St James's Theatre, London

‘Sir George Alexander has chosen Wednesday evening, May 19, for the production, at the St. James’s, of The Day Before the Day. In a note by the author, he states: - “Before the War I should have called this piece a melodrama with reference to its probability; I now call it a drama"' (The Stage, 6 May 1915). ‘The war is at last beginning to invade the theatre. Sir George Alexander announces a new play at the St. James’s Theatre entitled, “The Day Before the Day,” and I notice that Mr. Martin Harvey has got a new war play in preparation. I suppose this sort of thing is inevitable. But when I go to the theatre I like to be able to forget the war for two or three hours – don’t you?’ (Daily Citizen (Manchester), 7 May 1915). ‘London News. London, Wednesday night … This evening Sir George Alexander produced a play which promises to be successful. It is a full-blooded war melodrama, called “The Day Before the Day,” which seems a little out of place at the St James’s ... Mr Chester Bailey Fernald, the author, did not mince matters or make any pretence at treating his subject seriously. His work is very ingenious and full of thrills, the dialogue is often effective, and it really does not matter a bit if the logic of the characters is the logic of the stage, and not of real life. A capital performance was given, particularly by some of the obnoxious characters ... The reception was enthusiastic’ (The Scotsman, 20 May 1915). ‘The applause at the end of the new play at the St. James’s suggests that “The Day Before The Day” will have a real success, and its chances will be improved when the blue pen has been used and the acting screwed up a little tighter. One would like to see a play more worthy of its author, Mr. C. B. Fernald … In “The Day Before The Day” the author runs no risks. The public is supposed to want melodramas about the war, and so the dramatist gives them one hot and strong; indeed one might use the classical phrase “two-pence coloured.” Fortunately, though the play begins indifferently, it soon warms up and becomes a very blood-curdling, clever affair, with novel stage tricks and contrivances. To tell the story is quite beyond my power – and my duty, too, I think. There were bits that I did not quite understand, or, to be more accurate, passages where I failed to see what the characters were driving at; but this really did not matter ... We had an excellent performance of this ingenious and entertaining play, for in its unpretentious way it was quite entertaining, as are all really clever melodramas ... although [the audience] got chilled occasionally, by the length of the scenes, there is no doubt that it enjoyed the piece greatly’ (Westminster Gazette, 20 May 1915). ‘Sir George Alexander has given us at James’ Theatre a new drama about the war. It is by Mr Fernald, and is styled “The Day Before the Day,” which sufficiently indicates that its theme is a possible invasion of these shores. The play has the merit that, while in some respects it is serious, the satire worked round the miscreant Germans, and the plentiful use of theatrical tricks, makes it for the most of the time amusing' (Aberdeen Press and Journal, 20 May 1915' similarly the Dublin Daily Express and the Hull Daily Mail of the same date). 'There is only one way to take “The Day Before The Day.” It is a good joke, and when last night s audience at the St. James’ Theatre was not marvelling at Mr. Lyn Harding’s acrobatic feats which the “Handcuff King” [that is, Harry Houdini] might be proud of, they were laughing heartily at all the mock seriousness. The only wonder was that so many clever and capable players should have been engaged by Sir G. Alexander to present such banal melodrama. But then, these are war times, and you never know why things are as they are’ (The Globe, 20 May 1915). 'One of the most interesting things about the new spy play at the St. James’s Theatre was the way the audience took it. For the most part they took it as a joke, grim and real as some of the scenes were; but a few people took it seriously, and some people walking just behind me as we came out were evidently prejudiced. Said the portly lady to her portly escort, “It vas fery bat taste.” But then, I fear they were of Teutonic origin. Still, I never cease to marvel how our British audiences can sit through these war plays with evident enjoyment and laugh at or thrilled at the make believe on the stage of what may at any moment become a ghastly reality in these days. On Wednesday night, for instance, we applauded light-heartedly and happily the dramatic trapping and arrest of the three dangerous spies of the piece ... We had been laughing at their “comic” Teutonisms and hatred all through the play. A few hours after the curtain fell upon their clever performance Herr Kuepferle, a real German officer with real Teutonisms and filled with real hate for England, hanged himself in his cell at Brixton Gaol, half an hour’s taxicab ride away. We are a strange people’ (Daily Mirror, 21 May 1915). ‘Apart from a kind of Houdini exhibition on the part of Mr. Lyn Harding in freeing himself from fetters and manacles, which, clever as it was, would have been more in place on the stage of the Oxford Music Hall than on that of the St. James’s Theatre, there was nothing to distinguish Sir George Alexander’s latest production from an average melodrama at a third-rate Surreyside place of entertainment. The play bristled with sensational improbabilities, and was not even distinguished by the polished dialogue which one associates with the St. James’s. Its construction is loose and its characterisation colourless ... The actors do all that is possible with a very ungrateful task ... [They] all do their utmost to disguise the fact that their parts are altogether unworthy of their great abilities’ (Sporting Times, 22 May 1915). ‘There is no reason why we should not have good melodrama at the St. James’s, and if the new piece is not a very remarkable example of its kind it has one or two thrilling moments which prove that Mr. C. B. Fernald has in him the stuff of which writers of melodrama are made ... while there is some excitement and good fun in “The Day Before the Day,” there is more than once fun in the wrong place, which means that the author failed to convince his audience of the melodrama realities ... “The Day Before the Day” is nothing if not a war and spy play. As such it may win success’ (The People, 23 May 1915). ‘What a change from [Lady Gregory’s new drama] Shanwalla to The Day Before the Day at the St. James’s - from sincerity and simplicity to complexity and artificiality. It is disappointing to see so clever a man as Mr. Chester Bailey Fernald doing such undistinguished work. Still, he does it very cleverly. Cutting is needed, particularly in the scenes with the heroine; here and there are found needless repetitions, and the characters ought not to put so heavy a strain on their hip-pockets by constant production of revolvers or automatics never fired. However, the audience enjoyed the drama immensely. It was in the mood for hateful pictures of treacherous naturalised Germans, and their awful machinations on the East Coast; the hymns of hate and bloody threats; and the crushful downfall of the Teutons, and preservation of good old England. An excellent recruiting piece, I should think, and likely to go round the provinces - but I hope it will be a little simplified and straightened out before a country campaign; for fully to understand it demands as much brain-work as is needed for “the intellectual drama”' (The Sketch, 26 May 1915). ‘The play is somewhat disjointed … [It] is decidedly amusing, and contains few strong situations, but its plot is really altogether “impossible”’ (Gloucester Citizen, 26 May 1915). The Stage, 27 May 1915, listed the cast as follows: Captain Guy Howison … Mr. Lyn Harding Sec. Lieut. Robert Cresfield … Mr. Owen Nares Capt. Richard Buckingham … Mr. Hesketh Pearson Col. Wallingford … Mr. Dawson Milward Draper … Mr. Alfred Harris Führman Max Von Ardel … Mr. Gerald Lawrence Karl Pulitzer … Mr. Fredrick Ross Adolf Schindler … Mr. A. B. Imeson Ludwig Grunau … Mr. Nigel Playfair Herr Professor Willy Effenbach … Mr. Edmund Gwenn Frieda Grunau … Miss Clare Greet Ruthers … Miss Stella Rho Lady Lulliby … Miss Elizabeth Chesney Mona Cresfield … Miss Stella Mervyn Campbell Victoria Buckingham … Miss Grace Lane The Stage continued its review as follows: 'A serio-comic about the War may make its appeal to certain sections of the public It may amuse and excite persons who are not imaginative, or persons who are so confident about the tremendous issues as to see nothing incongruous in turning them, in anticipation, to the traffic of melodrama and travesty. The Day Before the Day runs a good deal upon the lines of The Man Who Stayed at Home, but whereas the authors of the latter piece wisely concerned themselves with a comparatively small matter of spying Mr. C. B. Fernald is content with nothing less than the plans of the Germans for the invasion and subjugation of England. Even if handled as well as it could be, we do not think that this subject would be suitable for stage treatment at the present moment. Mr. Fernald gives it a treatment of which it is difficult to make either head or tail. The first act, so whimsically is it written, would pass as an excellent burlesque of spy melodramatics ... But Mr. Fernald’s aim, judging from the subsequent acts of his play, is not burlesque, though he contrives to be funny enough at times, both intentionally and unintentionally. He indulges in all sorts of melodramatic happenings ... A love interest may be according to all the rules of melodrama, but what is one to say to it with the fate of England, as here represented or postulated, trembling in the balance? The plot of The Day Before the Day is too involved for description or even for full understanding, but it is rather upon incidents than upon plot that reliance is placed ... The play was received on the first night in an amused, half-jesting spirit' (The Stage, 27 May 1915; and similarly on 9 December 1915). 'This is the play ... of which a writer wrote that it was too ridiculous to criticise seriously, and that could it be taken seriously the audience would wreck the theatre. After reading these sentences from this particular writer’s review I went to the St. James’ expecting to find a truly ridiculous and piffling play. And to some extent my expectations were realised. Mr. Fernald styles his play a drama. I think he probably set out with a very good serious idea, which, if carried out, would have made the play a serious and perhaps stirring addition to war-time drama. Unfortunately, the main idea is permitted to play second to a theme of such ordinary melodramatic quality that the whole thing develops into sheer melodrama ... As melodrama, then, “The Day Before the Day” would stand a chance of success. But it fails in the pose I feel sure its author intended, because only, perhaps, a few members of an audience will realise the serious drama behind the melodramatic embellishments. One may exaggerate the danger of German spies in our midst. Who knows? Who can tell until too late? But events have too often and too conclusively proved that the German spy system is a real danger, and that it does exist here in our very midst ... It is the absolute duty of those at home to safeguard our sons, husbands, and sweethearts by seeing to it that the spy danger is removed as far as possible. We insist. These thoughts reframed themselves in my mind while watching Mr. Fernald’s play. Also another feeling obtruded its unpleasantness into my mental consciousness: a feeling of shame, of blushing, red-hot shame. Mr. Fernald’s play showed in a small and perhaps melodramatic way the completeness of German preparation ... after nine months of war ... Germany has had no shortage, has shown no sign of trouble. And I thought of the things we are hearing daily - shortage of men, shortage of ammunition, trouble at the Admiralty, grave Governmental crises, tramway strikes, dockers’ strikes, etc., etc., etc. Ashamed - yes, positively ashamed that our brave men should be facing hell for a country which refuses to see that the Government does its duty, that war business is efficiently organised, that strikes and shortages and quarrels do not take place ... It is the people’s sorrow, the people’s calamity. And the people are playing tennis - ye gods! they are even playing tennis!’ (Clarion, 28 May 1915). ‘A Playwright can be too clever at his job; can be so clever as not to take his own play seriously. That seems to be what is wrong with Mr. C. B. Fernald’s stage-story about spies, “The Day Before the Day”; he wavers constantly between burlesque and melodrama ... you can never be sure whether Mr. Fernald is not laughing at our dread of Teutonic espionage, and he never lets his patriots be patriotic in a very convincing way. So it is probably to little purpose that Sir George Alexander has engaged a splendid cast for the production ... will their efforts avail?’ (Illustrated London News, 29 May 1915). ‘There was a time when Mr. C. B. Fernald’s new play at the St. James’s would have been taken as a burlesque melodrama without qualification, say any time before August, 1914. So taken it would have been highly entertaining ... Mr. Fernald seemed clearly to be having his little joke at the expense of spy dramas in general, and, to do him justice, it would have been quite a good joke if we had all been quite sure that it was not meant to be serious. I voted for the joke theory, and consequently enjoyed myself; others appear to have voted for the serious theory, and consequently set the whole thing down as rubbish. And the joke then continued, but the problem became more difficult and while still enjoying myself I wavered ... Mr. Fernald had found a subject which was certainly no matter for burlesque and was better not treated, even seriously, upon the stage at all ... it was a play which it would have been easier and wiser not to write but at the same time it is only fair to state that it is a well-written, ingenious, and exciting melodrama' (Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 29 May 1915). ‘If the playhouse cannot aid us to carry on the grim business of battle it has no right to keep open. Now it may do this by diverting us with laughter, or by helping us to recuperate in other ways. But Mr. C. B. Fernald’s play, “The Day Before the Day,” at the St. James’s, simply presents (hypothetically) the war crisis on lines that are not helpful ... The whole affair is – chilling’ (The Graphic, 29 May 1915). 'It was all like a drama played at the Elephant and Castle - a spy drama with certain pretensions, not, however, pretentious enough to be really funny, but far too twopence coloured to be really thrilling. But the acting saved it. The play and the characters would have appeared absurd had not the actors by their art contrived to put a semblance of reality into those sawdust images of ferocious mien ... The Day Before the Day is a poor play well acted. With a few more high falutin’ heroics it ought to go down well with holiday audiences. But at the St. James’s … well, these are strange times. You never can tell. It certainly gives you plenty of stage thrills’ (The Tatler, 2 June 1915). ‘Saturday [5 June 1915] saw the last of “The Day before the Day” at the St. James’s Theatre' (The Globe, Monday 7 June 1915). ‘The production of a war play is a perilous business at the present time. Some quite good plays with a war flavour have been produced, only to fall like leaves before an autumn frost. The war is too near us to be staged in the way these plays have been presented to us. There was Mr. C. B. Fernald’s war drama at the St. James’s. There were two scenes in it which at any other time would have secured a long run ... A galaxy of stars did their utmost but for all that the play has passed away’ (The Sphere, 26 June 1915). ‘Actual war plays have proved somewhat of a drug in the market throughout the year, which need surprise no one … “The Day Before the Day,” by Mr. Chester Bailey Fernald … was another war play which failed to attract’ (Nottingham Evening Post, 1 January 1916). ‘C. B. Fernald’s “The Day Before the Day,” produced by Sir George Alexander at the St. James’s, ... failed entirely to suit the mood of the theatre-goer, and was quickly relegated to the list of the unsuccessful efforts [at plays inspired directly by the war]’ (The People, 2 January 1916).

Performed as part of a charity matinee in aid of the Royal Free Hospital Appeal for Infant Welfare Work, arranged by Sir George Alexander, and performed in the presence of Her Majesty the Queen. The Royal Free Hospital was in Grey's Inn Road and included a School of Medicine for Women, preparing doctors, with all students of the hospital being women.

‘To-day her Majesty the Queen was present at the big matinée at the St. James's Theatre in aid of the Royal Free Hospital appeal for infant welfare work, which has the support of practically every well-known woman in society. This matinée was more interesting than any that had gone before, as Sir George Alexander produced a new play, entitled “Good Gods,” and appeared in the same. Mr. Gerald du Maurier and Miss Mabel Russell also appeared in a new sketch entitled “Bit of a Lad,” by A. Neil Lyons; while Miss Irene Vanbrugh, Mr. Dion Boucicault, Miss Gladys Cooper, and Mr. Charles Hawtrey all took part in the programme’. Pall Mall Gazette, 2 March 1917. ‘Honoured by the presence of the Queen, Princess Mary, and Princess Arthur of Connaught, a matinée arranged by Sir George Alexander in aid of the Royal Free Hospital Appeal for Infant Welfare Work brought a large crown of fashionable folk and lovers of things theatrical to the St James’s Theatre last Friday afternoon. There were five one-act plays on the programme, two of them performed for the first time … “A Bit of a Lad”. Duologue by A. Neil Lyons … was a perfectly delightful little sketch, just a conversation between a high-spirited cockney girl, serving behind the counter in a small shop of all sorts in Paddington, and a boy in khaki, home on leave, one who before the war had written “poems and essays and things,” and has been asked by pals in the B.E.F. to look up Hookey [that is, Hookey Walker, the shop girl] and hand her some souvenirs. The lad is shy and not a little diffident. Pretty, lively Hookey is used to vigorous courtship, and takes the lad’s courtesy as a screaming joke. Each is a type unknown to the other, but they discover mutual attraction, and before setting out for the Corner House and “Three Cheers” (Hookey’s ideal of a tip-top evening) when she lifts her saucy face to his, the lad responds fervently – twice! It is enough to write that Miss Mabel Russell was Hookey and Mr. Gerald du Maurier was the Lad, to know that Mr. Lyons’s sketch – which might be taken from life – was interpreted to perfection’. The Era, 7 March 1917.

‘Mr. Henry Arthur Jones describes his new play, “The Pacifists” … as a parable in a farce. The parable is quite obvious, and, to be frank, I found the play and those pacific citizens of Market Pewbury only little less wearisome than that insignificant body of pacifists who occupy so much of the time of the House of Commons … Mr. Jones forgets that the few pacifists amongst us do not number a tribe’ (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 5 September 1917; similarly the Aberdeen Press and Journal, 5 September 1917). ‘After a long silence, Mr Henry Arthur Jones was heard again this evening at the St James’s Theatre. The result was disappointing … The moral of it is too obvious, and even without the moral it would be but uninteresting matter for an evening’s entertainment. It is all repetition of rather heavy humour, with long passages in which Miss Ellis Jeffreys ... has to give hilarious descriptions of events which are happening without … it was a disappointing evening, and not the sort of thing we-were accustomed to get in the old days from Mr. H. A. Jones’ (The Scotsman, 5 September 1917). ‘The parable is trite, and the farce is crude … “The Pacifists” is too full of talk, with too little of the old Jonesian wit’ (Globe, 5 September 1917). ‘One lesson from this [is that] if fighting is to be done it must not be vicarious, for a professional deliverer is as bad as a professional bully. Is that Mr. Jones’s lesson? It is, at any rate, told in a crude style of farce, akin, in manner, to an electioneering poster. By indulging in his love of exaggeration Mr. Jones has missed the truth of a genuine parable … The farce was received with considerable applause, and the audience was thoroughly amused’ (Daily News (London), 5 September 1917). ‘I have seldom observed a farce with a more complete solemnity … It was not merely solemnity. It was a pained discomfort at the realisation that Mr. Jones could put his name to anything so monotonously crude … when anything happened it happened “off “ - the defeat of the butcher by an imported pugilist, and his ducking in the pond. These things Miss Ellis Jeffreys had to describe with much hilarity and great vivacity. That is a difficult thing to do. When a thing is not funny, it is not improved by the teller of it insisting that it is and being almost unable to describe it for laughter ... merely as a farce it was mournful. It was so bald and uninspired … If Mr. Jones had not been carried so irresistibly away by his feelings he might have had time to think of his art. But in the castigation of evil-doers he always was a little heavy-handed (Westminster Gazette, 6 September 1917). ‘It is a thoughtful as well as a merry play, abounding in excellent characterisation, and was received with great favour’ (Northern Whig, 6 September 1917). ‘Pacifists may be all that Mr. Jones makes them out to be, but the point is that he fails to make them out to be living beings. They are just dummy figures, which he pelts with clods of satire in the style of a heavy-handed leading article’ (Manchester Guardian quoted in Labour Leader, 6 September 1917). ‘The versatile author of so many clever comedies has often done better work than in what is but a crude farce, in spite of the pretentiousness of its trimmings and its laboured and lengthy argumentation. There is little action proper except at the ends of acts two and three, and the best portions of it are the narratives … Pure extravagance, of course, is the whole coal-cellar business, nor, unless one agrees that two blacks make a white, can one appreciate the repeated ducking of Fergusson and his myrmidons in the canal by the pugilist and his scratch band got together by Belcher’ (The Stage, 6 September 1917). ‘“The Pacifists" ... is funny, but not funny enough. It is hardly likely, therefore, to run for any length of time. The author’s pacifist types do not really exist; consequently we are unable to laugh at their discomfiture with the necessary satisfaction … Jones’s new piece is a misfire as a parable. It is more successful as a simple farce. Try to forget that it is a play with a purpose; accept the characters as stage figments, and you will enjoy some hearty laughs’ (Sporting Times, 8 September 1917). ‘Fergusson does exactly as he likes until Peebody’s uncle enlists a local pugilist, with whose help Fergusson is thrown in the canal, but not until he had commandeered buxom Mrs. Peebody, whom he wellnigh persuades to spend a week at the seaside. The deliverer of Mrs. Peebody is as bad as the butcher, and also commandeers that lady’ (Gloucester Citizen, 8 September 1917). ‘It may be said that [Jones] is here too fond of the verbal quip, too anxious to make his point more by the written word than the eloquence of action. And, course, the drama is, or should be, the thing. But when all is said, “The Pacifists” is a characteristic, not to say notable, effort, and, thanks to admirable acting, gained a very pronounced first night success, with cheers for everyone and a speech from the author' (The People, 9 September 1917). ‘Mr. Henry Arthur Jones makes capital fun out of his pacifist parable. It may be obvious, but it is certainly plausible to make his village Kaiser appear in the rôle of a truculent butcher. Some of us got a little bored by the pacifist speeches. They were rather too true to life. They reminded me of leading articles in certain daily newspapers after we have suffered from an air raid’ (Sunday Mirror, 9 September 1917). ‘The audience laughed frequently, showing amusement at many of the excellent lines written in biting satire’ (The Era, 12 September 1917). ‘It really is a most amusing affair, somewhat farcical in tone, yet with an undercurrent of truth which strikes home the more forcibly because it strikes with laughter … the whole play is full of most entertaining situations. The Pacifists is a brilliant farce' (The Tatler, 12 September 1917). ‘I think it is not too much to say that in the general opinion of the St. James’ audience this play was tedious. Tedious and dull beyond hope of redemption. For three acts it dragged along until one felt inclined to give the poor thing a lift or a push to help it on its wearisome way. True, occasional ripples of laughter throughout the theatre proved that Mr. Jones has not entirely lost his hold on an audience. Indeed, had “The Pacifists” been produced, say, two years ago, and had it been treated more briskly, there might have been a chance. To-day these sneers and jeers at the pacifists among us seem stale. We have heard them all before, and Mr. Jones has failed to say anything new or startling … if he sought merely to amuse - well, not even here has he succeeded. There is the glimmering of an amusing idea, but somehow it seems scarcely fitting to make laughs out of such a serious thing at such a serious time.’ (Clarion, 14 September 1917). ‘‘“The Pacifist” comes off to-night, I note with regret, for it had its points. The great fault was that all the action took place “off “ and all the talk “on.” One would have thought a playsmith of Mr. Jones’ experience would have known better. The comedy acting could not have been improved' (Daily Mirror, 14 September 1917). ‘‘Parable and farce ... do not make too good a blend: the blend simply means that you have your moral hammered and hammered home till you are weary of it, and your fun thinned down because, in this instance of the combination at all events, too much of the action of the story is reported and does not take place under your eyes … here is hardly material for a three-act farce, and the parabolism gets rather obscure when the married heroine transfers her affections from the bully of the town to the pugilist who thrashes the bully' (Illustrated London News, 15 September 1917). ‘we … came to see the unworthy routed and remained to yawn; wondering what on earth had come over Mr. Jones, who has been so light and witty in his time, that he should write anything so monotonous and pointless and commonplace as this. It was strange. I can only attribute it to excess of patriotic fervour, to allowing the moral to overwhelm the play. This Market Pewbury, with its grotesque parodies of provincial Nonconformity and Christian humility, was too crude to be satire and too uneventful to be even moderately entertaining farce’ (Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 15 September 1917). ‘The author is so very much in earnest that in his “Parable in a Farce” he has simply used a sledge-hammer when a subtle method would have been far more effective. As an anti-war propaganda play Mr H. A. Jones may be said to have scored a popular success. Compressed into two short acts, what a run it would have on the variety stage, with its broad method of treatment and rough and tumble fun! … . In spite of a few “voices” from the gallery the play had a good reception’ (The Queen, 15 September 1917). ‘The withdrawal of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones’s Play “The Pacifists” after a week’s run is a warning to dramatists. There are several morals to be drawn from it. One is that the public does not go to the theatre to hear lectures on the war, and still less does it want five-act gibes at a small and intrinsically unimportant coterie … There are, of course, possibilities of delightful satire in some of the pacifist sects, but it is necessary to view them more in amusement than in anger. One felt with Mr. Jones’s play that it was righteous indignation masquerading as amusement’ (Leicester Daily Post, 17 September 1917). ‘Mr. Jones aimed, as he contended, at a parable in a farce, apparently typifying German autocracy in a butcher and English pacifism in his old bête noire the nonconformist conscience, with a prize-fighter as the god out of the machine to punish the wrongdoer. This grotesque and trivial perversion naturally pleased nobody, and while the construction was not without skilful contrivance in its own way, “The Pacifists” was a melancholy example of how not to write a war play’ (The Stage, 13 December 1917).