Abstract
This chapter considers the interwar period, and the emergence of an ambivalent nostalgia on the musical stage, spearheaded by Noël Coward, Ivor Novello, and Vivian Ellis, which eschewed the urban modernity of the prewar years and offered a romantic idyll of Ruritanian Britishness for a devastated nation, while knowing that such an ideal was irretrievable. The interwar years were marked by the return of intensely hierarchical class structures, and the anxieties surrounding them are explored with reference to the ‘dancing musicals’ and ‘sporting musicals’ popular in the 1920s and 1930s. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Noël Coward’s Cavalcade (1931) as a work that intended to critique the British imperial narrative, but was paradoxically lauded as celebratory of that narrative, as the world again headed toward conflict.
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Notes
- 1.
The rich paid around a tenth of their income in taxes prior to the Great War. This rose to around 30 per cent after 1918, in part to fund the escalating costs of unemployment. The net result was that, as A.J.P. Taylor suggests, the lower classes ‘were enjoying a richer life than any previously known in the history of the world: longer holidays, shorter hours, higher real wages’ (1965, p. 176).
- 2.
As Lawrence James notes, ‘Khaki did not prove a leveller. The civilian social order was reproduced in the trenches’ (James, 2006, p. 411).
- 3.
This totalled 35 million days in 1919.
- 4.
- 5.
For a detailed account of the General Strike, see Rachelle Hope Saltzman (2012).
- 6.
One estimate suggested that direct taxation increased by 21 per cent on country estates when a combination of land tax, rates, and income tax were considered (see Horn, 2015).
- 7.
A detailed discussion of these factors is offered in studies such as David Cannadine’s The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (1990).
- 8.
This replication was not exact—the shrinking of the liberal middle class resulted in a more tangibly two-party political terrain in an interwar period dominated by the Conservative party and newly-energised Labour party. Yet, even if the liberal-minded aristocratic classes were diminished in their social hegemony, the continued presence of wartime successes, and the reliance on prewar musical comedy tropes engendered and perpetuated Victorian and Edwardian values, assuaging the increasingly-muddled middle classes once more, at the height of their continued disillusionment.
- 9.
- 10.
This transferred to the Palace Theatre in October 1919.
- 11.
In fact, while there was a proliferation of imports, it is important to note that in each case, the works were always adapted for British audiences: ‘There are four prominent writers for the stage in this country—Arthur Wimperis, Adrian Ross , Captain Harry Graham , and Douglas Furber ; […] to-day all four of these lyric writers are called upon to tinker with imported pieces’ (Withers, 1927).
- 12.
It is noteworthy that whilst embodying the interwar period , both Novello and Coward had prewar or wartime pedigrees. Alongside Novello’s earlier successes, Coward had been active in the theatre as an actor since 1911.
- 13.
Vivian Ellis was a relative newcomer, although in this story, his influence plays a more pivotal role than Wright’s study suggests.
- 14.
To an extent, the same observation might be made of Novello’s operettas. For example, Careless Rapture similarly evoked the grandeur of Viennese operetta in its score, while knowingly offering echoes of imperial musical comedies such as A Chinese Honeymoon or even Chu Chin Chow , by its setting of part of the action in China, and its inclusion of a spectacular ‘temple ballet’.
- 15.
In the full consideration of Me and My Girl and Mister Cinders , Burrows sees these as pieces which consider the struggle of class and postwar modernity in Britain: ‘the chief protagonists of Mister Cinders ultimately represent an adjusted, modern aristocracy based on new forms of cultural capital. The values of hard work, unpretentious honesty, self-assurance, and integrity are drawn from working-class and modern-American ethics while old-world leisure-class values are affectionately beaten back by the youthful, jazzy song-and-dance of the contemporary sensibility of the show’ (2017, p. 178).
- 16.
In this regard, ‘many British stately homes have an adjacent cricket pitch and pavilion; where over the years encounters have taken place between “gentlemen and players”. This again underlines the British distinction between the upper class (gentlemen), who are leisured and admirable, and the lower classes (players) who work and are disparaged ’ (Storry and Childs, 1997, p. 113).
- 17.
In a further example of a ‘sporting musical’, Battling Butler —Jack Buchanan’s debut production as actor-manager—featured boxing rather than horse racing. First produced at the New Oxford Theatre, and premiering on 8 December 1922, Battling Butler told the story of a village local who takes up boxing as a hobby in order to break the boredom of living in Little Thatchley. Boxing was a popular hobby with working-class men, ‘attracting highly knowledgeable and partisan crowds’ to matches (Nicholas, 2001, p. 115), yet in this case, the choice of sport offered a comment on the recurring tensions between the country and the city, between parochialism and progress. Moore suggests that this production was particularly vivid in its Englishness , as it had been ‘written by’, and starred, creative teams with ‘no American experience’ (Moore, 2000, p. 100). It is also notable that the boxing in Battling Butler was choreographed as dance, with further Buchanan productions also featuring dance as a dominant form in the narrative, including Toni, Boodle, That’s A Good Girl, Stand Up and Sing, and This’ll Make You Whistle , which featured the song ‘I’m in a Dancing Mood’.
- 18.
In his book We Are the Champions: The Politics of Sport and Popular Music (2011), Ken McLeod notes that perhaps the most famous example of a race in musical theatre comes from an American production, the Ascot Gavotte in My Fair Lady (1956).
- 19.
In his reading of the 1936 film version of this musical, Mike Huggins suggests that this envisioning of class identity and contentment ‘may have helped diminish radicalism and disruption and contributed to the Conservative dominance of the 1930s’ (2003, p. 59).
- 20.
Although it is not directly related to the place of Derby Day in this story, the fact that A.P. Herbert was a Member of Parliament, and was responsible for—among other things—a Betting and Bookmakers Bill, and numerous attacks on the Entertainments Duty (a tax imposed during the Great War), perhaps suggests that Derby Day was, rather than being a simple evocation of this popular leisure pursuit, in fact much more politically driven in its depiction of the Derby, class, and heritage than it might first appear. For further information, see the ‘Betting and Bookmakers Bill’ (Herbert, 1938), http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1938/may/13/betting-and-bookmakers-bill, accessed 15 May 2017.
- 21.
While the comic opera was produced in 1932, Herbert’s libretto was in fact published in 1931.
- 22.
This heralds a twist in the story of British musical theatre, as when promoting his 1980 musical Cats, Andrew Lloyd Webber exclaimed: ‘We are creating a world of dance not seen before […] in a British musical’ (Richmond, 1995, p. 75).
- 23.
Adrian Wright observes that, as a matinee idol , Novello ‘personified a celebration of a certain type of male beauty’ (A. Wright, 2010, p. 14).
- 24.
In 1929, Coward accepted a contract to write for and appear in films with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. However, Hollywood did not suit him, and he soon returned to London, appearing in the talking version of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger (1932).
- 25.
Television and film successes such as Upstairs, Downstairs; You Rang M’Lord?; and Gosford Park, and Downton Abbey are all direct descendants of this production.
- 26.
This use of antithesis, along with the insertion of period songs into the dramaturgy of Cavalcade , in many ways might be seen to pre-empt Joan Littlewood’s staging of Oh! What A Lovely War (1963), itself a critique of the British narrative of the Great War.
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Macpherson, B. (2018). Peace: Nostalgia and Nationhood. In: Cultural Identity in British Musical Theatre, 1890–1939. Palgrave Studies in British Musical Theatre. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59807-3_7
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