A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre

by Christopher Innes (ed)

  On the other hand, if you threaten to act and are stayed the responsibility lies not with you, but on the court.

  It was said last night that ex-Senator Reynolds will apply for an injunction to prevent further interference with the play.

  […]

  Until the posting of the notice announcing the discontinuance of the play ticket speculators fairly haunted the Garrick. Every passer-by was buttonholed and asked to buy seats for them.

  The notice came so late and the assurances of those in the box office until its appearance had been so positive that many persons who bought tickets in the morning and early afternoon went to the theatre last night fully expecting to see a performance. As a rule ticket holders demanded the return of their money. It was given to them without a word. There were a few who had bought from speculators and who insisted that the whole amount of their outlay should be refunded, irrespective of box office prices.

  “I paid $80 for my ticket,” said one woman, “and you only give me $2 back.”

  “You’re lucky to get that,” said the man in the window.

  The speculators, by the way, will lose nothing.

  Inspector Schmittberger and Roundsman Brown of the Tenderloin Police Station were at the theatre by 7 o’clock with a large force of policemen, including the theatre squad commanded by Sergt. Fogarty. They had all they could do to preserve order.

  […]

  At 9:30 o’clock the following statement was handed out by Winchell Smith [Daly’s] personal representative, who said it was authorized:

  “When Mr. Daly said on Saturday night that he would abide by the decision of the press with regard to the merits of ‘Mrs. Warren’s Profession,’ he meant what he said. At that time the approaching production through no wish of ours had been surrounded by so much sensationalism we feared that the public would get an erroneous impression of the play and our purpose in presenting it. And the turn of events proved that this was true. On the opening night the theatre was besieged by a motley throng of curiosity seekers, who came expecting to see something that would appeal to their morbid tastes.

  “This was exactly the portion of the public to which we did not wish to appeal, and, had it not been too late to withdraw, we would not have produced the play then. When, this morning, we saw how unanimous the papers were in condemnation of the drama, we then and there gave up all thought of continuing its presentation.”

  […]

  Anthony Gomstock of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, was early advised of the position assumed by Commissioner McAdoo. He chuckled when the news reached him.

  “I had full confidence that Mr. McAdoo would do his duty,” he said. “And now I will do all in my power to help him see to it that Arnold Daly and those associated with him in the production get the limit of the law. I will forward to Mr. McAdoo a copy of the warning I sent to Mr. Daly. This warning will prevent any plea in extenuation of the outrageous offense against decency which was perpetrated last night.

  “I did not witness last night’s performance, nor did I have any agents there. I knew that Mr. McAdoo would be present. An example should certainly be made of the guilty persons.”

  Throughout his life Shaw conducted a campaign against censorship of the stage, which in Britain was imposed by the Lord Chamberlain’s office through an official Examiner of Plays. Most European governments exercised some control over the theatre during the nineteenth century, although like Russia they were primarily concerned with political material. For instance, the 1832 riot caused by references to King Louis-Phillipe in Victor Hugo’s Le Roi S’Amuse served as opportunity for the re-imposition of state censorship in France. Similarly the enthusiastic reception of Verdi’s Nabucco in 1842 led Italian authorities to clamp down on anything that could be construed as nationalistic. By contrast, although censorship had also been originally imposed in Britain for political reasons (dating back to Elizabethan times, and extended in 1737 by the Prime Minister Robert Walpole in reaction to plays lampooning his government), by the mid-nineteenth century it had evolved into the control of moral standards – which was only finally abolished in 1968. This imposition of “public morality” particularly affected naturalistic plays, and led Shaw to a running battle with Redford, the Examiner of Plays for most of the period from the early 1890s to just before the First World War.

  Shaw’s basic argument was that the system of censorship allowed “vicious plays, and refuses to license serious and exemplary ones” by prohibiting the depiction of the unattractive (i.e., realistic) aspects of vice and its corrupting consequences:

  I have myself had a play [Mrs Warren’s Profession] prohibited by Mr Redford. People imagine that he refused to license it because the heroine is a prostitute and a procuress. They are indeed wide of the mark. The licensed drama positively teems with prostitutes and procuresses. One of the most popular melodramas of our time is called The Worst Woman in London … You can also see in many a humble melodrama a brothel on stage, with its procuress in league with the villain and the bold, bad girl whom he has ruined, all set forth as attractively as possible under the protection of the Lord Chamberlain’s certificate.

  But in my play the consequences of promiscuity are not shirked. I provide the feast (an acridly medicinal one); but I also present the reckoning. The daughter of my heroine meets the son of one of her father’s clients, who falls in love with her. And the two have to face the question, Is he her half-brother? only to find it unanswerable. That is one of the inevitable dilemmas produced by “group marriage.” To suppress it is to pack the cards in favour of such arrangements. My refusal to pack them brought me into conflict with the taboo against incest. That is why Mrs Warren’s Profession is forbidden, whilst dozens of plays which present Mrs Warren as well-dressed, charming, luxuriating in “guilty splendour,” and suffering nothing but some fictitious retribution at the end, in which nobody believes, because everybody knows it need not happen in real life, teach their cynical lesson to the poor girl in the gallery, and send the young man in the pit into the arms of the best imitation the streets can offer him of the guiltily splendid young lady he has been admiring inside.

  Letter to The Nation, 16 November 1907)

  Associating his own play with Ibsen’s Ghosts (banned for its inclusion of syphilis as well as the possibility of incest) and Brieux’s Damaged Goods, Shaw concludes that censorship “buys off the licentious playwrights and managers by licensing their agreeable plays” which advertise the attractiveness of immorality, while suppressing “intellectually honest writers who insist on drawing the moral. The natural and inevitable result is that the British drama has become the impudent and shallow-hearted propaganda of gaiety in the policeman’s sense of the word.”

  When Mrs Warren’s Profession was finally licensed for performance at a public theatre in England – in 1925 – it was received with general equanimity. The critics still found the play “unpalatable” but tended to focus on its dramatic qualities. The production was so popular that the next year it was transferred from a repertory season at the Regent Theatre to the Strand Theatre, where it ran for 68 performances. However, having been written over 30 years earlier, there was a tendency to see the major theme as being less relevant. To counter this, Shaw wrote a programme note, updating the economics in the play.

  6.3.5 Shaw, the continued relevance of Mrs Warren: 1926

  This play, after being witheld from public performance in England by the Censorship for thirty years, has at last been released (Heaven knows why!) too late, I am sorry to say to save Parliament from the folly of passing an Act which has only secured a monopoly of Mrs. Warren’s trade to her sex by flogging all her male competitors.

  On the recent experimental performance by The Macdona Players, the Press assured us all that we might now enjoy the play as a striking early specimen of my well-known artistic virtuosity, as of course the state of things it dramatizes has long since passed away. I was irresistibly reminded of the cheerful village boy who, when they told him
the tragedy of the Gospels, said ‘Oh well, since it happened so long ago and it’s all so dreadful, let’s hope it ain’t true.’

  If this play no longer had any relation to life I should not trouble the public with it now that I have so many riper and more delicate specimens of my workmanship to offer instead. But the truth is that the economic situation so forcibly demonstrated by Mrs. Warren remains as true as ever in essentials to-day. The fact that we now call Mrs. Warren’s sister’s eighteen shillings thirty-six, does not increase its purchasing power by one crumb. When the war came the late Mary Macarthur found women ‘doing their bit’ for twelve hours a day at twopence-halfpenny an hour. Strongly countenanced by a much more highly placed lady, whose name must not be dragged into this discussion, she put a stop to that particular atrocity; but it convicted us, twenty years after the date of my play, of making the wages of virtue lower than the wages of sin at a moment when the nation needed all its virtue very urgently. To be precise, the twopence-halfpenny is now sixpence-halfpenny, shewing that we still do everything for the virtue of British womanhood except pay for it.

  In short, Mrs. Warren’s profession is a vested interest; and when a woman of bold character and commercial ability applies to herself the commercial principles that are ruthlessly applied to her in the labour market, the result is Kitty Warren, whom I accordingly present to you. You will hear her justify herself completely on those principles. Whether you and I, as citizens and voters, will be able to justify ourselves, in higher principles than those of commerce, for having made her justification not only possible but unanswerable, is another matter.

  I cannot pretend to feel easy about it. Can you?

  4 HEARTBREAK HOUSE

  The play

  Shaw later commented that the composition of Heartbreak House “began with an atmosphere” and – as he remarked in reaction to a presentation at the Oxford Playhouse in 1923, which distorted the play into “a farcical comedy” (Letter to H.K. Ayliff, 31 October 1923) – was conceived as “a quiet, thoughtful, semi-tragic play after the manner of Chekhov” (cited, Reginald Denham, Stars in My Hair, 1958). The Oxford director’s presentation of Heartbreak House as a comedy, and Shaw’s response, are strikingly similar to the disagreement between Stanislavsky and Chekhov over The Cherry Orchard, a play that had long impressed Shaw. He had urged its production in England as early as 1905, scornfully attacking the negative response of the audience when the Stage Society finally performed it in 1911. The elegiac mood of Chekhov’s play was appropriate to Shaw’s theme, since Heartbreak House was both a direct response to the First World War, and (as the Preface indicates) looked back to the world of “cultured, leisured Europe before the war” that was widely seen as bringing the end of European civilization.

  Shaw began Heartbreak House in 1916, the year of the Battle of the Somme in which the death-toll reached unsurpassed heights. But the central figure as well as the setting was specifically rooted in pre-war experience, echoing a story Shaw was told by the actress Lena Ashwell in 1913. His initial title for the play was “Lena’s Father” – a naval commander, who had retired to live on a sailing ship moored in the river Tyne that he had remodeled to include a drawing room and conservatory, and when dying refused to accept extreme unction unless cheese was put on the consecrated communion bread. The various titles for Heartbreak House, which changed during its composition more than any of his other plays, signal the difficulty Shaw had in dealing with the material. But each of the titles also provides insights into essential aspects of the theme.

  While writing the script Shaw referred to it as “the Hushabye play” (“hushabye” being a traditional refrain when rocking a baby to sleep), which relates to the willful ignorance of the characters who have shut their eyes to approaching disaster. It also explains the emphasis on sleep with one visitor (Ellie) dozing off, and another (Mangan) being put to sleep in a hypnotic trance. “The Soldier” – a poem by Rupert Brooke that had been read out in St. Paul’s Cathedral after his death in 1915 – speaks of the war having “wakened us from sleeping” and Shaw’s play can be seen as a response to that metaphor. Brooke, a leading member of the Cambridge Fabian Club before the war, now adopted as the voice of patriotic sacrifice, had come to represent the idealism that was Shaw’s primary target in his earlier plays. This perhaps explains some of the underlying tone of despair in Heartbreak House, as well as being reflected in the apocalyptic hope of renewal expressed at the end of the play. If Fabian gradualism cannot survive such a war environment, then the only possibility of reform is through destruction of the social order (symbolized by the house).

  The title for the first draft became The House in the Clouds, later The Studio in the Clouds, which encapsulates the sense of dreamlike unreality and disconnection that infects the inhabitants of this country house, and its connection with the artistic Bloomsbury group. Shaw started drafting the play while staying in a house-party at Sussex manor with the Woolfs and his fellow Fabians, the Webbs; and there are echoes of Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell in the Shotover daughters, as well as the fantastically dressed Lady Ottoline Morrell in Hesione Hushabye. As Shaw subsequently wrote to Virginia Woolf, the concept of Heartbreak House was shaped by that weekend in June 1916 (Letter, 10 May 1940). Indeed the garden – from which they could hear the guns of the Somme offensive across the English Channel – which had a lamp post on the terrace (which Virginia Woolf described as casting a circle of light like the moon) as well as a quarry beyond the gardener’s cottage, forms the setting for the last act of the play.

  Shaw had been a leading contributor to the New Statesman, a newspaper founded by the Fabian Society, as well as a member of its board; at the time he was writing Heartbreak House he felt himself forced to resign. This may have been partly to protect the newspaper from the fallout after the publication of his Commonsense About the War, but it was also (Shaw’s publicly stated position – due perhaps to a new sharpening of focus from working on the play) because he found himself identified with opinions about the war which he rejected, printed in its pages. A letter explaining his resignation to his co-Fabians, the Webbs, indicates the connections between some of the symbols in Heartbreak House and the political scene of the time, as well as providing insights into the ending of the play through Shaw’s analysis of his own response to a Zeppelin bombing raid.

  6.4.1 Letter to Beatrice and Sidney Webb, 5 October 1916

  I have […] written formally to the secretary to convey my resignation to the next meeting and regard me in the future as a simple shareholder. My withdrawal will be a great relief to everybody, probably;

  […]

  As far as policy and tactics go, the paper is suburban-Tory-cum-Webb-Limited. It is now clear that it will never attack any minister who is not already the lower middle class butt of Blackheath and West Kensington. Lloyd George, as a little Radical Welsh attorney, or John Burns, as an upstart, will be mercilessly handled; but no blow will be struck at the towering crests, and this not because of conscious snobbery, but from a genuine awestruck inability to escape from the social prestige of the country house and the plutocrat-professionals. […]

  What I wanted, and still want, is a paper which will not only put in your articles and mine (which plenty of more widely circulated ones are only too anxious to do) but will fight for our policy; disable and discredit our opponents when it cannot convert them; use the events of every week to drive home our morals; and, above all, attack the big national idols, and do it with sufficient tact, generosity and gallantry to compel the tolerance and applause of the political world and the ideal old English spirit. […] I do not expect it to believe in me, because after spending thirty years in keeping Englishmen from quarrelling, and steering them to their own ends without shipwreck on squabbles, and telling them the truth as far as human judgment is capable of the truth, I find that they remain invincibly persuaded that I am a mischief maker, a liar, and a wrecker

  […]

  I foresee that the development
of the war will sooner and later compel you to make your plans so topical that Sharp will find them inconsistent with his vision of a disarmed Germany and a Cecil-Chestertonic Last Judgment On The Huns. And then I shall observe with amusement your course.

  The oddest thing about the whole business is that no Englishman seems to have any real concern for the future of England provided his immediate passions are gratified. It seems to me plain enough that Germany is going to be smashed to the extent of completely eliminating from European diplomacy that dread of her which has dominated the continent for years and produced and held together the Alliance. Nothing is more plainly printed across the skies than that the removal of that dread will operate on the Alliance like the removal of the string from a faggot; and that Germany, forced to relinquish her dream of a Pax Germanica and to seek alliances like other human species, will seek them either in the east with Russia or in the west with America. Also that the dread of Germany will be succeeded by the no less formidable bogey of the British Empire. Our position will then be an extremely critical one.

  […]

  The Potters Bar Zeppelin manoeuvred over the Welwyn valley for about half an hour before it came round and passed Londonwards with the nicest precision over our house straight along our ridge tiles. It made a magnificent noise the whole time; and not a searchlight touched it, as it was the night-out of the Essenden and Luton lights. And not a shot was fired at it. I was amazed at its impunity and audacity. It sailed straight for London and must have got past Hatfield before they woke up and brought it down. The commander was such a splendid personage that the divisional surgeon and an officer who saw him grieved as for an only son. At two o’clock another Zeppelin passed over Ayot; but we have no telephone, and nobody bothered. I went to see the wreck on my motor bicycle. The police were in great feather, as there is a strict cordon, which means that you cant get in without paying. The charges are not excessive, as I guess; for I created a ducal impression by a shilling. Corpses are extra, no doubt; but I did not intrude on the last sleep of the brave. What is hardly credible, but true, is that the sound of the Zepp’s engines was so fine, and its voyage through the stars so enchanting, that I positively caught myself hoping next night that there would be another raid. I grieve to add that after seeing the Zepp fall like a burning newspaper, with its human contents roasting for some minutes (it was frightfully slow) I went to bed and was comfortably asleep in ten minutes. One is so pleased at having seen the show that the destruction of a dozen people or so in hideous terror and torment does not count. “I didnt half cheer, I tell you“ said a damsel at the wreck. Pretty lot of animals we are!