As always, some commentators confused commercial success with intrinsic merit and claimed that the arrival of the musical comedy amounted to the emergence of a new popular culture. G. K. Chesterton, in his Illustrated London News column, dismissed the claims in his usual trenchant language. ‘The fact is, that we have reached so high and rarefied a level of humbug that the most serious thing we have left is popular songs.’31 He ought to have known better, for he was spending happily pedantic days touring the country in order to debate the great issues of life, death and religion with the principal proponent of the theatre of ideas, George Bernard Shaw.
In the now forgotten Lady Epping’s Lawsuit, the playwright who is the hero complains, ‘Nobody seems to think a play serious unless it is about unpleasant people.’ The young man was mistaken. Certainly some dramatists made their names by creating conventionally disreputable characters. Somerset Maugham’s early fare depended on the louche habits of the dramatis personae. The stage directions for Act 3 of Lady Frederick typified the whole play. ‘The eponymous heroine comes through the curtain. She wears a kimono. Her hair is dishevelled, hanging about her head in a tangled mop. She is not made up, and looks haggard, yellow and lined.’ Bernard Shaw would not have wasted time on such triviality. Whether or not Shaw’s people were unpleasant depends on personal taste. But he certainly peddled what polite society regarded as unpleasant notions. That brought him into constant conflict with the Lord Chamberlain’s office, which believed that it existed to prevent the dissemination of ideas which were either subversive or degenerate.
Shaw’s long-running battle with S. A. Redford, the Lord Chamberlain’s ‘examiner of plays’, had begun on 11 March 1898 when the manager of the Victoria Hall Bijou Theatre was informed that he would not receive a licence for the public performance of Mrs Warren’s Profession, a morality play which revolved around a successful young woman’s discovery that her education had been financed by her mother’s earnings from prostitution. Without a licence Shaw could still put on his plays, but he had no protection against prosecution under the obscenity laws – a technicality the author thought amusing. He wrote to the ‘examiner’ – a one-time bank manager whose qualification for his public position was his enthusiastic participation in amateur dramatics – in language which was calculated to score debating points rather than obtain a reversal of the decision. ‘I quite recognise the impossibility of anyone sharing with me the responsibility for such a play.’32 Naturally Redford’s reply confirmed the previous ruling and quoted Shaw’s admission of sole responsibility as an acceptance that no reasonable man could have anticipated that a licence would be issued.
In July, nine years later, B. Iden Payne, an actor-manager closely associated with Anne Horniman, the manager and benefactor of the Midland and Gaiety theatres in Manchester, sought to have the 1898 ruling overturned. ‘The play has become part of the repertory of the ordinary reputable German and Austrian theatres. The question of its morality has been definitively raised in America and decided in the author’s favour in the United States Courts.’ Mr Payne in his righteous anger reminded Redford that plays by Tolstoy and Dumas had been refused licences and then, to the embarrassment of the Lord Chamberlain, subsequently approved for performance. Reference to his fallibility did nothing to change the examiner’s mind. The licence was again refused.33
Redford subsequently refused to license Press Cuttings, a one-act sketch about votes for women which was written to be performed at two charity matinees in aid of the London Society for Women’s Suffrage. The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet, a version of Don Quixote which Shaw wrote at the suggestion of Beerbohm Tree, received the same treatment.34 The piece was composed in five weeks and subtitled ‘Sermon in Crude Melodrama’. Shaw meant the adjective to apply to the speed of the play’s construction. Beerbohm Tree, who lost his nerve, thought it an appropriate description for the reference to God – ‘a sly one … a mean one’ – which the play contained. The allegation that one female character had experienced ‘immoral relations with every man in this town’ confirmed Beerbohm Tree’s judgement and prompted the suggestion that some of the more contentious passages should be removed. Shaw refused to censor his own play and the Lord Chamberlain’s certificate was withheld.
Shaw was not alone in his resentment of censorship. By the summer of 1909 the campaign to end a system which allowed the performance of vulgar (and often sexually charged) farce but prohibited the performance of plays that examined serious social questions had attracted the sort of support which guarantees publicity. Seventy-two theatrical and literary celebrities wrote a barrage of letters to the national newspapers. Shaw boasted that he had ‘sent a tremendous series of letters to The Times’35 and increased the examiner’s embarrassment by arranging for Blanco Posnet to be staged at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, beyond the Lord Chamberlain’s jurisdiction. Faced with a campaign led by Algernon Swinburne, H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith and James Barrie (as well as Shaw), Henry Campbell-Bannerman, the Prime Minister, agreed to meet a deputation to discuss ‘a procedure’ which the protesters claimed was ‘opposed to the spirit of the Constitution, contrary to common justice and to common sense’. The deputation was persuasive. Campbell-Bannerman (always dangerously susceptible to rational argument) agreed to set up a Joint Committee of Both Houses ‘to inquire into the censorship of stage plays, as constituted by the Theatres Act of 1843 … and to report any alterations of the law and practice which may appear desirable’. Its chairman was to be Herbert Samuel, and among its members was A. E. W. Mason, Liberal MP, former actor, future secret service agent and eventually famous as author of The Four Feathers.
Bernard Shaw composed, and published at his own expense, 11,000 words entitled Evidence in Chief of Bernard Shaw before Joint Committee on Stage Plays.36 In a letter to Gilbert Murray he compared it – those who did not know him thought jocularly – to Milton’s Areopagitica. It was much concerned with the fear that the irresistible assault on the Lord Chamberlain and his ‘examiner’ would result in local authorities being given the right to prohibit productions within their boundaries. He was adamant that writers must ‘fight censorship in every form’. The point was made time after time during his oral evidence to the Committee. That was essential to Shaw’s determination to leave a permanent mark on the debate. The Committee would not agree to the modern Areopagitica being treated as an official document and published in the record of proceedings.
The Committee held its first meeting on 29 July 1909. During the weeks which followed, it heard evidence from Shaw, James Barrie, Beerbohm Tree, Arthur Wing Pinero, W. S. Gilbert, Harley Granville-Barker and Squire Bancroft – the last of the actor-manager knights. The Times, reporting the proceedings, judged that ‘many of the witnesses were at once interesting and amusing and some even brilliant … The atmosphere of the footlights seemed to have found its way into the Committee Room.’37 Much of the evidence revealed less about the witnesses’ views on Edwardian theatre than their beliefs about Edwardian society. Like the members of the Committee, they were obsessed with questions of class.
Shaw could not resist overstatement. ‘A very large percentage of the plays which take place at present on the English stage under the censorship licence have as their objective the stimulation of sexual desire … If you prosecute for incitement to sexual vice, you immediately make it possible to prosecute a manager because the principal actress has put on a pretty hat or is a pretty woman.’ Other celebrities felt it equally necessary to act in character. G. K. Chesterton, giving evidence ‘on behalf of the average man’, was in favour of censorship but against the censor. ‘I would trust twelve ordinary men but I cannot trust one ordinary man.’ Israel Zangwill, the archetypal absent-minded professor, announced that he would ‘suppress half our plays for their indecency and the other half for their fatuity’. But the participants on both sides of the table who were more interested in the future of the stage than in their own immediate performances returned time after time to the character o
f the typical audience.
W. S. Gilbert, a supporter of censorship, did not regard the stage as a ‘proper platform upon which to discuss questions of adultery and free love before mixed audiences, composed of persons of all ages and both sexes, of all ways of thinking, of all conditions of life and varying degrees of education’. W. L. Courtney, the drama critic of the Daily Telegraph, thought that the ‘stalls and boxes have always favoured the lighter comedies and that they do not care much about the deeper laws of life or of morality’. However, in ‘the last row of the stalls and the first two rows of the pit’ were people who ‘do not go [to the theatre] for amusement but because they are interested in drama’. The notion that a serious play was incompatible with a good night out was endorsed by several witnesses. George Edwards, the musical comedy impresario, described the theatre as existing ‘to provide harmless entertainment’ and admitted, ‘I do not care about any higher function’. Under cross-examination he agreed that the Hull Town Council had tried to ban The Merry Widow which the local newspaper had described as ‘the most improper and immoral play ever produced’.
The serious playwrights of the period – Shaw, Galsworthy, Granville-Barker and Pinero (who believed censorship ‘degrades the dramatist by placing him under a summary jurisdiction otherwise unknown to English law) – spoke up for artistic freedom. The politicians believed that the public – particularly the public in the gallery and the gods – had to be protected from corrupting ideas. The rival views were encapsulated in a rhetorical question from Colonel Lockwood, ‘a plain blunt Member of Parliament’ and the reply he received from Granville-Barker.
‘Do you think that it is a wholesome thing for the drama that your advanced views should be put straight in front of the public without any further question?’
‘Yes. There is nothing to be gained by treating the public as children.’
Nobody could possibly suggest that Granville-Barker did not practise in the theatre what he preached in the Committee Room. His three great plays – as good as anything that was written in Edwardian England and better than most of what Shaw wrote during his whole career – dealt with essentially ‘adult’ issues. The Voysey Inheritance tells the story of a successful solicitor who discovers that his law firm has built its reputation (and in consequence his wealth) on a fraud. The Madras House (with a cast of twenty-five actors, seventeen of them female) dealt with women’s subservient place in early twentieth-century society. It was not quite A Doll’s House, but it did speak for the unemancipated half of the population who, led by the theatre-going classes, were about to rise up and demand the vote. Waste was the tragedy of a rising politician whose career was ruined by the exposure of an extra-marital affair. Because it included dialogue about abortion – one of the possible escape routes for the doomed anti-hero – the Lord Chamberlain refused to give it a certificate. The ‘banning of Waste’ did more than any other single act of censorship to promote the 1909 demand for a change in the law. The esteem in which Granville-Barker was held by intellectual society was illustrated by its ‘walk-through’ reading in 1908 – a formality necessary to guarantee the play’s copyright. The readers included Laurence Housman, Bernard Shaw, Gilbert Murray, Mr and Mrs H. G. Wells and Mrs John Galsworthy.38
The Select Committee Inquiry endorsed the status quo as Select Committee Inquiries often do. Its report reaffirmed that ‘the public interest required theatrical performances to be regulated by special laws’ and that the Lord Chamberlain should remain ‘The Licenser of Plays’. It pointed out that there was no legal obligation to submit a play for licence before it was performed in public, but it recommended that, if an unlicensed play was ‘open to objection on the grounds of indecency’, the Director of Public Prosecutions should remain empowered to take action against both the playwright and the manager of the theatre in which it was performed. Of course, the decision as to whether or not the play was ‘open to objection’ was, by implication, taken by the Examiner of Plays when he considered whether or not to issue a certificate. So the Establishment, as represented by Sir Squire Bancroft, an actor-manager of the old school who wanted the Examiner’s powers strengthened, triumphed, and the avant-garde, as typified by John Galsworthy, who thought that censorship ‘deters men of letters from writing for the stage’, was confounded. But the theatre of ideas had expressed its collective voice and would never again be regarded as the minority interest of a self-styled intellectual elite.
The transition was gradual and often unconscious. Pinero, who in 1880 had produced the paradigm line of drawing-room drama – ‘It is embarrassing to break a bust in the house of a comparative stranger’ – wrote Mid-Channel in the year of the Select Committee’s Inquiry. That play attempted (with mixed success) to explore the complications of marriage by analogies with the hollow joys of sporting victory. Shaw was never convinced that Pinero was capable of much more than frippery. After paying a curious compliment to Granville-Barker – ‘Ann Leete [is] by far the finest bit of literature since Stevenson’s Prince Otto’ – he argued that anyone who thought otherwise ‘ought to be condemned to sit out a Pinero Festival’.39 He was, in a back-handed, Shavian sort of way, much more complimentary about J. M. Barrie. He told August Strindberg that Barrie ‘wrote a sort of fairy play called Peter Pan … ostensibly as a holiday entertainment for children, but really as a play for grown-up people’.40 Peter Pan is both weird and whimsical. The complicated sexuality of its characters and the strange representation of vice and virtue were made all the more strange by a line added for the first revival. ‘To die’, says Peter, ‘will be an awfully big adventure.’ What Every Woman Knows was a genuine commentary on the role which able women filled, gladly or reluctantly, in Edwardian England. When it speaks of charm, it is obeying the rules of drawing-room drama – ‘It is a sort of bloom on a woman. If you have it you don’t need to have anything else’ – but it also contains lines which belong to a more astringent theatrical tradition. ‘There are few more impressive sights in the world than a Scotsman on the make.’
John Galsworthy spoke unequivocally for the new world of ideas and idealism or, as his critics would have said, a social sentimentality which was inconsistent with the stern and undemonstrative British character. ‘The writer is himself an entire Humane Society. He sides with the fox against the man in pink, the hen-coop against the marauding fox, the chickweed against the chicken and whatever it is that the chickweed preys on against the ferocious plant.’41 Galsworthy’s plays concerned real people in the real world – tin-plate workers on strike in Strife and a clerk who was convicted of forgery in Justice. The tin-plate workers were in conflict with a management that held beliefs as strong as those which inspired the men they employed. It was not a simplistic story of the battle of good against evil but an attempt to make an adult audience understand the inherent conflicts of industrial life.
Audiences who hoped for less complicated expositions of the triumph of virtue over vice waited for the arrival of a Wilson Barrett touring company. The highlight of its repertoire was The Sign of the Cross, a drama of ancient Rome in which the heroine chose martyrdom (and presumably the eternal life which it guarantees) rather than a life of pagan luxury. Nobody could complain that the Edwardian theatre failed to cater for every taste. While Wilson Barrett’s Christians were preparing for death behind provincial footlights, London stages were illuminating an entertainment which met the taste of ‘mashers’. ‘They were also known as the crutch and toothpick brigade because it was the fashion to carry smart walking sticks with crutch handles and chew toothpicks. They frequented the Gaiety Theatre for the sake not only of the very pretty music but also the charm and grace of that most beautiful and graceful of dancers, Kate Vaughan.’42
Although both the sacred and the profane appeared on stage in almost every interpretation of good and evil, Thomas Hardy – who had written more sternly of moral retribution than any of the Edwardian playwrights – temporarily forsook the fate of mortal men and the justice of the gods to write a l
ong verse play about Napoleon Bonaparte. The Dynasts was not originally intended for theatrical production – even the most extended company finds it hard to stage the Battle of Austerlitz on six evenings a week and two matinees. But produced it was. Hardy was not the only literary figure of the time to forsake his usual trade for the stage. John Masefield, who we now think of only as a poet, wrote two plays – The Tragedy of Nan and The Tragedy of Pompey the Great – in prose. Nan – staged, as was the Edwardian habit with plays of dubious popularity, only at matinees – had a strangely Hardyesque theme: the heroine was an orphan whose father had been hanged for sheep stealing. But nothing could compare for Grand Guignol with J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World.
In Riders to the Sea, Synge had already expressed black Irish gloom in a tragedy. It ended with a speech which was not designed to send the audience home happy.
Bartle will have a fine coffin out of white boards and a deep grave surely. What more can we want than that. No man at all can be living for ever and we must be satisfied.
Riders to the Sea was first produced at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, the home of the Irish National Theatre Society.* Its natural repertoire was the mystical Celtic plays which Lady Gregory wrote in collaboration with W. B. Yeats. But the Ireland of Cathleen ni Houlihan and The Unicorn and the Stars was not the country that The Playboy of the Western World inhabited. In his preface to the play, Synge paid tribute to the ‘rich and living’ Irish cultural tradition; but the Abbey audience on the opening night did not think that the spirit of Ireland was ideally represented by a young man who becomes a hero by pretending that he has murdered his father, splitting him ‘down the chine’ with a single blow from a spade. When the first-night audience attempted to storm the stage at the end of the third act, a member of the company held them off with an axe from the property department. According to Lady Gregory, the animosity was caused more by the language than the plot. Particular exception was taken, she claimed, to a description of ‘all the girls in Mayo standing in their Shifts’. Whatever the reason for those first-night troubles, the Abbey Theatre attracted an audience with particular perceptions. They were part of the Irish awakening – the reassertion of a cultural identity that produced drama which was essentially Irish and dramatists who did not make their names in London. The Playboy of the Western World was a comic aberration. But it was part of the awakening too.
The Edwardians Page 33