From google ebooks only

No sign of the Dove

Facades: Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell Sitwell

 By John Pearson

And that same week Peter Ustinov had produced his new play at the Lyric, Hammersmith, No sign of the dove. Not for the first time in their lives, the Sitwells found themselves the subject of a satire on the stage. Edith was soon predictably enraged by the reports that filtered through to Hollywood. As she wrote irately to her biographer, Max Wykes-Joyve, Osbert and  I have been most gravely libelled by a creature called Peter Ustinov in a play called No sign of the dove. This is about a famous writer who is also a baronet, his sister who is a “famous poetess” and wears a turban (I always did, before anyone else) and their eccentric old father. Three papers identified us by name. The witty Mr Ustinov gave the family the name of d’urt!!! Both osbert and I are represented as sex maniacs and one theatrical paper that identified us by name said I was shown hunting an unwilling gentleman through bedrooms, looking for a bed!!!!! What makes it especially disgraceful is that the part of me was taken by Beatrix Lehmann, whose brother is a great friend of mine and to whose sister Rosamond I have been most kind…. What filthy people to do that to a poor crippled man who has never harmed them.

Had Edith seen the play she might have realised that it was little more than a fairly harmless romps, which soon found the extinction id deserved.

Garden District (1958)

NOT IN FRONT OF THE AUDIENCE: Homosexuality On Stage

 By Nicholas de Jongh

Suddenly last summer was staged both in New York and London in such humble circumstances that it looked as if Williams was on the verge of losing his box office appeal, or so producers reckoned. …

In London the play’s subject matter would have meant that it could only be staged in club conditions, had not the lord Chamberlin, just relaxed his ban on plays about homosexuality. Yet the play was only presented at the small Arts theatre club, directed by Herbert Machiz, who had also staged the play in New York. The principal roles of the cousin and the mother were at least taken by Patricia Neal, the former film star, and Beatrix Lehmann, one of the principal classical actresses of her generation, with a particular facility for conveying elements of the sinistergrotesque in which her part as the mother abounded. The producers diffidence may have been inspired by the conviction that the play’s horrifying homosexual Grand Guignol and its expressionistic frame, staged in a Victorian Gothic garden would prove too much for traditional audiences.

Yet the play garnered superlatives from the critics both in London and New York. For despite the play’s shock tactics, its

Climactic revelations of cannibalism and stratagems for a dangerous lobotomy, Suddenly Last summer was construed as a shocking but highly moral fable. It handed out exemplary, fatal punishment for Sebastain, a homosexual writer whom Williams had conceived as a monstrous aberration of nature. It is as if Williams were disavowing what he had professed about homosexuality.

HUGE analysis of the homosexuality in the play and how it relected Williams life. Brillaint stuff but too much to type out.

The Aspern Papers (1959)

Blood on the Stage, 1950-1975: Milestone Plays of Crime, Mystery, and Detection  By Amnon Kabatchnik

Contains description of the Aspern papers and Michael Redgrave’s carreer.

p. 311 Ran for 370 performances in London

p. 313 though bisexual, Redgrave was married to the actress Rachel Kempson for fifty years until his death [no wonder him and Bea got on so well and did so many productions together].

Huis Clos

Peter Brook: A Biography  By Michael Kustow

p. 45 The arts theatre where he did huis clos, was a members-only club theatre. This was doubtless because of the lesbian undercurrents of Satre’s philosophical melodrama, in which two women and a man are trapped together for eternity, inflicting the utmost pain, of an emotional rather than a physical kin on each other…

Shakespeare festival (1947) Twelfth night

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy

 edited by Alexander Leggatt

“Once the second World War’s social disruptions brought the image of the ‘masculine’ woman who wore pants inside and outside the home into view, theatrical trousers no longer marked women actors as ‘transvestite’ performers. For thirty years after Beatrix Lehmann’s 1847 Cesario ‘appeared every inch a man’ Violas were praised less as feminine ideals than for their skills as acting the ‘boy eternal’

Desire under the elms (1940)

Censorship in Theatre and Cinema

 By Anthony Aldgate, James Crighton Robertson

Psubmitted in March 1925… When George Street, reader of plays since 1914 and senior reader from 1920 until his death in 1936, believed it was simply too horrible for a public performance in britian [citation needed] He recommended a ban but went on to state that this should not be decided purely on the basis of his report. Lord Cromer, the Lord Chamberlin from 1922 to 1938 agreed with street about a ban, noting that he was not prepared to sanction a play with such a horrible theme and observing, it is in fact typical of the sort of American play against which there is a growing resentment …[citation needed]

p. 10 Cromer’s decision to gran a licence to Mourning becomes electra, which encountered no public criticism, encouraged the Westminster Theare to try its luck with Desire under the elms in 1938. By then Cromer had been succeeded as Lord Chamberlin by Lord Clarendon, who held this post until 1952, and Game reported as follows:

Perhaps a refusal was justified in 1925, but I hold very strongly to the opinion that is is no longer justified now.

The potential audience for serious plays has very much increased during the intervening years, thanks to the work of the Sunday producing societies and such theatres as the Westminster, and because of the great increase in the number of published plays, the Censorship, recognising this development in public taste, no long treats the theatre audience as if it was entirely composed of children: and the theatre is now in the process of attaining aat long last a reasonable amount of freedom.

At the Westminster, where the play is to be staged, the management has built up a numerous audience which wishes to see serious drama; and which by no conceivable flight of imagination can possibly derive any moral harm from the work of a man who is undeniably a poet and an artist.

It is to me a humiliating thought to think of all the comedies of adultery and fornication which have passed… while a work of art such as this lies under our ban,

p. 11 just because it treats of the primal passions of a rude society… and finally I would ask upon what grounds can the play be forbidden? It would be difficult to substantiate a claim that it is morally harmful, or to forbid a play because some people prefer drawing-room drama or comedies is quite indefensible. [citation missing]

Lord Clarendon concurred with Game, so that this time Desire under the elms was allowed in full despite the addition of a final scene showing Abbie and Eben ascending the gallows. However, the Westminister theatre did not perform the play until January 1940 with Beatrix Lehmann as Abbie, Mark Dignam as Ephraim and Stphen Murray as Eben. It ran for approximately ten weeks, during which time there was no adverse press comment and the LCO did not receive a single public complaint.

Mourning becomes electra Censorship in Theatre and Cinema

 By Anthony Aldgate, James Crighton Robertson

 However, in Mid0September 1937 the westminister theatre in London submitted a script for O’Neill’s Mourning becomes electra, the story of Mannon family tensions at the end of the American civil war. This included references to adulty, an attempt to induce a heart attack through physical sexual submission, murder, suggested but unfulfilled incest, and finally a double suicde. Despite the depressing atmosphere, Henry Game, Reader of plays since 1930 and Street’s successor as Senior reader in 1936, recommended that the play should be allowed but with several dialogue cuts involving the use of ‘god’ ‘christ’ and two references to a woman offering herself physically to her husband. In Game’s view the incest proposal was allowable, partly because the incest did not actually occur and partly because it was dramatically justified within the context of the plot [citation needed] Cromer commented that the play was more to American tastes than British and questioned whether British audiences would accept such a long play, although he expressly endorsed Game’s recommendation that the incest suggestion should be retained. In the event the play lasted for only two months at the Westminster theatre, from mid-November 1937 to mid January 1938, and it was not until 1947 that RKO Radio filmed it. A turgid version which the BBFC allowed uncut in June 1948 by which time the board had relaxed its pre-1939 sexual standards.

So fair a Satrap (laodice and danae)

The London Stage 1930-1939: A Calendar of Productions, Performers, and Personnel  By J. P. Wearing

Lyric Hammersmith 28/3/30 1 matinee performance review observer 30/3/30

Brain Savoy 27/4/30 Producer

The London Stage 1930-1939: A Calendar of Productions, Performers, and Personnel  By J. P. Wearing

The Birthday Party (1958)

Modernity Britain 2014

David Kynaston

Mention of Birthday party

Heap, “just the sort of lunatic stuff they love to inflict on us at the court” “all its characters are clearly insane, all its dialogue completely irrational, and what the whole thing is supposed to convey or signify is beyond understanding. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it tedious or boring, for its young author, who is probably just trying to cash in on the stupid contemporary cult for avant-garde obscurity, has at least the knack of somehow holding one’s attention. But its utter incomprehensibility becomes irritating, its calculated idiocy, embarrassing, and not even the excellent acting of John Slater, Richard Pearson and Beatrix Lehmann as the three craziest crackpots gathered together in the dingy seaside boarding house that comprises the setting, can redeem its lack of sense and sensibility. “

(146)

(doesn’t say what the quote is from)

The young author of the Birthday party was Harold Pinter, who as a jobbing actor called David Baron, had written this, his first professionally produced play, during a tour of Doctor in the House. The next morning, few if any of the critics dissented from Heap’s unfavourable verdict. “The author never got down to earth long enough to explain what his play was about,” complained the Telegraph’s Darlington, bemoaning the lot of critics “condemned to sit through plays like this”. Alan Dent in the News Chronicle (Mr Pinter Misses his target) declaraed, after outlining the plot, that “the moral would seem to be that every man-jack of us is a raving lunatic”. And for the Mail’s Cecil Wilson, though not denying Pinter’s “wit that gleams through the mist of a play”, it was altogether a “baffling mixture”. Pinter himself, some forty years on, recollected in tranquillity the emotion of that Tuesday morning. “I went out at 7.30 am to get the morning papers, went to a café and had a cup of tea and read them. Each one was worse than the last. I thought I might give the whole thing up and go and write a novel. But my wife at the time Vivien [Merchant] said, “come on, you’ve had bad notices as an actor, pull yourself together.” There was still the Evening Standard headline to endure, “Sorry Mr Pinter, you’re just not funny enough” but by then the discussion had already been take to pull the plug at the end of the week. Audiences for the rest of the six day run were desultory, and by the time a eulogising review by Harold Hobson appeared in the Sunday Times, “Mr Pinter on the evidence of this work, possesses the most original, disturbing, and arresting talent in theatrical London’ it was too late.

The Times 20 May 1958

Crewe Chronicle 24 may 1958

(Anthony) Heap, 19 May 1958

Michael Billington The life and work of Harold Pinter (1996) p. 74

Daily Telegraph 20 May 1958

News Chronicle 20 May 1958

Daily Mail 20 May 1958

John Walsh That nice Mr Pinter,

Independent 8 Feb 1999

Billington, Pinter p. 84-85

Sunday Times 25 May 1958

Christopher Isherwood Diaries vol. 1

p. 92 February 6 1940 Tonight at a party at the Viertel’s The Huxley’s Anita Loos and Gottfried were invited. The real object of our presence was to convince a producer, who has bought They walk alone, that Beatrix Lehmann should be brought over from England to play the chief part. Unfoutunaetly the Huxley’s had never even heard of Beatrix, so our propaganda fell rather flat.

Bethold was in a tense, jumpy state, lika a cannon, loaded and longing to be fired.

Hoopla 1929

The Plays of Ernst Toller: A Revaluation

 By Cecil Davies

p. 323 “Hoopla wir Leben! Was translated into English by Hermann Ould and published by Ernest Benn in September 1928 and produced twice the following year, 1929 in London and Cambridge.
The London production was at the Gate Theatre Studio, directed by Peter Godfrey under the title of Hoopla! It ran from 19 February to 16 March. The cast included Gaveley Edwards (Karl Thomas), Beatrix Lehmann, (Eva Berg) Keith Pyott, (Albert Kroll) Ronald Simpson (Kilman) Joan Pereira (Mrs Meller) Robert Newton (Pickel).

A programme note by David Joseph indicated the direction which interest in the play was weighted:

p. 324 “Hoopla is interesting from a technical standpoint for the manner in which it utilises the film, not only to act as a commentary on the stage action but so that it performs an individual function towards the obtaining of a full common dramatic effect.

The moving pictures shown in this play were made with a cine-Kodak, and are projected by a Kodascope B. Only non-inflammable film is used”

The setting has been preserved in a newspaper cutting where a photograph shows that four simultaneous scenes were staged (Two up two down) on which the caption says is, “the smallest theatre stage in London”) [citation needed]

Ould’s translation is uninspired and occasionally incorrect (32) Toller’s more poetic passages suffer particularly badly (33) The inadequacy of the translation, together with the emphasis on technical novelty, may in part account for the hostility of the reviews; but the actors must have also  been at fault, even though the Times praised Graveley Edwards and Beatrix Lehmann as Karl Thomas and Eva Berg (34) For that anonymous reviewer the play was

“intolerably tedious… weighed down with stage mechanism masquerading as experimental technique. It is hard to believe that I was written in passion, yet if passion is not the explanation it is altogether unpardonable.

The dialogue, when it does not smack of a communist Sunday School is jerky and lifeless.

It is all very like the performance of a nasty tempered child whom no one prevents from inflicting his nonsense on the world, and who continues his elephantine pranks for hours and hours and hours.”

Another anonymous critique was nastily hostile to Toller and ended

“A pretentious evening, during which the audicen was completely bored.

Ivor Brown revied the production in the Saturday review of 23.2.29 and again on 24.2.29 presumably in the observer.

p. 325 Brown thought there was too much movement and activity, “The patron saint of the Gate Theatre is evidently St Vitus (39)

He pointed out that the 4 scene simultatneous stage was unoriginal. It has been started in Drury Lane and familiarised by Eugene O’Neill. (40)… Clearly on a tiny stage in a small studio an opportunity had been missed to free Hoppla Wir Leben from its mechanical trappings and to emphasise the qualities of the author’s language. Which were also destroyed by Ould’s unsatrisfactory translation.

p. 343 Eva berg is only seventeen and at this age deeply romantic. She, the young revolutionary, would like to emulate the French aristocrats who danced the minuet on the way to the guillotine. She is passionately in love with Karl (I’ll kiss you to death”) and cannot forbear with weeping. But she cries shame on Kroll’s attack on Kilman. …When Karl is led off to see a doctor, Eva, apparently unhindered goes with im.

p. 346 [by the end of the play] Eva has destroyed or suppressed her romanticism nor can her utter honesty prmit her even at the end of the play in Act 4, sc 3, to respond with warmth to Karl’s last declaration o flove.

He for his part carries into 1927 the pastsionate intensisty of 1919, both in sex and in politics. His inability to accommodate himself to the non-romantic sex for fun ethos of the 1920s is matched by his inability and unwillingness to accommodate himself into the politcs of elections, trade unions, patience and compromise.

p. 347 When eva unexpectably returns, having been sacked because of her union activity, and ironically says she could go away with him now, he still clings to the idea but Eva retorts: “Do you seriously believe I’d leave the comrades in the lurch?”

p. 353 The last witness is Eva, independent, fearless. She refuses to be bullied as to her sexual relationship with Karl Thomas, Asking the judge whether he is living in the fifteenth century. She witnesses strongly on Karl Thomas’s behalf, while at the same time, she retains her crystal-clear honest.y.

The birthday party

Post-War British Theatre Criticism (Routledge Revivals)

 By John Elsom

To begin with there is meg (BL) who lets lodgings in a seaside tow. She is mad. Thwarted Maternity (I think) her trouble and it makes her go soppy over her unsavoury lodger Stanley.

[I don’t think she was mad, just a bit dim, and NO WHERE is there any reason to suspect lack of children as the cause to her madness that seems to be such a sexist assumption, as to what would drive a woman mad and ironic cause Bea wasn’t mad and had no kids either]

Harold Hobson Sunday Times review 25 May 1958

“Peter wood has directed the play with an absolute response to its delicate nuances. It has six players, every one of them superb, Beatrix Lehmann is strangely funny and macabrely touching as the landlady…

Mr pinter and the Birthday party despite their experiences last week will be heard of again. Make a note of their names.”

Central School of speech and drama 0 1956?1957 BL was on Staff!!!

Judi chose two Shakespearan passages – Miranda’s second scene with Ferdinand in the Tempest, which begins ‘Alas now! Pray you, work not so hard’ and a speech of Julia’s from The two gentleman of Verona. She was able to study Barbara Jefford playing the latter part at the Old Vic and was coached in both pieces by Beatrix Lehmann, who was then on the staff at Central

Merchant of Venice (1947)

The Merchant of Venice: Critical Essays

 edited by John W. Mahon, Ellen Macleod Mahon

“But Bl’s casting puzzled people. A deep-voiced woman in her forties, with a strong stage presence, she gave a brisk, cool Portia, wich though obviously intelligent, failed to move audiences.

Huis Clos (1940)

Powers of Being: David Holbrook and His Work

 edited by Edwin Webb

Chapter by Roger Poole, England’s only existential philosopher.

p 211In a very illuminating autobiographical account of the books he has read over a lifetime, David Holbrook describes, with typical frankness, to what an extent a youthful encounter with Satre alienated him,

“one of the most disturbing experiences I had as a boy of seventeen was seeing a play by Satre, Huis CLos, put on with Beatrix Lehmann, and enthusiastically supported by the leftwing “people’s convention” of those days (1940). I was appalled by the work, because of its hatred of human beings, and its nihilistic picture of the inevetivable frustration of inter-human relationship and love. I have loathed Satre ever since.” (citation needed)

Strangers on a honeymoon (1936)

British Popular Films 1929-1939: The Cinema of Reassurance

 By Stephen Shafer

In SOAH a comedy released in 1936 and based on Edgar Wallace’s novel The Northing tramp, Constance Cummings plays October Jones, an orphan living unhappily with unpleasant relatives on the border between Canada and the united States. A wealthy but stuffy would-be suitor seeks her hand in marriage, but she resists, telling him she would rather marry a tramp than live with him, in spite of his wealth. To make her point she encounters a tramp named Quigley, played by Hugh Sinclari, who she does in fact wed for spite; but Quigley turns out to be an English peer in disguise who is searching for two parts of a valuble deed of land containing oil, which has been held by his cousin and rival, Elfrida (Beatrix Lehmann) and Sir Andrew Gregory (Edmund Breon). The remainder of the film is a standard comedy adventure plot including a night in a deserted house, auto chases, imporabable escapes, and an ultimately happy ending with the peer recovering the deed, defeating the villains, and also, of course, the heroine falling in love with the man she had married.( no page number given)

Salome 1931

File On Wilde  By Margery Mary Morgan

Festival theatre Cambridge, 23 Nov 31 (dir Terance Gray, des Gray and Pastong with Constant Lambert’s score, dance choreographed by Ninette de Valois, other movement devised by Hedley Briggs, With Beatrix Lehmann as Salome and Robert Morley as Herod. P. 17

Birthday Party (1958)

TBP was first presented by Michael Codron and David Hall at the Arts, Theatre Cambrdige, on 28 April 1958 and subsequently at the Lyric Opera House, Hammersmith.

The master builder (1934)

Donald Wolfit invited Margaret to appear in a special Sunday night performance of the Master Builder for the Scandinavina Society at Westminster Theatre. The production transferred to the Embassy Theatre, Swiss Cottage, and opened on 30 April 1934 for a short run. Margaret repeated her role of Aline, opposite Donald WOlfit’s Solness. Beatrix Lehmann and John Clements were also members of the cast. The embassy was situated several miles from the West End and the programme reflected a more suburban attitude to theatre-goin, in the form of two gentle reminders to the house; ‘Ladies are respectfully asked to add to the comfort of the audience by removing their hats. No alcholo will be served after 10 pm.”

This time the critics did take notice of her work: the much respected Ivor Brown declaraed that he was ‘especially struck by miss Margaret.

…
Eric Keown remartked on the importance of this production in terms of Miss Rutherfords career, to be acting at the Embassy in 1934 was much more than filling in time, for under Ronald Adan’s adventurous leadership this theatre had earned a glowing reputation: in that year no less than five of its productions were running at onece in the west end.

(no page numbers given)

The Silver tassie (1929)

The silver tassie was first performed at the Apollo Theatre, London on 11 October 1929, the cast in order of appearance was as follows,

Barry Fitzgerald, Sydney Morgan, Eithnee Magee, Beatrix Lehmann, Una O’Coonner. Charles Laughton, Billy Barnes…

Director Raymond Massey

Salome (1931)

The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays: Lady Windermere's Fan ...

 By Oscar Wilde Oxford University Press, 23 Feb 1995

Xiii Salome has largely neglected within the English theatre. Terence Gray’s 1921 production at the Festival Theatre Cambridge, with Beatrix Lehmann aas Salome was one landmark. Gray saw the play’s virture in its verbal treatment, which corresponds to a musical composition: accordingly, he produced it for sound and movement, and not at all for character.

The Silver Tassie (1929)

Seán O'Casey, Writer at Work: The Definitive Biography of the Last Great ...

 By Christopher Murray

(great deal of history on the play and its reception.

It was only at the start of September 1929 that Cochran asked Raymond Massey to direct the Tassie, scheduled to open at the Apollo on 11 October, which by today’s standards is unthinkable. Cochran engaged charles Laughton to play the lead, … Beatrix Lehmann, well-known in London , was to play Susie Monican…the musical qualities of the Tassie were acknowledged from the outset. As Massey remarked, It was essential that the war scene be cast with careful regard to the musical capability of chanting plainsong in the Gregorian manner. 159 “Reviews on the whole were favourable just a few dismissive… For the Tassie is not just about the horror of modern warfare but also if not primarily about the helplessness of the individual in the face of injustice of life itself. But the play in O’casey’s characteristic manner, mingles comedy with tragedy, at times too blatantly, indeed as if to stem the flow of empathy. …

While the reviewers were happy to have a piece to get their teeth into they were under no illustions about its prospective popularity. As to queue for thirty hours. Its artistic qualities and challenging experimentalis worked against its popularity. … So the Tassie was a success d’estime but a commercial failure. It ran until Saturday 7 December, a total of only eight weeks. Massey quoted Chochran as saying it was the proudest failure he ever had.

1939 political activity

Margaret Storm Jameson : A Life:  By Jennifer Birkett

As 1939 drew to its end, the situation in Europe grew darker. Jameson wrote to the Paris Centre asking for news of collegues who had vanished into prison and camps. H.G Wells and Beatrix Lehmann had both expressed to her their concern for the novelist Jean Giono and the philosopher Alain.

Garden district (suddenly last summer)

Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance

 edited by Philip C. Kolin

p132 International productions of suddenly last summer have not been so favourably received.

p., 133 The play premiered in London in September 1958 at the Arts theatre starring Beatrix Lehman as Violet Venable…Although Machiz also directed this production, it was coldly received by British critics. Robert Robinson regarded suddenly last summer as “primarily an anecdote, a melodrama (407) Alan Brien castigated the play as a ‘pedagogic approach to pederasty” (quoted in McCann 122). 

All gods chillin (1929)

Twentieth-Century British Theatre: Industry, Art and Empire

 By Claire Cochrane

p. 106 The growing interest in avant-garde American drama, especially the plays of Eugene O’Neill which featured black characters, began to stimulate the employment of black actors in the interests of theatrical innovation. The arrival in London in 1928 of the major American musical Showboat which featured black singers such as Paul Robeson who were also powerful actors, permitted a seque inot experimental theatre. A 1929 Court theatre revivial of Peter Godfrey’s production of O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun replaced the original blacked up actor with African American Frank H Wilson in the central role of the black lawyer Jim Harris and also included other black singers and actors. Wilson had both acted and sung the title role in Porgy (an early dramatisation

p.107 of the novel which became George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess) and played a supporting role in the first New York production of O’neill’s play when Robeson played Harris. Some reviews of All Gods Chillun commented on the ‘repellent’ aspect of the theme of tragic miscegenation embodied by the black Harris married to the white Ella, who was played by Beatrix Lehmann. This was a play dealing, it was claimed, with ‘very remote problems’. When Paul Robeson played Othello opposite Peggy Ashcroft as Desdemona at the Savoy Theatre in 1930 the issue seems to have moved closer to home. Outside the uncertain critical response to Robeson’s performance – the first by a professional black actor since they 1880s – there was racist hate mail and the suggestion that he was not welcome at the savoy hotel.

Wit and bisexuality

The Art of the Put-Down  By Winfred Coles

I’ve had them both, and I don’t think much of either

BL, actor, theatre director and author, during a wedding.

The dark lady of the sonnets (Oct 2 1955)

The Tudors on Film and Television

 By Sue Parrill, William B. Robison

UK bbc Sunday night theatre

90 minutes black and white writer George Bernard Shaw, BL Elizabeth I

The bbc Sunday night theatre, which ran from 1950 to 1959 presented quality programming in the early years of television. This episode is a presentation os Shaw’s short play, The dark lady of the sonnets.