‘This Unhappy Nation’: War on the Stage in 1914

Abstract

According to The Era in August 1914, recent wars involving the British army had been ‘so comparatively small and far away from us that it was possible to treat them effectively as entertainments of the stage’. This hardly applied to the present conflict and, in any case, the appalling actions of the invading German army had made it difficult to combine war and amusement. For dramatists in Britain now, ‘The great difficulty in writing a war play’ was ‘to avoid boastfulness and brag’ while managing ‘to preserve a tone of quiet confidence and reliance’.¹ A few weeks later, The Stage outlined what it believed audiences were looking for in a war-time theatre: ‘One may be sure that the public does not want anything that gives it furiously to think. It does not want the serious play.’ Rather, the public wished ‘to be taken out of itself’, through entertainment which was ‘stirring […] patriotic, romantic, or melodramatic’. Certainly, it was likely to shun anything ‘that adds at all to the burden of sadness that the War brings into the midst of us’.² For the theatre industry, meanwhile. the fear was that audiences would vanish, finding the entertainment on offer to be unnecessary or distasteful; and perhaps even asking whether those still involved in creating it might not be better occupied in active service — especially as The Era itself acknowledged that ‘[t]he actor ought to make a smart soldier’, being ‘alert, intelligent, habitually obedient, and essentially energetic’.³