Torture, murder and bestial lust: German villains on the British stage in 1915

In early October 1914 Frederick K. Melville’s One Way of War was premiered at the Brixton Theatre. Depicting German soldiers threatening a young mother with rape, and bayoneting her son, it was a play which was noteworthy, as the Examiner of Plays, G. S. Street noted, for being ‘the first we have had dealing with German outrages on women and children’ (BL Add MS 66078R). It was not however to the last and over the next year plays including Leonard F. Durell’s Kultur (Manchester, December 1914), J. Millane and Clare Shirley’s War and a Woman (Salford, January 1915) and Dorothy Mullord’s In the Hands of the Hun (Willesden, April 1915) drew on contemporary stories of German atrocities to create thrilling and entertaining dramatic productions.

This tension between the excitement elicited by the theatrical German villains of these plays and the real-life horrors which they concurrently denoted is the focus of this paper. Considered as fiction, these plays were a living embodiment of the propaganda atrocity stories circulating in the media, and served a similar purpose: to cultivate the necessary wartime emotions needed to get people to participate in violence. Yet in performance the most thrilling and interesting moments of these plays were those which featured the German villains at their most menacing. Indeed these villains’ most despicable characteristics were often those which brought the greatest spectatorial pleasure. Considered as live performance therefore the superficial function of these fictional German villains was complicated. Drawing on both propaganda and melodramatic theory to consider the multiple and often conflicting responses made available by German stage villains, I will suggest however that this complexity did not negate but may have actually enhanced the potential of the theatre to propagandise its audiences.