Introduction

Doris Lessing is an enduringly unique example of the autodidactic writer in the twentieth century. A recipient of a spotty colonial education at best in early-twentieth-century Rhodesia, the young Lessing voraciously devoured whatever books came her way—from those her mother brought with her, or regularly ordered from the metropole, to those that circulated among farmers in the bush. She read avidly and democratically across fiction, but generally in the echelon of literature.Footnote ¹

Her feeling of isolation in the bush encouraged a fierce imagination, and her lonely reading, Carole Klein speculates, led to a fascination with the theater—the projection of fictive imagination writ large combined with collaborative sociability. The large archives of Lessing's work in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, reveal a much greater commitment to the theater, to stage- and screenwriting, than most readers and critics of Lessing might glean. The archives, which contain the drafts, manuscripts, and typescripts of almost all her published work, also contain, singularly, all her unpublished work as well.Footnote ² In the second volume of her autobiography, Lessing writes about her productivity and complicates her future archive: “If you are the kind of writer that I am—that is, one who uses the process of writing to find out what you think, and even what you are—then it is surely dishonest to kick down the stepladder you came up by, but the fact is, I would be happy if some of the stories I wrote disappeared. Yet there are people who like the ones I don't think much of. Isn't it a form of contempt to wish away what other people admire?” (Walking in the Shade 250–51).

An interviewer in 1989 remarked, “You've written a few plays. Are you drawn to the dramatic form from time to time, or is this something you get asked to do and you'll try your hand at?” Her response draws out her obsession with theater:

She was deeply aware of when her theatrical work didn't hit (of Play with a Tiger, she reflects, “It is a good play but not a great one” [Walking in the Shade 255])—and not just when it didn't land. In a letter to Agate Krouse, quoted in Krouse's essay “Doris Lessing's Feminist Plays,” Lessing remarks of “The Truth about Billy Newton” and “Johnny's Luck,” both unpublished although the former was performed, that they were “dead ducks,” inasmuch as “they are dated, and when plays are that, in my view, they should simply be forgotten” (321). This is a line Lessing maintains—that she wishes she were the kind of poet who could suppress all but her favorites, “rejecting everything but the best” (Lessing, Walking in the Shade 251). Lessing wasn't just aware of her own shortcomings in theatrical writing—she grumbles, “At least, when I wrote a novel, it was printed as I wanted it,” unlike the liberties taken by and at the theater—she also smarted under the perception of rejection (257). Reflecting on Play with a Tiger, Lessing recalls frankly, “I was hurt by its reception. I thought it deserved better,” and records in several places how frequently she felt misjudged by either audiences or critics (256). Lessing's push-pull attraction to the theater ultimately resurfaces near the end of her career in the novel Love, Again (1996), which fictionalizes her collaboration with Philip Glass on the opera versions of The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, a novel in her series Canopus in Argos.

The 1996 Flamingo volume Play with a Tiger and Other Plays is the only collection of Lessing's theatrical writing, and in addition to the titular play from 1962 it contains The Singing Door (1971) and Each His Own Wilderness (1959). But these offer only tantalizing glimpses at an extremely varied theatrical oeuvre, showing nothing of her more naturalistic plays (like her “version” of Aleksandr Ostrovsky's The Storm, a production starring a young Anthony Hopkins, but which “no one saw” [Walking in the Shade 257], or the Ibsenesque satire of colonialism “Mr. Dolinger”), avant-garde attempts (her early masque “Africa Dances,” or her scathing Cold War teleplay “Inside Outside”), or her experiments with satire (as in her Shavian farce “£20,000 of Love”). The plays, some of which were written before her emigration to London, also reveal a longer and denser arc in her thinking about communism (as in “Africa Dances,” about the 1948 Johannesburg miner's strike [see Arnett, “African, Communist”]) and the knots and entanglements of the color bar (“Johnny's Luck”). Her comedy “£20,000 of Love” is a burlesque of the British colonial administrative class and their perpetually woeful and afflicted bumbling in “Eastern Kawawawa” (and a unique example of comedy in Lessing's whole oeuvre). In another fascinating example of her unpublished and unperformed “dead ducks,” “The White Princess,” Lessing plays with the idea of “space Africans,” who inhabit a future (the year 2000) where they have become galactic caretakers of primitive white tribes on Earth, having literally transcended and morally ascended over a viciously regressed British Isles (see Arnett, “Colonizing, Decolonizing”).

However, Lessing saw writing for television a bit differently. She is sanguine in her memory of television writing, remembering that she wrote “successfully and without disasters or misfortunes” (Walking in the Shade 257).Footnote ³ The flitting, fleeting fame of theater writing had its glamour for her, but she was too self-assured and motivated to submit to the vicissitudes of taste and trend. For a shining moment, she was one of the Royal Court Theatre's hangers-on: “I was a Royal Court writer. ‘Oh, you're one of our writers,’ they would say, giving me good seats, but meanwhile I brooded over betrayal: you made me a promise and didn't keep it” (225). Lessing's unpublished work, however, and its willingness to tackle vital, progressive themes at the risk of failure, augments our view of Lessing as a risk-taking, progressive writer who was also keenly aware of the business of writing. These unpublished and archived texts offer a glimpse at a complicated writer with complicated feelings about a complicated, multigeneric oeuvre; the plays offer, precisely as she feared, a glimpse at a crystalline moment of culture and politics, but they are not “dead ducks.” Her plays—and the other unpublished or self-suppressed works—in the Ransom Center offer, each, a captivating view of a writer who used writing to find out what she thinks, and even what she is.

The three documents transcribed below are lists of plays compiled by Lessing herself and written in her own hand. These documents can be found in the Doris Lessing Papers, Harry Ransom Center Archives, University of Texas, Austin, in box 42, folder 1, labeled “List of dramatic works in Lessing's handwriting, undated.” All the plays listed by Lessing are available in manuscript at the Harry Ransom Center (with the exception of “Peace at Any Price”).