A finely impressive work — Examiner of Plays
Not all of the catalogued plays are out of copyright and part of this latter phase of the project is to establish whether a work is available for public performance a hundred years on.
The team, now made up of some 45 people actively researching supported by a responsive Facebook group, is looking at the playwrights themselves as well as their wartime work.
Using genealogy techniques, the work reveals who was writing for theatre at the time and importantly pinpoints a playwright's date of death and possibly identifies their living descendants.
The research continues so the full picture has yet to be seen but it wasn’t just the big names who were writing plays during the War.
The Reverend Waldron, vicar of Brixton, penned a number of pro-war plays and there are lots of women writers who, Helen tells me, hadn't been heard of and who are very prolific theatre-makers like F G Kimberley who also co-managed the Theatre Royal Wolverhampton.
Harder to research are the ordinary men and women who wrote during the period and whom Helen conjectures probably saw writing patriotic pieces as something they could do for the war effort.
Bringing the century-old plays to today's audiences is much more than an exercise in nostalgia. "For instance," says Helen, "you’ve got romances set in field hospitals—and again these are about mediating the trauma of war—where blinded soldiers regain their sight because a beautiful nurse is tending to them. It sounds so silly, but staged, there is more to it than is recognisable on the page."
Helen reports that modern audiences have responded enthusiastically to productions and readings of WWI plays.
Threadbare Theatre company performed A A Milne’s The Boy Comes Home at the Somme centenary in Manchester and J M Barrie's The New Word at the Bluehouse Festival Oxted.
Readings have taken place at events supported by Gateways to the First World War, one of five consortia set up to engage the public with the centenary of the First World War, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, both of whom have supported the Great War Theatre project along with the Society for Theatre Research.
Amongst these were readings from the 1914 play The Hem of the Flag by Kenelm Foss and The Man Who Stayed At Home.
Other events included rehearsed readings of John G Brandon's There was a King in Flanders about the Belgian war experience and J M Barrie’s The Old Lady Shows her Medals.
These performances manifested themselves as touching and funny works off the page and, as Helen said, "some of them really do you still have life in them".
As at this summer, the project had identified 61 scripts in the public domain and these have been made available for download. They include Jerome K Jerome's The Three Patriots and J M Barrie's Der Tag.
The public availability of work of a further thirteen playwrights is being pursued through their descendants where this has been possible, or by applying for Orphan Works status from the Intellectual Property Office.
Surprisingly, little is known about theatre of the time and the wide-ranging works that have come to light through the project are increasing our understanding of how theatre engaged with and represented the War.
At the same time, it is reversing what Helen describes as the "preconception both academically and publicly about theatre during the war being entertainment, a distraction keeping peoples spirits up, or if it does deal with war, it's just patriotic puff and that there was nothing 'good' produced."
Whatever you think of the work produced in the period, it certainly fulfilled a social need: at the outbreak of war, most theatres were closed but once reopened they went on to flourish.
Theatre producers faced new challenges: unavailability of male actors, Zeppelin raids, the army commandeering of train carriages and railway services which touring companies relied on to transport their sets, costumes, cast and crew.
There was also from January 1916 onwards the Entertainment Tax levied across the light entertainment industry.
Alongside all this, cinema was challenging theatre's hold on audiences, although cinema also relied on theatre to provide material for films and for preludes to screenings.
Excepting the permanent closure of a few regional venues, despite the difficulties, theatre enjoyed a boom period.