T.S. Eliot is one of the most revered English poets. He spent, however, much of the second half of his career writing plays composed entirely in verse, following in the tradition of Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights he greatly admired, such as Shakespeare and John Webster. His reason for turning his hand to theatre was primarily to gain a wider audience: as he said a poet would like:
“to be something of a popular entertainer, and be able to think his own thoughts behind a tragic or a comic mask. He would like to convey the pleasures of poetry, not only to a larger audience, but to larger groups of people collectively; and the theatre is the best place in which to do it.”
Although two of his plays, Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party, enjoyed moderate critical and commercial success, they never achieved the same acclaim as his poetry; perhaps because they felt dated even in his own lifetime.
The books in the photographs are early editions published by Faber and Faber, where he also worked from 1925 till his death in 1965 and was responsible for publishing other notable poets including W. H Auden and Ted Hughes.
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James Bridie (1888-1951), whose real name was Osborne Henry Mavor, was a Scottish playwright, screenwriter and surgeon. He wrote 49 plays including The Anatomist (1931) about the infamous Burke and Hare murders. A success in London’s West End, in 1943 he founded the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow.
Bridie’s taste for the supernatural and macabre led to an association with Alfred Hitchcock. He wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn (1949) and is unaccredited for his work on The Paradine Case (1947) and Stage Fright (1950).
The play in the photograph, Mr Gillie (1950), originally starring and directed by Alastair Sim, is representative of Birdie’s ‘problem plays.’ A ghostly Procurator and Judge must decide whether the recently deceased schoolmaster Mr Gillie is deserving of immortality; though he was an unsuccessful writer and the pupils he inspired have also failed to flourish artistically.
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This play chronicles the trials and tribulations in the three months leading up to the British premiere of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. The rehearsals were fraught with difficulty as Shaw struggled to preserve what he had written whilst his two leading actors Beerbohm Tree (Professor Higgins) and Mrs Patrick Campbell or ‘Mrs Pat’ (Eliza Doolittle) battled each other and connived at every turn to gain an even greater share of the limelight. To add to the difficulties just one week before the first performance was due to take place, Mrs Pat decided to elope and go on honeymoon without a word to anyone.
The comedy in the play derives from what these three ‘monstrous egos’ said in real life and in this battle of wits the strongest character that emerges, by far, is the indomitable, irrepressible and impossible Mrs Pat who Shaw wrote the part of Eliza Doolittle for. Mrs Pat, with her Italian looks and musicality, infatuated Shaw and though the relationship was never consumated, he would not allow his letters to her to be published for fear of their contents upsetting his wife. Despite being already 49, she played the part of the 18 year old flower girl Eliza Doolittle to great acclaim in both the London West End and later on Broadway. As Shaw remarked, Mrs Pat always liked to have the last word and her time in New York did not pass without incident. She caused a press sensation when asked in a tea-room to stop smoking (as at that time only men were allowed to smoke in public) she retorted:
‘Young man, I have been told that America is a free country and that is the only thing about this God-forsaken place which I do not wish to alter.’
As a result smoking was banned for all in the New York subways.
The book in the photograph is a first edition paperback published in 1970 by Faber and Faber. It was performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 1968 and was televised by the BBC in 1969.
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Stage and the scent of scandal are never far apart. This Victorian book pocket book which is a reprint of Oxberry’s Dramatic Biography does nothing to dispel this myth.
In particular I was drawn to the biography of the unfortunate Miss Maria Foote. It appears that Miss Maria Foote, suffered from what, according to the author, has always been a common affliction among talented women: “to place their affections upon ignorant and vicious men.” It details her relationship with the rackish Colonel Berkley with whom she bore two illegitimate children as well as the buffon Joseph Hayne:
“It has, as we before observed, been long an opinion that talented women, by an unfortunate fatality, love fools; and as far as folly can go, Hayne was eminently qualified to attract.”
It is surprising, considering when it was written, that it is wholly sympathetic towards the woman involved at the centre of the scandal, concluding that “Can there be a crime more dire than trifling with the feelings of a woman?”
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Judging books by their cover
