Great War Theatre

Performances at this Theatre

Date Script Type
21 Oct 1920 The Foundations Professional
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Director: Norman Macdermott. Also performed "The Little Man", by John Galsworthy. "The Stage", 28 October 1920.
21 Oct 1920 The Little Man Professional
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Performed alongside "The Foundations" also by John Galsworthy. "The Stage", 28 October 1920
4 Nov 1920 The Foundations Professional
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Performed alongside the "The Little Man" also by John Galsworthy for 6 nights plus a matinee on Saturday. "Hendon and Finchley Times, 29 October 1920.
4 Nov 1920 The Little Man Professional
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Performed by the Everyman Company alongside "The Foundations" also by John Galsworthy. "Hendon and Finchley Times", 29 October 1920
14 Mar 1921 The Shewing up of Blanco Posnet Professional
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First public production in London, by Norman Macdermott, in repertory; performed with Shaw’s ‘How He Lied To Her Husband’ and ‘The Dark Lady of the Sonnets’ (Mander & Mitchenson, pp. 124, 292). The cast was: Babsy, Marjorie Gabain; Lottie, Helen Boyce; Hannah, Edith Harley; Jessie, Mimosa Valentine; Emma, Audrey Cameron; Elder Daniels, Harold Scott; Blanco Posnet, Brember Wills; Strapper Kemp, Leslie J. Banks; Feemy Evans, Muriel Pratt; Sherriff Kemp, Felix Aylmer, Foreman of Jury, George Hayes; Nestor, a Juryman, Douglas Jefferies; The Woman, Hazel Jones; Waggoner Jo, Robert Craig. ‘Mr. Shaw’s “Blanco Posnet” is one of those plays formerly censored which leave one wondering why on earth they were ever banned. The triple bill confirmed me in a feeling that Shaw is essentially a hundred yards man. His long plays get tedious towards the end, but curtain raisers like “How He Lied to Her Husband” are a pure joy from start to finish’ (Derby Daily Telegraph, 15 March 1921). 'What an extraordinary achievement it is! Mr. Shaw has stolen from Lyceum melodrama and the cinema all the familiar characters of the romantic Wild West. There is the traditional group of tough, rough, gruff cowboys, the traditional Sheriff, the traditional Bad Man and the traditional Bad Girl of the township saloon. (You will meet them all in “The Savage and the Woman.”) He has made his puppets dance, and the result is, not a W. S. Hart film, but an absorbing drama of the soul. “Blanco Posnet” is a play in which religion is truthfully represented as the thrillingly exciting emotion that it really is, a play in which good and evil, so uninspiring as mere ideas, are brought back to their strange emotional origins. How this study of religious conversion ever came to be censored is wholly incomprehensible. There is nothing in it that ought to offend the most rural of deans, much less a Lord Chamberlain. The play teaches what all the founders of religions have taught - that religion and morality are of little value unless they spring from the heart. It may be that the censors objected to Blanco’s remarks about the craftiness of God, his pertinacious slyness in running after and seizing his own. If that is so, then they should also have censored every religious poet from the author of the Psalms to Francis Thompson. But it is foolish to waste time in trying to find intelligent motives in the minds of the censors of plays' (Westminster Gazette, 15 March 1921). 'The main interest, however, was in the production of “The Showing Up of Blanco Posnet” for the first time in public. After it was over, the first reflection of most people was to wonder why it had ever been censored. As a play it is crude melodrama of the Wild West type; but the author puts into the mouths of his characters certain opinions on the Divine purpose which may easily have provoked the ban of the Censor; or perhaps it may have been the action and language of an unusually pronounced type of prostitute. However that may be, no one seemed to mind last night, and the play was received with complete satisfaction' (Pall Mall Gazette, 15 March 1921). '“The Showing Up of Blanco Posnet” is an amusing, ridiculous torrential piece of Wild West melodrama, in which Shaw becomes as sentimental as his bitterest opponents. It might as well be called “The Showing Up of Bernard Shaw”’ (Sunday Mirror, 20 March 1921). 'This little play gives us a sermonising Mr. Shaw, employing the unusual medium of crude melodrama, in a Wild West setting with all the conventional characters of the American film – the bold bad sentimental cowboy, the painted lady of the wilds, the string silent sheriff, and the rest of them. But into this unpromising clay the author has infused the life of his brilliant dialogue, and a primitive, passionate religious feeling which carries conviction. The Everyman production was cramped by the smallness of the stage, and there was a tendency to overact which robbed it of its full effectiveness' (Truth, 23 March 1921). 'It is the Salvation Army equivalent of universal experience, and some of Blanco’s language might heard uttered by a convert in a Salvation Army barracks. It the same theme lifted to a poetic plane that Francis Thompson immortalised in “The Hound of Heaven.” Shaw’s character is a cowboy, and expresses himself in Wild West language. There was real feeling about Miss Craig’s production; a scene of crudeness and rudimentary humanity was finely conveyed, and some of the rough-and-tumble scrambling in Air court [sic] were perfectly stage-managed' (The Era, 23 March 1921). 'The Triple Bill, which comes to an end this week, is not one of the most satisfactory ventures of the season. For an evening’s entertainment one Shaw is better than three Shaws. Mr. Shaw’s evolutions in making a play are so simple and so little varied that though quite amusing and not too conspicuous if spread over a three-act play, they become a little tedious if repeated three times. The evolutions are, of course, the somersault and the sermon. One can keep one’s head if the somersault is performed slowly, once in an evening. But when it is done three times in succession, one feels at first giddy, then slightly sick. This is what happens in the Triple Bill ... Added to the somersault, in two of these plays there is the equally familiar sermon. “The Dark Lady” ends with a very Shavian and rather irritating sermon on the necessity for a national theatre, and “Blanco Posnet” with a very curious lecture on morality ... of course, the chief feature of the evening’s entertainment was “The showing up of Blanco Posnet,” which, like the wine in the parable, was kept till the last. It did not turn out to be the best wine, however. Twelve years ago the Censor did Mr. Shaw a very good turn. He refused to license “The showing up of Blanco Posnet.” The reason was that the hero, “with the fire of incipient delirium tremens in his eye, shakes his fist at the ceiling and complains of the Creator in words more colloquial,” but no stronger than those of Job which are read in Church. Mr. Shaw, of course, made the most of this opportunity to force public attention on his play. It gained all the glamour peculiar to forbidden fruit. It is true that he honestly warned us that “this little play is really a religious tract in dramatic form.” But in spite of the evidence of the text before us, we did not really believe him, and felt that if only it could be put on the stage it would make a very daring and sparkling performance. Unfortunately, it does not. It is now all too clear that it is a religious tract, and not a very good one at that. Shaw has merely tried to make morality more popular than the popular preachers have done’ (Common Cause, 8 April 1921). 'Hospitable friends ... took me to see Mr. Bernard Shaw’s greatest play. For so I esteem The Showing Up of Blanco Posnet - the most human, the most subtle of that distinguished writer’s works. What owls there must be in English officialism that such a play should ever have been banned. Not for years have I received so much stimulus from anything on the stage’ (The Sphere, 9 April 1921).