Edith Craig and the Pioneer Players: London’s International Art Theatre in a ‘Khaki-clad and Khaki-minded World’

Abstract

War-time theatregoers, and music hall audiences in particular, are often associated with the callously self-indulgent civilian population on the home front as described in Siegfried Sassoon’s poem ‘Blighters’ (1917). As other contributors to this book also note, this poem is often used specifically to highlight the dubious pleasures derived by large audiences from performances associated with comedy, dancing women and ragtime music.² However, the question of taste — pleasurable performances delivered at the expense of the deaths of soldiers — also arose in response to some of the controversial wartime plays staged by the Pioneer Players discussed in this chapter. This relatively small theatre society, based in London, defies many generalizations offered about London theatre in relation to modernism, the First World War and women’s suffrage.³ The Pioneer Players had its most artistically successful years during the war in spite of (and to some extent as a direct result of) financial and other constraints. The society responded to the war by presenting plays that showed how it affected non-combatants and putting on fund-raising productions for war charities. Most explicitly addressing the experience of war were plays such as Gwen John, Luck of War (dealing with accidental bigamy during wartime), and Sewell Collins, The Quitter (desertion from the war zone) both produced on 13 May 1917 and George Bernard Shaw, The Inca of Perusalem (a parody of the German Kaiser) produced on 16 December 1917.⁴

The House is crammed: tier beyond tier they grin

And cackle at the Show …¹