Vigorous and painful; but sound and wholesome, even in its horror — Examiner of Plays
Volunteer enthusiasm for the project carried things forward to a second phase which seeks to fill in more of the gaps in our knowledge and further challenge assumptions about theatre of the period.
Using newspaper archives and other records, volunteers are researching where the plays toured, who was in them and the reviews they received, so the legacy of the project, re-named Great War Theatre, is more even than Helen's book.
The database that has been created records the nearly three thousand works licensed from August 1914 to December 1918 and reveals that roughly 900 are about the War. For these, the expanding database is more detailed.
Already, analysis of the material in the database has started to show interesting trends such as the prevalence of plays with plots involving spies for a period at the beginning of the War and then, after a drop, a resurgence around the time of the German Spring Offensive which had fuelled spy hysteria as recorded by newspapers of the day.
Where these plays have their roots is often evident, as Helen explains:
Spy plays are very much taken from Victorian melodrama where you have a dastardly German villain, a brave Englishman and a plucky heroine who is usually a Red Cross Nurse or something along those lines.
In a way, they are quite easy to dismiss because they are melodrama, but I think they are fascinating.
Society had been changing at a phenomenal rate and for the working and lower middle classes Victorian melodrama had been a safe, contained way of dealing with the anxieties about the world around them and the challenges of urbanisation.
And just as it gave temporary relief in that time, I think the same thing is happening in the First World War. Through these—to our eyes quite comic and silly melodramatic portrayals of the war—audiences… could feel some relief and explore some of these traumatic events in a safe way, so I think there is an interesting social function that the melodramas have.
Reflecting other concerns of the day in Britain, plays looked at strikes and unionisation, or could have amongst their characters repatriated wounded soldiers and soldiers with psychological trauma known then as 'shell shock', and now termed post traumatic stress disorder.
On the lighter side, there were comedies and of course propaganda pieces which, from the onset of war to conscription being introduced in January 1916, were encouraging enlistment. These were directed as much to the men as to the women who were reluctant to let their men go to war, and could be subtler than at first appears.
Helen, alluding to the work of historian Steve Nicholson, explains: "We look at these [plays] as a kind of didactic propaganda, very simplistic—it is what it says on the tin—there's nothing complex or artistic in it.
"But actually, when you stage them, they have that potential to twist what looks like the obvious message so the propaganda pieces are quite interesting."
The range of themes covered in the plays is wide, though there is little pacifism depicted on stage and the Lord Chamberlain's office was careful not to let anti-war messages through.
Helen tells me that there are, however, pieces with a tone of discontent and again this is in the performance rather than the text. "The text might look quite bland or quite pro-war, but an actor says it with a different tone and it changes the piece.
"Even from very early on, you get plays such as E T Thurston's The Cost which has characters who are very discontented and are not going to go to war.
"The obvious piece to talk about in relation to pacifism is John Drinkwater's 1917 allegorical play X=0, A Night In The Trojan War. It clearly deals with the current conflict but it’s set during the Trojan War and this is how it gets past the censor.
"[It was] seen as pacifist. Written in verse, it has two Greek soldiers and two Trojan soldiers whose conversations echo each other—it's a beautiful piece—it explores the futility of war, the destruction of beauty, the fact that the soldiers don't quite know why they're fighting but they’ll carry on fighting because that’s their duty.
"In the final scene, one of each soldier goes into the opposite camp and kills the other one so it's X=0. And this was seen by many to be a pacifist piece, although others were saying it is about noble heroic sacrifice as opposed to it being a pointless war. It depends on the nuance."