Guardian, Stage, Variety and Observer digitised records 1929-1933

Hoopla

J, B., 1929, Feb 20. "HOPPLA". The Manchester Guardian (1901-1959), 14.

London presentation of Toller’s play

Mr Ould’s translation by Peter Godfrey at the gate (mentions of set) “This, of course, is to set the technique of the theatre feebly painting after the mobility and fluency of the films. If the theatre accepts the challenge and joins that rivalry it will naturally be beaten, as combatants are always beaten who choose to fight the enemy on his own soil or under his own conditions.

Hoopla is a drama of revolution, with the constant Communist as hero, and the tame rebel who becomes a reactionary Labour minister as Villain. It ought to be exciting, for Toller is a dramatist of passion and invention. As it was presented to-night the drama was smothered by the stagecraft. The actor, playing jack in the box and clambering from cabin to cabin and berth to berth, was hampered by this necessity of being a mere item in a producer’s field day.

All the interest of dramatic construction has vanished, since the play flickers here and there and now and again has the assistance of the kinema to flicker with it. Vainly did Mr Gravely Edwards struggle with the main part and endeavour to make tragic matter of the disillusioned Communist’s despair. Vainly did Miss Beatrix Lehmann add her intensity to the part of the girl rebel. Their efforts and those of the rest were dissipated amid irrelevant noises and kinematic interludes of the most amateurish kind.

If Toller had been content to admit that human thought and feeling humanly portrayed can be the stuff of drama, he might have turned his combatant champions of democracy to fine issues of the theatre. …”

BROWN, I., 1929, Jan 27. Lyrlo. "BYRON". The Observer (1901- 2003), 13. ISSN 00297712.

Bryon Miss Beatrix Lehmann as Lady Caroline looks more of the twentieth than of the nineteenth century, but her acting has a sharp edge and always holds the eye.

Play Pictorial, Plays of the month, Feb 1929

Lyric Theatre Byron

Bryon still waits. Mrs Ramsey’s attempt at his portrait is well-intentioned, but stage and crude to the last degree. She has been so busy making her hero Byronic that she forgets to make him human. Never were such windy suspirations of forced breath as she has put into the poor fellow’s mouth. Never was seen, outside of Madame Tussaud’s such a collection of lifeless puppets bearing the names of famous men and women as this with which she has surrounded him. …

(Esme carrying the play, no mention of Bea besides cast list)

Nju

Anonymous1928, Jun 17. THE WEEK'S THEATRES. The Observer (1901- 2003), 15. ISSN 00297712.

Adapted by George Merritt from the Russian by Ossip Dymov

Mr Peter Godfrey is a praiseworthy pioneer, an ingenious explorer of unorthodox fields. Moreover, little that mattered in this Russian tragedy of Everyday Life seemed to have escaped Mr George Merritt who anglicised it. Yet with all the good will in the world it was difficult to see in it anything but callow melodrama that hiccupped portentously over the mysteries of life and death and love and art, in default of being articulate. Its theme is of the simplest – sexual passion and jealousy, a broken marriage, and an ironic funeral; yet masterpieces have been made of such material…. Miss Beatrix Lehmann is an interesting young actress, whose respect for her art deserved kindlier material than the febrite woes of Nju provided, and Mr Godfrey, sincere rather than forcible as the husband, and Mr Raymond Huntley as He, the Poet, gave her such support as their parts permitted. As an exercise in expressionism this production was not without its provocative interest; but the play itself seemed to me both insignificant and tiresomely jejune.

Gate Theatre Twenty Below

Anonymous1928, May 13. Dramatis Personce. The Observer (1901- 2003), 15. ISSN 00297712.

That same evening the Gate Theatre will produce Twenty Below, a drama of the road, by… in the cast…

PLAYS of the MONTH. 1929. Play pictorial, 55(328), pp. 4-12.

All God’s

The strength of the play is in the theatrical effectiveness of the situation that mr O’Neil has contrived by deftly arranging psychological motives to suit his purpose. As a study of mixed marriage it may be rather superficial and opportunist, but as a story it holds the attentions, and is not without a curious beauty – the times

The one trouble is that the repellent aspect of black and white marriage remains so obvious that there is no question to be answered. After all, even Othello, would stand for nothing if it were not a treatment of universal jealousy. Mr Peter Godfrey’s production deserves every compliment – morning post

The paly, except in its earlier scenes, left me cold. That was not the fault of the producer, Peter Godfrey, who was also responsible for the production three eyars ago… nor was it the fault of Beatrix Lehmann who gave quite a striking and intense performance – daily news.

“it gives Miss Beatrix Lehmann excellent scope for her special gift of queerness”. Daily telegraph

EUGENE, O., 1929, Jun 23. "ALL GOD'S CHILLUN GOT WINGS.". The Observer (1901- 2003), 15. ISSN 00297712.

All God’s

Miss Beatrix Lehmann as Ella, took her racial gruelling with all the licence due to her Macbeth blook, and sleep-walked and soliloquised, wheedled and whimpered and stormed and stabbed, in the best Glamis tradition.

Anonymous1929, Mar 11. MUMPS CLOSES A THEATRE. The Manchester Guardian (1901-1959), 11.

“Mumps closes a theatre: Two-thirds of company take the complaint.

As the result of mumps attacking two-thirds of the performers in Hoppla, the German play be Ernest Toller, management have been compelled to closet the Gate Theatre Studio in Villiers Street, Strand, London.

… The company struggled on until Friday when Mr Gravely Edwards and Miss Beatrix Lehmann, the leading actor and actress, fell victims and the performance had to be cancelled.

It had been hoped to resume last night with Mr Peter Godfrey, the producer, in the lead, but that was found to be impossible. No fewer than ten of the fifteen actors and actresses are now down with the maladay. The intention of running Hoppla to the end of this week has had to be abandoned. Mumps permitting it is hoped to reopen the theatre on March 19 with the Race of the shadow.

Saturday Review 23 Feb 1929

Hoppla at the Gate

The Gate Theatre exists to open up avenues. Its business is to make experiments, and since by the law of averages a large number of experiments must wholly or partially fail, the Gate is not to be condemned as an institution because its novelties are sometimes a mere clashing of brass or a boring series of bangs and bashes at the jaded attention. The Gate would deserve immediate destruction if it started to play for safety and merely repeated the routine of the public stage, offering us Mayfair trifles or further glimpses of the amorous life in Capri, Tahiti or Taplow. Accordingly I take up the seemingly paradoxical view that Hoppla is tiresome, and that it wought to have been produced. It has had a large success in and out of Germany, and it is well that we should taste it for ourselves.

As a written document (Mr Ould’s translation has been published by Messrs Benn) it has passion and power; the life of the consistently red rebel who sees the pinks take office, and is ultimately hounded to self-slaughter by his own despair and the accident of injustice is worth telling. There ought to be here a good dramatization from the left wing’s workshop of Mr Belloc’s admirable epigram on a certain electoral triumph:

… Accordingly he has subjected this great subject and his own terrible experience and sincerity to the tyranny of producer’s tricks; he has demanded that the piece shall be executed on a four fold stage (two cabins up and two down) and has drafted his play like a scenario for the kinema with little jerky episodes. One’s eye is constantly being dragged from one cubby-hole to the other, while the actors are turned into the scalers of ladders, scurrying from one room of the doll’s house to the next. Consequently there is no time for development of drama or of character; the mind has no point of rest’ it is all simply a feast of fidgets.

During a few interludes some kinematic episodes and captions are projected on to the curtain. I do not complain that the home-made films, supposed to typ8ify proletarian life, the class-struggle, and so on, were utterly amateurish and mere misty irritants of the optic nerve. One does not expect the Gate to be as rich or as talented as Metro-Goldwyn. Had the films been prepared by the most gifted Bolshevik that ever enraptured the most hirsute members of the Film Society on a Sunday afternoon, they would have been utterly futile. If the dramatist cannot suggest atmosphere without running to the photographer to help him out he had better go out of business altogether. If the theatre cannot live by actor and his spoken word, then let us close its doors and go to the genuine pictures or go home. What is intolerable is the notion that language is so feeble that it cannot do its own work of touching the imagination, and that imagination is so feeble that it cannot realise the monotony of labour without seeing a celluloid presentation of a number of hands typing. There is a really superb irony in this final collapse of the anti-realistic drama. Have not its theorists been screaming derisive laughter at the poor, besotted realists and their paltry photography? Only too often have we heard that Mr Galsworthy simply turns the handle of a camera and has no inkling of what Imaginative art may be. And now, when we go to the Gate Theatre to discover the latest, grandest flight of the darting mind that leads the anti-realists, we find, literally, exactly, and, oh so boringly – photography! Thus the triumph of fancy spreads. The wayward genius has now marched so proudly on that it can present us with moving photographs of some typists at work in order to symbolise labour under modern conditions. So this is art!

Of course Toller’s play collapsed under the nonsensical technique of rattle-trap methods. I was infinitely sorry for the poor actors, clambering like monkeys from pillar to post, and interrupted by loud speakers, captions, films, gramophones and other assiduous flourshes and alarums provided by a diligent stage-management; particularly did I symapthize with Mr Gravely Edwards and Miss Beatrix Lehmann, who both gave as fine performances in the leading roles as cruel circumstances would allow.

In conclusion, I would like to thank the Gate Theatre for a considerable service to the drama, and indirectly, to Toller. Its productions will prove in the long run, even to the most obstinate progressive, that the dramatist’s business is to speak his mind instead of binding his hands in theory, setting his feet in stocks of the more grandiose stage-carpentry, and smothering himself to fathoms of ridiculous celluloid…

The Stage

May 1 1930

Brain

On April 27, 1930 at the Savoy, was presented by the Masses Stage and Film Guild a play in three acts by Lionel Britton entitled Brain

(cast list)

“Bernard Shaw to the N’th might be the description applied to the turgid and long-winded closing stages of the pretentiously amazing and inflated play, garnished with pseudo-scientific jargon, which made a section even of an Advanced audience of soi-distant intellectuals join scoffingly in the final oft-repeated refrains, All is over. This was the last utterance of a mechanical Brain, thus holding forth in darkness as awaiting the collision with the solar system of a star which would bring about night and the end of time. In this gloomy fashion, Lionel Britton, a young writer, finished a strange piece that had apparently begun as a plea for general co-operation, or collectivism, as against such disease-bacteria as private enterprises.

 His theory of a mechanical brain was, it would appear, the idea of an unappreciated philosopher who was buried in a pauper’s grace and whose treatise was discovered in the Library of the British Museum some 150 years after his death. It had seemingly contained some great thoughts as that an idea is a molecular pattern corresponding to some external influence, and that will is but an anticipation of the future. His theory, at first discussed and regarded with some favour at the so-called ideas club, was much later derided by a gathering of such pestilential creatures as typical business men, and then by a cabinet of time-serving politicians whose farseeing PM and a play-writing Home Secretary, decided, for different reasons, to fall in with and help the rapidly spread secret society of the Brain Brotherhood, composed of intellectual and mechanical workers of every sort, who were devoting their efforts to the construction in the Sahara of a huge mechanical Brain which would do “all the thinking of the world”.

From this promising and not uninteresting beginning Mr Britton plunges his bewildered bearers into the absurdities of Expressionism run mad, as preliminary to dosing them with a powerful mixture of ideas presumably a continuation or amplification of Back to Methuselah. In the course of the first six scenes of his third act, which ends with the reaching of the year Fifty Millionth Year and the onset of that dark star bringing about the Night of Time, Mr Britton introduces us to a queer world of sun bathing youths and damosels, who talk learnedly, and almost dispassionately about fertilisation in the laboratory, external fertilisation, and “sex stuff”, in the intervals of doing much hard thinking as human links in the vast organisation of the mechanical brain. Some of these ornaments of Mr Brain’s new world, in which shorts and tunics are almost the only wear, engage in gymnastic exercises when they are not reeling on hard couches or indulgins in rhapsodies about the sun, and far from lisping in numbers, they are known (through the deafening utterances of the exasperating loud-speaker) by such appallingly complicated numerical appalations as History A.N.07.42.54 Physics EL.19.63.82 and Myology E.T.22.44.24 But in spite of these young-old folk having from time to time much needed brain-change-over-areas as relief from prolongued spells of volunatires and compulsories (vile phrases indeed), they cannot avert the oncoming of the Night and Time, with mystic and sonorous ejaculations by Voices and pessimistically prophetic Brain, awaiting the overthrow of his long-existant order.

…”

Play pictorial, plays of the month, Nov 1929

Apollo Theatre Silver Tassie

(cast list)

The scene is filled with a kind of wonder. It is, in the theatre, a new wonder; it is exciting and, at intervals, moving; but little proceeds from it. Mr O’Casey has not been able to give a full answer to his own challenge.

“You must not be disconcerted when Mr O’Casey, after an act of realism which introduces you to certain soldiers on leave in Ireland, then takes you to the front and gives you, not a continuation of the story of those soldiers, but a fantastic and ferocious satire on the war, written in verse and played mostly in a chant. You must not be troubled when he returns to realism for his third, nor yet when he writes a last act which is part realistic comedy and part tragedy in verse; nor yet when he holds up the progress of that act in order to insert a comic interlude, which could be lifted almost as it stands and made into a music hall skit called, The Irishman at the Telephone – Daily Telegraph

I, B., 1929, Oct 12. "THE SILVER TASSIE.". The Manchester Guardian (1901-1959), 16.

Silver Tassie

Mr Sean O’Casey in writing The silver Tassie which Mr Cochran produced at the Apollo Theatre to-night, was a man wrestling with new forms, a man so seized with the enormity of human suffering in the war that he felt constrained to force his dramatic method like a frantic engineer forcing machinery to new speed and new power. The second act of his play is a scene at the front kept purely on an abstract level. The soliders’ voices chant their dull agony to the sky while puppet officers strut and bully above them. Mr Raymond Massey, the producer has cleverly devised a pattern of sound and movement to turn this second act into a sort of spook sonata and a silhouette of suffering, symbolised in the droning, moaning platoon of those condemned to death or worse. Heegan, the footballer, is condemned to the worse, for he lives on as the paralysed athlete watching the man who rescued him for this intolerable survival claiming and winning the vivid young woman whom he had loved. The play, beginning in a Dublin home where Heegan is the footballing hero enlisted in the British Army, swings over to this gauntly poetic vision of war and then back to hospital and the horrors of peace. In short, an actual and abstract method of play-writing jostle one another.

The Silver Tassie though it has a true ring of Mr O’Casey’s mental violence, is also a vessel in which the drinks are rather dangerously mixed. Now and again the action of the piece is held up for totally irrelevant fooling by the clowns, a device for which there is good Shakespearian precedent and which Mr Sidney Morgan and Mr Barry Fitzgerald can easily justify by the splendid richness of their humours. But compared with either of Mr O’Casye’s pervious master pieces The Silver Tassie is rather like a league of nations; its severity and it’s searching comedy, its compassion and its ruthless derision of the army officer and the army surgeon, and its raging denunciation of the general civilian forgetfulness of war’s wreackage are all typical of Mr O’Casey’s passion and of his power of phrasing it. But the play does not gather meomentum; it skids and swerves on its course, and gives the audience no secure sense of dramatic direction. The ironic values of the last act are dispersed and delayed. But, of course, it is all, despite the tumultuous effect of the technique, infinitely stronger, larger and more exciting than 99 per cent of London plays. Mr O’Casey may have some misfires as he experiments with his new engine, but its revolutions, when they come, have the right dynamic quality. The fitfulness of the genius in this play does not prove any ultimate failing in force.

The presence of mr Barry ….

Miss Una O’Connor, Miss Beatrix Lehmann, Mr Ian Hunter, and Mr S.J. WArmington are useful auxiliaries, and Mr Massey’s production shows fine consideration of the teasing problems set by the dramatist’s experiment. Mr Augustus John’s scenery for the war-episode may not obviously carry the artist’s signature, but it shows gauntly the skeleton of the warring world. Mr Cochran has once more earned the gratitude of playgoers by venturing to produce this strange scattered collection of scenes and characters, from which the directors of the Abbey Theatre retreated in such nervous apprehension.

Grand Guignol plays  Godfrey

H, H., 1929, Sep 22. GRAND GUIGNOL PLAYS. The Observer (1901- 2003), 23. ISSN 00297712.

And firmly though Miss Beatrix Lehmann defined the lonliness, anxieties, and tragedy of life at an up-country railroad shack among the landlines, “The end of the trial was mannered rather than moving.

Saturday Review, 15 November 1930

The Theatre, plays, ancient and modern by Robert Gore-Browne Gone to Earth adapted by T.G. Saville from the novel of Mary Webb. Players Theatre.

“At the moment of writing, a third of the plays running in London (musical comedies excepted) are revivals. With a single exception, each of the eight plays that have been produced on the commercial stage since October 3, and have survived, is a revival. Mangers say that it is impossible to find new plays. As the enterprise and altertness of British theatrical managers have passed into a prover, this argues a serious state of the drama. ….

To see plays that have not been produced before, resort must be made to the clubs and societies. At the Players Theatre in New Compton Street the Swanage Repertory season opened with a dramatization of Mary Webb’s novel Gone to earth by T.G. Saville. This piece is the exact opposite of the French revival just considered. It shows no craftsmanship or skill of any sort. Instead it has much honesty, feeling and conviction. Its critic must divest himself of the shaftesbury Avenue point of view and assume the fresher and less sophisticated attitude of Village Drama…. How much the whole affair owes to Miss Beatrix Lehmann’s art only the able producer (Mr Harold Arneil) can say. Looking like one of Rossetti’s girls, she captures the elusive and usually unconvincing character in play or novel – the daughter of the marriage of earth and fairy – land, half-simpleton, half-saint. It is a pleasure to look forward to seeing the capable repertory company which supported her in a succession of plays.

R, K., 1931, Feb 10. MANCHRSTER STAGE AND SCREEN. The Manchester Guardian (1901-1959), 11.

On the spot

Mr Charles Laughton at the Palace.

“But there is little of the lurid about Mr Edgar Wallace’s drama of Chicago’s underworld…. Up to the point at which tony Perelli’s nerve breaks at the actual sight of blood and reduces him to a grovelling craven it plays like a highly amusing satire. And there was much more laughter than horror in the crowded house that last night welcomed Mr Charles Laughton to Manchester in the Al Capone part.
We can, of course, afford to laugh. Perhaps in Chicago itself the smile comes more awry. For there is nothing extravagant in this play’s claim to present only selected facts from a civic situation unparalleled in the modern world. The affluent gang leader who lives in a glorified ice cream saloon decorated in gold and mosaic plays Puccini on his private organ while his gang are shooting a former friend, bullies a judge of the supreme court over the telephone, smothers his victims’ corpses in flowers, revels with a vulgar simplicity in his wealth and his cunning, and feverently prays the Virgin to aid him in his assassinations is a portrait drawn from the life life….Miss Beatrix Lehmann is well cast as the hussy whose motto in life is that “you can’t respect a guy if he ain’t got the money to treat you right.”

Stage Feb 12, 1931 On the Spot,  Manchester, Palace,

… And a splendid audience gave it a rousing welcome on its first appearance in Manchester. …Beatrix Lehmann plays Marie Pouliski cleverly.

WEITZENKORN, L., 1931, Jun 28. Phoenix. "LATE NIGHT FINAL.". The Observer (1901- 2003), 15. ISSN 00297712.

Late night final (cast list)

This may be described in the vernacular as a whale of a show, it splashes, lashes, spouts, and generally churns up the fouler waters of American journalism. … the multiple stage is here used to excellent purpose. If you show four rooms at once in a play of small range (eg Mr O’neill’s desire under the elms) the contraption overweighs what it has to carry. In that case one only felt that the dramatist had been technically lazy; …Miss Beatrix Lehmann and Miss Rosemary Ames doing particularly well as cast-iron reporter and a daughter in distress….

Play Pictoral Plays of the month  July 1931

Late night final  Weitzenkorn

There are drawings of Rowlandson’s as coarse and brutal as this play, and there are pictures of Hogarth’s fiercer in statire, but in the work of Hogarth and Rowlandson there is a beauty that transcends the subject, enabling the spectator to consider it with joy. From Mr Witzenkorn’s play one turns away sickened as from a series of vile phtographs. That the photographs accurately represent the inner working of a new york tabloid newspaper is not enough even if it be true. The play has the mind of such a newspaper; it blazes with crude photographs, it shouts its headlines, it has caught the hated disease and is in its effects as violent and in aesthetic content as worthless as the squalor it attacks.

The story is of the consequences of a newspaper’s fling for circulation. The Voorhees murder case is raked up against Mrs Townsend, formerly Nancy Voorhees, who has outlived the scandal by 15 years. She and her husband are living happily together; her daughter is to be married tomorrow; but the newspaper hunts her down and publishes the ancient story with the modern embellishment. Mrs Townsend poisons herself; Mr Townsend throws himself under a lorry; Jenny, with a pistol in her back, invades the newspaper office. Why did you kill my mother? The staff and the proprietor are shaken but the serial goes on. Only Randall, the editor, is deeply stricken. He resigns his chair and sets out to star another and better journal, not before it was needed.

To add to the effect newspaper boys invaded the stalls during an interval, offering a late night final. We needed nothing that they could give. For hours the evening gazette had been flourished at us – its journalistic methods dramatically translated. – times

The Stage

July 2 1931

Late night final

Called in America, five star final (and what it is under at the BL) which should draw crowds of playgoers, ready to enjoy strong theatrical fare to the new house out of Charring Cross Road, will cause a sensation by reason alike of its theme, its treatment, and the manner of production, with the aid of four or five stages, some of them revolving. It is designed to show us poor benighted, innocent Londoners some of the methods adopted by conductors of the most unscrupulous organs of the American Yellow Press, blackmailing, most of us know, used to be practiced by certain gutter journalists dealing with financial matters, even in the heart of the City of London,….”However, this vile proprietor’s resolve to go on with the serial publication of the inside story, of Nancy Voorhees, even after she and the man who had married and lived happily with her for twenty years had killed themselves, and when efforts were being made to stop the wedding of the poor creature’s illegitimate child, proved too much even for the comparatively case-hardened editor, Randall. The latter, therefore, as though to justify the business and the circulation managers’ reproaches that he was becoming highbrow, resigns, and goes off on to some real paper… His colleagues included Luella Carmody, a woman reporter, switched off to investigate the double suicide; …Miss Beatrix Lehmann goes unflinchingly through the unpleasant part of the woman reporter…

The stage October 22 1931

Late night final,  transfers to King’s Hammersmith.

Cast include “Miss Beatrix Lehmann who makes a bright and vivacious Luelle Carmody”.

Anonymous1932, Jun 24. BOOKS OF THE DAY. The Manchester Guardian (1901-1959), 7.

Cornwall to the Rescue

But Wisdom Lingers

Beatrix Lehmann, London : Methuen and Co. Pp. 229, 7s 6d net

Cornwall is not a first-class cricketing county, but let us, without proposing a new parlour game imagine a championship competition of litearary counties, and in any table of results Cornwall is secure of a high place. The assessors will consider this novel; they will note what Cornwall has accomplished for Miss Lehmann, and how after her vile bodily and conventionally bright treatment of London and Paris she finds with Cornwall’s aid a beauty both in scene and persons. The older novelists, in the age of security, ended their novels. Sometimes one felt the ending unsatisfying, but usually one felt that  the novelist’s interest in the principals had exhausted itself. Here the whole is episode, not more, and Richard, left in the arms of Susan after her fight for common sense, has decidedly not ceased to be interesting on the last page. Miss Lehmann leaves off well, in the casual modern way, and cynically we feel that Richard got a good play out of Susan, and actually, for once, we crave a sequel to this story of the love of Richard and Susan, who was a grown woman when Richard was a child of eight. He met her again in Cornwall when he was a playwright with two successes and with the nasty taste left in his soul of the unpleasant death of his leading lady. Miss Lehmann does the raffish stuff unflinchingly, and rather as if somebody had better that she couldn’t do it. She does Cornwall exquisitely, and if she doesn’t decide to tell us more about Susan we shall be disappointed.

ST, J.E., 1932, Aug 14. New Novels. The Observer (1901- 2003), 5. ISSN 00297712.

Miss Beatrix Lehmann’s But wisdom lingers is a modern book. That is to say, it was out of date on the day of publication. It is about people who are always looking at their exiguous insides and being cynically sentimental about them. Not Good.

The Stage, April 27, 1933

Overture  The Little

On Monday April 24, 1933 was produced here, for the first time in the West End, a play in three acts and eight scenes, by Sutton Vane Entitiled,

(Cast list, Bea third from last as “another cockney” which is pretty funny!)

Play produced by Miss Nancy Price.

Mr Sutton Vane’s interesting and provocative play, which is a sort of companion picture to his successful Outward bound, was originally produced at the Everyman, Hampstead, on April 11, 1925, but this is its first showing in London proper. As produced by Miss Nancy Price, the director of the People’s National Theatre, it had a warm reception at the Little on Monday, when the author was called but did not appear. Miss Price repeats her original performance as the sadly-disillusioned society lady, and Mr. Allan Jeayes and Mr Randolph McLeod also play original parts as the self important Judge and the conceited actor.

Overture is not exactly on the same plan of effectiveness as Outward bound, should nevertheless succeed as a play full of thought, observation and satire. Instead of “dead” people, it shows us people waiting to be born …The provocative nature of Mr Vane’s play lies in the fact that all his unborn people are fully developed on the lines they intend to pursue on earth. There are, for instance, a lady with social ambitions, a pair of lovers, a judge who wants ot be Lord Chancellor, an actor who wants to illumine Shakespeare, a costermonger, a girl who wants flowers and the peace of the country and so on. All these people, apparently, are given no choice, which knocks the theory of the influence of the environment or free will completely on the head; and of course, the view is almost hopelessly pessimistic. … Mr Hay Petrie, too is admirable as the coster, with Miss Beatrix Lehmann playing very cleverly as the coster’s wife…

Saturday Review 29 April 1933

Overture Little

Where Mr Sutton Vane not still, as we hope, in the heyday of a brilliant carrer, thre might be grounds to say that Overture is to him what When we dead awaken was to Ibsen – a potpourri of disjointed reminiscences of his previous work. As that of Mr Vane consists of one remarkable play, Outward bound, it is early for him to announce a drying up of the fount. Overture might otherwise be described as Dinner for eight, applied to life instead of New York. Some of the scenes in which we see the working out of destiny foreshadowed for un-born sounls are in themselves taking, but they hang on no connecting thread save a sketchy philosophy that bids us take the rough with the smooth, witness the hollowness of ambition, and see compensating virture in modest contentment.

Superb acting by Miss Nancy Prince and the People’s national Theatre company may carry Overture along. The best snatches are those in which Miss Elizabeth Maude fairly raises our scalp as a madwoman in love destroying her rival, and the Cockney scraps of Mr Hay Petrie and Miss Beatrix Lehmann, as pathetico-comic as fine artists must always be in such parts…

Anonymous1933, May 27. MISS CLEMENCE DANE'S BRONTE PLAY. The Manchester Guardian (1901-1959), 12.

Miss Clemence Dane’s play about the Brontes, Wild Decembers was produced by Mr Cochran at the Apollo to-night.

Naturally a drama with so much pulmonary pressure must have its dismal side, but the tragic quality, which can ease with the addition of beauty this tale of spiritual misery and physical distress, is soon apparent, and some acting of great strength and tenderness achieves its work of elevating the story beyond its potential level of so many clinical cases and so much domestic rumpus. Perhaps one does not sufficiently feel the oppression of the place and the house. There should be more sense of walls closing in and of the desolation beyond the walls.  The parlour which we saw seemed hardly to be the room in which Wuthering Heights was written. But so far as individual feats of action could peruade us, the persuasion was absolute. Miss Diana Wynyard’s picture of Charlotte was less striking than Miss Beatrix Lehmann’s brilliant bleakness as Emily. But that is the limitation of the dramatic medium. Your homespun characters are always going to suffer in comparison with the exotic and the baroque. There is perpetually this cruel injustice of the theatre. … In the same way Emily while she lives becomes, because of her strangeness and aloofness, more important that Charlotte, who did in life dominate over Emily. Miss Wynyard accordingly has a very hard task to stand up to Miss Lehmann and Mr Williams. Not really until they are dead does the play become hers, and then it is a smaller, less effective play than it was before.

By keeping closely to the facts Miss Dane has handicapped herself in the cause of veracity. There is no theatrical pattern in these lives, and no patter of the obvious kind can be forced upon them. But within the limits of episodic drama the piece has abundant life, and this life the acting richly amplifies. We shall not easily forget the tremendous spiritual assertion of Miss Lehmann’s Emily, the alcoholic tubercular pathos of Mr William’s Branwell, or the engaging selfish old codger that Mr Marcus Batron makes of the Rev. Patrick, incumbent of Haworth. The Belgian interlude is the least impressive. We have already seen Haworth, we have met Emily, we have caught the rolling eye of Branwell. After that the trip to Brussels with Charlotte is something of  a declension. That Yorkshire can so possess us is, after all, a tribute to Miss Dane’s creation of the moorland parsonage, and the players’ ability to make flesh and blood of that sinister and suffering family.

The Stage Aug 31 1933

The Princes  The wandering Jew

… The dramatist rounded off his play uncompromisingly with the harrowing scenes of the betrayal of the learned and generally esteemed doctor in Seville, Matteos Battadios, by the renegade Jew Zapportas, whose son he had healed, and of Matteos’s condemnation by the officials of the most Holy and mercifial inquestion, and his burning at the stake together with the one time harlot, Olalla Quintana [BL], whom, somewhat after the manner of Christ with Mary Magadalene, he had reclaimed from a life of sin. Surrounded by flames the “wandering member of a wandering race” at last finds the rest that he had sought in vain for many centuries, and sees the light of God so long denied him for his impious spitting upon the bearer of the Cross. All these and other thrilling incidents in this dramatisation of the Wandering Jew are again receiving most effective treatment on this revivial of the piece, which started successfully at the Princess on Saturday, August 26….

And that able emotional actress, Miss Beatrix Lehmann, plays Olalla on lines quite different from those formally taken by Miss Dorothy Holmes-Gore.”

Stage Oct 19 1933

At the Embassy

The next production at the Embassy will be the Tudor Wench by Elswyth Thane, a play about Queen Elizabeth as a young girl of fifteen. It is dramatisation of a portion of the book of the same name that has recently been published – the part covered by the first 50 pages of the book. Elizath will be played by miss Beatrix Lehmann (who is being released from the wandering jew for the part)… The production will be by Mr Andre Van Gyseghem. The opening is on Monday, October 23

OUR, L.C., 1933, Oct 23. THE TUDOR BOOM. The Manchester Guardian (1901-1959), 8.

… And at the Embassy on Monday there is to be a play about Queen Elizabeth’s girlhood called the Tudor Wench, in which Miss Beatrix Lehmann will play the part of the Princess at the time when she was exposed to the pursuit of Thomas Seymour, a calamity whose subsequent psychological results were somewhat inventively analysed by My Lytton Strachey.

The Stage Oct 26 1933

The Embassy

The Tudor Wench

On Monday October 23, 1933 was presented here a play in three acts, dramatised from an episode in the book of the same name by Elswyth Thane.

(cast list)

The Tudor wench dramtised by an aspiring young authoress, Elswyth Thane, from an episode of her recently published book of the same name, shows us Good Queen Bes, in her girlhood or young womanhood, in a light which she is seldom seen. The play, … To use Elswyth Thane’s description the play gives us a portrait, with every detail carefully substained of “a vital and a attractive girl, whose nervous system was terribly impaired during the critical adolescent period by the emotional tension and cruel mental strain imposed upon her.” This portrait of a “great and eccentric Queen in the making” was presented vivvidely at the Swiss Cottage House by Miss Beatrix Lehmann, who made no attempt to show us the read hair to which several allusions are made in the dialogue.

Miss Lehmann, however, seemed to get completely into the skin o’the title character, whose complex and at times puzzling nature she set forth with full command of detail and admirable effect… Obviously the chief merit of Eswyth Thane’s play is derived from the drawing of the title role the embodiment of which by Miss Lehmann accounted mainly for the night’s success at the Embassy…

BROWN, I., 1933, Oct 29. The Week's Theatres. The Observer (1901- 2003), 15. ISSN 00297712

The Tudor Wench This is far the most interesting piece that I have seen at the Embassy this autumn, and is a welcome reassurance that Mr Adam is not allowing the quality to fall away. It has its faults, faults commonly incidental to adaptation from novels. There are short scenes which do not achieve self-justification; the little episode on the stair-case, for example (Act II Scene II) is not strong enough for so central a position; it is more like a “shot” in a film. But, after all, what matters is the play’s ability to command and to retain the attention. This story of Princess Elizabeth Tudor’s girlhood does that to the full. It has the additional advantage of offering romantic values, duels, red roses and young hearts aflame, to those who find their rapture in the clash of steel and the falling of symbolic petals. To those of sterner appetite it offers some actual history, the sufferings of Elizabeth in the house of Sir Thomas Seymour who mingled his clumsy and treasonable statecraft with the bedside manner of a “market-merry” farmer, treating his royal ward and guest with a familiarity that might easily breed neurosis. According to Lytton Strachey, Katherine, Seymour’s wife, put Elizabeth out of the house; according to Mis s Thane the princess went of her own descision.

But Elizabeth has already, in this play, experience a true and tender love, a sensation which would naturally make more odious the ribaldries and clumsy caresses of the dashing but loutish Seymour. Her page Ferdinando, a quite worshipper, has offered her roses, adoration, and the service of his well-trained rapier. In that world, Juliet’s world, where youth is ripened at a pace which now seems revolting, such service of the heart and hand could easily and wholly conquer the unhappy girl as she shrank from the bawdy Seymour’s touch and tattle. On the phrase “not indifferent to” the authoress has builded, may be, rather much.  At any rate, calf-love is always good theatre-matter. … Seymour has Ferdinando “bumped off” the river bank, endeavours to inveigle young Bess into a plot against the Lord Protector, his brother Somerset, and is caught embracing the girl. But Elizabeth has too much sense for scatter-brained plots and no appetite for Seymour’s kisses; though still a child she is now beginning to feel her own destiny and dignity. She is a Tudor, queen-to-be; she will away, she will bide her time, she will while yet a schoolgirl, think upon this England now tortured in a sad mis-rule of pillage and of persecution which she will inherit and must heal.

On the playing of the young Elizabeth all depends. Miss Beatrix Lehmann can fashion a fine similitude of what the Princess must have been; more important than her facial likeness is the ability to present the promise of the strength to come. The performance has a quick and vibrant vigour, the decision of a thing, tightened lip, the first thrust of an imperial chin, and the flashing promise of the brain before long to be so quick and cunning on the Crown’s behalf. It misses, with this strength and tautness, something of the pathos in the childish love-affair. But it is, on the whole, a brilliant presentation.  … Ivor Brown.

Anonymous1933, Nov 19. Classified Ad 23 -- No Title. The Observer (1901- 2003), 16. ISSN 00297712.

Tudor Wench  ad with reviews

Beatrix Lehmann in The Tudor Wench by Elswyth Thane

“Watching Miss Lehmann we are persuaded not merely by the facial likeness, which is always striking, but by her general attitude to life that this is the kind of girl Elizabeth must have been – The Times

“It is the sensitive performance of Beatrix Lehmann as the young Elizabeth which gives the production its quality” Daily Telegraph

“The Tudor Wench was successfully produced at the Alhambra Theatre last night. Miss Beatrix Lehmann repeats her brilliant performance as Elizabeth, Princess of England. The difference from the small embassy to the large Alhambra in no way dimmed that brilliance” – the morning post

Elswyth Thane’s the Tudor Wench was well received last night. Although the historical evidence of this episode in the early private life of Elizabeth of England is a bit flimsy  the acting and the Tudor background is convincing enough. Beatrix Lehmann as Elizabeth displays tenderness and romanticism. A really thrilling duel adds to the interest of the play – Daily Mirror

Miss Lehmann’s fine acting. The excellent duel and and Mr Derrick de Marney’s graceful performance deserves as wide an audience as they can get – evening news.

The Stage Nov, 23, 1933

The Tudor wench

On Thursday evening, November 15, 1933, Sir Oswald Stoll revived at this theatre, Elswyth Thane’s play,…(cast)

This play was originally produced at the Embassy Theatre on October 23 last, and reviewed in the Stage of October 26, when the full cast was given. The only change in it at the Alhambra is the substitution of Mr Clarence Bigg for Mr Bernard Lee in the small part of Sir John Harington.

It was brave to take the play from the little Embassy to the vast spaces of the Alhambra, where inevitably its weaknesses appear more clearly. As a picture the production is still charming. The scenes in Chelsea, in which Henry VIII’s famous daughter, Elizabeth, is shown in her girlhood, have a pleasantly Tudor look, and the costumes, the lighting and the very pleasant incidental music all assist the illusion.

Inevitably, however, the dramatic and other weaknesses of the play appeared more clearly here than they did in the small play house in Hampstead. One reason, no doubt, is that several of the players spoke too rapidly and indistinctly for the auditorium in Leicester Square. The most articulate member of the cast last Thursday evening was Mr Herbert Lomas, every word of whose small part of the old solider, Wickham made itself felt every where…

Miss Beatrix Lehmann’s performance as the young Princess again showed all the energy which distinguished it at the Embassy; but too often a the Alhambra she allowed herself to express deep emotion by the not very expressive trick of standing silent, immovable, and staring hard into vacancy. Obviously, however, the part as written would be a trying one for any actress. The girl’s infatuation for her page, carried in the lengths here shown, is sufficiently surprising. Her acceptance, after the young man’s murder, of the kisses of Sir Thomas Seymour, who, as she rightly suspected had been the instigator of the youth’s death, is even less credible. And the speech in her concluding scene, in which, anticipating herself as Queen of England, she cries: “Spain, France, The Holy Roman Empire – let them all come!” has as comic a modern ring to-day that even another Sarah Siddons would probably be unable to draw much more than a smile for it. The fencing match between the page and Sir Thomas was well managed by Mr Derrick de Marney and Mr John Laurie and the small part of a Tudor murderer was realistically rendered by Mr Frederick Piper.