a triumphant mix of jukebox nostalgia and postmodern intertextuality. Its animating spirit was Bob Carlton, who was born in 1950 in Coventry to parents who ran a post office, and with an uncle thought to be a member of the Communist Party. He was certainly familiar with left-wing traditions. After working as a stage manager in Guildford,

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Carlton studied drama at Hull University and eventually became artistic director of the London Bubble Theatre, a company which performed in tents for younger audiences and people who didn’t normally go to the theatre, taking the job over from founder Glen Walford in 1979. With an ambition to create popular theatre, he wrote and directed Return to the Forbidden Planet, which was first staged by a company of actor-musicians in a tent on Blackheath on 23 May 1983. During that summer, it ran at various outdoor parks and was seen by Walford, who invited Carlton to develop the show at the Liverpool Everyman, which she was now running. Opening in October 1983, and then brought back the following year, the rewritten musical sported the tag line ‘Shakespeare’s forgotten rock-and-roll masterpiece!’41 Revised yet again, it was the Tricycle Theatre’s Christmas show in 1984, and then, after a gap in which the rights to the film Forbidden Planet were secured from MGM, the musical was staged at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry on 6 April 1989, before transferring to the Cambridge Theatre in the West End on 18 September 1989, where it ran for 1,516 performances.42 At the Bubble, under Walford’s mentorship, Carlton pioneered the idea of using actor-musicians in shows that mixed well-known archetypal stories with pop music, often in the format of a late-night band show. His ambition was to make theatre that his ‘mum and dad would have wanted to go and see’.43 It was meant to be fun. In one incident, he caught a couple of skinheads messing around outside his theatre tent and, to avoid further disruption, he gave them free seats. Later, he asked them what they thought, and they replied: ‘It was great, but when is the theatre going to start?’44 Using actor-musicians was also a practical solution to the problem of keeping costs down: you didn’t have to employ separate groups of actors and musicians. Carlton’s masterpiece, Return to the Forbidden Planet, is a three-way mash-up of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the 1956 film Forbidden Planet and a selection of rock ’n’ roll and pop songs from the 1950s and 1960s. It was one of the first jukebox musicals and helped start a trend of mixing classic pop songs with a fully-fledged plot, a genre which culminated in the international mega-hit Mamma Mia!. Carlton’s inspiration was MGM’s classic Forbidden Planet, directed by Fred McLeod Wilcox and one of the first big-budget sci-fi films to be made in colour. Loosely based on The Tempest, it told the story of twenty-third-century astronauts, led by John Adams (Ferdinand) arriving at the distant planet Altair IV (Prospero’s island) in search of a previous expedition. They find the reclusive professor Morbius (Prospero), his daughter Altaira (Miranda) and an android called Robby (Ariel). Morbius tells the astronauts that some unknown force

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killed his expedition and shows them the underground city of the Krell (Sycorax), the planet’s previous natives, now extinct. When a terrifying monster starts killing the astronauts, their companions discover that this is a projection of Morbius’s subconscious, a kind of Freudian horror from the Id. Carlton’s version, however, makes some significant changes. In his adaptation, Doctor Prospero is a scientist working on Factor X, a form of telegenesis which turns ideas into reality. Fifteen years ago, his wife Gloria tricked him, dispatching him into deep space, unaware that their infant daughter Miranda was also in the spaceship. They end up on a remote planet, D’Illyria. Now a routine survey flight by other astronauts, led by Captain Tempest (Ferdinand) and including Gloria as its science officer, has crashed on Prospero’s planet. Tempest and Gloria are separated, and Tempest, who in the show’s iconography resembles an archetypal Dan Dare hero, falls for Miranda. In a subplot, Cookie (Caliban), the expedition’s cook, is also smitten by her. After a tentacled monster from the Id attacks the spaceship, Gloria enlists Cookie to get revenge on her estranged husband by stealing the Factor X formula. When the Id monster is revealed to be a projection of Prospero’s mind, he sacrifices himself to save the others. As D’Illyria is also a product of Prospero’s imagination, it begins to decay when he dies. Blasting off in the spaceship, Gloria agrees to the marriage of her daughter Miranda to Tempest, and Cookie is pardoned. After a pre-show announcement, in which the crew welcome the audience and demonstrate the ‘regulation safety procedures’ (7) the show begins with Captain Tempest’s appeal: ‘Friends, crewmen, passengers lend me your ears’ (9), and the driving drums of Wipe Out, a surfer tune from the early 1960s.45 Inspired partly by the American television series Star Trek, Rodney Ford’s set was a mixture of the Starship Enterprise and a prog rock concert, with B-movie spaceship instrument panels as well as two sets of drums and keyboards for the band. The original cast, supervised by musical director Kate Edgar in the role of the Navigation Officer, played a range of instruments, parodying the posturing of rock performers, with blazing guitar solos and thundering bass lines, sometimes switching instruments in the middle of a song or having two cast members playing one guitar simultaneously, all part of the show’s spectacle. The staging was deliberately low-key, with for example hair dryers being used as ray guns. Gradually it acquired a cult following with repeat visits being made by space-clad devotees who mimicked the actors at the front of the stage, and of course there was dancing in the aisles – it is a rock ’n’ roll musical, after all. And this tradition continues: the current official website states: ‘Bring everyone . . . dress up fancy and get ready for BLAST OFF!’46

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As well as using the film’s story, Carlton added a huge amount of Shakespearean quotation, usually with a humorous twist. Unusually for a musical, you can’t say that his text has no literary pretentions. A cheery collage of high and low culture, the show is built up of familiar speeches. As it opens, the Newsreader, who appears on video and has been played by celebrities such as Patrick Moore and Brian May, says, ‘Two parents, both alike in dignity,/ In outer space, where we our play locate,/ From ancient grudge break to new mutiny/ And on Forbidden Planet meet their fate.’ (10).47 Even a passing familiarity with the bard enables you to get the joke. Other clever rewrites include ‘But soft. What light from yonder air-lock breaks?’ (21), ‘I am a dad more sinned against than sinning’ (35), ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friend, once more./ Or close the hull up with your metal head’ (45) and, hilariously, ‘Beware the Ids that march’ (65) (Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Henry V and Julius Caesar). Malvolio’s anguished ‘I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you!’ is spoken by an equally anguished Cookie, while Oberon’s ‘Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania’ becomes the robot Ariel’s ‘Ill met by starlight, proud Glo-ri-a’ (32, 48). Carlton recycles ‘angels and ministers of grace’ as well as ‘more things in Heaven and Earth’ from Hamlet and joyfully rewrites Macbeth: ‘Out damned blob’ (37, 38, 45). Lear’s ‘Blow winds and crack your cheeks’ becomes Prospero’s angry cry when his daughter falls for Tempest (35). Subtle changes include the bard’s ‘I have seen tempests, when the scolding winds’ (Julius Caesar) becoming Carlton’s ‘I have seen tempests, when the scalding winds’ (67). Some lines are just cod Shakespeare: Miranda talks about Cosmopolitan magazine as ‘An ancient tome that I have read of late,/ That shows you how to be a sophisticate’ (56). At the end, the Newsreader wraps up the show with Puck’s ‘If we shadows have offended’ speech, almost unchanged, from the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (70). By then, the audience has been bombarded with dozens upon dozens of varied references. Just as the dialogue is thick with Shakespeare-isms, so the songs have been rewritten to fit in with the science-fiction fantasy of the show. When Gloria arrives at the end of Act One, the cast sings, inevitably, ‘Gloria’ by Them (1964), but instead of the original lyric ‘She comes around here’, they sing ‘COMING UP THE STAIRS’ and ‘COMING THROUGH THE FLOOR’ (38). When Tempest meets Miranda he bursts into The Beach Boys’ ‘Good Vibrations’ (1966) and when Miranda gives the lovestruck Cookie a quick peck on the cheek, the young man sings The Brook Brothers’ ‘Ain’t Gonna Wash for a Week’ (1961). Every moment of frustrated young love is illustrated by Dion and the Belmonts’ ‘A Teenager in Love’ (1959), while Jerry Lee Lewis’s ‘Great Balls of Fire’ (1957) accompanies the initial (space)shipwreck. Just as Carlton often changed the

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playtext, for example creating a new dialogue between Tempest and Gloria (11–12) at the start of the musical in order to introduce the soul duet ‘It’s a Man’s World’ by James Brown and Betty Jean Newsome (1966) so several of the songs are interchangeable: for example, Elvis’s ‘All Shook Up’ (1957) and ‘Shake Rattle and Roll’ by Bill Haley and the suitably named Comets (1954).48 One of the joys of the music is that the celestial metaphors of pop acquire new shades of meaning in a science-fiction context: the lines ‘Each night I ask the stars up above,/ Why must I be a teenager in love?’ somehow sound better when sung in an extraterrestrial location. And, of course, Carlton’s staging was full of nods to pop culture: when Cookie sings Roy Orbison’s plaintive ‘Only the Lonely’ (1960) he puts on a pair of sunglasses, the singer’s trademark. Likewise there is a perfect match between pop’s youthful content and the show’s story: before Tempest and Miranda can jointly sing Cliff Richard’s ‘The Young Ones’ (1962), he must protest, in lyrics from Gary Plunkett’s ‘Young Girl’ (1968), that she is too young for him.49 Carlton’s musical has a generous sweep that takes in the Byrds’ ‘Mr Spaceman’ (1966), Connie Francis’s ‘Robot Man’ (1960) and Bobby Boris Picket’s ‘Monster Mash’ (1962), as well as the Animals’ ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’ (1965), a song which covers any amount of plot twists. To guide West End audiences through the thickets of this postmodern bricolage the souvenir Return to the Forbidden Planet In-Flight Magazine is full of spoof articles describing Carlton’s work as ‘a long process of cultural archaeology’ in which he ‘put back together all of the missing lines and songs according to Shakespeare’s original intention’.50 Critical reaction to the show was mixed. At the Tricycle, Return to the Forbidden Planet was welcomed: ‘A sort of “The Tempest” meets “Star Trek” it’s a slick witty parody of the bard and sci-fi that provides a flimsy excuse for an exuberant airing of some of the rock ’n’ roll hits of three decades.’51 But reviews of the West End transfer were mixed: the Daily Mail reported that the musical had ‘been rolling the rounds these past six years’ and that its fans welcomed the show into the West End ‘with the kind of ecstatic fervour guaranteed to turn the rest of us novitiates into aliens’, but found the show ‘flabby’ and uninspiring.52 The Guardian called it a ‘spaceship load of intergalactic drivel’ with no sense of camp or irony, while the Financial Times said,‘It tries for Rocky Horror cultishness (achieved, I gather, in Coventry since its April premiere), but lacks the knowingness of camp.’53 However, the Evening Standard argued that ‘Kitsch takes on culture against a terrific soundtrack – perfect ingredients for a cult hit’ in a ‘frankly enjoyable’ show, while the Daily Express called it ‘quite simply the best rock and roll show in town’ – ‘it’s audience-friendly theatre, performed with tremendous zest and inventiveness by a young company calling themselves

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Rhythm Method Productions’: ‘Only the po-faced could fail to appreciate the joke’.54 Although initial West End audiences were poor, the box office livened up when Heather Cooper gave the show ‘a rave review’ on ITV’s Sunday Sunday, a chat show hosted by Gloria Hunniford and Brian Glover.55 By the end of the year, Carlton’s creation was being hailed by the Evening Standard as ‘the unlikeliest musical in years’ and ‘an improbable cocktail of science fiction, rock classics and the complete works of William Shakespeare’.56 It worked because it was fun, and immersive. As Girl About Town magazine pointed out, the members of cast mingling with the audience before the show started, and coaching them in spoof emergency procedures, meant that ‘everyone gets drawn into the action from an early stage’.57 Although Return to the Forbidden Planet can be enjoyed by itself, without exact awareness of all its allusions, its multiple meanings do depend on both mainstream and subcultural knowledge. But those not part of the knowing audience could always consult the Return to the Forbidden Planet In-Flight Magazine.58 The fantasy of this show is of a rock concert that has a story, where individual songs not only make sense, but acquire greater meaning in the context of the overall event. It exploits the fantasy world of both 1950s sci-fi and the heritage of pop music, with a bit of high-culture thrown in. A lively mix of parody, pastiche and warmhearted tribute, this cult experience has a sense of glory and fun. But it also has its own contradictions: enjoyable as it is, it has to be said that the science fiction setting and the songs are frankly nostalgic, and the message of the story rather conservative – the mad scientist dies; mother and daughter are reunited; young lovers embrace. On the other hand, Return to the Forbidden Planet also expresses the utopian hope that popular theatre, and by extension popular culture, could have a profounder meaning than it ever actually does. As is clear from Cats, English literature, and especially children’s literature, provides an exciting playground for fantasy. Not only does it appeal to the imagination of children, but it can also bewitch the child in the adult. It is a place of limitless possibilities, a world where anything goes. Marrying children’s stories with stage versions of already successful films is one route to creating a contemporary mega-hit: in this way, Richard Sherman and Robert Sherman have contributed Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (Palladium, 2002) and Mary Poppins (Prince Edward, 2004) to the great catalogue of West End successes. The phenomenal pulling power of American musicals, and their effect on our national imagination, also continues today. Consider Stephen Schwartz and

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Winnie Holzman’s delightful Wicked (Apollo Victoria, 2006) and Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx’s satirical Avenue Q (Noël Coward, 2006). Of course, Disney has become an international player in theatre as well as film. Of all of the corporation’s shows, the best is Elton John and Tim Rice’s brilliant creation, The Lion King (Lyceum, 1999). As directed by Julie Taymor, this example of glocalization has been running without a pause since its opening, and is a mega-hit phenomenon: on its fifteenth anniversary, it was widely celebrated as ‘the highest-grossing stage show in history’, with takings exceeding $6.2 billion (more than The Phantom of the Opera), and being more profitable than ‘the combined global revenues of the six most popular Harry Potter films’.59 Certainly the combination of Taymor’s theatricality and the percussive music of South African composer Lebo M. has created a triumphantly positive vision of Africa that is both a utopian fantasy and an assertion of black pride. Long may it run.

Matilda the Musical (2010) In children’s literature, of course, our dark side can be as readily explored as our bright side, and no one knew this better than Roald Dahl, the British writer who won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 1983, and whose books include bizarre, macabre and comic stories such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Twits and the BFG. And of course Matilda, an anarchic children’s novel written in 1988, two years before his death, and which was adapted for the stage by Dennis Kelly and Tim Minchin. The result, Matilda the Musical (Cambridge, 2011) is a triumph of musical theatre that, like Les Misérables, originated in the subsidized sector. Only a state-funded institution, such as the Royal Shakespeare Company, has the resources not only to invest in years of development work, but also to bring together a group of creatives, none of whom were obvious choices.60 This high-risk venture began in 2006, when the RSC – then led by the artistically adventurous Michael Boyd and assisted by dramaturg Jeanie O’Hare – asked Dennis Kelly, a gritty in-yer-face playwright specializing in depictions of sex and violence, if he’d like to write a family show. O’Hare had the idea that by starting with a playwright the company could concentrate on getting the story right and the musical’s words wouldn’t just be the glue between the songs. They suggested an adaptation of Matilda. Despite having no experience in writing either family shows or musicals, Kelly agreed. So far so good. Two years later, Boyd asked director Matthew Warchus to turn the resulting rough draft

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into a piece of musical theatre. Warchus approached various composers before selecting Tim Minchin, an Australian alternative comedian with wild hair and kohled eyes. It was another risk – Minchin’s sister describes him as ‘a total wild card’.61 But Minchin had history with Dahl. As a young man he’d written music for a children’s theatre company in Perth, and, at the age of twenty-five, had already approached the Dahl Estate to see if he could get the rights to Matilda. When they asked for a sample from the score, he gave up because he couldn’t write music. So, ten years later, when Warchus approached him, he was so pleased he ‘freaked out’. He was also convinced that a Dahl musical should be ‘dark, angular, unsentimental’.62 And this is exactly what he and Kelly delivered. In Kelly and Minchin’s version, five-year-old Matilda is the daughter of Mr Wormwood, a crooked used-car salesman, and Mrs Wormwood, who is obsessed with ballroom dancing. The little girl is an avid reader and her intelligence contrasts with the stupidity of her brother, who – like their father – is addicted to television. All the family despise the bookish Matilda, so she prefers the local library, where she tells stories to the sympathetic librarian Mrs Phelps. At school her young teacher Miss Honey is impressed by Matilda’s ability, but the autocratic headmistress Miss Trunchbull hates her and all the other children, regularly punishing them by putting them in Chokey, a tiny cupboard lined with spikes. Trunchbull’s cruelty comes to a head during a surreal spelling test, after which the children rebel. Matilda realizes she has telekinetic powers and uses them to defeat Trunchbull, who runs away, and the children celebrate their freedom. Matilda also realizes that the story she thought she was inventing for Phelps is an account of Honey’s family background, and that Trunchbull was Honey’s sadistic aunt. With Trunchbull beaten, Honey becomes the new headmistress of the school. Meanwhile, at home, Matilda’s father tries unsuccessfully to cheat the Russian Mafia, but when they threaten to kill him the family flees to Spain. As they leave, he agrees that Matilda can live with Honey, which makes everyone extremely happy. While the tone of Dahl’s original, which is humorous, exaggerated and full of verbal twists, is easy to reproduce on stage, Matilda posed a theatrical problem: its structure is episodic, and although ideal for bedtime reading, it would be too disjointed for a stage show. Likewise, the novel’s central image shows the tiny Matilda raptly reading a huge volume, which is great as an illustration by Quentin Blake, but fatal for stage craft: it is a static image and, frankly, a boring one. Kelly’s major breakthrough was to change this passive image of a reader into the active image of a storyteller. So, in the library scenes, his Matilda doesn’t just read, she tells Mrs Phelps a story, which is called ‘The World’s Greatest Acrobat Meets the

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World’s Greatest Escapologist’.63 To dramatize this even more, Kelly splits this story into four parts so both Phelps and the audience eagerly await its outcome. He also tricks the audience into thinking that the story is a metaphor for Matilda’s life, when actually it is an account of Miss Honey’s background. Such creative moments didn’t mean that everything went smoothly. At first, Kelly’s original adaptation left gaps for the songs, and for a year he tried writing lyrics, but when Minchin came on board he realized that the musician was much better at lyrics and had a much better feel for where the songs should go and how they should tell Matilda’s story. Other problems that arose during the show’s gestation included finding enough small, but confident young actors to play Matilda (each cast has three ten-year-olds playing her), as well as all the other schoolchildren. Matilda finally opened at the RSC’s Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, on 9 December 2010, before, having been renamed Matilda the Musical, transferring to the Cambridge Theatre in the West End on 24 November 2011. The critical response was adulatory: the Daily Telegraph called it ‘the best British musical since Billy Elliot’, while the Evening Standard called it ‘a triumph: enchanting, bold and ingenious’.64 Reviewers praised the cleverness of the writing, both book and songs, and saw that what made the show such a success is that there is something in it for everyone, young and old.65 Reviews were similarly positive about the West End transfer: the Daily Mail hailed it as ‘a fabulous family fizzer. It has strong tunes, witty lyrics and enough “eew!” moments to satisfy the most revolting urchin’ and The Times pointed out that ‘although it makes nods to Quentin Blake’s illustrations, it makes darn sure to establish a theatrical character of its own’.66 The Financial Times called it ‘a hymn to the power of the imagination’.67 Although some commentators expressed anxious doubts about the suitability of actors aged ten exploring a ‘darker emotional range – fear, anxiety, loneliness, shame, yearning, grief – extremely disconcerting’, they acknowledged the link between childhood ‘fantasising of some sort or another’ and child actors.68 But nothing could stop the show’s runaway success. At its heart is Matilda, called ‘tiny, feisty, slightly runty’ by Warchus, and one of the most powerful little girls ever to dominate a musical (significantly, she is not a tomboy, not a boygirl).69 Her first words tell us that she has been verbally abused all her young life – ‘My daddy says I should learn to shut my pie hole./ No one likes a smartmouthed girl like me’ (31) – and emotionally too: her father refuses to accept that she is a girl.70 The whole family bully her mercilessly. Her first solo song, ‘Naughty’, maps out the arc of the show: she argues that the archetypal characters of fiction, such as Romeo and Juliet, are all trapped in stories that have tragic

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endings. They are ‘Innocent victims of their story’ (32), and even Cinderella has to rely on her godmother. But it doesn’t have to be like that. Matilda wonders ‘why they didn’t just change their story?’. If something is not right, ‘You have to put it right’ (33, 37). Her power is her ability to create her own destiny, to change her story. The fantasy aspect of this defiance against cruelty at home and bullies at school is the fact that she, like Carrie in the 1976 horror movie of the same name, has magic powers (telekinesis), which she uses to good effect.71 In the end, Matilda abandons her natural, but abusive, family in favour of her family of choice, a single-parent who loves her. Both narrate the show’s final lines: Miss Honey Because they had found each other. Matilda Yes. They had found each other. (75)

Matilda and Honey then cartwheel off the stage, a moment of unity between child and adult that is both gutsy and blissful – and extremely moving. Not only is Matilda a radical, but her insurrection, and triumph, is shown to be an act of collective action. When Trunchbull imposes an impossible spelling test, and threatens Lavender, one of the children and Matilda’s friend, with Chokey, the rest of her classmates deliberately misspell some easy words and demand to also be punished, in what Kelly and the team called the musical’s ‘Spartacus moment’.72 The children are classic Dahl creations: a bit naughty, a bit dirty, a bit out of control. But the show also demonstrates how their collective defiance can succeed against abusive adults. As Kelly says, Dahl ‘writes with a sense of relish’, with a direct understanding of childhood’s intense emotions, especially of the desire for justice.73 If Matilda the Musical has the aesthetics of British pantomime, it needs an archetypal cartoon villain – and Trunchbull fits the bill.74 A mixture of tyrannical teacher, evil stepmother, ugly sister, fearsome ogre and terrifying witch, she strides through the show with enormous energy and stage presence. As a nod to the English tradition of pantomime dames, she is played by a man in drag, a casting decision that enables the actor to stress this archetypal character’s sadistic abusiveness, part Bond villain, part psychopath. Played with lip-smacking enjoyment by Bertie Carvel in the original production, she is a magnetic largerthan-life character. An English ex-hammer-throwing champion, her sense of strict discipline and sadistic pleasure in insulting and punishing the children means that she is the bullish villain all of us love to hate. And the delight in seeing her domination ended is not just a question of applauding a youthful rebellion against a tyrant, but also reflects the joy of seeing this hugely imposing character turned into a whimpering and snivelling coward as the tiny Matilda

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uses her magic against her, confronting her with the truth of her past. It is a fantasy not just of naughtiness, as the ‘Naughty’ song celebrates, but of a new generation remaking the world – that’s its emotional power. At the heart of Matilda the Musical, and of all fantasy, is storytelling. Talking about Matilda’s love of books, Kelly says, I also wanted to try and pull off the same trick that Dahl had: the character being in love with the medium we are receiving the story through. But a character that went around saying they were in love with musical theatre seemed too irritating for words, so in our version of Matilda she is in love not just with books but with stories in general.75

There are two types of grown-ups in the tale: story-lovers (Phelps, Honey) and story-haters (the Wormwoods, Trunchbull). Since stories are so intimately linked to our imaginations, to our personal sense of fantasy, it is fitting that these battle lines are so clearly drawn. As Kelly puts it, ‘Without stories we’re just eating machines with shoes.’76 And Minchin’s songs, whose lyrics and music pay tribute to Dahl with their anarchic black humour, without sentimentalizing the children, are central to the power of the show. In ‘When I Grow Up’, the repeated upward lilt of the music, which in its poppy sprightliness gives an injection of unadulterated joy to the lyrics, celebrates the sensuous pleasure and freedoms that children believe that adults possess: ‘(And when I grow up) I will eat sweets every day’ and ‘I will go to bed late ev’ry night’ and ‘I won’t care’ (138–39). And its choral harmonies underline the sense of the children’s collective action. Likewise the song ‘Quiet’ begins in mental confusion, a turbulence which is represented both musically and lyrically, before it pauses to take a breath, goes quiet, ‘Just that still sort of quiet like the sound of a page being turned in a book, or a pause in a walk in the woods’ (121–22), with gentle solo piano music and simple strings as Matilda’s voice is joined by Honey’s. Finally, the song ‘Revolting Children’ begins with little Bruce’s imitation of a soul singer, singing that ‘never again’ will Trunchbull ‘take way my freedom’, before opening up into the rhythmic chant: ‘We are revolting children/ Living in revolting times./ We sing revolting songs/ Using revolting rhymes’ (130–31). It is not just that the children want the right to be naughty, to not do as they are told, but more that the pleasure of collective action is being viscerally expressed in song. Michael Boyd says that ‘One of the (many) things we never predicted about Matilda The Musical was that it would go way beyond its original remit as a family show’ – it has become a ‘musical for all of us’.77 The show has ‘that quintessential panto quality of blackness-and-whiteness, of appalling villains

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and a small but clever heroine’, so everyone can respond instinctively to the folk tale and moral aspect of the story.78 It embodies the fairytale idea, equal parts of Jack the Giant Killer, Cinderella and the Ugly Duckling, of a tiny girl beating huge and powerful adults by using her brain power. With its sense of melodrama and justice, this joyous musical is for everyone who, at one time or another, has loved to lose themselves in their own fantasy worlds, or who, having been misunderstood and bullied by adults, has nursed a burning sense of putting things right. In this way, Matilda the Musical is a fitting heir to both Oliver! and Billy Elliot. It is also part of a trend in which playwrights who have had success in straight drama move into the more lucrative world of the mega-hit musical. A world where name recognition is vital. Today’s new British mega-hit fantasies are usually either adaptations of well-known novels or musicals based on children’s stories or films (often on both). Certainly, fantasy remains a potent place in which the popular imagination can find the scope to gambol, a space in which the dream life of the nation can find ample room to expand its horizons.

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Conclusion: Dream Life of the British People

When the British people dream collectively, they visit the Neverlands of popular culture: pop music, popular films, popular television programmes and popular theatre shows. From the perspective of the popular, the history of postwar theatre suddenly looks intriguingly strange. It starts not with J. B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls (New Theatre, 1946), but with Delderfield’s Worm’s Eye View, a comedy which ran in the West End for more than five years. Although apparently different, the two plays share some similarities. Both are well-crafted and both comment on the public’s desire for social change in the aftermath of total war. Both were state-of-the-nation plays, but only Delderfield’s was a mega-hit. The great British public just wants to have fun, to enjoy a good night out. Like all other forms of popular culture, popular theatre provides content for dreams about who we are as a people, how we feel as a society, and what we might become in the future. Often with dazzling clarity, the mega-hits of the past show many of us what we thought, what we fantasized about and thus who we were. Popular theatre is a factory that produces myths which tell a collective narrative, as well as images that inspire ideas about national identity. This is all about desire: mega-hits usually tell us what we want to be, what we want to feel and where we’d love to go. They produce icons that live on in the affections of the public. The great popularity of mega-hits is a reminder that it is audiences who make meaning, as well as ‘authors’ such as playwrights or other theatre-makers. Huge audiences not only add meanings of their own, but they also spread the news about these experiences and ideas throughout society. But the collective dreams of the British people are not monolithic; they are as contradictory as the shows that inspire them. In fact, the dream world tends to heighten rather than smooth over contradictions. Theatre has a social effect through repetition. Each performance repeats the impact of previous nights, and its effect is reiterated through publicity, reviews, articles, adverts, television and filmed versions, as well as playtexts and, in the case of musicals, cast recordings. All of these are supplemented by word of mouth. In the case of good nights out, there is an avalanche of repetition, which 173

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also seeps through society by means of audience enthusiasm and fan activity, always given a helping hand by anniversary events, gala performances and the smashing of previous records. Repetition creates cultural impact. The mega-hits in this book not only chart the enormous changes that have occurred since 1940, but they have also contributed to them, and still do. Because seeing these shows is often a highly emotional experience, the depth of feeling they engender carries their ideas, messages and images deep into the public psyche. The British are, let’s face it, a militaristic nation, and in their dreams they won the Second World War all by themselves: in the playground, for decades after 1945, the chant was ‘We won the war!’ But, in the theatre, they are happier with the comedy of conflict than with its horror. The popularity of service comedies proves that comedy is one of the key ingredients of popular theatre, especially during a national emergency. It’s not so much a case of being unable to bear too much reality as a profound wish not to be trapped in the past by only talking about its ugliness. Service comedies offered the joy of recognition to millions of servicemen and their families – they were hugely popular because they spoke directly to lived experience but also, equally importantly, because they didn’t dwell on trauma. Mass audiences didn’t want a political criticism of patriotism; but they did respond to social criticism that was class-conscious, directed at incompetent toffs, rather than at the war effort. It was all about class. Despite the contradiction at the heart of war plays, between the pride of patriotism and the knowledge that war is terrible, war plays were a chance for audiences to dream about being a great, victorious nation. Watching comedy about conflict was deeply liberating. Instead of being constrained by realism, audiences were free to laugh, to enjoy a carnivalesque overthrow of deference. If the real war was full of discipline, fear, pain and boredom, onstage wars were brimming with happy laughter, working-class insubordination and the pleasures of ridiculing authority. It was fun. Here the British people identified with a self-image that exalts their anarchic qualities and their ability to laugh at themselves: not to take things too seriously. Keep calm and carry on laughing. The British are a nation of crime novel readers, and the success of crime mega-hits shows a popular belief in this country’s essential decency and sense of fair play: crime can be rationally solved, and explained, and justice can be seen to be done. All this is a powerful ingredient of British national identity. In our dream life good people solve fiendishly difficult puzzles, while bad people get their just deserts. And crime plays are a genre in which disadvantaged groups might enjoy the satisfaction of violence – the fantasy of punishing or hurting or killing a villain (or even a hero) – in an imaginary world far removed from daily life. But, generally, what we love about crime stories is not their brutality, but

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their ingenuity. Ingenious twists mean we can even enjoy the horror of murder. The popularity of crime plays set in country mansions is a reminder that the country house is a defining image in our national consciousness: it symbolizes a lost Eden, a pastoral Arcadia. Murder disturbs this demi-paradise, and the crime play’s job is to finally restore order after this disruption. The other thing about crime is that it symbolizes a desire to get one over on the system, being both an expression of the audience’s rebellious spirit and a containment of it. But the crime play is not just a myth machine, it is also a pleasurable game. It has its rules, its clichés and its elements of sheer fun. In the 1950s, the game was played at face value; by the 1970s it had turned into a parody of itself, a kind of in-joke. The arrival of the postmodern crime play illustrates how adaptable the genre of the mystery drama was at absorbing other theatrical trends. The central contradiction is that crime is enjoyable, but must also be punished. You can have your cake, but you can’t eat it. The British attitude to sex is a contradictory mix of puritanism and prurience. For decades, popular theatre was constrained by censorship, and relied on suggestion, or innuendo (closely scrutinized by the Lord Chamberlain), rather than overt representation. Mega-hits with a sexual theme tended to be translations from the French. Sex was foreign, somehow un-English. Perhaps what many audiences actually wanted were guilty pleasures, a term that sums up in one phrase a whole history of puritanical restraint. After the abolition of censorship in 1968, the loosening of formal rules allowed some shows that would have been impossible in previous years. But there was no huge explosion of explicitness. Mega-hit sex shows were either cheerful comedies or rare forays into pornography. While, during the 1960s, comedies quickly caught up with the way that more and more women questioned traditional sexual set-ups, their form tended to blunt their critical edge. And whatever the public actually dreamed about sexuality, its representations on stage were highly gendered. Popular sexual fantasy in the theatre was predominantly male – and it was often nasty, brutish and short. Patriarchal attitudes and sexist jokes dominated to the point of browbeating. In this dream world, men were superior; women were sex objects. Men were selfish lotharios and women willing playthings. Although not everyone embraced such images with equal pleasure, it still took feminism more than a decade to effect changes in this scenario. The personal is political, but the popular is often conservative. The British are a domestic nation. If representing sex could create problems of embarrassment, the family has always been a much more acceptable subject. In most postwar mega-hits, families were conservative and traditional institutions. The dream is always that of a situation in which manageable conflict

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co-exists with psychological security and warmth of feeling. Popular theatre is often celebratory, and in family dramas it applauds a narrow definition of what is normal, taking refuge in cliché and drawing comfort from the ordinary. Members of the extended family – the complex web of grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, step-fathers and step-mothers that makes up most communities – are often noticeable by their absence. Instead, fathers are the heads of families, even if mothers do most of the work, and it is conflicts involving men that dominate this genre. But the central contradiction of the traditional family is always present: it is a social institution that offers security, but at the price of some loss of liberty. Hence the conflicts. Family plays always have a deep emotional undertow: after all, most audience members have some kind of family. After any conflict, family relationships usually end up renegotiated. In this dream world, the British are reasonable, fair and ready to compromise. In the 1960s, however, these structures were questioned in no uncertain terms, even if they remained strong; by the new millennium, however, the fractured family has become the default way in which home life is imagined. Reality has gatecrashed the dream world of popular theatre. The fact that class is so central to popular theatre proves how obsessed the British are with the subject. But although a nation lives within its collective imagination of itself, in a dream world, individuals also exist in the grim reality of the material world. Because, in that world, class division, class antagonism and class disadvantage are often experienced negatively, and daily, their representation in popular theatre tends to compensate by being idealistic and aspirational. It’s a psychologically powerful fantasy that a disadvantaged lower-class individual, an ugly duckling, turns out to be the child of upper-class parents, a swan. At the same time, the notion that real class is in the blood, somehow innate, is disturbingly traditional. It means not only that you are what you were born as, but also that you will be so for ever. Unchangeable. The only way out of this oppression is magic: in mega-hit after mega-hit, the ghostly presence of the Cinderella story inflects the plot, offering a magical class mobility in this dreamy world rather than the rigid stratification of actual society. So the real social contradictions of class division can be overcome more often in fiction than in the world outside the theatre. The British are obsessed with history, but they do not dream of the past so much as create dreams of the past. Mega-hits set in yesteryear are not academic accounts of historical events. Rather, they are dreams of a beautiful fantasy world. They do not offer a lesson in dusty history, but instead something more wonderful: the chance of escaping from contemporary cares. So the contradiction

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is that the more theatre travels into the past, the more loudly it speaks of today. That’s one reason why nostalgia is so strong in British culture. Most popular evocations of past decades are retro-versions of the contemporary assembled from common memories and clichés that emphasize our familiarity with historical conditions. They are dreams rather than challenges to our preconceptions. On the stages of mega-hits, the past is also a safe space where audiences can indulge a desire to time-travel, to experience different worlds and to see qualities that seem to be sadly lacking in contemporary life. This typically includes conservative virtues, theatrical glamour, gothic spookiness or pop culture in all its innocent infancy. The past is a place where we not only forgive the use of cliché, but also enjoy knowing spoofs of classic genres, whether they be detective fiction or spy stories. Yesteryear is full of clean-cut heroes and glamorous women, of monstrous caricatures and inflated feeling. It’s part of a heritage culture, and recognizably British. In a way, fantasy is very similar to history: both offer a kind of therapy room where audiences can take a break from everyday life, and soak up both their most conservative instincts and their more suppressed desires – as well as perhaps their wildest fantasies. Fantasy worlds can, at one and the same time, be traditional in their attitudes to politics and gender, yet also anti-authoritarian and liberatory, poly-sexual and poly-magical. Sometimes you need to experience the most unrealistic situations in order to feel okay about the world outside the theatre. Fantasy, whether it is gothic horror or sci-fi space travel, is great at loosening the constraints of everyday life, and at giving audiences permission to dream as boldly as they want to. It is not only a legitimate response to reality, but it can also make the world outside the theatre both more meaningful and more pleasurable. This kind of theatre exults the imagination, and provides fantastical solutions to mundane problems. Fantasy is a place where novelty can appear, where new cultural images are tried out; it appeals to our individual and mass psychology by creating limitless possibilities for meaning. And its values are not rational, but emotional – and therefore immensely powerful. If it’s the utopian impulse you’re looking for, here it is. Popular theatre, like all culture, is a form of fiction that trickles quietly into society, helping the nation to create an imaginary community, a dream world of the mind. As seen through the eyes of good nights out, the postwar national narrative goes something like this: the patriotic pride and common enterprise of the Second World War marches hand-in-hand with strong feelings of both nostalgia and anti-authoritarianism, and laughter is as important as stoicism in surviving the privations of the early postwar years. Ideas about deference to

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authority and respect for tradition and emotional restraint take years before they are overcome by a drive for individualism. The genre of farce not only pokes fun at social superiors, but also confirms the deeply held notion that we are a humorous, eccentric nation. One constant is that we always love to have a laugh. Watching comedy is essentially a social experience because you laugh louder when you are part of an audience. We are also a domestic nation that enjoys the thrills of crime, especially when ingenuity is more in evidence than brutality. We are a game-playing nation, with notions not only of fairness, but also of poetic justice. Yet, once the crime play genre had dated in its social attitudes, we are quick to appreciate it being parodied and to take the gamesmanship to another, more postmodern, level. At the same time, British national identity can be profoundly conservative in its attitudes to the traditional family, to race and to gender, with novel and more liberal social attitudes taking decades to make an impact. For years, sexual freedom was associated with the Continent. Until the 1960s, popular theatre could only hint about being gay. Its shows were overwhelmingly white. The image of Britishness they convey is exclusionary and quite narrow. Then, with the gradual sexual revolution of the 1960s, British masculinity reasserts its ideas of humour and prurience, and its desire for a soft liberation in sex comedies, which flourish in the 1970s before dying out in the 1980s. Women make their point on stage, but cannot immediately overturn the male narrative. Apart from some odd, anomalous instances of polysexual freedom, toleration does not arrive instantly, despite the impact of 1960s counterculture. This is not to say that popular theatre never changes – it does, but rather more slowly than you might expect. The four great social changes of the postwar era – decline of deference, emancipation of women, and acceptance of sexual and ethnic diversity – have taken decades to arrive, and it can be said that they still remain unfinished business. But blackface shows have died out, and the male gaze is now subject to more questioning than ever. In the Thatcher years, the national story dances to the pleasures of music as never before, and our love of history and fantasy is expressed in gothic settings and imaginative flights. Musicals dominate the world of new mega-hits. Farces and postmodern spoofs of traditional genres prove astonishingly resilient. But by the Blair years, and the new millennium, there is a decisive shift in sensibilities, with decidedly left-wing musicals, images of non-traditional families and instances of female and racial assertiveness becoming immensely popular. For more than a couple of decades now British mega-hits have been markedly and overtly less tolerant of racial and sexist stereotyping. Class, however, remains a constant. And our love for American

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culture is, as it always has been, part of who most of us are. Lately, children’s stories have been revisited with renewed interest – our inner child is being pampered as never before. Of course, popular theatre, good nights out, can only tell a partial story about our national identity, but the narrative it tells ends, as it began, on a positive note. More people are enjoying more popular shows than ever before. What is certain is that London theatre continues to boom – and contemporary mega-hits are as creative and enjoyable as those of the past. Despite all the hardships of Brexterity, London theatre is enjoying, both commercially and artistically, a prolonged golden age – long may it thrive.

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Appendix 1: List of New Shows from 1940 Until the End of 2015 with More Than 1,000 Performances (by Run Length) N.B. The symbol + means still running on 31 December 2015. Dates given are of the first production. Where a show has moved from one theatre to another, only the venue(s) of the longest part of the run are given. Agatha Christie, The Mousetrap (Ambassadors, 1952/St Martins, 1974) 26,339 + Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil, Les Misérables (Palace, 1985/Queen’s, 2004) 12,619 + Andrew Lloyd Webber, The Phantom of the Opera (Her Majesty’s, 1986) 12,214 + Stephen Mallatratt, The Woman in Black (Fortune, 1989) 11,257 + Willy Russell, Blood Brothers (Phoenix, 1988) 10,013 Andrew Lloyd Webber, Cats (New London, 1981) 8,949 Andrew Lloyd Webber, Starlight Express (Apollo Victoria, 1984) 7,406 Catherine Johnson and Abba, Mamma Mia! (Prince Edward, 1999/Prince of Wales, 2004) 6,978 + Elton John and Tim Rice, The Lion King (Lyceum, 1999) 6,792 + Alistair Foot and Anthony Marriott, No Sex Please, We’re British (Strand, 1971) 6,761 Steve McNicholas and Luke Cresswell, Stomp (Vaudeville, 2002) 6,512 John Kander and Fred Ebb, Chicago: The Musical (Adelphi, 1997) 6,187 Alan Janes, Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story (Victoria Palace, 1989) 5,140 Ben Elton, We Will Rock You (Dominion, 2002) 4,659 Elton John and Lee Hall, Billy Elliot the Musical (Victoria Palace, 2005) 4,566 George Mitchell, The Black and White Minstrel Show (Victoria Palace, 1962) 4,344 Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil, Miss Saigon (Drury Lane, 1989) 4,264 Kenneth Tynan et al., Oh! Calcutta! (Royalty, 1970/Duchess, 1974) 3,918 Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman, Wicked (Apollo Victoria, 2006) 3,888 + Patrick Barlow, The 39 Steps (Criterion, 2006) 3,784 Adam Long et al., The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) (Criterion, 1996) 3,744 Ray Cooney, Run for Your Wife (Shaftesbury, 1983) 3,650 Mark Bramble and Harry Warren, 42nd Street (Drury Lane, 1984) 3,550 Andrew Lloyd Webber, Jesus Christ Superstar (Palace, 1972) 3,358 Bob Gaudio and Bob Crewe, Jersey Boys (Prince Edward, 2008) 3,268 + Andrew Lloyd Webber, Evita (Prince Edward, 1978) 3,176

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Richard Harris, The Business of Murder (Duchess, 1981) 3,035 Nick Stafford, War Horse (New London, 2007) 3,028 + Richard O’Brien, The Rocky Horror Show (King’s Road, 1973) 2,960 Adrian Grant, Thriller: Live (Lyric, 2009) 2,920 + Lionel Bart, Oliver! (New, 1960) 2,618 Terence Frisby, There’s a Girl in My Soup (Globe, 1966) 2,547 Yasmina Reza, Art (Wyndham’s, 1996) 2,509 Mawby Green and Ed Feilbert, Pyjama Tops (Whitehall, 1969) 2,498 Marc Camoletti, Don’t Dress for Dinner (Apollo 1991/Duchess, 1992) 2,480 Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, The Sound of Music (Palace, 1961) 2,386 Anthony Shaffer, Sleuth (St Martin’s, 1970) 2,359 Julian Slade and Dorothy Reynolds, Salad Days (Vaudeville, 1954) 2,283 Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, My Fair Lady (Drury Lane, 1958) 2,281 R. F. Delderfield, Worm’s Eye View (Whitehall, 1945) 2,245 John Taylor and David Heneker, Charlie Girl (Adelphi, 1965) 2,202 Sandy Wilson, The Boy Friend (Wyndham’s, 1954) 2,084 Nevill Coghill and Martin Starkie, Canterbury Tales (Phoenix, 1968) 2,080 Clarke Peters and Louis Jordan, Five Guys Named Moe (Lyric, 1990) 2,073 Marc Camoletti, Boeing-Boeing (Apollo, 1962) 2,035 Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, Fiddler on the Roof (Her Majesty’s, 1967) 2,030 James Rado and Gerome Ragni, Hair (Shaftesbury, 1968) 1,999 Noël Coward, Blithe Spirit (Piccadilly, 1941) 1,997 Eleanor Bergstein, Dirty Dancing (Aldwych, 2006) 1,994 Michael Frayn, Noises Off (Savoy, 1982) 1,968 Paul Raymond, Rip-Off (Windmill, 1976) 1,940 Bertha Egnos Godfrey and Gail Lakier, Ipi Tombi (Her Majesty’s, 1976) 1,879 Tim Minchin and Dennis Kelly, Matilda the Musical (Cambridge, 2011) 1,841 + Moie Charles and Barbara Toy, Murder at the Vicarage (Playhouse, 1949) 1,776 Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, Avenue Q (Noël Coward, 2006/Gielgud, 2009) 1,730 Tom Stoppard, Dirty Linen (Arts, 1976) 1,667 Marie Jones, Stones in His Pockets (New Ambassadors, 2000) 1,640 Colin Morris, Reluctant Heroes (Whitehall, 1950) 1,610 Crazy Gang, Together Again (Victoria Palace, 1947) 1,566 Hugh Hastings, Seagulls over Sorrento (Apollo, 1950) 1,551 Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, Oklahoma! (Drury Lane, 1947) 1,543 Andrew Lloyd Webber, Sunset Boulevard (Adelphi, 1993) 1,529 Bob Carlton, Return to the Forbidden Planet (Cambridge, 1989) 1,516 Marguerite Monnot, Irma La Douce (Lyric, 1958) 1,512 Charles Strouse and Martin Charnin, Annie (Victoria Palace, 1978) 1,485 John Chapman, Dry Rot (Whitehall, 1954) 1,475 William Douglas-Home, The Secretary Bird (Savoy, 1968) 1,463 Richard Sherman and Robert Sherman, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (Palladium, 2002) 1,416

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John Chapman, Simple Spymen (Whitehall, 1958) 1,404 Crazy Gang, Knights of Madness (Victoria Palace, 1950) 1,361 Joseph Kesselring, Arsenic and Old Lace (Strand, 1942) 1,337 Andrew Lloyd Webber, Aspects of Love (Prince of Wales, 1989) 1,325 Irving Berlin, Annie Get Your Gun (Coliseum, 1947) 1,304 Richard Sherman and Robert Sherman, Mary Poppins (Prince Edward, 2004) 1,291 André Roussin, The Little Hut (Lyric, 1950) 1,261 Earl Wilson Jr, Let My People Come (Regent, 1974) 1,245 Bill Naughton, Spring and Port Wine (Mermaid, 1965) 1,236 Philip King and Falkland Cary, ‘Sailor, Beware!’ (Strand, 1955) 1,231 Ray Cooney and Tony Hilton, One for the Pot (Whitehall, 1961) 1,221 Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, Chess (Prince Edward, 1986) 1,209 Trey Parker, Robert Lopez and Matt Stone, The Book of Mormon (Prince of Wales, 2013) 1,184 + Peter Cook et al., Beyond the Fringe (Fortune, 1961) 1,184 Denise Deegan, Daisy Pulls It Off (Globe, 1983) 1,180 Richard Harris, Stepping Out (Duke of York’s, 1984) 1,176 Terence Rattigan, While the Sun Shines (Globe, 1943) 1,154 Stephen Schwartz, Godspell (Roundhouse, 1971) 1,128 Christopher Hampton, The Philanthropist (Mayfair, 1970) 1,114 Alec Shanks and Joan Davis, London Laughs (Adelphi, 1952) 1,113 Iris Murdoch and J. B. Priestley, A Severed Head (Criterion, 1963) 1,110 Marc Shaiman and David Greig, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Drury Lane, 2013) 1,096 + Paul Raymond, Let’s Get Laid (Windmill, 1974) 1,095 Alan Menken, Howard Ashman and Tim Rice, Beauty and the Beast (Dominion, 1997) 1,072 Esther McCracken, Quiet Week-End (Wyndham’s, 1941) 1,059 Richard Bean, One Man, Two Guvnors (Adelphi, 2011/Haymarket, 2012) 1,052 George Mitchell, The Magic of the Minstrels (Victoria Palace, 1969) 1,047 Andrew Lloyd Webber, Whistle Down the Wind (Aldwych, 1998) 1,044 Simon Stephens, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Apollo, 2013/ Gielgud, 2014) 1,042 + Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, West Side Story (Her Majesty’s, 1958) 1,040 Simon Gray, Otherwise Engaged (Queen’s, 1975) 1,029 Marc Shaiman, Hairspray (Shaftesbury, 2007) 1,028 Joyce Rayburn, The Man Most Likely To . . . (Vaudeville, 1968) 1,023 Ivor Novello, Perchance To Dream (Hippodrome, 1945) 1,022 Lesley Storm, Roar Like a Dove (Phoenix, 1957) 1,007

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Appendix 2: List of New Shows from 1940 Until the End of 2015 with More Than 1,000 Performances (by Date) 1940s Noël Coward, Blithe Spirit (Piccadilly, 1941) 1,997 Esther McCracken, Quiet Week-End (Wyndham’s, 1941) 1,059 Joseph Kesselring, Arsenic and Old Lace (Strand, 1942) 1,337 Terence Rattigan, While the Sun Shines (Globe, 1943) 1,154 Ivor Novello, Perchance To Dream (Hippodrome, 1945) 1,022 R. F. Delderfield, Worm’s Eye View (Whitehall, 1945) 2,245 Crazy Gang, Together Again (Victoria Palace, 1947) 1,566 Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, Oklahoma! (Drury Lane, 1947) 1,543 Irving Berlin, Annie Get Your Gun (Coliseum, 1947) 1,304 Moie Charles and Barbara Toy, Murder at the Vicarage (Playhouse, 1949) 1,776

1950s Colin Morris, Reluctant Heroes (Whitehall, 1950) 1,610 Hugh Hastings, Seagulls over Sorrento (Apollo, 1950) 1,551 Crazy Gang, Knights of Madness (Victoria Palace, 1950) 1,361 André Roussin, The Little Hut (Lyric, 1950) 1,261 Agatha Christie, The Mousetrap (Ambassadors, 1952/St Martins, 1974) 26,339 + Alec Shanks and Joan Davis, London Laughs (Adelphi, 1952) 1,113 Julian Slade and Dorothy Reynolds, Salad Days (Vaudeville, 1954) 2,283 Sandy Wilson, The Boy Friend (Wyndham’s, 1954) 2,084 John Chapman, Dry Rot (Whitehall, 1954) 1,475 Philip King and Falkland Cary, ‘Sailor, Beware!’ (Strand, 1955) 1,231 Lesley Storm, Roar Like a Dove (Phoenix, 1957) 1,007 Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, My Fair Lady (Drury Lane, 1958) 2,281 Marguerite Monnot, Irma La Douce (Lyric, 1958) 1,512 John Chapman, Simple Spymen (Whitehall, 1958) 1,404 Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, West Side Story (Her Majesty’s, 1958) 1,040

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1960s Lionel Bart, Oliver! (New, 1960) 2,618 Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, The Sound of Music (Palace, 1961) 2,385 Ray Cooney and Tony Hilton, One for the Pot (Whitehall, 1961) 1,221 Peter Cook et al., Beyond the Fringe (Fortune, 1961) 1,184 George Mitchell, The Black and White Minstrel Show (Victoria Palace, 1962) 4,344 Marc Camoletti, Boeing-Boeing (Apollo, 1962) 2,035 Iris Murdoch and J. B. Priestley, A Severed Head (Criterion, 1963) 1,110 John Taylor and David Heneker, Charlie Girl (Adelphi, 1965) 2,202 Bill Naughton, Spring and Port Wine (Mermaid, 1965) 1,236 Terence Frisby, There’s a Girl in My Soup (Globe, 1966) 2,547 Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, Fiddler on the Roof (Her Majesty’s, 1967) 2,030 James Rado and Gerome Ragni, Hair (Shaftesbury, 1968) 1,999 Nevill Coghill and Martin Starkie, Canterbury Tales (Phoenix, 1968) 2,080 William Douglas-Home, The Secretary Bird (Savoy, 1968) 1,463 Joyce Rayburn, The Man Most Likely To . . . (Vaudeville, 1968) 1,023 Mawby Green and Ed Feilbert, Pyjama Tops (Whitehall, 1969) 2,498 George Mitchell, The Magic of the Minstrels (Victoria Palace, 1969) 1,047

1970s Kenneth Tynan et al., Oh! Calcutta! (Royalty, 1970/Duchess, 1974) 3,918 Anthony Shaffer, Sleuth (St Martin’s, 1970) 2,359 Christopher Hampton, The Philanthropist (Mayfair, 1970) 1,114 Alistair Foot and Anthony Marriott, No Sex Please, We’re British (Strand, 1971) 6,761 Stephen Schwartz, Godspell (Roundhouse, 1971) 1,128 Andrew Lloyd Webber, Jesus Christ Superstar (Palace, 1972) 3,358 Richard O’Brien, The Rocky Horror Show (King’s Road, 1973) 2,960 Earl Wilson Jr, Let My People Come (Regent, 1974) 1,245 Paul Raymond, Let’s Get Laid (Windmill, 1974) 1,095 Simon Gray, Otherwise Engaged (Queen’s, 1975) 1,029 Paul Raymond, Rip-Off (Windmill, 1976) 1,940 Bertha Egnos Godfrey and Gail Lakier, Ipi Tombi (Her Majesty’s, 1976) 1,879 Tom Stoppard, Dirty Linen (Arts, 1976) 1,667 Andrew Lloyd Webber, Evita (Prince Edward, 1978) 3,176 Charles Strouse and Martin Charnin, Annie (Victoria Palace, 1978) 1,485

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1980s Andrew Lloyd Webber, Cats (New London, 1981) 9,000 Richard Harris, The Business of Murder (Duchess, 1981) 3,035 Michael Frayn, Noises Off (Savoy, 1982) 1,968 Ray Cooney, Run for Your Wife (Shaftesbury, 1983) 3,650 Denise Deegan, Daisy Pulls It Off (Globe, 1983) 1,180 Andrew Lloyd Webber, Starlight Express (Apollo Victoria, 1984) 7,406 Mark Bramble and Harry Warren, 42nd Street (Drury Lane, 1984) 3,550 Richard Harris, Stepping Out (Duke of York’s, 1984) 1,176 Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil, Les Misérables (Palace, 1985/Queen’s, 2004) 12,619 + Andrew Lloyd Webber, The Phantom of the Opera (Her Majesty’s, 1986) 12,214 + Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, Chess (Prince Edward, 1986) 1,209 Willy Russell, Blood Brothers (Phoenix, 1983) 10,013 Stephen Mallatratt, The Woman in Black (Fortune, 1989) 11,257 + Alan Janes, Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story (Victoria Palace, 1989) 5,140 Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil, Miss Saigon (Drury Lane, 1989) 4,264 Bob Carlton, Return to the Forbidden Planet (Cambridge, 1989) 1,516 Andrew Lloyd Webber, Aspects of Love (Prince of Wales, 1989) 1,325

1990s Clarke Peters and Louis Jordan, Five Guys Named Moe (Lyric, 1990) 2,073 Marc Camoletti, Don’t Dress for Dinner (Apollo 1991/Duchess, 1992) 2,480 Andrew Lloyd Webber, Sunset Boulevard (Adelphi, 1993) 1,529 Adam Long et al., The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) (Criterion, 1996) 3,744 Yasmina Reza, Art (Wyndham’s, 1996) 2,509 John Kander and Fred Ebb, Chicago: The Musical (Adelphi, 1997) 6,187 Alan Menken, Howard Ashman and Tim Rice, Beauty and the Beast (Dominion, 1997) 1,072 Andrew Lloyd Webber, Whistle Down the Wind (Aldwych, 1998) 1,044 Catherine Johnson and Abba, Mamma Mia! (Prince Edward, 1999/Prince of Wales, 2004) 6,978 + Elton John and Tim Rice, The Lion King (Lyceum, 1999) 6,792 +

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Appendix 2

2000s Marie Jones, Stones in His Pockets (New Ambassadors, 2000) 1,640 Steve McNicholas and Luke Cresswell, Stomp (Vaudeville, 2002) 6,512 Ben Elton, We Will Rock You (Dominion, 2002) 4,659 Richard Sherman and Robert Sherman, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (Palladium, 2002) 1,416 Richard Sherman and Robert Sherman, Mary Poppins (Prince Edward, 2004) 1,291 Elton John and Lee Hall, Billy Elliot the Musical (Victoria Palace, 2005) 4,566 Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman, Wicked (Apollo Victoria, 2006) 3,888 + Patrick Barlow, The 39 Steps (Criterion, 2006) 3,784 Eleanor Bergstein, Dirty Dancing (Aldwych, 2006) 1,994 Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, Avenue Q (Noël Coward, 2006/Gielgud, 2009) 1,730 Nick Stafford, War Horse (New London, 2007) 3,028 + Marc Shaiman, Hairspray (Shaftesbury, 2007) 1,028 Bob Gaudio and Bob Crewe, Jersey Boys (Prince Edward, 2008) 3,268 + Adrian Grant, Thriller: Live (Lyric, 2009) 2,920 +

2010s N.B. Some of this decade’s long-running mega-hits, such as Ray Davies and Joe Penhall’s, Sunny Afternoon (Harold Pinter, 2014), are excluded because they did not reach 1,000 performances by the cut-off date of 31 December 2015. Tim Minchin and Dennis Kelly, Matilda the Musical (Cambridge, 2011) 1,841 + Richard Bean, One Man, Two Guvnors (Adelphi, 2011/Haymarket, 2012) 1,052 Simon Stephens, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Apollo, 2013/Gielgud, 2014) 1,042 + Trey Parker, Robert Lopez and Matt Stone, The Book of Mormon (Prince of Wales, 2013) 1,184 + Marc Shaiman and David Greig, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Drury Lane, 2013) 1,096 +

Notes Introduction 1 Quoted in ‘SOLT Box Office Figures 2015’, Society of London Theatres website, solt. co.uk, http://solt.co.uk/about-london-theatre/press-office/solt-box-office-figures2015/ (accessed 5 July 2017). 2 For example, Les Misérables musical has grossed more than $2 billion dollars in the US alone; the successful film version grossed $149 million. The highest grossing films never go above $3 billion; West End mega-hit musicals do. See pages 130, 166. 3 See Adrian Wright, Must Close Saturday: The Decline and Fall of the British Musical Flop, Woodbridge: Boydell, 2017. 4 Jim Davis, Theatre & Entertainment, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 9–14, 53–58. 5 For a recent survey see Jason Price, Modern Popular Theatre, London: Palgrave, 2016. 6 John Sutherland, Bestsellers: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 1. 7 Michael Billington, State of the Nation: British Theatre Since 1945, London: Faber, 2007, p. 44. 8 Ian Herbert, with Christine Baxter and Robert E. Finley (eds), Who’s Who in the Theatre 17th Edition, Vol. 2, Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1981, p. 221. 9 Listings in Daniel Rosenthal, The National Theatre Story, London: Oberon, 2013, no page numbers. 10 John Bull, ‘The Establishment of Mainstream Theatre, 1946–1979’, in Baz Kershaw (ed.), The Cambridge History of British Theatre, Vol. 3: Since 1895, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 345–7. For other playwrights based outside London consider John Godber (Llewellyn, ‘Popular Theatre and Participation in the Work of John Godber’ in Ros Merkin (ed.), Popular Theatres? Papers from the Popular Theatre Conference 1994, Liverpool: John Moores University, 1996, pp. 94–102). 11 Oliver Double, ‘Alternative Comedy: From Radicalism to Commercialism’, in Ros Merkin (ed.), Popular Theatres? Papers from the Popular Theatre Conference 1994, Liverpool: John Moores University, 1996, pp. 127–39. For a survey of the variety of alternative and local popular theatre types see Adam Ainsworth et al., Popular Performance, London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2017. 12 George Orwell, ‘Lear Tolstoy and the Fool’, in George Orwell: Essays, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000, p. 404.

189

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Notes

13 ‘One Night This Week’, Daily Telegraph, 20 September 1960. 14 The Royal Court is particularly small: it has fewer seats (470) than the Duchess, one of the smaller commercial West End theatres. 15 By contrast, some contemporary classics from the subsidized sector had a very slow start: John Arden’s Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance (1959) at the Royal Court only managed 28 performances at 30 per cent; Edward Bond’s Saved (1965) at the same venue originally played for 24 performances at 50 per cent (Terry Browne, Playwright’s Theatre: The English Stage Company at the Royal Court, London: Pitman, 1975, pp. 115, 121). 16 Quoted in Price, Modern Popular Theatre, p. 2. 17 John McGrath, A Good Night Out: Popular Theatre – Audience, Class and Form, 2nd edn, London: Nick Hern, 1996, p. 54; Bim Mason, ‘Popular Theatre: A Contradiction in Terms?’, in Ros Merkin (ed.), Popular Theatres? Papers from the Popular Theatre Conference 1994, Liverpool: John Moores University, 1996, pp. 3–5. 18 McGrath, Good Night Out, pp. 53–9. 19 Davis, Theatre & Entertainment, pp. 9–41. 20 Michael R. Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 150–64. 21 David Edgar, How Plays Work, London: Nick Hern, 2009, p. 65. 22 Michael Billington, One Night Stands: A Critic’s View of Modern British Theatre, rev. edn, London: Nick Hern, 2001, p. 61. 23 Millie Taylor, Musical Theatre, Realism and Entertainment, London: Routledge, 2016, p. 13. 24 Christine White, ‘ “Humming the Sets”: Scenography and the Spectacular Musical from Cats to The Lord of the Rings’, in Robert Gordon and Olaf Jubin (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical, New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 401–18. 25 Enoch Powell quoted in Dominic Sandbrook, The Great British Dream Factory: The Strange History of Our National Imagination, London: Penguin, 2016, p. xxix. 26 Quoted in Giverny Masso, ‘Dominic Cooke: “Liberal Intelligentsia Are Snobs About Musical Theatre” ’, The Stage, 26 October 2017; Giverny Masso, ‘Hamilton Star Leads Calls To End Snobbery Against Musical Theatre’, The Stage, 22 November 2018. 27 Quoted in Miranda Lundskaer-Nielsen, ‘ “In This England, in These Times”: Redefining the British Musical Since 1970’, in William A. Everett and Paul R. Laird (eds), The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, 3rd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, pp. 328–9. 28 Nicholas Hytner, Balancing Acts: Behind the Scenes at the National Theatre, London: Jonathan Cape, 2017, p. 244. 29 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, rev. edn, Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1980, p. 12.

Notes

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30 George Orwell, ‘The Art of Donald McGill’, in George Orwell: Essays, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000, p. 201.

1: War: Comic, Tragic and Nostalgic 1 Quoted in Rebecca D’Monté, British Theatre and Performance 1900–50, London: Bloomsbury, 2015, p. 171. 2 The Times, 23 April 1945. 3 Baz Kershaw, ‘British Theatre, 1940–2002: An Introduction’, in Baz Kershaw (ed.), The Cambridge History of British Theatre, Vol. 3: Since 1895, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 294–6. 4 Arthur Morrison quoted in Blake Morrison, Things My Mother Never Told Me, London: Vintage, 2003, p. 279. 5 Quoted in Richard Huggett, Binkie Beaumont: Eminence Grise of the West End Theatre 1933–73, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989, p. 323. 6 Quoted in Philip Hoare, Noël Coward: A Biography, London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995, p. 321. 7 Blithe Spirit did better than its nearest wartime rival, American playwright Joseph Kesselring’s 1941 Broadway comedy Arsenic and Old Lace (Strand, 1942), which clocked up 1,332 performances. Coward’s 1930 hit Private Lives was revived and had a creditable run of 716 performances at the Apollo in 1944. 8 French Without Tears (Criterion, 1936) ran for 1,039 performances. 9 Flare Path ran for 679 performances. Rattigan’s third major wartime play, Love in Idleness (Lyric, 1944), starring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, ran for only 213 performances in London, but 451 in New York. 10 Quoted in Geoffrey Wansell, Terence Rattigan: A Biography, London: Fourth Estate, 1996, p. 126. 11 The Times, 14 August 1942. 12 James Agate, ‘A Moot Point’, The Sunday Times, 16 August 1942. 13 Terence Rattigan, Flare Path, Apollo Theatre, 1942, programme. 14 Michael Darlow, Terence Rattigan: The Man and His Work, London: Quartet, 2000, pp. 170–1. 15 Ibid. 16 Quoted in Wansell, Terence Rattigan, p. 133. 17 Ibid., p. 135. 18 Beverley Baxter, ‘War Without Tears’, Evening Standard, 1 January 1944. 19 B. A. Young, The Rattigan Version: Sir Terence Rattigan and the Theatre of Character, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1986, p. 52. The other play was French Without Tears. 20 Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz, London: Pimlico, 1992, pp. 1–19.

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21 Peggy Wood quoted in Alan Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989, p. 8. 22 Anthony Heap quoted in David Kynaston, Austerity Britain 1945–51, London: Bloomsbury, 2007, p. 94. 23 Observer, 20 April 1947; The Sunday Times, 20 April 1947. 24 Tatler, 23 February 1949. 25 Quoted in Kynaston, Austerity Britain, p. 264. 26 Maggie B. Gale, West End Women: Women and the London Stage 1918–62, London: Routledge, 1996, p. 6. 27 R. F. Delderfield, For My Own Amusement, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1968, pp. 175–85. 28 After his playwriting career petered out, Delderfield turned to writing highly successful historical sagas, including A Horseman Riding By (1966) and To Serve Them All My Days (1972), which were adapted for television. 29 Delderfield, For My Own Amusement, pp. 234–5. 30 Gwen Berryman, one of the original cast, later played Doris Archer in The Archers (BBC radio, 1951–80). 31 Marion Lindsey-Noble, R. F. Delderfield: Butterfly Moments, Brompton Regis: Cashmere, 2011, pp. 69–72. 32 Andrew Spicer, ‘The “Other War”: Subversive Images of the Second World War in Service Comedies’, in Steven Caunce et al., Relocating Britishness, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004, pp. 167–82. 33 Lindsey-Noble, R. F. Delderfield, p. 98. 34 The Times, 5 December 1945. 35 Delderfield, For My Own Amusement, pp. 229, 230, 232. 36 Orwell, ‘The Art of Donald McGill’, pp. 202, 201. 37 Delderfield, For My Own Amusement, p. 182. 38 R. F. Delderfield, Worm’s Eye View, Whitehall Theatre, 1945, programme. 39 Huggett, Binkie Beaumont, p. 435. 40 Dennis Barker, ‘Hugh Hastings Obituary’, Guardian, 11 January 2005. 41 Quoted in Huggett, Binkie Beaumont, p. 435. 42 ‘Torna a Surriento’ is a 1905 Neapolitan song composed by Ernesto De Curtis, with words by his brother Giambattista De Curtis, in the style of the more famous ‘O Sole Mio’. 43 Hartnell became the first Doctor Who (BBC, 1963–66). 44 Nigel Stock quoted in Huggett, Binkie Beaumont, pp. 437–8. 45 Harold Conway, ‘The Cockney of Scapa Flow’, Evening Standard, 15 June 1950. 46 The Times, 15 June 1950; The Sunday Times, 18 June 1950. 47 The Stage, 22 June 1950. 48 Anthony Cookman, ‘At the Theatre’, Tatler, 5 July 1950, p. 12; Peter Fleming, ‘Seagulls over Sorrento’, The Spectator, 22 June 1950, p. 13.

Notes

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49 Robin May, Theatremania, London: Vernon & Yates, 1967, p. 71. 50 John Osborne, A Better Class of Person, London: Faber, 1981, p. 266. 51 Quoted in Leslie Smith, Modern British Farce: A Selective Study of British Farce from Pinero to the Present Day, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989, p. 70. 52 The cast of Desert Rats included Richard Greene, who later played the title role in The Adventures of Robin Hood (ITV, 1955–59). 53 Brian Rix, My Farce from My Elbow: An Autobiography, London: Star, 1977, p. 70. 54 Brain Rix, Life in the Farce Lane, or Tragedy with Its Trousers Down, London: Andre Deutsch, 1995, pp. 139–41; Smith, Modern British Farce, pp. 70–75. 55 Rix, My Farce from My Elbow, pp. 90–1. 56 The Sunday Times, 17 September 1950. 57 Quoted in Morris, Reluctant Heroes, p. 3. 58 Dick Richards quoted in Rix, My Farce from My Elbow, p. 93; Morris, Reluctant Heroes, p. 4. 59 Quoted in Rix, My Farce from My Elbow, p. 92. 60 Ibid., p. 101. 61 Ibid., p. 117. 62 Ibid., p. 75; May, Theatremania, p. 72. 63 Mervyn Millar, The Horse’s Mouth: How Handspring and the National Theatre Made War Horse, London: National Theatre/Oberon, 2011, pp. 17–18. 64 Ibid., p. 19. 65 Ibid., p. 21; Hytner, Balancing Acts, pp. 245–50. 66 Toby Malone and Christopher J. Jackman, Adapting War Horse: Cognition, the Spectator, and a Sense of Play, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 57–65, and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, ‘Animal Ontologies and Media Representations: Robotics, Puppets, and the Real of War Horse’, Theatre Journal, Vol. 65, No. 3 (October 2013), pp. 373–93. 67 Quoted in David Bickerstaff and Phil Grabsky, Making War Horse, DVD, National Theatre/Seventh Art, 2009. 68 Quoted in Louis Wise, ‘A View from the Bridge’, The Sunday Times, 23 April 2017; Hytner, Balancing Acts, pp. 244, 284; Michael Blakemore, Stage Blood: Five Tempestuous Years in the Early Life of the National Theatre, London: Faber, 2013, pp. 237–48. 69 Nicholas Hytner, personal interview with the author, 17 August 2017. 70 Theatre Record, Vol. XXVII, Issue 21 (2007), pp. 1258–63. 71 Quoted in Philip Sherwell, ‘War Horse the Movie Storms America’, Sunday Telegraph, 27 November 2011. 72 Quoted in Maev Kennedy, ‘A Book, a Play, a Film’, Guardian, 22 October 2011. 73 Bryan Appleyard, ‘Dark Horse’, The Sunday Times, Culture magazine, 15 March 2009. 74 Liz Hoggard, ‘Horsepower for Techno Teens’, Evening Standard, 29 November 2007.

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75 Jasper Rees, ‘An Incredible Ride Continues as War Horse Breaks in Broadway’, Daily Telegraph, 16 April 2011. 76 Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standard, 18 October 2007; Theatre Record, Vol. XXVII, Issue 21 (2007), p. 1258. 77 Aleks Sierz, Rewriting the Nation: British Theatre Today, London: Methuen, 2011, pp. 52, 118, 229. 78 Michael Morpurgo, ‘Writing War Horse’, in Nick Stafford, War Horse, National Theatre, 2007, programme.

2: Crime: Classical, Farcical and Postmodern 1 Beatrix Hesse, The English Crime Play in the Twentieth Century, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 3–10. 2 The Times, 24 December 1942. 3 The Mousetrap (Ambassadors, 1952), Witness for the Prosecution (Winter Garden, 1953) and Spider’s Web (Savoy, 1954). 4 Julius Green, Curtain Up: Agatha Christie – A Life in Theatre, London: Harper Collins, 2015, pp. 564–7. 5 W. A. Darlington, ‘Agatha Christie Story as Play’, Daily Telegraph, 15 December 1949. 6 Agatha Christie, The Mousetrap, Ambassadors Theatre, 1952, programme. 7 They also starred in the 1953 Christie Partners in Crime thirteen-part radio series. 8 Agatha Christie, An Autobiography, London: Harper Collins, 1993, p. 530. 9 Ibid., p. 529. 10 Harold Hobson, ‘Alas, Freud’, The Sunday Times, 30 November 1952. 11 The Stage, 27 November 1952. 12 Quoted in David Kynaston, Family Britain 1951–57, London: Bloomsbury, 2010, p. 266. 13 ‘It’s Paying Big Money’, Sunday Express, 11 January 1953. 14 Peter Saunders, Mousetrap Man, London: Collins, 1972, p. 131. 15 Quoted in Green, Curtain Up, p. 325; see also Eric Johns, ‘The Mousetrap Man’, in Eric Johns (ed.), Theatre Review ’73, London: W. H. Allen, 1973, pp. 97–100. 16 ‘An Eccentrically English Tourist Trap’, Independent, 15 January 1998. 17 Green, Curtain Up, p. 305. 18 Hesse, The English Crime Play, pp. 53–5. 19 Dan Rebellato, 1956 and All That: The Making of Modern British Drama, London: Routledge, 1999, p. 236. 20 Hobson, ‘Alas, Freud’. 21 Quoted in Green, Curtain Up, p. 305. 22 Quoted in Kynaston, Family Britain, p. 266.

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23 Quoted in Peter Haining, Agatha Christie: Murder in Four Acts, London: Virgin, 1990, pp. 26–7. 24 Quoted in Green, Curtain Up, p. 286. 25 Quoted in Sandbrook, The Great British Dream Factory, p. 337. 26 Chapman played the anonymous soldier in Act One and the Scottish Soldier in Act Three. 27 ‘The Racehorse Switch’, The Stage, 2 September 1954. 28 Rix, My Farce from My Elbow, p. 167. 29 Rix, Life in the Farce Lane, p. 147. 30 Quoted in Smith, Modern British Farce, p. 80. 31 Quoted in ibid., pp. 5–6. 32 Quoted in ibid., p. 80. 33 W. A. Darlington, ‘Rib-Tickling Recipe Works at the Whitehall’, Daily Telegraph, 20 March 1958. 34 Rix, My Farce from My Elbow, p. 168. 35 Daily Telegraph, 9 August 1960. 36 ‘Nearly Eleven Years of Whitehall Farce’, The Times, 15 April 1961. 37 Ibid. 38 Hesse, The English Crime Play, p. 93. 39 Marvin Carlson, Deathtraps: The Postmodern Comedy Thriller, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993, pp. 9–22; Hesse, Ibid., pp. 5–11. The arrival of Inspector Truscott in Joe Orton’s Loot (Cambridge, 1965) is another example of parody. 40 Anthony Shaffer, So What Did You Expect?: A Memoir, London: Picador, 2001, p. 50. 41 James Inverne, The Impresarios, London: Oberon, 2000, p. 139. 42 Gerald Berkowitz, ‘Shaffer, Anthony (Joshua)’, in K. A. Berney (ed.), Contemporary Dramatists, 5th edn, London: St James Press, 1993, pp. 592–3. 43 Shaffer, So What Did You Expect?, pp. 58–60. 44 Ibid., p. 61. 45 R. B. Marriott, ‘ “Sleuth”, a Brilliant Thriller Which Parodies Thrillers’, The Stage, 19 February 1970; Irving Wardle, ‘Shocks and Laughs’, The Times, 13 February 1970. 46 Jules Glenn, ‘Twins in Disguise: A Psychoanalytic Essay on Sleuth and The Royal Hunt of the Sun’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 43, No. 2 (1974), pp. 288–302. 47 Shaffer, So What Did You Expect?, p. 53. 48 Ibid., pp. 54–7. 49 Carlson, Deathtraps, p. 155. 50 ‘Theater; Of Mystery, Murder and Other Delights’, New York Times, 10 March 1996, http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/07/19/specials/sondheim-shaffer.html (accessed 22 May 2017). 51 Richard Harris, Stepping Out, Vaudeville Theatre, 2017, programme; see Alan Strachan, ‘Harris, Richard’, in K. A. Berney (ed.), Contemporary Dramatists, 5th edn,

196

52 53 54 55 56 57

Notes

London: St James Press, 1993, pp. 278–80, and Richard Harris, ‘Playwright Richard Harris on Stepping Out, and Seven Decades in the Business’, theatreVOICE website, 10 April 2017, http://www.theatrevoice.com (accessed 10 May 2017). Carlson, Deathtraps, pp. 56, 190. Jack Tinker, Daily Mail, 3 April 1981; London Theatre Record, Vol. I, Issue 7 (1981), p. 151. Sheridan Morley, Punch, 15 April 1981; Milton Shulman, Evening Standard, 3 April 1981; London Theatre Record, Vol. I, Issue 7 (1981), p. 152. Hesse, The English Crime Play, pp. 83, 183. Carlson, Deathtraps, p. 93. Sheridan Morley, Spectator at the Theatre, London: Oberon, 2002, p. 17.

3: Sex: Comic, Episodic and Ironic 1 George Mikes, How To Be a Brit, London: Penguin Random House, 2015, p. 25. 2 Daily Telegraph, 24 August 1950; The Sunday Times, 27 August 1950; see also the illustration in André Roussin, The Little Hut: Adapted from the French by Nancy Mitford, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1951. 3 Felix Barker, ‘There’s No Need To Blush’, Evening Standard, 18 September 1958. 4 Harold Hobson, ‘Irma Translated’, The Sunday Times, 20 July 1958. 5 Robert Ottaway, ‘The Girl with a “Method” of Her Own’, Illustrated London News, 23 August 1958. 6 Dominic Shellard and Steve Nicholson, The Lord Chamberlain Regrets . . .: A History of British Theatre Censorship, London: The British Library, 2004, pp. 178–81. 7 Steve Nicholson, The Censorship of British Drama 1900–68, Vol. 3 (The Fifties), Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2011, pp. 19, 29–36. 8 Quoted in John Elsom, Erotic Theatre, London: Secker & Warburg, 1973, p. 129. 9 Ibid., p. 184. 10 Harold Hobson, ‘Miss Murdoch Is Amused’, The Sunday Times, 30 June 1963; see also John Elsom, Post-War British Theatre Criticism, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981, pp. 121–6. 11 W. A. D[arlington], ‘Amusing Satire Drawn from Serious Novel’, Daily Telegraph, 24 June 1964. 12 Philip Hope-Wallace, review of Pyjama Tops, Guardian, 23 September 1969. 13 For the contribution of pop music to a history of popular performance see David Pattie, Rock Music in Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 14 Quoted in Helen Osborne, ‘Model Marriage but a Messy Divorce’, Daily Telegraph, 30 May 1998.

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15 See Henry Raynor, ‘Frisby, Terence’, in K. A. Berney (ed.), Contemporary Dramatists, 5th edn, London: St James Press, 1993, pp. 205–6; John Russell Taylor, Anger and After: A Guide to the New British Drama, London: Eyre Methuen, 1977, pp. 208–10. 16 Osborne, ‘Model Marriage but a Messy Divorce’. 17 Michael Codron and Alan Strachan, Putting It On: The West End Theatre of Michael Codron, London: Duckworth Overlook, 2010, pp. 177–80. 18 Peter Lewis, ‘A Sex Era Comes to an End’, Daily Mail, 16 June 1966. 19 The Times, 16 June 1966. 20 The Sunday Times, 19 June 1966. 21 Evening News, 17 November 1966. 22 ‘Terence Frisby: Interview Transcript’, Interviewer: Francesca Holdrick, 19 December 2008, British Library Theatre Archive, http://sounds.bl.uk/related-content/ TRANSCRIPTS/024T-C1142X000236-0100A0.pdf (accessed 27 June 2017); see also ‘Interview: Terence Frisby’, Interviewer: Dominic Cavendish, 16 November 2017, theatreVOICE website, http://www.theatrevoice.com/audio/terence-frisby/ (accessed 16 November 2017), and Codron and Strachan, Putting It On, pp. 177–80. 23 Donald Sinden, Laughter in the Second Act, London: Futura, 1986, p. 207. 24 Codron and Strachan, Putting It On, p. 179. 25 ‘Terence Frisby: Interview Transcript’. 26 Ibid. 27 Codron and Strachan, Putting It On, p. 180. 28 ‘Terence Frisby: Interview Transcript’. 29 In the film version, there is an additional line—‘He’s in hospital with a dose’—which suggests that Frisby was aware of how such subjects were increasingly becoming a part of the sexual landscape. 30 Quoted in Robert Tanitch, London Stage in the 20th Century, London: Haus, 2007, p. 205. 31 Jeremy Kingston, Punch, 9 October 1968. 32 Philip Hope-Wallace, ‘Fallen Figleaf or Hair’s Breadth’, Guardian, 5 October 1968; John Barber, ‘Let’s Be Fair to Hair’, Daily Telegraph, 25 November 1968. 33 R. B. Marriott, ‘Nudity without Protest’, in Eric Johns (ed.), Theatre Review ’73, London: W. H. Allen, 1973, p. 28. 34 Quoted in John Bull, Stage Right: Crisis and Recovery in British Contemporary Mainstream Theatre, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994, p. 55. 35 Irving Wardle, ‘Welcome Light Comedy’, The Times, 17 October 1968. 36 Philip Hope-Wallace, Guardian, 17 October 1968. 37 Quoted in Paul Willetts, The Look of Love: The Life and Times of Paul Raymond, Soho’s King of Clubs, London: Serpent’s Tail, 2013, p. 45. 38 Willetts, The Look of Love; Elsom, Erotic Theatre, pp. 175–9, 181–5; Nicholson, The Censorship of British Drama, pp. 173–7.

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39 The title of the American version is spelt Pajama Tops. It ran for 52 performances. 40 Mawby Green and Ed Feilbert, Pyjama Tops, Whitehall Theatre, 1969, programme. 41 Ronald Hastings, ‘80 Applied for Four Nude Roles’, Daily Telegraph, 17 September 1969. 42 John Barber, ‘Nudity Fails to Save Boring Play’, Daily Telegraph, 23 September 1969. 43 Barry Norman, ‘For Once, Words Fail Me’, Daily Mail, 23 September 1969. 44 Evening Standard, 25 September 1969. 45 Green and Feilbert, Pyjama Tops, Whitehall Theatre, 1970, programme. 46 Quoted in Willetts, The Look of Love, p. 221. 47 Michelene Wandor, ‘Oh Calcutta & Pyjama Tops: A Snigger & a Giggle . . . And the Message is Killing’, Spare Rib 41 (November 1975). 48 Quoted in Willetts, The Look of Love, p. 283. 49 Quoted in Dominic Shellard, Kenneth Tynan: A Life, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003, p. 321. 50 Quoted in Ibid., p. 320. 51 Graham Saunders, ‘Contracts, Clauses and Nudes: Breath, Oh! Calcutta! and the Freedom of Authorship’, in David Tucker and Trish McTighe (eds), Staging Beckett in Great Britain, London: Bloomsbury, 2016. 52 Kathleen Tynan, (ed.), Kenneth Tynan Letters, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994, pp. 514–15. 53 Graham Saunders, ‘A Last Hurrah? Joe Orton’s “Until She Screams”, Oh! Calcutta! and the Permissive 1960s’, Studies in Theatre and Performance 37(2), (April 2017); Richard Curson Smith, Joe Orton Laid Bare, BBC2, 25 November 2017. 54 Later renamed ‘To His Mistress Going to Bed’. 55 Quoted in Willetts, The Look of Love, p. 233. 56 Quoted in Shellard, Tynan, p. 323. 57 Blakemore, Stage Blood, p. 189. 58 ‘Oh! Calcutta! It’s Cold’, Daily Mail, 18 November 1970. 59 Quoted in Willetts, The Look of Love, p. 238. 60 Blakemore, Stage Blood, p. 190. 61 Saunders, ‘A Last Hurrah?’, p. 3. 62 Elsom, Post-War British Theatre Criticism, pp. 191–5. 63 Elsom, Erotic Theatre, pp. 185–86. 64 Celia Haddon, ‘Oh! Calcutta! Now You’re Just Another Panto for the Coach Parties’, Daily Mail, 1 April 1971. 65 Wandor, ‘Oh Calcutta & Pyjama Tops’. 66 Elsom, Erotic Theatre, p. 187. 67 Orwell, ‘The Art of Donald McGill’, p. 201. 68 Quoted in Inverne, The Impresarios, p. 138. 69 David Jason, My Life, London: Arrow, 2014, p. 200.

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70 Michael Crawford, Parcel Arrived Safely: Tied with String (My Autobiography), London: Arrow, 2000, p. 196. 71 Jason, My Life, p. 201–3. 72 ‘Heaven Sent’, Daily Telegraph, 15 July 1975. 73 Philip Hope-Wallace, Guardian, 4 June 1971. 74 John Barber, ‘Bank-Clerk Comedian Is Farce’s Attraction’, Daily Telegraph, 4 June 1971; Colin Frame, Evening News, 4 June 1971. 75 Quoted in ‘Tony Marriot Obituary’, Daily Telegraph, 23 April 2014. 76 Quoted in Ibid. 77 Quoted in Emily Langer, ‘Anthony Marriott: Playwright Best Known for the Farce No Sex Please, We’re British [Obituary]’, Independent, 1 May 2014. 78 ‘No Sex – We’re 3000’, Evening Standard, 17 August 1978. 79 Bull, Stage Right, pp. 57–84, 87–104, 207–19. 80 Codron and Strachan, Putting It On, pp. 226–9. 81 Peter Bowles, Ask Me If I’m Happy: An Actor’s Life, London: Simon & Schuster, 2010, p. 203. 82 John Barber, ‘Puns and Panties Are Kept on the Move’, Daily Telegraph, 17 June 1976; J. C. Trewin, Birmingham Post, 18 June 1976. See also Smith, Modern British Farce, pp. 161–67. 83 Ira Nadel, Double Act: A Life of Tom Stoppard, London: Methuen, 2002, p. 263. 84 ‘Show Piece’, Guardian, 16 November 1978. 85 Francis King, Sunday Telegraph, 3 April 1983; Michael Coveney, Financial Times, 31 March 1983. 86 Ray Cooney interview in Roger Foss, May the Farce Be with You, London: Oberon, 2012, pp. 33–56; Smith, Modern British Farce, pp. 111–19. 87 Keith Richmond, The Musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber, London: Virgin, 1995, p. 118.

4: Family: Traditional, Redemptive and Fractured 1 D’Monté, British Theatre and Performance, p. 186; Gale, West End Women, pp. 16, 162–66, 187–89. 2 ‘Over the Footlights’, Theatre World, Vol. XXXV, No. 199 (August 1941). 3 ‘London’s Second Longest Run’, Tatler, 30 December 1942. 4 ‘Sailor Beware! Loose Talk Can Cost Lives’, 1942, V&A Prints and Drawings, E.592-2004. 5 Dennis Barker, ‘Peggy Mount Obituary’, Guardian, 14 November 2001. 6 Shellard, Kenneth Tynan: Theatre Writings, p. 52. 7 Harold Hobson, The Sunday Times, 20 February 1955; Kenneth Tynan, ‘Versatility’, Observer, 20 February 1955.

200

Notes

8 Milton Shulman, Evening Standard, 17 February 1955. 9 Anthony Cookman, ‘Hornett’s Nest’, Tatler, 2 March 1955; May, Theatremania, p. 1; Ivor Brown, Theatre 1954–55, London: Max Reinhardt, 1955, p. 45. 10 Quoted in Huggett, Binkie Beaumont, p. 342. 11 Smith, Modern British Farce, pp. 85–91. 12 Ray Cooney and Tony Hilton, One for the Pot, Whitehall Theatre, 1961, programme. 13 ‘A Delightful New Farce’, The Times, 3 August 1961. 14 Ronald Hayman, The Set-Up: An Anatomy of English Theatre Today, London: Eyre Methuen, 1973, pp. 141–2. 15 Tim Bezant, ‘Introduction’, in Bill Naughton, Spring and Port Wine, Oxford: Heinemann Educational, 1994, pp. vii–viii. 16 Bill Naughton, Spring and Port Wine, Mermaid Theatre, 1965, programme. The programme reproduces photographs of old Bolton, plus some of the cityscape’s 1960s changes. 17 ‘Bitterness Translated into Warm Comedy’, The Times, 11 November 1965. 18 Peter Lewis, ‘The Bard of Bolton Beats Granada’, Daily Mail, 11 November 1965. 19 Milton Shulman, ‘Miracle-Worker at the Mermaid’, Evening Standard, 11 November 1965. 20 Philip Hope-Wallace, Guardian, 11 November 1965. 21 J. W. Lambert, ‘How To Do It’, The Sunday Times, 14 November 1965. 22 Bezant, ‘Introduction’, p. xi. 23 Gale, West End Women, p. 138. 24 J. C. Trewin, ‘Thoughts by the Way’, Illustrated London News, 12 October 1957; see Susan Bennett, ‘New Plays and Women’s Voices in the 1950s’, in Elaine Aston and Janelle Reinelt (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 43–50. 25 Quoted in Samantha Ellis, ‘Black Chiffon, London, May 1949’, Guardian, 2 July 2003. 26 The Man Most Likely To . . . poster, V&A Enthoven collection, V&A Theatre and Performance Collections, http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1163203/poster-echopress/ (accessed 5 November 2017). 27 Leslie Phillips, Hello: The Autobiography, London: Orion, 2007, pp. 277–8. 28 Ibid., p. 278. 29 Ibid., p. 280. 30 Ibid. 31 Barry Norman, ‘West End Woe’, Daily Mail, 5 July 1968; Eric Shorter, ‘Very Light Comedy of Cliches’, Daily Telegraph, 5 July 1968. 32 Phillips, Hello, p. 280. 33 Saunders, The Mousetrap Man, pp. 215–16. 34 Phillips, Hello, p. 281. 35 Shorter, ‘Very Light Comedy of Cliches’.

Notes

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36 Michael Codron, Putting It On, pp. 215–17. 37 ‘Frequently Asked Questions: London and the West End’, Alan Ayckbourn website, http://biography.alanayckbourn.net/styled-5/styled-15/AyckbournFAQLondon.html (accessed 14 November 2017). 38 Ibid. 39 Elaine Aston and Geraldine Harris, Good Night Out for the Girls: Popular Feminisms in Contemporary Theatre and Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 1–22. 40 Quoted in ibid., p. 118. 41 Quoted in David Benedict, ‘Great Musicals Confound the Haters’, The Stage, 28 March 2019. 42 Ibid., p. 119. 43 Quoted in Hytner, Balancing Acts, p. 255. 44 Rosenthal, The National Theatre Story, p. 798. 45 Evening Standard, 3 August 2012; Time Out, 9 August 2012; Theatre Record, Vol. XXXII, Issue 16/17 (2012), pp. 858, 863. 46 Michael Billington, Guardian, 3 August 2012. 47 Laura Thompson, Daily Telegraph, 4 August 2011. 48 Simon Stephens, Simon Stephens: A Working Diary, London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016, p. 191. 49 Hytner, Balancing Acts, p. 255. 50 Stephens, A Working Diary, p. 189. 51 Ibid., pp. 131, 153.

5: Class: Musical, Parodic and Political 1 Daily Telegraph, 2 May 1947. 2 Beverley Baxter, ‘Goodbye to Oklahoma!’, Everybody’s Weekly, 21 October 1950. 3 Nancy Mitford, The Little Hut, Lyric, 1950, programme; Dominic Symonds, ‘The American Invasion: The Impact of Oklahoma! and Annie Get Your Gun’, in Robert Gordon and Olaf Jubin (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical, New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 225–47. 4 Quoted in Sheridan Morley, Spread a Little Happiness: The First Hundred Years of the British Musical, London: Thames and Hudson, 1987, p. 132. 5 John Barber, ‘The Bright Young Things Are Back’, Daily Express, 15 January 1954. 6 Robert Whelan, The Other National Theatre: 350 Years of Shows in Drury Lane, Brighton: Jacob Tonson, 2013, p. 479. 7 Eric Keown, ‘At the Play’, Punch, 7 May 1958.

202

Notes

8 Anthony Cookman, ‘Moments I Shall Remember’, Tatler, 14 May 1958; ‘Shaw with the Broadway Touch’, The Times, 1 May 1958. 9 ‘Does Stage Violence Really Have So Serious an Effect on Children?’, Daily Telegraph, 22 December 1958; ‘The Real “West Side Story” ’, Daily Telegraph, 30 January 1959. 10 Robert Gordon, Olaf Jubin and Millie Taylor, British Musical Theatre Since 1950, London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016, pp. 44–5, 125–31. 11 Ibid., p. 129. 12 Morley, Spread a Little Happiness, pp. 154–5. 13 Robert Muller, ‘Everyone Will Ask for More’, Daily Mail, 1 July 1960. 14 Tanitch, London Stage, p. 181. 15 Gordon et al., British Musical Theatre, pp. 28–32. 16 ‘Damages in “Charlie Girl” case £15,000’, Daily Telegraph, 22 October 1966. 17 Anna Neagle, ‘There’s Always Tomorrow’: An Autobiography, London: Futura, 1979, p. 193. 18 Early in her career, in the 1920s, Neagle danced in Cochran’s shows. 19 Bernard Levin, Daily Mail, 16 December 1965. 20 ‘Cinderella in a Stately Home’, The Times, 16 December 1965; Tanitch, London Stage, p. 197. 21 The Sunday Times, 19 December 1965. 22 Milton Shulman, ‘Charlie Girl, Where’s Your Heart?’, Evening Standard, 16 December 1965. 23 Godfrey Winn, ‘Sour Puss Critics’, London Life, 6 January 1966. 24 Morley, Spread a Little Happiness, p. 163. 25 Beryl Bainbridge, Front Row: Evenings at the Theatre; Pieces from ‘The Oldie’, London: Continuum, 2005, p. 203. 26 Denise Deegan, ‘The Creation of Daisy’, in Deegan, Daisy Pulls It Off, Park Theatre, 2017, programme. 27 Christopher Warman, ‘Hurrah for Jolly Hockey Sticks’, The Times, 16 April 1983. 28 Ibid. 29 Andrew Lloyd Webber, Unmasked: A Memoir, London: Harper Collins, 2018, pp. 399, 404–5; photograph between pp. 326–7. 30 The exception is when Miss Gibson, the headmistress, condemns ‘casual hobnobbing’ with ‘boys from St Hugo’s County Grammar School’ (48). 31 Michael Billington, Guardian, 19 April 1983; London Theatre Record, Vol. III, Issue 8 (1983), p. 287. 32 Milton Shulman, Evening Standard, 19 April 1983; London Theatre Record, Vol. III, Issue 8 (1983), p. 286; ‘Chin up, old thing’, Letters Page, Evening Standard, 25 April 1983. 33 London Theatre Record, Vol. III, Issue 1/2 (1983), pp. 50–51, Vol. III, Issue 8 (1983) pp. 285–8.

Notes

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34 Michelene Wandor, Carry On Understudies: Theatre and Sexual Politics, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986, p. 180. 35 David Llewellyn, ‘Popular Theatre and Participation in the Work of John Godber’, in Ros Merkin (ed.), Popular Theatres? Papers from the Popular Theatre Conference 1994, Liverpool: John Moores University, 1996, pp. 94–102. 36 Quoted in Jim Mulligan, ‘Introduction’, in Willy Russell, Blood Brothers, London: Methuen Student Editions, 1995, p. xi. 37 Quoted in Ibid., p. x. 38 Gordon et al., British Musical Theatre, pp. 33–44; Ros Merkin, Blood Brothers GCSE Student Guide, London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016, pp. 20–3, 46–8. 39 Merkin, Ibid., p. 22. 40 Quoted in Merkin, Ibid., p. 60; London Theatre Record, Vol. III, Issue 8 (1983), pp. 261–5. 41 Mark Steyn, Independent, 1 August 1988; London Theatre Record, Vol. VIII, Issue 15 (1988), p. 1004–5. 42 Francis King, Sunday Telegraph, 31 July 1988; London Theatre Record, Vol. VIII, Issue 15 (1988), p. 1002. 43 Sheridan Morley, Our Theatres in the Eighties, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990, pp. 6, 58. 44 Ibid., p. 58. 45 Bill Williamson, ‘Theatre’, Midweek, 22 November 1988. 46 Benedict Nightingale, ‘Ten Years On, the Moral’s Still in the Message’, The Times, 30 July 1998; see also Benedict Nightingale, ‘Not Greek Myth but a Hit of a Folk Ballad’, The Times, 31 December 2002. 47 Michael Owen, ‘Butcher of Broadway Spares Blood Brothers’, Evening Standard, 26 April 1993. 48 Merkin, Blood Brothers, pp. 49–53. 49 Quoted in Ibid., p. 24. 50 Quoted in Ibid., p. 21. 51 Gordon et al., British Musical Theatre, pp. 167–74; Inverne, The Impresarios, p. 105. 52 Bainbridge, Front Row, p. 118. 53 Sandbrook, The Great British Dream Factory, pp. 539–52, 490–501. 54 See Aleks Sierz, ‘A Postmodernist Calls: Class, Conscience and the British Theatre’, in Jane Stokes and Anna Reading (eds), The Media in Britain: Current Debates and Developments, London: Macmillan, 1999, pp. 236–45. 55 Quoted in David Gritten, ‘Why Billy Had To Grow Up’, Daily Telegraph, 4 May 2005. 56 Nigel Reynolds, ‘Three “Billy Elliots” Win Star Roles in Stage Show’, Daily Telegraph, 6 October 2004. 57 Gordon et al., British Musical Theatre, pp. 49–68, 116.

204

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58 Elton John, Lee Hall and Stephen Daldry, Billy Elliot the Musical Live, DVD, Universal, 2014. 59 Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph, 12 May 2005; Sheridan Morley, Express, 12 May 2005; Bill Hagerty, Sun, 20 May 2005; Theatre Record, Vol. XXV, Issue 10 (2005), pp. 632, 637. 60 Michael Billington, Guardian, 12 May 2005; Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standard, 12 May 2005; Theatre Record, Vol. XXV, Issue 10 (2005), pp. 631, 632. 61 Quentin Letts, Daily Mail, 12 May 2005; Theatre Record, Vol. XXV, Issue 10 (2005), p. 635. 62 Quoted in Sarah Crompton, ‘How Billy Elliot Swept the Globe’, Daily Telegraph, 17 March 2010. 63 Elton John et al., Billy Elliot Live DVD. 64 Lee Hall, ‘Adaptation’, in Hall, Billy Elliot the Musical, 2005, programme. 65 Quoted in Sandbrook, The Great British Dream Factory, p. 551. 66 George Rodosthenous, ‘Billy Elliot the Musical: Visual Representations of Working Class Masculinity and the All-Singing, All-Dancing Bo[d]y’, in Studies in Musical Theatre, Vol. 1, No. 3 (2007), pp. 275–92.

6: History: Gothic, Edwardian and Pastiche 1 Beverley Baxter, ‘Mr Novello as the Great Lover’, Evening Standard, 28 April 1945. 2 Gordon et al., British Musical Theatre, p. 10. 3 Tanitch, London Stage, p. 256. The first London showing was at the Barbican because the show had been developed by the RSC. 4 Davis, Theatre & Entertainment, pp. 31–5; Billington, State of the Nation, pp. 290–3. 5 Bainbridge, Front Row, pp. 67, 68. 6 Gordon et al., British Musical Theatre, pp. 154–7. 7 Codron, Putting It On, pp. 279–83. 8 Billington, One Night Stands, p. 182. 9 The Phantom of the Opera official website, http://www.thephantomoftheopera.com/ facts-figures/ (accessed 13 March 2018). 10 Paul Prece and William A. Everett, ‘The Megamusical: The Creation, Internationalisation and Impact of a Genre’, in William A. Everett and Paul R. Laird (eds), The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, 3rd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, pp. 301–5; Inverne, The Impresarios, pp. 90–107. 11 Lloyd Webber, Unmasked, pp. 436–82; Michael Coveney, The Andrew Lloyd Webber Story, London: Arrow, 2000, pp. 163–91. 12 Crawford, Parcel Arrived Safely, pp. 342–5.

Notes

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13 Daily Mail, 10 October 1986; London Theatre Record, Vol. VI, Issue 21 (1986), p. 1117. 14 Ros Asquith, City Limits, 16 October 1986; Mary Harron, New Statesman, 17 October 1986; London Theatre Record, Vol. VI, Issue 21 (1986), pp. 1120, 1123. 15 See Gordon et al., British Musical Theatre, pp. 178–89. 16 Daily Telegraph, 11 October 1986; London Theatre Record, Vol. VI, Issue 21 (1986), p. 1116; Crawford, Parcel Arrived Safely, p. 346. 17 John Snelson, Andrew Lloyd Webber, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004, pp. 96–105. 18 Quoted in Ibid., p. 103. 19 Prece and Everett, ‘The Megamusical’, pp. 308–10, 312–17. 20 Snelson, Andrew Lloyd Webber, pp. 88–90. 21 Crawford, Parcel Arrived Safely, p. 358. 22 Coveney, Andrew Lloyd Webber, p. 165. 23 Emma Brockes, ‘An Ever-Living Phantom’, Guardian, 11 January 2006. 24 Quoted in James Bone, ‘Phantom Puts Out Cats to Smash Record on Broadway’, The Times, 10 January 2006. 25 Max Davidson, ‘The Enduring Magic of a Musical’, Daily Telegraph, 1 October 2011. 26 Stephen Mallatratt and Susan Hill, The Woman in Black: A Ghost Play, London: Samuel French, 1989, stage direction: ‘The child’s cry rises to a scream of terror’ (49). 27 Bainbridge, Front Row, p. 25. 28 Ibid., pp. 25–6. 29 Herford quoted in ‘Robin Herford: The Man Behind the Horror’, Living North website, May 2015, https://www.livingnorth.com/yorkshire/people-places/robinherford-%E2%80%93-man-behind-horror (accessed 12 April 2017). 30 Martin Hoyle, Financial Times, 19 January 1989; Milton Shulman, Evening Standard, 18 January 1989; London Theatre Record, Vol. IX, Issue 1–2 (1989), pp. 44, 47. 31 Michael Billington, Guardian, 19 January 1989; London Theatre Record, Vol. IX, Issue 1–2 (1989), p. 47. 32 Jack Tinker, Daily Mail, 19 January 1989; London Theatre Record, Vol. IX, Issue 4 (1989), p. 199; Billington, Ibid. 33 ‘Arts Diary’, The Times, 11 February 1989. 34 Christopher Robinson, ‘Things That Go Bump . . .’, Mallatratt and Hill, The Woman in Black, Fortune Theatre, 1989, programme. 35 Susannah Clapp, ‘Milestones of Mystery and Song’, Observer, 8 January 2012. 36 Mallatratt and Hill, The Woman in Black, no page number, capitalization in original, probably a printer’s error. 37 Ibid. 38 Susan Hill, ‘Fear and Imagination’, The Woman in Black Student Guide, Fortune Theatre, ATG, n. d.

206

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39 Ibid. 40 Mallatratt and Hill, The Woman in Black, Fortune Theatre, (2001), 5,000th performance souvenir programme. 41 Alex Needham, ‘The Woman in Black’s Reign of Terror’, Observer, 28 October 2012. 42 Michael Billington, Guardian, 25 May 2000; Jane Edwardes, Time Out, 31 May 2000; Theatre Record, Vol. XX, Issue 11 (2000), pp. 678, 679. 43 Dick Johns, The 39 Steps: A Teaching Resource Pack, Criterion Theatre, March 2009, p. 5. 44 Sarah Hemming, Financial Times, 18 August 2006; Sam Marlowe, The Times, 18 August 2006; Theatre Record, Vol. XXVI, Issue 16–17 (2006), pp. 915, 914. 45 Robert Gore-Langton, Daily Express, 18 August 2006; Theatre Record, Vol. XXVI, Issue 16–17 (2006), p. 916. 46 Susannah Clapp, Observer, 24 September 2006; Theatre Record, Vol. XXVI, Issue 19 (2006), p. 1038. 47 Jasper Rees, ‘10 Questions for Playwright Patrick Barlow’, The Arts Desk website, 16 November 2016, https://theartsdesk.com/theatre/10-questions-playwrightpatrick-barlow (accessed 8 May 2018). 48 Quoted in Nick Smurthwaite, ‘The Steps to Success’, The Stage, 19 January 2013. 49 Patrick Barlow, ‘Adapter’s Foreword’, August 2009, The 39 Steps: A Comedy, London: Samuel French, 2010, no page number. 50 Quoted in Louise Jury, ‘39 Steps from Tricycle Theatre to World Stage’, Evening Standard, 15 January 2008. 51 ‘A Note from Patrick Barlow, Adaptor’, July 2006, in Dick Johns, The 39 Steps: A Teaching Resource Pack, p. 11. 52 Hytner, Balancing Acts, p. 265. 53 Ibid., p. 259. 54 Ibid., p. 264. 55 Henry Hitchings, Evening Standard, 25 May 2011; Theatre Record, Vol. XXXI, Issue 11 (2011), p. 563. 56 Michael Billington, Guardian, 25 May 2011; Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph, 25 May 2011; Theatre Record, Vol. XXXI, Issue 11 (2011), pp. 563, 564. 57 Paul Taylor, Independent, 25 May 2011; Kate Bassett, Independent on Sunday, 29 May 2011; Theatre Record, Vol. XXXI, Issue 11 (2011), pp. 564, 565. 58 Vanessa Thorpe, ‘Stop the Clowning Around, Director Tells Ad-Libbing Cast of Corden Hit’, Observer, 3 July 2011. 59 Quoted in Rosa Price, ‘So How Did It Play on Broadway?’, Daily Telegraph, 9 April 2012; see also Barbara McMahon, ‘Broadway’s New Guvnor’, The Times, 8 April 2012. 60 Cal McCrystal, ‘British Humour’, in Richard Bean, One Man, Two Guvnors, National Theatre, 2011, programme. 61 Nicholas Hytner, interview with Emma Freud during interval of NT Live recording of the show; Hytner, Balancing Acts, p. 264.

Notes

207

7: Fantasy: Whimsy, Camp and Sci-fi 1 Quoted in Morley, Spread a Little Happiness, p. 135. 2 Adrian Wright, A Tanner’s Worth of Tune: Rediscovering the Post-War British Musical, Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010, pp. 95–100; Gordon et al., British Musical Theatre, pp. 16–28. 3 The title comes from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Act One, Scene 5, lines 607–8. Cleopatra: ‘My salad days,/ When I was green in judgment: cold in blood.’ 4 Minnie the Magic Piano, Salad Days, V&A Performance Collection, http://collections. vam.ac.uk/item/O98813/salad-days-piano-unknown/ (accessed 9 June 2017). 5 Quoted in Wright, A Tanner’s Worth of Tune, p. 95. 6 Cecil Smith, Daily Express, 6 August 1954; Philip Hope-Wallace, Manchester Guardian, 9 August 1954. 7 Cecil Wilson, Daily Mail, 6 August 1954; Milton Shulman, Evening Standard, 6 August 1954. 8 W. A. Darlington, Daily Telegraph, 6 August 1954. 9 ‘Facts on Your Face’, Vanity Fair, October 1954. 10 ‘Successful Salad’, Observer, 13 February 1955. 11 ‘Salad Days in French’, The Times, 15 August 1957. 12 ‘Salad Days’, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, BBC 1, 30 November 1972; Mackintosh quoted in Brain Logan, ‘Salad Days – the Other Longest Running West End Musical’, Guardian, 19 November 2009. 13 ‘The Magnetism of the Minstrels’, in Eric Johns (ed.), Theatre Review ’73, London: W. H. Allen, 1973, p. 24. 14 Ibid., p. 25. 15 Ibid., p. 26; Michael Pickering, Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008, pp. 218–19. 16 ‘Black and White Minstrels Creator dies’ [George Mitchell], Guardian, 29 August 2002. 17 David Benedict, ‘Missing in Action: Our Black Stars’, Independent, 1 April 1998. 18 Andrzej Lukowski, Time Out website, 15 December 2017, https://www.timeout.com/ london/theatre/five-guys-named-moe-review (accessed 5 July 2018). 19 See page 3. 20 Gordon et al., British Musical Theatre, pp. 131–40. 21 Quoted in Rocky Horror Double Feature Video Show Documentary, 1995, in Richard O’Brien, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, 25 Anniversary Edition, 20th-Century Fox, 2001. 22 Nicholas Wright, Artistic Director of the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, quoted in Ruth Little and Emily McLaughlin, The Royal Court Theatre Inside Out, London: Oberon, 2007, p. 162.

208 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38

39

40 41 42

43

Notes

Quoted in Nassem Khan, Evening Standard, 26 June 1973. Jeremy Kingston, Punch, 5 September 1973. Ibid. ‘Mark Caldwell Interview with Tim Curry’, Film Talk, STOIC [Student Television Of Imperial College], September 1975. Nassem Khan, Evening Standard, 26 June 1973. Michael Billington, Guardian, 23 June 1973; Irving Wardle, The Times, 23 June 1973. Time Out quoted in The Rocky Horror Picture Book, Dewynters, June 1979. Roderick Gilchrist, Daily Mail, 28 August 1973; Time Out, 24 August 1973. Daily Mail, 28 August 1973. Nicholas de Jongh, Guardian, 18 July 1974. Georgina Walsh, ‘A Message for Impresarios’, Evening Standard, 9 February 1978. Georgina Walsh, ‘Rocky and His Rolling Eyes’, Evening Standard, 9 February 1978. Quoted in Michael Billington, ‘The Case of the Durable Transvestite’, Guardian, 6 April 1979. Gordon et al., British Musical Theatre, pp. 138–9. Quoted in Little and McLaughlin, The Royal Court Theatre Inside Out, p. 162. See also Anna-Sophie Jürgens, ‘Violent Clowns and Panto Dames: The Origins of Rocky Horror’s Frank-N-Furter’, The Theatre Times website, 25 December 2018, https:// thetheatretimes.com/violent-clowns-and-panto-dames-the-origins-of-rockyhorrors-frank-n-furter/ (accessed 30 December 2018). Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (ed.), Reading Rocky Horror: The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Popular Culture, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; Millie Taylor, ‘ “Don’t Dream It, Be It”: Exploring Signification, Empathy and Mimesis in Relation to The Rocky Horror Show’, Studies in Musical Theatre, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2006), pp. 57–71. ‘The Virgins Guide to Rocky Horror’, Timewarp; The Official UK Rocky Horror Fan Club, (2017), http://www.timewarp.org.uk/1virgins.htm (accessed 11 June 2018); Brian Moylan, ‘The Fan Rituals That Made Rocky Horror Picture Show a Cult Classic’, Guardian, 19 October 2016; Rocky Horror Double Feature Video Show Documentary, 1995, in Richard O’Brien, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, 25 Anniversary Edition; see also Aston and Harris, A Good Night Out for the Girls, pp. 55–6. Richmond, The Musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber, p. 137. Bod Carlton, Return to the Forbidden Planet, Everyman Theatre, 1984, programme. Carlton’s many other credits include From a Jack to a King (Bubble, 1982; Liverpool Everyman, 1985), which is a rock version of Macbeth; he also directed the Channel 4 soap Brookside in the late 1980s. Quoted in Jeremy Harrison, Actor-Musicianship, London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016, p. 9; see also pp. 1–29.

Notes

209

44 Quoted in Harrison, Ibid., p. 9. 45 Ibid., pp. 6–13. 46 Return to the Forbidden Planet, 25th Anniversary Tour website, 2015, http:// forbiddenplanetreturns.com/ (accessed 19 June 2018). 47 Cf. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Chorus in the Prologue: ‘Two households, both alike in dignity,/ In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,/ From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,/ Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.’ (lines 1–4). 48 Cf. Carlton, Return to the Forbidden Planet, London: Methuen, 1985 and Return to the Forbidden Planet, London: Samuel French, 1998. 49 Carlton, Return to the Forbidden Planet, London: Methuen, 1985, pp. 31–2. 50 ‘The Development of Our Space Fleet’, Return to the Forbidden Planet In-Flight Magazine [souvenir programme], Dewynters, 1990. 51 Lyn Gardner, City Limits, 4 January 1985; London Theatre Record, Vol. IV, Issue 25/26 (1984), p. 1142. 52 Jack Tinker, Daily Mail, 19 September 1989; London Theatre Record, Vol. IX, Issue 19 (1989), p. 1265. 53 Nicholas de Jongh, Guardian, 21 September 1989; Martin Hoyle, Financial Times, 19 September 1989; London Theatre Record, Vol. IX, Issue 19 (1989), pp. 1263, 1265. 54 Annalena McAfee, Evening Standard, 19 September 1989; Maureen Paton, Daily Express, 25 September 1989; London Theatre Record, Vol. IX, Issue 19 (1989), pp. 1265, 1264. 55 Quoted in Harrison, Actor-Musicianship, p. 12. 56 Laurence Phillips, ‘Forbidden Fruits . . .’, Evening Standard, 28 December 1989. 57 Claire Gillman, ‘Bard Rock’, Girl About Town, 9 July 1990. 58 Return to the Forbidden Planet In-Flight Magazine [souvenir programme], Dewynters, 1990, and subsequent editions. 59 David Gritten, ‘How The Lion King Became the Most Successful Stage Show of All Time’, Daily Telegraph, 17 October 2014; Adam Sherwin, ‘The Theatrical Version of The Lion King Has Become the Most Lucrative Entertainment Event in History, but Who Is Profiting?’, Independent, 24 September 2014. 60 Gordon et al., British Musical Theatre, pp. 68–82. 61 Quoted in Nel Minchin and Rhian Skirving, Matilda & Me, DVD, In Films, 2016. 62 Quoted in Elizabeth Grice, ‘I’m So Conventional, Says Matilda’s Untutored Genius’, Daily Telegraph, 11 December 2010. 63 Aleks Sierz, ‘Changing Stories, Changing Things: Dennis Kelly and Alexandra Wood in Conversation with Aleks Sierz’, Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, Vol. 7, No. 2 (July 2014), pp. 243–4, 245, 249–50. Also Tim Minchin, ‘Foreword: Creating, Discarding, Collaborating’ in his Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical sheet music. 64 Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph, 10 December 2010; Henry Hitchings, Evening Standard, 10 December 2010; Theatre Record, Vol. XXX, Issue 25–26 (2010), p. 1430.

210

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65 For example, Michael Billington, Guardian, 10 December 2010; Theatre Record, Vol. XXX, Issue 25–26 (2010), p. 1431. 66 Quentin Letts, Daily Mail, 25 November 2011; Dominic Maxwell, Times, 25 November 2011; Theatre Record, Vol. XXXI, Issue 24 (2011), p. 1303. 67 Sarah Hemming, Financial Times, 26 November 2011; Theatre Record, Vol. XXXI, Issue 24 (2011), p. 1305. 68 ‘Is Acting Really Child’s Play?’, Daily Telegraph, 24 January 2011. 69 Quoted in Minchin and Skirving, Matilda & Me, DVD. 70 Lyric booklet in Tim Minchin, Matilda the Musical, CD, Original London Cast, RSC Enterprise, 2011. 71 Directed by Brian de Palma from Stephen King’s 1974 novel. 72 Quoted in Sierz, ‘Changing Stories, Changing Things’, p. 251. In Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 film, Spartacus, about the Roman slave revolt, the recaptured rebel slaves are asked to identify their leader in exchange for leniency, but they all say ‘I am Spartacus’, and share his fate. 73 Quoted in Minchin and Skirving, Matilda & Me, DVD. 74 Gordon et al., British Musical Theatre, p. 78. 75 Dennis Kelly, ‘Books Versus Stories’, in Kelly and Minchin, Matilda the Musical, Cambridge Theatre, 2011, programme. 76 Ibid. 77 Michael Boyd, ‘Introductory Note’, in Kelly and Minchin, Matilda the Musical, Cambridge Theatre, 2011, programme. 78 Melanie McDonagh, ‘Once Upon a Time, There Was a Man Who Liked To Make Up Stories . . .’, Independent on Sunday, 12 December 2010.

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Articles and Chapters Bennett, Susan, ‘New Plays and Women’s Voices in the 1950s’, in Elaine Aston and Janelle Reinelt (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 38–52. Berkowitz, Gerald M., ‘Shaffer, Anthony (Joshua)’, in K. A. Berney (ed.), Contemporary Dramatists, 5th edn, London: St James Press, 1993, pp. 592–93. Bezant, Tim, ‘Introduction’, in Bill Naughton, Spring and Port Wine, Oxford: Heinemann Educational, 1994. Bull, John, ‘The Establishment of Mainstream Theatre, 1946–1979’, in Baz Kershaw (ed.), The Cambridge History of British Theatre, Vol. 3: Since 1895, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 326–48. Double, Oliver, ‘Alternative Comedy: From Radicalism to Commercialism’, in Ros Merkin (ed.), Popular Theatres? Papers from the Popular Theatre Conference 1994, Liverpool: John Moores University, 1996, pp. 127–39. Glenn, Jules, ‘Twins in Disguise: A Psychoanalytic Essay on Sleuth and The Royal Hunt of the Sun’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 43, No. 2 (1974), pp. 288–302. Johns, Eric, ‘The Mousetrap Man’, in Eric Johns (ed.), Theatre Review ’73, London: W. H. Allen, 1973, pp. 97–100. Kershaw, Baz, ‘British Theatre, 1940–2002: An Introduction’, in Baz Kershaw (ed.), The Cambridge History of British Theatre, Vol. 3: Since 1895, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 291–325. Llewellyn, David, ‘Popular Theatre and Participation in the Work of John Godber’, in Ros Merkin (ed.), Popular Theatres? Papers from the Popular Theatre Conference 1994, Liverpool: John Moores University, 1996, pp. 94–102. Lundskaer-Nielsen, Miranda, ‘ “In This England, in These Times”: Redefining the British Musical Since 1970’, in William A. Everett and Paul R. Laird (eds), The Cambridge

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Companion to the Musical, 3rd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, pp. 323–38. ‘The Magnetism of the Minstrels’, in Eric Johns (ed.), Theatre Review ’73, London: W. H. Allen, 1973, pp. 23–26. Marriott, R. B., ‘Nudity without Protest’, in Eric Johns (ed.), Theatre Review ’73, London: W. H. Allen, 1973, pp. 27–30. Mason, Bim, ‘Popular Theatre: A Contradiction in Terms?’, in Ros Merkin (ed.), Popular Theatres? Papers from the Popular Theatre Conference 1994, Liverpool: John Moores University, 1996, pp. 1–5. Mulligan, Jim, ‘Introduction’, in Willy Russell, Blood Brothers, London: Methuen Student Editions, 1995, pp. vii–xv. Orwell, George, ‘The Art of Donald McGill’, in George Orwell: Essays, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000, pp. 193–203. Parker-Starbuck, Jennifer, ‘Animal Ontologies and Media Representations: Robotics, Puppets, and the Real of War Horse’, Theatre Journal, Vol. 65, No. 3 (October 2013), pp. 373–93. Prece, Paul and William A. Everett, ‘The Megamusical: The Creation, Internationalisation and Impact of a Genre’, in William A. Everett and Paul R. Laird (eds), The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, 3rd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, pp. 301–22. Raynor, Henry, ‘Frisby, Terence’, in K. A. Berney (ed.), Contemporary Dramatists, 5th edn, London: St James Press, 1993, pp. 205–6. Rodosthenous, George, ‘Billy Elliot the Musical: Visual Representations of Working Class Masculinity and the All-Singing, All-Dancing Bo[d]y’, in Studies in Musical Theatre, Vol. 1, No. 3 (2007), pp. 275–92. Saunders, Graham, ‘Contracts, Clauses and Nudes: Breath, Oh! Calcutta! and the Freedom of Authorship’, in David Tucker and Trish McTighe (eds), Staging Beckett in Great Britain, London: Bloomsbury, 2016, pp. 177–92. Saunders, Graham, ‘A Last Hurrah? Joe Orton’s “Until She Screams”, Oh! Calcutta! and the Permissive 1960s’, Studies in Theatre and Performance 37 (2), (April 2017), pp. 1–16. Sierz, Aleks, ‘A Postmodernist Calls: Class, Conscience and the British Theatre’, in Jane Stokes and Anna Reading (eds), The Media in Britain: Current Debates and Developments, London: Macmillan, 1999, pp. 236–45. Sierz, Aleks, with Dennis Kelly and Alexandra Wood, ‘Changing Stories, Changing Things: Dennis Kelly and Alexandra Wood in Conversation with Aleks Sierz’, Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, Vol. 7, No. 2 (July 2014), pp. 241–56. Spicer, Andrew, ‘The “Other War”: Subversive Images of the Second World War in Service Comedies’, in Steven Caunce et al., Relocating Britishness, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004, pp. 167–82. Strachan, Alan, ‘Harris, Richard’, in K. A. Berney (ed.), Contemporary Dramatists, 5th edn, London: St James Press, 1993, pp. 278–80.

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Symonds, Dominic, ‘The American Invasion: The Impact of Oklahoma! and Annie Get Your Gun’, in Robert Gordon and Olaf Jubin (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical, New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 225–47. Taylor, Millie, ‘ “Don’t Dream It, Be It”: Exploring Signification, Empathy and Mimesis in Relation to The Rocky Horror Show’, Studies in Musical Theatre, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2006), pp. 57–71. Wandor, Michelene, ‘Oh Calcutta & Pyjama Tops: A Snigger & a Giggle . . . And the Message is Killing’, Spare Rib 41 (November 1975). White, Christine, ‘ “Humming the Sets”: Scenography and the Spectacular Musical from Cats to The Lord of the Rings’, in Robert Gordon and Olaf Jubin (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical, New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 401–18.

Other Media [NVAP: The National Video Archive of Performance, V&A Museum] Barlow, Patrick, The 39 Steps, DVD, Criterion, NVAP, V&A Theatre & Performance Archives, 11 January 2008. Bean, Richard, One Man, Two Guvnors, NT Live recording, National Theatre Archive, National Theatre, 15 September 2011. Bickerstaff, David and Phil Grabsky, Making War Horse, DVD, National Theatre/ Seventh Art, 2009. Carlton, Bob, Return to the Forbidden Planet, CD, Original London Cast, Virgin, 1990. John, Elton and Lee Hall, Billy Elliot the Musical, CD, Original London Cast, Polydor, 2005. John, Elton, Lee Hall and Stephen Daldry, Billy Elliot the Musical, DVD, Victoria Palace, NVAP, V&A Theatre & Performance Archives, 15 July 2008. John, Elton, Lee Hall and Stephen Daldry, Billy Elliot the Musical Live, DVD, Universal, 2014. Lloyd Webber, Andrew, The Phantom of the Opera, CD, Original London Cast, Polydor, 1987. Lloyd Webber, Andrew, The Phantom of the Opera, DVD, Her Majesty’s, NVAP, V&A Theatre & Performance Archives, 4 March 2003. Lloyd Webber, Andrew, The Phantom of the Opera at the Royal Albert Hall, DVD, 2 October 2011, Really Useful Films, 2011. Mallatratt, Stephen, The Woman in Black, DVD, Fortune, NVAP, V&A Theatre & Performance Archives, 10 August 2010. Minchin, Nel and Rhian Skirving, Matilda & Me, DVD, In Films, 2016. Minchin, Tim, Matilda the Musical, CD, Original London Cast, RSC Enterprise, 2011. Minchin, Tim and Dennis Kelly, Matilda the Musical, DVD, RSC Courtyard Theatre, (three different casts), Shakespeare Centre Library and Archive, January 2011.

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Minchin, Tim and Dennis Kelly, Matilda the Musical, DVD, Cambridge (four different casts), Shakespeare Centre Library and Archive, 22–31 December 2011. Minchin, Tim and Dennis Kelly, Matilda the Musical, DVD, Cambridge, NVAP, V&A Theatre & Performance Archives, 21 March 2012. O’Brien, Richard, The Rocky Horror Show, CD, Original London Cast, Hit Record Co, 1996 [1973]. O’Brien, Richard, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, 25th Anniversary Edition, DVD, 2 Discs, 20th-Century Fox, 2001. Priestley, J. B., directed Stephen Daldry, An Inspector Calls, DVD, Aldwych, NVAP, V&A Theatre & Performance Archives, 9 February 1994. Russell, Willy, Blood Brothers, CD, Original London Cast, Sanctuary, 1983. Schönberg, Claude-Michel and Alain Boublil, Les Misérables, DVD, Palace, NVAP, V&A Theatre & Performance Archives, 25 March 2004. Slade, Julian and Dorothy Reynolds, Salad Days, CD, Original London Cast, Sony West End, 1994 [1954]. Stafford, Nick, War Horse, NT Live recording, National Theatre Archive, New London Theatre, 27 February 2014. Stephens, Simon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, NT Live recording, National Theatre Archive, National Theatre, 6 September 2012. Taylor, John and David Heneker, Charlie Girl, CD, Original London Cast, Sony West End, 1965. Tynan, Kenneth, Oh! Calcutta!, DVD, Broadway Cast, Elkins Entertainment, 1972.

220

Index 39 Steps 140–4 42nd Street 129 Absurd Person Singular 5, 98 Adelphi Theatre 22, 30, 58, 108, 129, 144 Agate, James 20 Aitken, Maria 141, 142 Albery, Donald 108 Aldwych farces 29–30, 48 Alfie 89 Amadeus 3 Ambassadors Theatre 27, 38, 40, 41, 52 Apollo Theatre 19, 26, 29, 62, 76, 89, 99 archetypes 10 Arsenic and Old Lace 17, 38, 191n Art 121 artificiality 12 Aspects of Love 81–2 Attenborough, Richard 40, 41 Ayckbourn, Alan 4–5, 79, 80, 98, 136 Bainbridge, Beryl 112, 121, 129, 135–6 Barber, John 67, 70, 77, 80, 106, 133 Barlow, Patrick 58, 140, 141, 142, 143–4 Barnes, Clive 72 Bart, Lionel 107 Bassett, Kate 147 Baxter, Beverley 21, 31, 106, 128 Bean, Richard 7, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148 Beaumont, Hugh Binkie 18, 22–3 lover 64 Sailor, Beware! 86 Seagulls over Sorrento 26, 27 Sleuth 49, 52 While the Sun Shines 19, 21 Beckett, Samuel 73 Belgrade Theatre 161 Bennett, Alan 3 Bernstein, Leonard 107 Beyond the Fringe 80–1 Billington, Michael Billy Elliot the Musical 124

Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, The 101 Daisy Pulls It Off 114–15 Noises Off 130 One Man, Two Guvnors 147 popular theatre 2, 12 Rocky Horror Show, The 156 Stones in His Pocket 140 Woman in Black, The 137 Billy Elliot the Musical 121–5 Birds of a Feather 71 Bjornson, Maria 131, 132 Black and White Minstrel Show, The 4, 153–4 Black Chiffon 93 Blakemore, Michael 73, 74 Blasted 7 Blithe Spirit 17, 18–19 Blood Brothers 4, 116–20 Body in the Library, The 44 Bolton Hippodrome 89 Bourton, Rayner 156 Boyd, Michael 166, 170–1 Boyfriend, The 106, 149 Brightman, Sarah 130–1, 133 Brown, Ivor 86 Brown, J.M. 47 Brown, Joe 109 Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story 5 Buffini, Fiona 141 Bull Boys, The 26 Business of Murder, The 4, 53–8 Cambridge Theatre 58, 160, 161, 166, 168 Carey, Denis 150 Carlton, Bob 160–1 Carry On Sergeant 26 Cats 160 censorship 59, 60–1, 66–7, 72, 74 Chapman, John 44–5, 195n Charlie Girl 108–12 Chelsea Classic 155

221

222

Index

Chicago: The Musical 58 Christie, Agatha 38, 52 Body in the Library, The 44 Hollow, The 44 Mousetrap, The 3–4, 5–6, 39–44, 52 Ten Little Niggers 43 Christie, Bunny 100 Churchill, Winston 19 City Limits 131 Clapp, Susannah 138 class 8, 43, 88, 105, 176. See also Sailor, Beware!; Spring and Port Wine Billy Elliot the Musical 121–5 Blood Brothers 4, 116–20 Boyfriend, The 106, 149 Charlie Girl 108–12 Daisy Pulls It Off 112–16 Les Misérables 120 My Fair Lady 6, 106–7 Oklahoma! 105–6 Oliver! 107–8, 128 West Side Story 107 Classic Cinema 156 Cold War 46 Comedy Theatre 3, 27, 155 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Abridged) 5 Connaught Theatre 85 conscription 29 Reluctant Heroes 30–3 Cooke, Dominic 14 Cooney, Raymond 4, 48, 58, 88, 109 Corden, James 144, 145, 147 Coronation Street 90 Courtyard Theatre 168 Coward, Noël 4, 17, 18, 41 Crawford, Michael 76, 131, 132, 135 Craze, The 144 Crazy Gang 22 crime 37–8, 174–5 Arsenic and Old Lace 17, 38, 191n Business of Murder, The 4, 53–8 Mousetrap, The 3–4, 5–6, 39–44, 52 Simple Spymen 45–8 Sleuth 48–53 Criterion Theatre 5, 6, 7, 49, 58, 61, 62, 98, 140, 141 cultural discrimination 121 cultural insensitivity 153–4 cultural resonance 7

cultural snobbery 14 Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, The 99–103 Curry, Tim 155, 156 Dad’s Army 32 Dahl, Roald 166, 167 Daily Express 164–5 Daily Mail Billy Elliot the Musical 124 Matilda the Musical 168 Oh! Calcutta! 74 Oliver! 108 Return to the Forbidden Planet 164 Rocky Horror Show, The 157 Spring and Port Wine 90 There’s a Girl in My Soup 63 While the Sun Shines 21 Daily Mirror 21, 63 Daily Telegraph Matilda the Musical 168 My Fair Lady 6 Phantom of the Opera 135 Pyjama Tops 69 A Severed Head 61 Simple Spymen 47 West Side Story 107 Worm’s Eye View 25 Daily Worker 31 Daisy Pulls It Off 112–16 Daldry, Stephen 121–2 Daniels, Paul 131 Darling, Peter 121 Darlington, W.A. 25, 38, 47, 61, 151 de Jongh, Nicholas 124 Deegan, Denise 112–13 Delderfield, Ronald Frederick 23, 25, 26, 192n Desert Rats 30, 193n Dirty Linen 80 dream life 13–14, 173–9 Drury, Ken 139 Drury Lane Theatre 6, 32, 105, 106, 127, 129 Dry Rot 45 Duchess Theatre 54, 74 Duke of York’s Theatre 6, 18, 96 Edgar, David 12 Edgar, Kate 162

Index Elliott, Marianne 99, 100 Elsom, John 74 Entertaining Mr Sloane 66 escapism 11 Evening News 67 Evening Standard Irma La Douce 60 Matilda the Musical 168 No Sex Please, We’re British 79 Pyjama Tops 70 Reluctant Heroes 31 Return to the Forbidden Planet 164, 165 Rocky Horror Show, The 157 Seagulls over Sorrento 28 Spring and Port Wine 90 War Horse 36 exclusion 6 Falter, John 84 family 83, 175–6. See also Billy Elliot the Musical; Blood Brothers Black Chiffon 93 Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, The 99–103 Man Most Likely To, The 93–7 One for the Pot 48, 88–9 Otherwise Engaged 97–8 Quiet Week-End 17, 83–4 Roar Like a Dove 93 Sailor, Beware! 84–8 Spring and Port Wine 89–93 fantasy 149, 177 Black and White Minstrel Show, The 4, 153–4 Cats 160 Lion King, The 4, 166 Matilda the Musical 166–71 Return to the Forbidden Planet 160–5 Rocky Horror Show, The 3, 4, 154–60 Salad Days 149–53 Starlight Express 14, 160 farce 29–30 Fazakerley Young People’s Theatre Company 116 Fielding, Harold 109 film 8, 129, 158 Alfie 89 Billy Elliot 121

Bull Boys, The 26 Dry Rot 45 No Sex Please, We’re British 79 Reluctant Heroes 31 Return to the Forbidden Planet 161 Rocky Horror Show, The 155, 160 Sailor, Beware! 85 Seagulls over Sorrento 29 Sleuth 52 Spring and Port Wine 89 There’s a Girl in My Soup 63 War Horse 35 Woman in Black, The 136 Worm’s Eye View 23 Financial Times 81, 164, 168 Finney, Albert 89 Five Guys Named Moe 154 Flare Path 19–20, 191n Flashdance: The Musical 99 Foot, Alistair 75 Ford, Rodney 162 foreign shows 4 Fortune Theatre 38, 81, 135, 136, 139 Fothergill, Miles 157 French audiences 153 French Without Tears 19, 191n Frisby, Terence 4, 62 Gale, John 79 gay and lesbian theatre 67 gay characters 20–1, 42–3 genre 12 Gielgud Theatre 99 Gilchrist, Roderick 156 Gillam, Melville 85 Gilmore, David 113 Girl About Town magazine 165 Glass, Eric 27 Globe Theatre 17, 21, 63, 64, 98, 113 Godspell 129 Good Night Out, A 2, 8 Gore-Langton, Robert 142 Grant, Steve 119 Gray, Simon 97 Guardian 2, 68, 80, 90, 135, 157, 164 Haddon, Mark 99, 101 Hair 67, 154 Hall, Lee 121, 124, 125

223

224 Harris, Richard 4, 53 Hart, Charles 131 Head, Anthony 40–1 Hemming, Sarah 142 Heneker, David 108–9 Herford, Robin 136, 138, 139 Hill, Susan 139 Hilton, Tony 88 Hippodrome 17, 89, 127 history 127–30, 176–7 39 Steps 140–4 Les Misérables 4, 14, 120, 128–9, 189n One Man, Two Guvnors 7, 144–8 Phantom of the Opera 130–5 Stones in His Pocket 140 Woman in Black, The 4, 135–40 History Boys, The 3 Hitchings, Henry 101, 146 Hobson, Harold 40, 61, 86 Hollow, The 44 homophobia 81 homosexuality 20–1, 42–3, 152. See also gay and lesbian theatre Hope-Wallace, Philip 61, 67, 77, 151 Hoult, Michael 139 How the Other Half Loves 5 How To Be an Alien 59 Hoyle, Martin 137 Hytner, Nicholas Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, The 99, 102–3 One Man, Two Guvnors 144–5, 147, 148 popular theatre 14 War Horse 33, 34 Illustrated London News 60 Independent 119 Inns, George 153 Inspector Calls, An 122 Ipi Tombi 154 Irma La Douce 60 Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary? 18 Jagger, Mick 156 Janes, Alan 5 Jason, David 77 Jesus Christ Superstar 129, 154 John, Elton 121

Index Kelly, Dennis 166, 167–8, 169, 170 Kenwright, Bill 119 Khan, Naseem 156 King, Francis 119 King, Philip 84 King’s Road Theatre 155, 157 Lambert, J.W. 47, 90 Layle, Evelyn 109 Le Monde 153 Les Misérables 4, 14, 120, 128–9, 189n Let My People Come 67 Let’s Get Laid 71 Letts, Quentin 124 Levin, Bernard 111 Lewis, Peter 63 Lion King, The 4, 166 literary gaze 14–15 Little Hut, The 59–60 Liverpool Playhouse 116 Lloyd Webber, Andrew 4, 113, 129, 160 Aspects of Love 81–2 Phantom of the Opera 130–5 London Bubble Theatre 161 London Laughs 22 London Life magazine 111–12 Longford, Lord 74 Look Back in Anger 7–8, 29 Love in Idleness 191n Luff, Robert 154 Lukowski, Andrzej 101 Lynne, Gillian 131 Lyric Theatre 5, 54, 59, 60, 98, 112, 116, 135 Lyrick Hammersmith 23, 129, 136, 139 Macbeth 30 Mackintosh, Cameron 128, 130, 131, 153 Madden, Ciaran 94 majority, tyranny of 6 Mallatratt, Stephen 135, 136, 138–9 Mamma Mia! 4, 98 Man Most Likely To, The 93–7 Marlowe, Linda 74 Marlowe, Sam 142 Marriott, Anthony 75 Marriott, R. B. 51 Marsden, Gerry 109 Matilda the Musical 166–71 May, Robin 28, 86

Index McCrystal, Cal 145, 146, 147, 148 McGrath, John 2, 8, 9 Mead, Rod 139 media 7–8 Medwin, Michael 89 mega-hits 3–6, 173 characteristics 9–10 dream life 14, 173–9 melodrama 11–12 Mermaid Theatre 62, 89 Merrick, David 75 Middle East wars 35 Midweek magazine 119 Mikes, George 59 military conscription 29 military plays 17, 174. See also Simple Spymen; wartime entertainment Flare Path 19–20, 191n Reluctant Heroes 29–33 Seagulls over Sorrento 26–9 War Horse 4, 33–6 While the Sun Shines 17, 19, 20–1 Worm’s Eye View 22–6 Miller, Max 60–1 Minchin, Tim 166, 167, 168, 170 Mitchell, George 154 Mitford, Nancy 59–60 Moody, Ron 108 Morley, Sheridan 54, 58, 112, 119, 124 Morning Advertiser 31 Morpurgo, Michael 35, 36 Morris, Colin 30, 31 Morris, Tom 33 Mount, Peggy 85, 86 Mousetrap, The 3–4, 5–6, 39–44, 52 multimedia 8, 31–2, 35. See also film; radio Murder at the Vicarage 38 musicals 4, 12–13, 14, 67, 178 42nd Street 129 Billy Elliot the Musical 121–5 Blood Brothers 4, 116–20 Boyfriend, The 106, 149 Cats 160 Charlie Girl 108–12 Chicago: The Musical 58 Flashdance: The Musical 99 Godspell 129 Hair 67, 154 Jesus Christ Superstar 129, 154

225

Les Misérables 4, 14, 120, 128–9, 189n Lion King, The 4, 166 Mamma Mia! 4, 98 Matilda the Musical 166–71 My Fair Lady 6, 106–7 Oklahoma! 105–6 Oliver! 107–8, 128 Perchance To Dream 17, 127–8 Phantom of the Opera 130–5 Return to the Forbidden Planet 160–5 Rocky Horror Show, The 3, 4, 154–60 Salad Days 149–53 Sound of Music, The 129 Starlight Express 14, 160 Sunset Boulevard 129 West Side Story 107 Whistle Down the Wind 129 My Fair Lady 6, 106–7 National Service 29 National Theatre 3, 6, 7, 14, 49, 72 Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, The 99, 100 An Inspector Calls 122 One Man, Two Guvnors 144, 147, 148 War Horse 33, 34, 35 National Theatre of Brent 141 Naughton, Bill 89 Neagle, Anne 109 Needham, Alex 139 New London Theatre 34, 160 New Statesman 131–2 New York Times 72, 119 Newling, Carol 1 Nicholas, Beverly 25 Nightingale, Benedict 119 No Sex Please, We’re British 4, 75–9 Noël Coward Theatre 6, 99, 166 Noises Off 129–30 Norman, Barry 70, 95 Novello, Ivor 17, 127–8 nudity 66–7, 69 Nunn, Trevor 14 O’Brien, Richard 3, 154–5, 157, 159 Observer 22, 47, 85, 142, 147, 151 Oh! Calcutta! 4, 72–5 O’Hare, Jeanie 166 Oklahoma! 105–6

226 Old Vic Theatre 6 Olding, Grant 144 Oliver! 107–8, 128 One for the Pot 48, 88–9 One Man, Two Guvnors 7, 144–8 Orwell, George 6, 15, 25–6, 75 Osborne, John 29, 71 Otherwise Engaged 97–8 Page, Philip 21 Parnes, Larry 109 parodies 48–9 Parry, Gordon 85 Perchance To Dream 17, 127–8 Perry, John 64 Phantom of the Opera 130–5 Philanthropist, The 79 Phillips, Leslie 94, 95, 96 Phoenix Theatre 93, 116, 128 Playhouse 38, 135 playwrights 4–5, 38. See also individual names political theatre 2 politics 10, 43 popular taste 8–10 popular theatre 1–2. See also mega-hits characteristics 11–12 dream life 13–14, 173–9 Prince, Hal 131, 132 Private Lives 191n Punch 106 Pyjama Tops 4, 68–71 Quiet Week-End 17, 83–4 Quinn, Geoffrey Anthony. See Raymond, Paul radio 31, 39, 47, 89 Rattigan, Terence 20, 21 Rayburn, Joyce 93, 94, 97 Raymond, Paul 68 Real Inspector Hound, The 49 Reduced Shakespeare Company 5, 141 Rees, Jasper 120 religion 129 Reluctant Heroes 29–33 repetition 173–4 research method 3–6 Return to the Forbidden Planet 160–5

Index revivals 7 revues 4 Reynolds, Dorothy 150, 151 Rich, Frank 119 Rip-Off 71 Rix, Brian 44–5, 68 One for the Pot 88 Reluctant Heroes 30–2 Simple Spymen 45, 46, 47, 48 Uproar in the House 75–6 Roar Like a Dove 93 Rocky Horror Picture Show, The 155, 160 Rocky Horror Show, The 3, 4, 154–60 Roundhouse 73, 129 Royal Court Theatre 6–7, 79, 113, 154, 155–6, 190n Theatre Upstairs 3, 154–5 Royal Shakespeare Company 168 Royalty Theatre 71, 74 Run for Your Wife 4, 48, 58, 81 Russell, Willy 116–17 Sachs, Andrew 46, 77 Sailor, Beware! 84–8 Salad Days 149–53 satire 47 Saturday Review of Literature 47 Saunders, Peter 39, 41, 43, 52, 95–6 Saved 190n Seagulls over Sorrento 26–9 Secretary Bird 61, 67–8 See How They Run 84–5 sentimentality 11 Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance 190n service comedies. See military plays Severed Head, A 61 sex 59, 175, 178. See also Rocky Horror Show, The Beyond the Fringe 80–1 Birds of a Feather 71 censorship 59, 60–1, 66–7, 72, 74 Dirty Linen 80 Hair 67, 154 Irma La Douce 60 Let My People Come 67 Let’s Get Laid 71 The Little Hut 59–60 No Sex Please, We’re British 4, 75–9 Oh! Calcutta! 4, 72–5

Index Philanthropist, The 79 Pyjama Tops 4, 68–71 Run for Your Wife 4, 48, 58, 81 Secretary Bird, The 61, 67–8 There’s a Girl in My Soup 4, 62–6 Shaffer, Anthony 49, 53 Shaffer, Peter 3 Shakespeare, William 10, 161, 163 Sharman, Jim 154, 155–6, 157 Sherwood, Henry 94 Shiner, Ronald 23, 26, 27, 28 Shorter, Eric 95 Shulman, Milton 54, 86, 111, 115, 137, 151 Sim, Sheila 40 Simple Spymen 45–8 Slade, Julian 149–50, 151 Sleuth 48–53 Smith, Cecil 151 Snape, Edward 144 snobbery 14 social class. See class social groups 8–9 Society of London Theatres (SOLT) 1 Sondheim, Stephen 52–3, 107 Sound of Music, The 129 Spectator 28 Spencer, Charles 124, 147 Spring and Port Wine 89–93 St Martin’s Theatre 49, 52 Stage, The 28, 40, 51, 98 Starlight Express 14, 160 Stars Look Down, The 122 Stephen, Simon 99, 103 Stephen Joseph Theatre 136, 139 Steyn, Mark 119 Stomp 5 Stones in His Pocket 140 Storm, Lesley 93 Strand Theatre Arsenic and Old Lace 17, 38 No Sex Please, We’re British 76 Sailor, Beware! 84, 85, 86 Woman in Black, The 135, 137 striptease 61–2 Sun 63 Sunday Chronicle 25 Sunday Express 41 Sunday Pictorial 31

227

Sunday Telegraph 81, 119 Sunday Times 20, 22, 31, 47, 63, 111 Sunset Boulevard 129 Sutherland, John 2 Tanitch, Robert 108, 128 Tatler magazine 22, 28, 84, 86, 107 Taylor, Paul 147 television 54 Ten Little Niggers 43 Theatre Act 1968 66 Theatre Review 67 Theatre Royal Drury Lane. See Drury Lane Theatre Theatre Royal Haymarket 144 Theatre Upstairs 3, 154–5 Theatre World 84 There’s a Girl in My Soup 4, 62–6 Thomas, Basil 23 Thorpe, Jeremy 57 Thriller: Live 5 thrillers 53–8 ticket sales 7 Time magazine 62 Time Out 140, 154, 156–7 Times, The Arsenic and Old Lace 38 Daisy Pulls It Off 113 Flare Path 19–20 Matilda the Musical 168 My Fair Lady 107 One for the Pot 89 Perchance To Dream 17 Salad Days 153 Sleuth 51 Spring and Port Wine 90 Ten Little Niggers 43 There’s a Girl in My Soup 63 Worm’s Eye View 25 Tinker, Jack 54, 131, 137 Together Again 22 transfers 7 Trewin, J.C. 17, 80, 93 Tricycle Theatre 141, 161, 164 Trump, Donald 144 Tynan, Kenneth 47, 72, 85, 86 Uproar in the House 75–6 Use of Literacy, The 91

228 Vanity Fair 151 Variety magazine 109 Vaudeville Theatre 93, 95, 149, 150, 151 venue size 6–7, 34, 41, 47–8 Victoria Palace 154 Waiting for Godot 7 Walford, Glen 161 Waller, Jack 85 Wandor, Michelle 70–1, 74–5, 115 War Horse 4, 33–6 Warchus, Matthew 166–7 Wardle, Irving 51, 67, 120, 156 wartime entertainment 17–19, 21–2. See also military plays Flare Path 19–20, 191n Love in Idleness 191n Quiet Week-End 17, 83–4 While the Sun Shines 17, 19, 20–1 Worm’s Eye View 22–6 Watling, Jack 96 Watson, Emily 35

Index We Will Rock You 5 West End 1 West Side Story 107 West Yorkshire Playhouse 141 While the Sun Shines 17, 19, 20–1 Whistle Down the Wind 129 Whitehall Theatre Dry Rot 45 One for the Pot 88 Pyjama Tops 68, 70 Reluctant Heroes 30 Simple Spymen 45, 47–8 Uproar in the House 75 Worm’s Eye View 23 Who’s Who in Theatre 3 Williams, Hugh 108, 109 Williams, Kenneth 22 Williamson, Bill 119 Wilson, Cecil 151 Wilson, Peter 139 Woman in Black, The 4, 135–40 Worm’s Eye View 22–6 Wyndham’s Theatre 6, 17, 83, 106, 121