The Man Who Stayed At Home

Examiner of Plays' Summary:

A sort of tabloid burlesque of the play at the Royalty, parodying and exaggerating some of the incidents in it, with the substitution of a hunger motive - the boarders being starved and 'Brent' intercepting sausages - for the original spy plot. Average fooling, Recommended for license. G. S. Street

Researcher's Summary:

The Stage, 5 August 1915, announced, ‘On Monday [9 August] Mr. Alfred Butt will introduce into [the revue] The Passing Show at the Palace, two burlesques of the most uncompromising kind. One, entitled The Man Who Stayed at Home, is by Frederic Norton and George Bull, and is designed to put upon the plot of the highly successful piece at the Royalty an entirely new, if not altogether plausible, complexion. In this will appear Nelson Keys, Arthur Playfair, Gwendoline Brogden and Wish Wynne, who will be supported by other members of the Palace company. The other novelty … Henry, Him of Eight, was one of the successes of the recent Actors’ Orphanage Garden Party’. Both new pieces were also mentioned in notices in The People (8 August 1915) and The Globe (9 August 1915) and in advertisements for The Passing Shows in the Daily Mirror and the Westminster Gazette (9 August 1915). However, a burlesque of The Man Who Stayed at Home does not seem to have materialised. Henry, Him of Eight was mentioned in advertisements for the revue in the Daily Mirror and the Westminster Gazette on 10 August 1915 and in later newspaper advertisements, but a burlesque of The Man Who Stayed at Home was not. Henry, Him of Eight was reviewed in the Western Mail (11 August 1915), the Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser (12 August 1915), the Graphic (14 August 1915), The People (15 August 1915), and the Harrow Observer (20 August 1915), but a burlesque of The Man Who Stayed at Home was not mentioned. A reviewer in the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 21 August 1915, reported that the previous week he had gone to the Palace Theatre 'with the promise of two new things'. He saw Henry, Him of Eight but the other item 'was not ready and so could not be served up'. The Passing Shows closed at the Palace Theatre on 28 August 1915. It then went on a provincial tour. Research into the performance history of the three-act play The Man Who Stayed at Home did not identify any reference to a burlesque version of it.