On 9 January 1920, Sara Allgood made her final appearance in Australia, when the curtain closed on Peg o’ My Heart—undoubtedly one of the most popular plays of recent times—and the audience rose to their feet to say farewell to their beloved Peg and the actress who had so vividly brought her to life. A week later, after eight tumultuous years in the antipodes, Sara was on her way home to the UK. Her subsequent visits to Australia would be via the movies as by 1940 she had settled in Hollywood becoming a popular character actress in films such as How Green Was My Valley.
The following night, Emelie Polini presented the first new play for the year—The Little Damozel—for the first time in Australia. This was Polini’s fourth (and final) season at the Palace, her earlier appearances introducing the plays De Luxe Annie, The Invisible Foe and Eyes of Youth. In July 1919, at the coercion of the Taits, she postponed her planned departure for America to undertake her first visit to Brisbane and a tour of New Zealand.
The Sun, 10 January 1920, p.8
Described as a comedy in three acts, The Little Damozel told the story of a young girl who works as a musician in a seedy café. She attracts the attention of a wealthy rake, Neil Partington, who writes many intimate letters to her and proposes marriage. When a ‘better offer’ comes along, he calls off the engagement, but fearing the letters may find their way to his new paramour, he promises Recklaw Poole, a gentleman turned turf adventurer, £15,000 if he will marry Julie and secure the letters. Recklaw woos and wins Julie and for a time the two are very happy, but when she learns the truth of her husband’s duplicity, she seeks to be rid of him and returns to the café where she is welcomed back by her old friends. But despite his behaviour, she loves her husband and the play ends happily with a reconciliation.
This play by Monckton Hoffe—his first full-length piece—was ten years old, having enjoyed successful seasons in both London and New York during 1909 and 1910. In London, May Blayney and Charles Hawtrey premiered the comedy at Wyndham’s and then the Prince of Wales Theatre where it played for a total of five months. The play apparently became known as ‘The King’s Favourite’ on account of it receiving several Command Performances at the request of the late King. In America, the lead roles of Julie Alardy and Recklaw Poole were acted by May Buckley and Australian actor Cyril Keightley. Following a Washington opening, the play transferred to Broadway, where it played for a month at the Comedy Theatre, relocating to the Nazimova’s 39th Street Theatre for four additional weeks.
Emelie Polini was not unfamiliar with the role of Julie, having played it on tour in England during 1910 with Mark Blow’s company. Now, supported by a cast of old favourites including Gerald Kay Souper, John Fernside, John de Lacey and Marie Ney, she was joined by newcomers Cecil Brooking and W.J. Coulter. The play was directed by Gregan McMahon.
A scene from The Little Damozel: Gerald Kay Souper, W.J. Coulter, Cecil Brooking, Raymond Lawrence, John Fernside, Emelie Polini, and Norman Pearce. From The Theatre, 1 April 1920.
The first Australian production of The Little Damozel received mixed reviews, but as the Sunday Times (11 January 1920, p.2) noted: ‘Opinions may differ on the Little Damozel presented for the first time at the Palace Theatre last night, but there could be no difference of opinion about Miss Emelie Polini’s acting in the title role. Likewise, The Sydney Morning Herald (12 January 1920, p.5) was impressed by Emelie Polini’s performance, but found the play ‘quite simple, rather obvious, and somewhat thin’.
Miss Polini is particularly well cast in the piece. Indeed, the success of the performance is due in great measure to her brightness and resource. The little damozel she is called on to portray has the mercurial temperament in most ample measure. The characterisation would fail were the touch not light, the transitions of mood other than swift as impulse. Miss Polini brings to the part just that quality of impetuousness—of waywardness tinged with artfulness—in which she has displayed so much skill before.
The World’s News (24 January 1920, p.5) wanted the play to succeed:
Emelie Polini has again captured the hearts of Sydney playgoers, this time, thank goodness, with something English. As the actress herself is English, it is only fitting that she should score a big success in the first typically English comedy drama to be produced here for many moons.
The Little Damozel played for nine weeks, closing on 12 March, with the Sydney Morning Herald (28 February 1920, p.14) observing, ‘The unusually good run is due to the charm of the play, and the capable acting of Emelie Polini, G. Kay Souper, Victor Fitzherbert, and Cecil Brooking’.
National Library of Australia, Canberra
National Library of Australia, Canberra
Emelie Polini’s next offering, which opened on 13 March, was Kindling, a three-act comedy drama by Charles Kenyon, a journalist on the San Francisco Examiner. More drama than comedy, the play, set in the home of the Shultz family in a New York tenement, is ‘a sympathetic study of the emotions of the desperate poor’. First performed on Broadway at Daly’s Theatre, it opened, ‘unheralded by any advertising in advance’, on 3 December 1911, with Margaret Illington as Maggie Schultz, and although it was withdrawn after a month, it attracted a band of supporters who considered it an ‘admirable work of art’ and ‘important as a social document’. The play subsequently took to the road and was performed for fifty weeks.1
Despite the subject matter, the drama was warmly received at its Sydney opening. A week into the season, it was reported that the Taits had received ‘many letters of appreciation’.2
In addition to Emelie Polini, supporting roles were played by Gerald Kay Souper, John de Lacey, Cecil Brooking, Olive Wilton and Marie Ney, with Maggie Moore and Harry Roberts specially engaged to strengthen the ensemble.
As Maggie Shules (changed from Shultz), Emelie Polini vividly portrayed the struggles of a young mother, who when her husband loses his job, is forced into a life of crime for the sake of her child. As the Sydney Morning Herald (15 March 1920, p.5) observed, she played the role with ‘infinite skill and with that rare insight into the human emotions which stamp the true artist’. Of the supporting cast, the same paper noted: ‘The docker is drawn with absolute fidelity by Harry Roberts [giving] him an opportunity to show once again that he has lost none of those gifts which in earlier plays brough hm right into the forefront’, while Maggie Moore, in the play’s only comic role, showed she ‘has no equal on the Australian stage in her particular line’. Overall, the Herald concluded, Kindling ‘is a play far above the average merit, a play of the people, with many appealing touches that strike home’.
During Easter holidays, 3-10 April, The Little Damozel was revived for five matinee performances, with Kindling continuing to fill the evening slot, enabling country visitors and others to appreciate Emelie Polini’s versatility, ‘as the Bohemian Julie and the steadfast, serious labourer’s wife’.3
With the Polini season concluding on 22 April, Kindling was withdrawn to make way for a brief revival of Eyes of Youth (15-22 April), with Maggie Moore stepping into the role of Joan.
Barry Lupino as Mother Hubbard
State Library Victoria, Melbourne
Elsie Parkes
State Library Victoria, Melbourne
From Saturday 24 April, the theatre was transformed into a colourful and music-filled wonderland of ‘mirth, melody, and beauty’, with the Sydney premiere of Mother Hubbard, J&N Tait and Baily and Grant’s spectacular Christmas pantomime, ‘direct from a fourteen-weeks’ record-breaking season in Melbourne, and a two-weeks’ capacity business in Adelaide’.4
With book and lyrics by Leonard F. Durrell, music by Robert Keers, and directed by Barry Lupino, it saw the return of many old favourites who had contributed to the success of the previous year’s Jack and Jill. Once again Barry Lupino was the Dame, with William A. Hassan in the ‘skin’ role of Billy the Dog, supported by Jack Cannot as Mr Hubbard, and Dan Morris as the Hubbards’ son Fauntleroy. The pantomime boasted two principal boys, Marjorie Carlisle (Captain Jack Merryweather) and Dorothy Leigh (Harry Wildair), with Miss Wensley Russell as Dorothy, the principal girl, and Ethel Walker as the Fairy Queen. Specialty dances were provided by Elsie Parkes, Daisy Yates and Kelso Henderson, and additional songs by Gertie Latchford and Colin Crane.
Playing to capacity houses for seven weeks, it didn’t eclipse the Melbourne run but with Brisbane, Newcastle and New Zealand yet to visit, Mother Hubbard was withdrawn at the height of its success.
The Theatre, 1 July 1920
Marie Ilka, who followed on 19 June, made her first Sydney appearance in the thrilling three-act drama Tiger Rose by Willard Mack, having already enjoyed sell-out seasons in Melbourne, Adelaide, Hobart and Launceston. Supported by a ‘band of talented American actors’ including Ethan Allen, John Waller, Louise Waller, Reginald Goode, Douglass Ross and C. Henry Gordon, the new actress was hailed for the passionate strength of her emotional acting and her great beauty.
When Tiger Rose opened on Broadway in October 1917, the title role was performed by Lenore Ulric, with William Courtleigh, Willard Mack and Edward Mack in supporting roles. Produced under the direction of David Belasco, the drama, which featured numerous realistic scenic effects, including a violet rainstorm, proved a sensation, running for just on a year at the Lyceum Theatre.
Set against the backdrop of Canada’s rugged north-western frontier, the play is a story of a hot-blooded half-bred Indian girl who goes to extraordinary lengths to shield her lover from the police after he shoots a man dead in self-defence.
On her first appearance, The Sydney Morning Herald (21 June 1920, p.6) reported:
The action introduced Marie Ilka as the heroine, a role she fills “au pied de la lettre”—petite and trim of figure, her dark face with its flashing eyes and aquiline nose full of expression, her art a happy commingling of vivacious comedy and dramatic intensity. Marie Ilka, though clever, is not a great actress, but she is playing a star-part which might have been written for her, and will become a favourite here.
Of the highly anticipated special effects, the Sunday Times (20 June 1920, p.2), painted a vivid picture:
The stage illusion is so good that it carries the audience far away, and Pitt-street comes as a strange country after the last curtain falls. The thunder-storm is reality itself. The window curtains flap, the thunder rolls, the lightening flashes until the eyes ache, and, beyond everything else, the deafening rain rattles and patters and pours down.
A subsequent article in The World’s News (26 June 1920, p.5) provided a behind the scenes look at how the storm was created by a ‘corps of supernumaries’.
The whistling of the wind is produced by silk stretched on wooden drums, and scraped by wooded cogs, two “supers” being employed to turn the handles which bring about this result. Electric torches operated from the wings supply lightning, and four electric fans, placed in suitable positions, cause the agitation of the curtains. The rain comes from an overhead main placed in the flies, the water pattering upon a large sheet of canvas and escaping through pipes into a tank below the stage … Each burst of thunder is numbered and described, the parts reading: “No. 1 Rumble”, “No. 2 Crash”, and so forth. Cues are given by means of colored electric lights, operated by the stage manager, who stands beside the switchboard.
Tiger Rose held the stage until 30 July, and for the final week of the season The Heart of Wetona was introduced for the first time in Australia. Written by George Scarborough and first performed in New York in 1916 with Lenore Ulric in the lead, this play also has an impetuous half-bred Indian girl as the heroine, but unlike the previous play, Wetona falls in love with a cad. And it is through the devotion of an Indian agent, John Hardin, that she slowly comprehends the truth of the situation. As the Sydney Morning Herald (2 August 1920, p.5) observed:
Marie Ilka emphasised the capricious nature of the Redskin princess in the intensity with which her love turned suddenly to hate; and the comedy passages with the “papoose cat” happily illustrated the extreme youth of a vivacious girl.
The play was enriched by the ‘manly impersonation’ of Ethan Allen as Hardin, and the welcome addition of George Bryant, whose powerful voice and statue made the role of Quannah as success.
National Library of Australia, Canberra
With the departure of Marie Ilka and her company for Brisbane, the next attraction at the Palace was Tilly of Bloomsbury, a J.C. Williamson Ltd production, which was being transferred from the Criterion Theatre. A comedy in three acts by Ian Hay, this play had opened at the Criterion on 24 July, following successful seasons in Melbourne and Brisbane. The play introduced a new actress, Dorothy Manville, in the title role, alongside many old favourites including Arthur Styan, J.B. Atholwood, Florence Brough (recently returned from London), Emma Temple, Meta Pelham and Dorothy Seacombe.
With this change, it seems Williamsons and the Taits were undertaking something of a ‘swap’, whereby Tilly was moving into a more appropriate intimate theatre, with the Taits’ new musical Irene to occupy the larger theatre.
Tilly of Bloomsbury was withdrawn on 3 September and the following evening the same cast appeared in a new play, The Blindness of Virtue, for the first time in Sydney. Written by Cosmo Hamilton, this comedy-drama in three acts featured Dorothy Manville as Effie Pemberton, with Frank Freeman as Archibald Granham and Florence Brough as Mrs Pemberton.
On 25 September, J&N Tait presented the ‘intriguing spy drama’ The Luck of the Navy by Mrs Clifford Mills for the first time in Sydney. This was one of the few English plays that impressed E.J. Tait when he was in England and America during 1919 seeking new attractions for Australia. The hero of the piece, Lieutenant Clive Stanton, VC, RN, was played in London by Percy Hutchison. At the Queen’s Theatre, this stirring patriotic naval drama ran for almost two years and gave the Admiralty a huge boost by shining some light into the secret missions undertaken during wartime. Looking resplendent in his navy blue and gold buttons, Frank Harvey made a striking hero, alongside Olive Wilton as a society spy, Marie Ney as the heroine, with Gerald Kay Souper, Eardley Turner and Arthur Greenaway in supporting roles.
With the arrival of Marie Tempest and W. Graham Browne set for 9 October, The Luck of the Navy was transferred to the Theatre Royal for a final performance.
The 9 October saw the first appearance of Marie Tempest at the Palace. Marie Tempest was a leading West End performer, having commenced her career on the musical comedy stage in the mid-1880s, developing an international reputation for her skill and charm, and becoming a popular postcard actress. On the advice of her second husband, the actor-playwright Cosmo Stuart, whom she married in 1899, she abandoned the musical stage in favour of light comedies. During the war years, she toured throughout America, and in 1917 she visited Australia for the first time under the auspices of JCW. With leading man W. Graham Brown, her repertoire included the plays The Marriage of Kitty, Mrs Dot and Cousin Kate. After a year, they departed for South Africa, returning to Australia via India and the East, bringing with them several new attractions.
Marie Tempest, 1920, by Harold Cazneaux
State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
Program cover for Outcast
Theatre Heritage Australia
They opened their return Australian tour at the Theatre Royal in Melbourne on 11 September 1920 with The Duke of Killiecrankie. This play, a three-act farce by Robert Marshall, had premiered in Australia in 1905, but this was the first time that it was being performed by Marie Tempest’s company. This play also opened the company’s Sydney season at the Palace.
The young Duke of Killiecrankie (Roger Barry) falls in love with Lady Henrietta Addison (Dorothy Hamilton), but when she rebuts his marriage proposals, he concocts a plan to abduct her and carry her off to his castle in Scotland. To avoid suspicion, he co-opts a wealthy widow, Mrs Mullholland (Marie Tempest) to act as chaperone, also inviting Henry Pitt Welby MP (W. Graham Browne), an ageing fortune hunter.
Owing to the limited season at the Palace, The Duke of Killiecrankie was staged for just a week, as were most of the plays that followed: Cousin Kate (16 October), Mrs Dot (23 October), The Great Adventure (30 October), The Marriage of Kitty (13 November), At the Barn (20 November), Penelope (30 November), Good Gracious Annabelle (4 December) and Outcast (11 December).
Of these plays, Cousin Kate, Mrs Dot, The Marriage of Kitty, Penelope and Good Gracious Annabelle, had been performed in Australia during 1917/1918, while The Great Adventure, At the Barn and Outcast were new additions.
The first play, Cousin Kate, was a comedy by Hubert Henry Davies, which sees Kate the recipient of a fortune on the proviso she marries. Mrs Dot by Somerset Maugham had been specially written for Marie Tempest and the character of Mrs Worthington, the ‘bright, merry, and fascinating widow’ who contrives to find a husband for Nellie Sellinger so that she may secure her sweetheart for herself. With The Marriage of Kitty, written in 1902 by Cosmo Gordon Lennox, she engages in amusing repartee as she navigates the perils of matrimony with her new husband, Sir Reginald Belsize. Penelope, also by Maugham, is a social comedy about a woman who seeks to reclaim her husband’s affections after he becomes entangled with another woman. Good Gracious, Annabelle is the only American play in the repertoire, written in 1916 by Clare Kummer, it is the story of a girl who is forced into an unhappy marriage, and who falls in love with a mysterious stranger who turns out in fact to be her husband in disguise.
Of the new pieces, The Great Adventure by Arnold Bennett, ‘a romantic play of fancy’, sees Marie Tempest in a totally new character, that of a middle-class widow, who marries Ilam Carve, England’s foremost painter, in the belief that he is the artist’s valet (the valet having been buried in place of the reclusive Carve), and rather than reveal his identity, the painter is happy to live simply and comfortably with a doting wife. In Anthony P. Wharton’s At the Barn, she plays an actress who, escaping the clutches of a rich patron, finds refuge in a rural cottage that turns out to be occupied by three bachelors, an author, an artist and a journalist—and of course, they all fall in love with her. The final play, Outcast by Hubert Henry Davies, a somewhat dramatic piece about a man, who after being abandoned by his wife, becomes addicted to whiskey and morphine, and the actress who moves into his apartment and wins his heart.
On the last night of the season, 17 December, in response to sustained applause following the fall of the curtain, Marie Tempest came on to the stage and ‘murmured words of thanks and farewell’.
She wanted to acknowledge the generous reception of the evening, and not only so, but the whole-hearted support which had made her return to Sydney a pleasure and a joy. She wished also to remember the J.C. Williamson management, and the many friends unseen by the public in and around the theatre who had smoothed the path of continued effort from week to week.
And with a ‘cheery au revoir’ she left the stage amid loud cheers from a delighted audience.
John D O'Hara, 1920
Theatre Heritage Australia
Sydney’s Chief Theatre
The Sun, 16 December 1920, p.12
The following night, the joint management of JCW and J&N Tait presented the return of veteran American character actor John D. O’Hara to Sydney, with a revival of Three Wise Fools, a comedy by Austin Strong. Described as looking more like a clergyman than an actor, offstage ‘his classic features, silvery hair, kindly mouth, and quiet dressing might give him somewhat the appearance of a bishop in mufti were it not for the humorous twinkle of the eye’.5
O’Hara had arrived in Australia in August 1919 under engagement to JCW. His first Sydney season had commenced at the Criterion Theatre in November 1919 and in March 1920, he performed the current play in Australia for the first time. Playing the role of Theodore Findley, one of the ‘wise fools’ of the story, the other two being Dr Richard Gaunt (Sydney Stirling) and Judge Trumbell (Fred Esmelton), the three crusty old bachelors help Sidney Fairchild (Lizette Parkes), the daughter of a woman they once admired, find happiness.
Three Wise Fools played until 31 December, bringing the year 1920 to a successful close.
To be continued
Endnotes
1. Clayton Hamilton, Introduction to Kindling, Samuel French, New York, 1914
2. Sydney Morning Herald, 20 March 1920, p.14
3. Sydney Morning Herald, 3 April 1920, p.8
4. Advertisements, Sydney Morning Herald, 17 April 1920, p.2 & 24 April 1920, p.2
5. Table Talk (Melbourne), 28 August 1919, p.12
References
Gerald Bordman, American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1914-1930, Oxford University Press, 1995
Viola Tait, A Family of Brothers: The Taits and J.C. Williamson; a theatre history, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1971
Newspapers
Trove, trove.nla.gov.au
Pictures
National Library of Australia, Canberra
State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
State Library Victoria, Melbourne
With thanks to
Rob Morrison
