Sleeping Your Way to the Top - The 17th Century Theatre

by Deborah Swift

In the wake of accusations of sexual misconduct at the Old Vic, and the scandal around various Hollywood directors, I thought it would be interesting to investigate the 17th century and how female actors at the onset of the profession were regarded, and look at how the seeds of this type of culture originated.

Up until the 17th Century, women had no reflections of themselves in entertainment; they were played by boys. Being an actress was a way of both gaining and losing power – because a woman was able to behave on stage in a powerful way, (eg Kate in  The Taming of the Shrew) but also women were still seen as commodities; an attraction or novelty to please those that mattered (ie men).

In the 17th century, status was always conferred on a woman by the man. Thus Pepys refers to his wife Elisabeth always as ‘my wife’. Although this seems in our ears to diminish her, in fact this is not an insult; it was designed to confer on her a status not accorded to his servants who were referred to as Dolly, or Deb, or Jane. The theatre was the one place where this did not hold sway – female actors were always called ‘Mrs’ as a mark of respect. 

Nell Gwyn

Beauty was a woman’s currency in the early theatre, and in life in general. A frank and unflattering assessment of women’s looks was commonplace, their ‘assets’ as if it was a calculation – a checklist of features: how straight the nose, how even the teeth, how pale the complexion. In the theatre a good pair of legs was essential as in many roles the women played boys to show their legs. For a woman to reveal her legs, usually hidden beneath skirts, was considered extremely daring, and this is why so many 'cross-dressng' roles were written in this period. These were called ‘breeches’ roles. Voyeuristic? Certainly, but it was a way for a woman to counter invisibility, and to have a public voice. And a degree of freedom must have been felt by these women as they played assertive men’s roles – the reverse of what had been the status quo before. 

Elizabeth Barry

The idea of sleeping your way to the top in the entertainment industry was commonplace in the 17th Century Theatre. An example is Mrs Barry, who was ‘procured’ by the rake Rochester at 15 years of age and then moulded (like Eliza Dolittle in My Fair Lady) to be an actress. At the onset of acting as a career for women, beauty was a necessity, it was supposed (by men) that acting skills could be taught. Rochester’s letters give confessions of the progress of their affair. Ironically, Mrs Barry was then most famous for her tragic parts depicting an innocent maiden. 

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

The Casting Couch

 A popular idea in the early theatre was that of the “couch scene”. This was a scene where an attractive woman was placed centre stage on a bed or couch, with the scene calling for her to be asleep and therefore in a state of undress.

Why would any woman want to go along with this idea? Well, in this period the theatre & entertainment was one way for women to transcend social boundaries. In researches into Pepys’ diaries we can witness Nell Gwyn, who sleeps her way to the top from bawd’s daughter to mistress of a King. Was this a bad thing? Evidence shows Mrs Gwyn certainly had a mind of her own and of course now she has achieved some sort of national status. In Pepys' Diary, the actress Mary Knep is invited to musical soirees with Pepys and his civil servant friends. Being in the theatre conferred a ‘celebrity’ status not available to other women. 

Pepys Diary

A woman’s fortunes in the 17th century could change dramatically. In Pepys’s Diary, Abigail Williams, known as ‘Madam’ Williams, began life as the daughter of a baronet, was married off for her lands at age 12 (and had a daughter at that age). After her husband died, she returned to England from Holland and became an actress. There is some suggestion she was a spy (like Aphra Behn), but she re-emerged in high society as the mistress of Lord Brouncker, a well-respected mathematician and founder and president of the Royal Society. Her fortunes rose and fell, and rose again. It is tempting to think beauty alone did this – but it takes a skilled mind to manipulate and use what used to be called ‘assets’ to best advantage.

The theatre, even then, was a reflection of society. Scenes on stage echoed or parodied scenes at Court. And Charles II was a rake of a King. Only recently has the convention of the fourth wall arisen. At the beginning of women’s life in the theatre, there was constant badinage across the divide between stage and audience. There was an emphasis on wit and banter on both sides of the stage. Pepys went to the theatre to be seen. 

In Pepys' Diary there’s a notable argument at the theatre between Pepys and his wife. Pepys insists the maid sit beside him, and Mrs Pepys, scandalised by this flouting of the proprieties, refuses. Maidservants were supposed to sit behind their mistresses. The women in the plays by Sheridan, Etheredge and Wycherly (for example, Lady Gimcrack and Mrs Figgup) were imitations of the rich women attending the play. Actresses of the time trod the line of impersonating women who were almost always of a higher class to themselves, but in doing so, acquired the gloss of the characters they portrayed.

Through my trilogy of novels based around Pepys' Diary, I'm investigating the women Pepys knows, and re-imagining their lives. My first novel Pleasing Mr Pepys features actress ‘Madam Williams’ alongside Mrs Pepys and her maid Deb Willet. The second, A Plague on Mr Pepys features Pepys most long-cherished mistress, Bess Bagwell, and Entertaining Mr Pepys (in progress) is about his friend, Mary Knep the actress.

More on Hollywood and the Casting Couch 
Images from wikipedia.
Sources:
The Play of Personality in the Restoration Theatre - Masters
Nell Gwyn - Beauclerk
Every One A Witness : The Stuart Age - Scott
Pepys' Diary

Find Deborah at www.deborahswift.com or on Twitter @swiftstory

Sadayakko in London by Lesley Downer

On Tuesday May 8th 1900 a group of Japanese travellers sailed into Liverpool and that afternoon stepped through the great Doric arch out of Euston Station in London. They’d been on the road for over a year and had performed in theatres across America, from San Francisco to New York. 

Otojiro (left) and Sadayakko (centre) Kawakami

They were the first professional Japanese theatre troupe ever to visit the west and the first to visit England. The Japanese actors whom W S Gilbert had seen in the Knightsbridge Village, who famously inspired The Mikado, had been travelling players, not professional actors.

This was the era of the great actresses - ‘The Divine Sarah’ (Sarah Bernhardt), Ellen Terry, Gabrielle Réjane and Eleanora Duse. But the Japanese troupe had a diva of their own, who had already thrilled audiences across the United States: the beautiful Sadayakko, an exquisite dancer, actress and musician and until recently the most celebrated geisha in Japan. 

London was the capital of the richest, most powerful nation on earth and the hub of its vast empire. The real test was to make their mark there. Despite their success they were hovering on the verge of bankruptcy. In Boston they had met the great actor Henry Irving and he had given them letters of introduction but it was still two weeks before they could put on their first performance, during which time they had no income. To make matters worse they had to keep up the illusion of being rich celebrities and ran up debts at an alarming rate.

They finally opened at the Coronet Theatre in Notting Hill, a distant rather slummy suburb of London, on May 22 1900. Londoners had never seen anything like the colourful, almost wordless dramas they showed, with athletic swordplay, jujitsu-like fights, humour, split second costume changes, gorgeous scenery and above all Sadayakko’s ethereal beauty, mesmerising dancing and shattering death scene. To put together their plays, they had taken sections of kabuki dramas which in Japan began at dawn and went on till nightfall and cut them to thirty minutes and cut out nearly all the Japanese dialogue which was incomprehensible to their audience. They issued an English language synopsis so the audience would know what was going on.

The Geisha and the Knight Act II

At first the plays were just too outlandish for the supercilious London critics. Of the Japanese music - the plink plink of the shamisen, a kind of banjo, and the wailing singing - one critic wrote, ‘No words could do justice to its horrors, besides which the efforts at cacophony of the domestic pussy cat on the roof are paltry.’

At the time Japonisme was at its height. The rich and fashionable collected woodblock prints, blue and white porcelain and netsuke, so they were prepared to appreciate the aesthetic nature of Japanese culture. ‘In fact, the whole of Japan is a pure invention,’ Oscar Wilde had written in 1889. ‘There is no such country, there is no such people. The Japanese people are simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art.’

'The Henry Irving of Japan' and 'The Ellen Terry of Japan'
'This famous couple are appearing at the Coronet Theatre.'
The Sketch May 23 1900

Soon Sadayakko’s beauty, exquisite dancing and heart-felt acting had captured their imaginations. ‘Sada Yacco is certainly one of the most enchanting ladies at present appearing on the London stage,’ The Morning Post enthused.

The Welsh symbolist poet and theatre critic, Arthur Symons, was stunned by her death scene in The Geisha and the Knight. It was unthinkable even to compare the new Japanese arrival with the all-conquering Sarah Bernhardt. But Symons went further. ‘It is death as not even Sarah Bernhardt has shown us death,’ he wrote.

The troupe was so successful and so celebrated that they were invited to perform before Edward, Prince of Wales, at the home of the Bischoffsheim banking dynasty in Mayfair on Wednesday June 27th.

Cast list for the Kawakami
troupe's performance in Germany

Sadayakko remembered that the Prince of Wales greeted her and said to her through an interpreter, ‘I’m very happy to have been able to see this oriental art from such a distant land. This is thanks to you. What a long journey you have had!’ - a comment irresistibly reminiscent of our own dear monarch’s enquiries as to whether one has come far. Maybe it’s in the instruction book for royalty to mention the distance one’s petitioners have come.

Sadayakko later recorded her opinion of the British. Having enjoyed the company of the outgoing Americans, she found the British in contrast ‘haughty and unsociable.’ On the positive side there was plenty of whisky and even ladies drank and smoked quite openly in public. She also noticed - as an excellent horsewoman herself - that British women were ‘very good at horse riding.’

The day after performing for the Prince of Wales the troupe left for Paris, where the 1900 Paris Expo was in full swing. Under a new manageress, the American dancer Loie Fuller, their performances proved a sensation. Rodin begged to sculpt her (she was too busy) and André Gide declared her ‘as great as Aeschylus.’


When they returned to London for a second visit in 1901, it was as superstars. This time they performed at the magnificent Criterion Theatre in Piccadilly Circus, right in the heart of the city.

The wit, essayist and parodist Max Beerbohm mused, ‘What is the secret of Sarah’s appeal to us? Why do our hearts go out to Sada Yacco? Why is Réjane enchanting? If I, Paris-like, were called on to decide which of these three goddesses was most admirable, the apple would (I think) be adjudicated to Sada Yacco.’ 

More - far more - was to come, including a meeting in Paris with a young artist called Pablo Picasso, who did four paintings of her, dinner with the ill-fated Tsar Nikolai II in St Petersburg, and an encounter in Milan with the composer Giacomo Puccini, who modelled his Madama Butterfly on her. And thus she found immortality of sorts.

Lesley Downer's new novel, The Shogun’s Queen, is published by Bantam. Find more information on her website, http://www.lesleydowner.com/

"946" or G.I's at THE GLOBE by Penny Dolan

Today’s post is about a play – and a novel - for young people based on a historical event and performed at a historical place.
 

As soon as I saw that the Kneehigh Theatre Company was at The Globe on London’s South Bank in September, I checked dates and booked tickets. Although the Cornish-based company occasionally tours to Leeds, I wasn’t sure if that would happen with this show. So London it was. 

I particularly wanted to see how they would dramatise THE AMAZING STORY OF ADOLPHUS TIPS, a children’s novel by Michael Morpurgo, the author of WAR HORSE. The story is another “animal & war” tale, written in his classic, thoughtful style which was why I could not quite imagine how the story – and the history behind it - could be translated for the stage and for a family audience.

I had hopes: Kneehigh has a wonderfully theatrical approach. Although their performances feel emotionally real, what the audience sees is not realistic in the TV or CGI sense of the word: the company uses a cast of multi-talented actor-musicians in a variety of roles as well as puppetry, music, song, dance and movement and seem able to tread between from moments of raucous humour to intensely moving sensitivity.

“946: THE AMAZING STORY OF ADOLPHUS TIPS” is set during WWII. Ostensibly, the story is about a twelve year old girl trying to find her lost cat, yet it is also about the pity of war and the changes that war brings to ordinary lives and places. Michael Morpurgo, as ever, reminds us of the histories that one generation should share with those that come after. 

The inspiration for Morpurgo’s book was both the requisitioning of Slapton, a remote, rural village in Devon in1943 and the disaster that happened there. The military had noticed that the wide, sloping beaches of Slapton Sands were similar to the Normandy coastline and therefore chose that area to stage Operation Tiger, an intentionally realistic, don’t-turn-back rehearsal for the D-Day landings.

 

During the preparations, as American troops flooded into the area and landing craft gathered along the Devon coast, the local villagers had to make arrangements to leave the homes, farms, livestock and land and all that everything that had been part of their lives for generations. Even then, the rehearsal did not go well. When German U-boats were spotted in the Channel, a mismatch between the British and American coding systems blocked radio warnings and the landing ships, full of troops and sailors, heavy equipment and vehicles were torpedoed. Many men were maimed, killed or lost at sea and, furthermore, the “realistic” nature of Operation Tiger meant that the “live” ammunition was used when troops engaged on the beaches.

Afterwards, Morpurgo found, that although there had been local rumours of the disaster, a news black-out was imposed. Morale had to be kept high for the proposed D-Day landings and so the tragedy remained an official secret for many years, both in Britain and in America. The number chosen for the show’s title - 946 – is quoted as the number of G.I’s who died at Slapton Sands. A grim event, and I could not help wondering how Kneehigh would manage this uneasy subject.

A question asked of Bertholdt Brecht makes the opening line of the show:

“In the dark times
Will there also be singing?”
”Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.”

Slowly, as a model farmhouse - complete with a smoking chimney - is carried on stage, we are shown a country backwater in miniature: a small Dorset farm, surrounded by tiny puppet sheep, a small black and white sheepdog and a delightful boy-puppet playing “keepy-uppy” with his football. In moments, that tiny scene expands to human scale. The small collie becomes a full-sized puppet collie, and we are inside the remote farmhouse with strong-minded Grandma, poorly Grandad in his wheelchair and, gradually all the family, especially Booey, the grandson and narrator. The grandfather is, very gently, dying. Grandma, clearly dominant, takes Booey out on a motorbike, recalling how she and her ailing husband used to travel, “Supreme!” she declares, a refrain that echoes throughout the play. Then, after the funeral, she announces she is setting off on a secret adventure, to do something she has waited until now to do.

If you have read any Morpurgo books, you will recognise his familiar time-slip structure when you see Grandma gives puzzled Booey her girlhood diary, briskly telling him that if he reads it – twelve-year-old Lily Tregenza’s diary - he will understand where she is going and why. As Booey starts reading the pages, time changes and Lily, played by Katy Owen, appears, furiously grabbing her diary out of his hands. 

A frisky self-willed young girl, Lily is obsessed with searching for her cat Tips who has been in hiding since Lily’s father drowned her litter of kittens. (This is a “told” incident, thank goodness.) Lily, unable to forgive her father, would not say goodbye when he left for war. 
Thankfully for my emotions, the puppet cat Tips is quite large and not particularly cute or needy: she is a typical farmhouse cat, in fact, and not one that anyone else on the Tregenza family farm worries about, because it is wartime and, short-handed, they are struggling to keep things going.
   
Lily attends the small village school, where lessons are now conducted by a teacher from France, the cruelly-nicknamed Madam Bloomers, who the “children” mock as she circles the stage on her bicycle. The “pupils” act their parts magnificently well, mixing naughtiness, name-calling and argy-bargy, along with acrobatically gliding around their old-school desks, and more. Even there, Lily does not change: she does not love school or rules and her liveliness and cussedness gives the play and story a nicely unsentimental edge.

Shortly, a group of evacuees arrive. Immediately, the cramped sharing of desks leads to arguments and fights between the village children and the incomers. They are, at first, instant enemies:

“They keep looking at us funny.”

“Well, look funny back!”

Gradually, Lily and Barry, a dim, kindly boy from war-damaged London, form an awkward relationship, with the headstrong Lily delighting in taunting the love-struck Barry throughout he play.

 
The whole “school cast” worked excellently, especially in a wonderfully raucous scene where Lily angrily suggests that Hitler and Churchill should settle the war between themselves rather than making everyone else fight the war for them, an idea demonstrated through a trio of children’s street games using rounds of scissors-paper-stone, a clapping pattern contest and a rather unequal skipping game at the end of which a Hitler figure is driven, snivelling, off-stage and a brash, triumphant Churchill celebrates with a tour-de-force on the skipping-rope.

Morpurgo was very involved with the Kneehigh Company’s adaptation, and I could not help noticing how subtly scripted the language was during these moments and the whole play. For example, the Nazi party is blamed, rather than the German nation as a whole, and although the children may be thoughtless, once they hear that their teacher’s husband has been drowned in a naval convoy, their behaviour immediately changes to sympathy, and for once the sight of school recorders brought peace and joy.

All the way through, the first half is full of activity and sound: the recorders sing tunefully, the tractor rattles around the stage, puppet hens squawk and small farm animals cause  havoc. Even the elusive Tips appears for a cuddle now and then.

However, the schoolchildren’s biggest surprise comes when Adie and his friend arrive in the classroom, asking for directions for their jeep: the children meet two black American soldiers, at a time and in a place where they would have been an unusual sight. Lily is totally enchanted by Adie, especially when the two G.I’s visit the Tregenza farm. 

Moreover, the soldier’s involvement, culture and cheerful friendship is emphasised all the way through by the music from the band on-stage, up in the gallery, descending to act their parts by ladders or skinning down the pole. 946 is full of “American” music - jazz, jitter-bug, gospel and more – and with never a single lute in sight.

 
I felt that the play is noisier and ruder than the original novel and once, rather mistook the book’s mood for me. When Barry’s larger-than-life bus-conductress mum visits the farm, her comic drag role rather overwhelmed the Ivy from the page, who I’d thought of as a helpful, extra pair of hands whose bustling ways had stirred the grandfather out of his mood of dejection. This book Ivy was hidden by the dramatically loud wails of protest about the awful green of her country surroundings. 

Yet, maybe the production needed that energy at that point, coming just before the imminent tragedy? As the second half starts to the sound of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”, the stories start to interweave and darken and Kneehigh moves into the powerful arts of mime and symbolism:

- the stage, barricaded with lengths of wire, signifying the dangerous, restricted areas where Lily goes searching for Tips;

- the communication error is signified by two string-and-can phone-sets ( one colour British, the other American) the lines crossed but unconnected.

- an almost ritual acting out of the disaster, where G.I’s carry model ships forward to a rank of water-filled tin baths, like toys in the game of war.

- the fusillade of flashes and explosions and water spurting through the layers of mist and smoke: the fog of war indeed,

-  religious symbols: as the people leave the village, both the vicar’s church candlestick and the teacher’s menorah are carried among the precious possessions: this is not a one-faith confrontation.

- a tiny parachutist puppet descends; immediately an injured German parachutist stands on stage, hands in position but without a trailing parachute. The remote far-off is made immediate and personal

- the children and villagers holding out photos not only of the young German’s family but also the “lost” faces of British, Indian, Black, Jewish and other peoples who suffered in this World War

The production offers much to think about, not only the fact that life was changed for all in that community by those times. Lily’s “journal” concludes, ending with runaway Tips being brought home and the plot returns to the “present” of the early scenes. Where has Booey’s Gran gone? Who will look after her when she comes back? Who will the old lady live with? The squabbling family are waiting at the airport to find out . . .

Emma Rice’s production sharpened all the emotions and strengths of the Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips book, lightening it with humour and bringing sparkle and life to both the past and “present” stories, and there is much in this busy production that I would have liked to include but could not. You'll find a flavour of the show here.

 

However, at the same time, I was aware that The Globe was dressed for a twentieth-century war story. The familiar painted stage - see below - was stacked with sandbags or “protected” by wooden planking. Each pillar carried a large aeroplane propeller that whirred into action at significant moments, the music and sound was amplified and at one point a glitter-ball rotated under the Shakespearean canopy. This production meant a big change for The Globe, which was created to be as authentic an experience of Shakespearean theatre as possible, a theatre where costumes were laced and tied and where the great Round “O” would respond to the sound to human breath. Now – though not all in a single move - there are zips and electricity.

Emma Rice of Kneehigh is now the Director of the Globe so it will be interesting to see how Shakespeare will be played here in future. Her Midsummer Night’s Dream, recently shown on television, was much more in the vibrant, cross-dressing Kneehigh style than in the “authentically historic” tradition. Is this change a loss and if so, does it matter? Or is it a matter of “bums-on-seats” accountancy?

.

I will be seeing this production again. 946: The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips is now on tour – maybe near you? - and will be coming to the West Yorkshire Playhouse during Book Week.  At this, a term-time matinee) I will probably witness the show among an audience of school-children. What they will make of it all? How much of the history will get though to them. And what will they make of all this “singing about the dark times?”

Penny Dolan

www.pennydolan.com

Meanwhile, as I have mentioned events in the North, places may still be available at next weekend's HARROGATE HISTORY FESTIVAL, held at THE OLD SWAN, where you can spend a day or three celebrating historical fiction.  Details here!

THUNDERBALLS, SNOWDROPS AND FURS by Penny Dolan

Today my desk and room are covered in papers, print-outs and receipts, various. As I’m sure you have guessed, I am in the middle – or maybe almost at the end – of preparing my tax returns. So the post is a slightly indulgent celebration of three joys, three things that have interest me, and each with its own historical echo.

The first was an item I hear on BBC news, quite early in the morning. Ever since writing my junior novel, “A Boy Called Mouse,” I have been fascinated by theatrical effects and currently – for the work in progress -  am pursuing magical illusions. 

So I was delighted to hear that when people went to investigate the uppermost floors of the Bristol Theatre, something unusually interesting was discovered among the accumulated theatrical debris. They discovered an old original thunderball run: not a lottery aid but a device that allowed heavy cannon-balls to be rolled along hollow, echoing guttering. Below, down on stage and in the auditorium, the clamour of the rolling balls created a believable thunder-storm effect. This Bristol machine seems to be a superior design, created almost like a musical instrument. Carefully “played”, the rolling balls could move from a gentle rumbling through to a powerful crescendo, so much so that the wooden theatre building itself seemed to shake with the might of the storm overhead. The intention is, if trials at the Bristol Theatre go well, to use this marvellous thunder-ball device during a future production of King Lear. (Do look at the BBC interview here.)

The second item I want to share is something that happens around midday every day. An email drops in to my box, often just at the time when I need a glimpse of something else my emailed version of “Spitalfields Life”. I was born on the edge of London and have always felt emotionally involved with its history, even if I live much further up country now. 

  

Daily, in this blog, nominally from The Gentle Author, come small histories, remarkable people, sets of engravings, photographs from the life of East London as well as news of campaigns and dastardly planning battles. I have never yet spotted a promotional link on “Spitalfields Life”, but if you have never yet visited, do go there. There's even a Blogging Course on offer. The Gentle Author blog is a pleasure and it brings, despite the days news, a sense of history, inclusion and witness in an often confusing world.

The third item is a strange sort of delight, a pretence and a falsehood in its way, yet one that reminds me of Woolf’s Orlando striding the chilly corridors of Knole,

For Christmas, I was given a large fur bedspread or throw, entirely fake but beautiful in its own way. I have found myself lying under it and thinking of moments in ancient stories and legends, and of the rich ones who would have lain under fur covers in the draughty houses of the past, even more so tonight when snow has settled outside. 

My imagination brings me thoughts of the Tudors nobility, layers of fur edging their robes and sleeves, of aristocratic nuns and clergymen whose habits were lined with fur, or of the heavy pelts hanging on the shoulders of authority. 

A silly foolishness and a vanity but I am sure that when I’m trapped yet again by the wakefulness of the old “two sleeps” pattern, my fur coverlet will warm my reading through the early hours. 

 

Of course, there are other things I could offer, some more sternly historical, some even sillier, but for now indulge me. There is a lot of paperwork to be got through tomorrow – and what, I wonder, are your own, small historical joys?

Penny Dolan

Imagining Eglantyne, by Clare Mulley

‘We have to devise a means of making known the facts

 in such a way as to touch the imagination of the world.’ 

Eglantyne Jebb 

Poster for Anne Chamberlain's production, Eglantyne

Earlier this month I was fascinated to see a new one-woman play called simply, Eglantyne, written, produced and acted by the New Zealand artist Anne Chamberlain. Eglantyne Jebb, around whose life the play is built, was the remarkable founder of the independent children’s development agency Save the Children, and author of the pioneering statement that has since evolved into the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most universally accepted human rights instrument in history. She was also the subject of my first biography: The Woman Who Saved the Children, and it is wonderful to see that her life is still inspiring people, both to write, and to support the vital work of Save the Children today. Proceeds from both my book and Anne’s play are donated to the charity. You can read my History Girls blog on Eglantyne’s life and achievements here.

Among Eglantyne’s many skills was an extraordinary ability to communicate the facts in such a way as to inspire others. She had a very vivid imagination and clearly loved words, writing numerous poems and romantic-social novels, as well as her pioneering statement of children’s rights. She also wrote and gave speeches, published leaflets and press articles, and made pioneering use of photographs and film footage to win support for her cause, often from initially hostile audiences.

Anne’s play opens with Eglantyne’s very public arrest in Trafalgar Square in the spring of 1919, for distributing leaflets calling for an end to the economic blockade that was contributing to the starvation of thousands in Germany and Austria. These leaflets had not been cleared under the Defence of the Realm Act – it had never struck Eglantyne that they might need to be. The crown prosecutor did not mince his words, but Eglantyne chose to represent herself and focused on the moral case. By the end of the session she had been found guilty, but the court reporters had plenty to pad out their stories with, and the crown prosecutor insisted on paying her fine.

Eglantyne Jebb, c.1921

Anne Chamberlain, as Jebb 2015

Save the Children was swept into existence on the wave of publicity that followed this trial, culminating with an exciting public meeting at the Royal Albert Hall. After listening to Eglantyne and her sister’s speeches, the crowds, who had arrived armed with rotten fruit to throw at the traitor women who wanted to give succour to the enemy, were instead inspired to put their hands in their pockets and fund a herd of Swiss dairy cows to provide milk for the children of Vienna.

Eglantyne gained the support of factory girls and aristocrats, the Pope and the Mining Unions, the British aristocracy and the Bolshevik government. She even won the backing of the wife of the Prime Minister whose policies she had campaigned against. ‘When she spoke’, her friend and colleague Dr Hector Munro later wrote, ‘everything seemed to lose importance and one agreed to do whatever she wished.’

Little surprise then, that Eglantyne’s words are still inspiring people today. In her play, Anne manages to integrate many wonderful examples of Eglantyne’s own phrases, from speeches and letters, into her script:

- ‘Humanity owes to the child the best it has to give.’

- ‘Every generation… offers mankind anew the possibility of rebuilding his ruin of a world.’

- ‘The world is not ungenerous, but unimaginative, and very busy.’


As I often still give talks about Eglantyne, and use many of the same quotes, it was strange to hear these words in someone else's mouth, with different intonations. But it was also really lightening - and heartening. At the end of the evening I felt as though, in a way, I had been kindly exorcised of Eglantyne. She will always be an inspiration, but my relationship with her feels less intense – it feels shared.

Eglantyne Jebb, c.1925

Anne Chamberlain as Jebb, 2015

Before I saw Anne’s play, I had wondered whether I would see a very different Eglantyne on stage, to the one I had come to picture to myself, someone I might not recognise even. This happened once before when I went to a production of Tony Harrison’s play in verse, called Fram. Fram, which means ‘Forward’ in Norwegian, was the name of the arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen’s ship. As the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees, Nansen became an associate of Eglantyne’s, helping to bring desperately needed relief to Russia during the famine of 1921. She greatly admired his spirit and energy, calling him a ‘solid viking’. Harrison’s play explored the relationship between art and aid, at times in quite provocative and painful ways. Eglantyne’s lines are the best in it, I think, and she was excellently played by Carolyn Pickles when I saw the production at the Royal National Theatre. But although Carolyn made me laugh by signing my programme ‘Eglantyne’, I did not feel a strong connection with the figure she had portrayed on stage. Perhaps, I thought for a while, I had imagined her wrongly...

Save the Children feeds starving Russian children, 1921 

As we slowly approach Save the Children’s centenary in 2019, the charity has asked whether it might be possible to re-imagine Eglantyne, to bring her story to a new and younger audience – with a picture book about her life, adventures and achievements. I think this would be wonderful, and look forward to seeing yet another interpretation of this wonderful woman on the page… If anyone has suggestions for brilliant and inspiring children’s illustrators I would be delighted to hear them!

Sadly there is no one alive today who knew Eglantyne. There are photographs and sketches, but no one who heard her voice, and no recording of her. However, much of her writing survives, her actions speak volumes, and her energy, spirit, determination and often rather dark sense of humour, are palpable throughout. When I watched Anne Chamberlain’s play earlier this month, I was delighted to discover that I felt very familiar with the Eglantyne that she brought to life, which makes me hope that perhaps we both found something of the truth in this remarkable woman.

Anne and me, holding each other's writing about Eglantyne Jebb 

I think that Eglantyne herself would have been fascinated by each reincarnation, and on the whole pleased, given that each helps to promote the cause – the welfare and rights of the world’s children – that she cared so passionately about. ‘A friend of mine once said to me that our minds, contemplating the truth, were like so many cameras turned towards the same building’, she once wrote. ‘No two cameras can be in the exactly the same position… so that no two precisely similar photographs can be taken; hence also, though some may be better than others, no single photograph, always supposing that it had not been faked, will be without its value.’

Sadly Anne’s play has now finished its British run, but it may be back next year and if so I will pass on the tour dates. I hope that between Eglantyne the play, my biography, and any new portrait, many more people, of all ages, may yet come to picture Eglantyne Jebb in their own way, and be inspired.

Beaux on the Stage

by Marie-Louise Jensen

I've always been fascinated by the phenomenon of men sitting on the stage during performances and disrupting the play, and read more about it when I researched my short story, A Night in the Theatre, for our History Girls anthology.
I'm very far from being an expert on the Restoration period and the theatre (though I would love to learn more) but I understood a few things much better from what I did read.
So how and why did the Restoration theatre-goers (and later) put up with fine bucks on the stage making a nuisance of themselves and disturbing the action?
I think the first thing to bear in mind was how different the stage was. It was much bigger and had a huge, wide apron that sloped down towards the audience. So there was more space for this practice than there would be now.
Secondly, going to the theatre was a more general entertainment experience than just watching the play. It was not generally considered to be a high point for drama. You went for the afternoon, you socialized, you showed off your new clothes, you ate and drank and there were even prostitutes on offer. Not just the actresses, though some of those fell into the trade too, as is general knowledge and no end of displaying of charms and intriguing went on in the dressing rooms, to which 'gentlemen' were admitted.
Often the men in the pit were so noisy that you couldn't hear the play, let alone the men on the stage itself. Sword fights regularly broke out and everyone else had to scramble for safety.
For many, the play itself was fairly incidental. But not for everyone, and audience grew steadily more annoyed.
In the 1700s, a dramatic satire, called Lethe by David Garrick, was performed at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. There is a wonderful dialogue about beaux on the stage from the point of view of one of them:

Aesop: How do you spend your evenings?
Fine Gentleman: I dress in the evening and go generally behind the scenes of both play-houses; not as you may imagine to be diverted with the play, but to intrigue and show myself - I stand upon the stage, talk loud and stare about, - which confounds the actors and disturbs the audience; upon which the galleries, who hate the appearance of one of us, begin to hiss and cry "off off!" while I, undaunted, stamp my foot, so, take snuff with my right hand and smile scornfully - thus. This exasperates the savages, and they attack with vollies of suck'd oranges and half-eaten pippins.
Aesop: And do you retire?
Fine Gentleman: Without doubt if I am sober - for orange will stain silk and an apple may disfigure a feature.

Garrick finally banished spectators from the stage in 1763 - not before time!

A BLOW-OUT IN A BREWERY by Penny Dolan

I enjoy map-reading but I remember my way by the visual geography. I watch for the line of the road, the building on a turn, the look of the street, a shop front or a tree.

More than a year ago, I went down to London, got off a bus near an ex-publishers ex-office and turned in what was the right direction. Suddenly I couldn’t recognise the place. Where had the landmarks gone?

That whole familiar corner of Tottenham Court  Road was a vast building site. 

I couldn’t spot Centrepoint’s fountain pool or turn left for Foyles. Behind the large PR-pasted hoardings, the legendary Astoria lay demolished. 

Only the Dominion Theatre, with its gigantic “We Will Rock You” statue, offered a fixed point in that altered place. 

Yet cities do change. What was there before the Dominion? As a writer, I like to search out the history of places and this is what I found. 

Back in 1814, this area was part of the Parish of St Giles, known for its dreadful poverty, squalor and deprivation as the Rookeries. At the corner of Tottenham Court Road stood the Horse Shoe Brewery, part of the brewing empire of Sir Henry Meaux. With the poor quality of London water, this must have been a busy and welcome industry. 

Inside the brewery was a vast vat: a wooden construction twenty-two feet high bound together by twenty-nine metal hoops. Constructed in 1785, at a cost £10,000, the vat was designed to hold 20,000 barrels of porter, a beer that needs months to mature.

Almost thirty years later, in 1814, the gigantic vat was full of fermenting porter and the evening must have seemed an ordinary one. 

However, at  6pm, one of the metal hoops snapped and the huge vat exploded, bringing down the others around it. The sound was so loud it was heard five miles away. 

Within moments, more than twelve hundred thousand litres of beer smashed through the brick wall of the brewery.

The beer swept in a flood through the surrounding slum of Saint Giles in a violent wave. It damaged buildings, totally demolished two houses and a pub in Great Russell Street, The dreadful torrent caused injury and death, especially to young children and destroyed both homes and livelihoods. Of course, as this liquid was beer, some of the injuries were caused by people rushing out with pans, pots and kettles to gather up beer for themselves and being caught up in the flood.

The disaster immediately attracted huge interest. Some of the locals exhibited the bodies of the drowned, charging for a viewing. The crowd inside one house was so big that it broke the floorboards and dropped the sightseers down into the still-flooded cellar. Before long, the police stepped in and closed all the gruesome exhibits. The funerals were paid for by coins placed on coffins by parishioners. 

The stench of the beer filled the district for many months. Eventually but not unsurprisingly, the Meaux Brewery Company was taken to court and the incident was judged an “Act of God”. The brewery gradually recovered and continued on the same site until its demolition in October 1922. 

Did those who knew the Horse Shoe brewery grumble about their old missing landmark when the Dominion appeared? 

As for the date of the famous 1814 London Beer Flood? 

It was 17^th October. 

Cheers! 

Penny Dolan 

A Boy Called M.O.U.S.E (Bloomsbury)

Scouting locations by Eve Edwards

One of the joys of being a writer is that you have a job that includes all the best roles in film making.  The script writing part is obvious.  As director, you plan the story, the look of your concept, set the tone for the whole.  You cast your movie without having to worry about including the latest flavour-of-the-month hottie even if he is not suited to the part.  The only fly in the ointment preventing this being a one person show are the equivalent of the studio producers and distributors: the publishers and the shops. But, hey, I suppose us authors have to be kept in check somehow, don't we?

In the gallery at the Globe

One of the jobs I enjoy most is location scout.  Sometimes this is straightforward: I have an idea and go and seek out the places that I know I am going to use.  For example, when writing about Tudor London, I took the decision to include the first theatre - helpfully known as The Theatre - in the third book of the series.  I had the star-crossed lovers idea at the heart of the book.  The heroine was to be a daughter of an early English Puritan household so her opposite is, naturally, one of the players.  In this era, Puritans denounced the stage as the work of the devil and blamed them for all social ills and the earthquake of 1580 with which I start the book (The Rogue's Princess).  The Tudor theatre is not hard to find thanks to Sam Wanamaker's Globe.  Although located north of the river, The Theatre was the same structure that was dismantled and reassembled as the Globe (see a brilliant account of this in James Shapiro's 1599), so a trip to the South Bank was obvious.

Chocks away!

Some research trips take a little more planning.  I'm now writing a two part series for the anniversary of the outbreak of World War I.  The first part, called Dusk (out Summer 2013), entailed a trip to the Somme area.  If you are interested in this period, I can't recommend too highly the museum at Peronne. As well as a clear narrative, they have full kit for different kinds of soldier, officers and men, laid out as if for inspection and lots of very personal items that bring the individuals into focus.

 For the second part Dawn (which I'm in the process of researching at the moment) I intend to use some of the experiences of the early aviators.  Well, naturally, there was only one thing for it: find out what it was like to fly in an open cockpit.  I went up in a Tiger Moth in June - designed in the Twenties so fairly close to the planes my characters would use.  I hope you like the full Amy Johnson look.  And to prove that, yes, I really did go up, here's a shot from the air.  It may look as if I'm the pilot but in fact I'm in the observer's seat - the pilot sits behind in these two-seaters.  Alex, my guide for the day, entered into the spirit of the thing as we looked for 'Jerry' over the Cotswolds.

These were planned locations but very often the chance-met location inspires the story that follows.  We are fortunate in the UK to live in a country seeded liberally with little historic gems.  The manor at Snowshill owned by the National Trust provided me with unexpected inspiration when I went there with my family on an Easter egg hunt.  It suggested what life in the ranks below the highest would have been for Tudor gentlemen.  It wasn't the manor itself but the hidden corners that spoke to me about the texture of this life - here the studded nails and horse shoes.  This set the tone for my inner director and was used in The Other Countess.

Perhaps you have a favourite location.  If so, do tell me about it.

Bloodied Hearts & 1950s Underwear - Emma Darwin

When hanging out with my historical fictioneering friends, I sometimes feel a bit inferior. So many of them spent their student years reading Defoe, Joyce and Greene, or Clarendon, Elton and Schama, at least when the pubs were closed. I've dipped into both myself, a little, but I got my degree by pretending to be a tree.

The theatre, like any performing art, is devoted to tradition in a way that written arts don't have to be, so in the Department of Drama at the University of Birmingham our trees were rooted in the soil of this classic Stanislavskian exercise. Mind you, quite how the experience of being a silver birch or a cork oak helped Stanislavski's actors to play Uncle Vanya I've never been sure, although perhaps it was more fruitful when it came to rehearsals for The Cherry Orchard. But the more I write, teach and blog about fiction, the more I realise just what a good grounding a Drama degree is for a historical novelist.

I wouldn't dream of suggesting that just because we set our novels in the past, they're all about heaving bosoms. But when you've had to wear full, period costume for anything from Hamlet to Strindberg's Easter, you discover that the only way to breathe is indeed for your bosom to heave. Corsets work better than a Wonderbra for showing off your assets, but at the cost of 90% of your lung capacity. Racing up the spiral green room staircase to make your entrance through the audience, or running into the arms of your stage lover, shows you exactly why all those heroines keep fainting: sheer lack of oxygen.

Directors need to know this stuff, but so do novelists. Then there was Wardrobe. I not only know how to wear a corset, I've made one. And a straitjacket (Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty). I've realised how much sewing it takes to make a bodice, how much cloth to make a skirt and the petticoats beneath, and just how much mending it takes when you tread on the hem (A Doll's House). Even  a twentieth century show should have not just clothes but underwear actually from the period; fabrics have changed and so have erotic tastes in breasts, bottoms, waists, shoulders and makeup. And that goes for men as well as women, as I must remember now I'm writing a novel set between the wars. And have you tried getting out of a too-low sofa wearing high heels, a 1950s roll-on, and not much else? I have, because in Albee's The American Dream they switched sofas between the last dress rehearsal and the first night. Now, which of my characters shall I do that to?

Stage Management? I know how to research period weapons (Peer Gynt) and nurses' uniforms (Testament of Youth). I know that hiring real scaffolding for a Constructivist set (Meyerhold) brings in more dust than you'd thought existed in the whole of the West Midlands. I also learnt that if you fling a bloody heart to the ground it bounces, and reduces the entire cast of The Duchess of Malfi to giggles.

Some of what I learnt is useful for any novelist. There's Pinter: what's between the words spoken is as important as the words, so how do you make that happen in your reader's head? There's learning Shakespeare by heart and speaking it, to develop your ear for how character-in-action is embodied in the sound and rhythm of words. And it's useful for an author: after all those years of acting, I'm not too fazed at an event when the sound system goes down or the coffee machine starts up.

I also learnt that I wasn't much of an actor myself. Years later, as a beginner-writer, I came across the bizarre suggestion that you should "cut all adverbs". This is the bastard, tyrannical offspring off a good regime: fiction is built of character-in-action, so keep looking for the perfect verb for that action and don't settle for a bland one spiced up with an adverb. At which point, I had... well, I was going to say a lightbulb moment, but it was more of an olive-oil-and-wick-lamp moment, which sent me back to my undergraduate copy of Aristotle's Poetics:

For Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality. Now character determines men's qualities, but it is by their actions that they are happy or the reverse...if you string together a set of speeches expressive of character, and well finished in point of diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and artistically constructed incidents.

He's talking about theatre, and Tragedy (Comedy got lost, and lost again in The Name of the Rose), but it could just as well be a snarky TLS fiction review, couldn't it? Action - actors - act-ors... I remembered working on Stanislavski's idea of "intentions", from An Actor Prepares, where for each speech you have to decide what the character is trying to do, in speaking it. Not, "he's in love with her", "she's furious with him", "they're bored"; your idea must be expressed as a verb: "to seduce", "to scold", "to destroy". As Aristotle says, there's no point in having a crystal-clear idea of your character and their thoughts and emotions, if you don't know exactly what that makes them do. It's all in finding the right verb.

Of course, we historical fictioneers have a particular relationship to this basic truth about narrative; we write about the foreign land of the past, and it's too easy for us to get caught up in the "qualities", the "diction and thought", of that foreigness. But it's how our characters act in their Then that makes the connection with our own Now. We wouldn't whoop at a bear-baiting, or happily die for our faith. But if I start thinking, "to cheer on the team", or "to save my soul" I begin to get it, and so can write it. And what about locking up a sister so she can't run away with her lover? Is that "to protect", "to control", "to possess" or "to prevent evil"? Now there's a story...