Consider the Audience …

Abstract

The actor-playwright Emlyn Williams likes to tell the story of his big break that never happened in 1929. ‘Just before Christmas I lost, in mid-rehearsal, a wonderful small part in Tunnel Trench at the Duchess. (“A little too emotional” — too emotional, the boy was dying in a shell-hole !)’¹ The story in many ways symbolises the theatrical, and indeed social climate that was to prevail throughout the thirties and into the war years. ‘Youth’ was no longer a magical word. Although the new attitudes to sex and marriage were to remain, the sense of hectic glamour they had brought in their wake had faded. The angst of the twenties and its attempts to shut out the memories of war underlay the decade’s most fashionable ailment, neurasthenia. ‘Nerves’ drove Nicky and the Poor Little Rich Girl, and indeed Coward himself. The diagnosis of the thirties was more sombre — ‘anxiety’, the sense of ill-being summed up at the close of Cavalcade in Twentieth Century Blues: