Remembering the War on the British Stage: From Resistance to Reconstruction

One week after the armistice, in an article entitled “Peace and the Theatre: The Outlook for the Future”, a columnist for The Times confidently predicted that “one immediate result of the armistice will undoubtedly be the disappearance of the ‘war play’”, adding dismissively that “few productions of this kind will be remembered”. 1Over the next ten years, the declining interest in war-themed plays was a repeated theme in critical commentaries on theatre. “As the war recedes into the past, the less interest do people take in war plays”, reported the Daily Herald in 1920, whilst in 1923 the Gloucester Citizen reflected on the “prejudice attached to plays which bring in the war”.2 In October 1928 The Scotsman went so far as to declare that J. M. Barrie’s, The Old Lady Shows Her Medals, then being performed at the Lyceum, Edinburgh, “must be one of the very few literary or dramatic works of art to survive the war period […] Most war plays have been left high and dry by the receding tide”.3 Alongside contemporary accounts of the disappearance of wartime plays, histories of British theatre also suggest that the decade following the armistice saw the war, and its consequences, being rejected as a theme for new plays. “The war seems to have passed across the stage making little impact outside a handful of plays”, concluded Michael Woolfe in 1993, whilst more recently Maggie Gale has argued that 1920s playwrights and audiences seemed “to shy away from the ‘war’ itself as a setting”, with dramatic analyses of the effects and consequences of the conflict becoming common only in the 1930s.4