Early Influences: Maeterlinck

Sutro’s work, and the challenges it posed to his audience, have to be understood in the context of a period of perceived stability and affluence, in which theatregoing was both a pretext for social outings for the leisured class and a nexus of genuine enthusiasm for the less wealthy patrons who attended for the sake of the play, the particular theatre, or the presiding actor-manager. Walter MacQueen-Pope’s cloyingly nostalgic, but nonetheless informative account of the Edwardian theatre begins with an image of London as ‘a city of smiles, the habitation of wealth, of peace, of security, and of power’: ‘an English city, speaking its own language, conscious that it was the centre of the whole world, that it called the tune and held the balance as the capital of the greatest Empire ever known.’Footnote ⁹ He then describes the typical audience in the West End, differentiating between those who ordered their carriages at eleven, whose ‘play-going … was easy’, who ‘arrived late and [for whom] a visit to the play was sandwiched between a dinner and a supper’, and the regular theatregoers who commuted from the suburbs and queued, sometimes for hours, for a cheaper seat.Footnote ¹⁰ Each West End theatre under the actor-manager system cultivated a certain kind of audience, which had come to expect a certain consistency, quality, and aesthetic programming, ranging from the dress-code and the perfectly curated customer service to the type of play and the ‘house-style’ of the acting. In contrast to MacQueen-Pope’s optimism, the Edwardian era can also be understood as a period of transition and, as such, of uncertainty, in the various spheres of social life. The liberal politician C. F. G. Masterman provides a more sombre perspective, writing in 1905 that ‘Expectancy and surprise are the notes of the age’, ‘a time balanced uneasily between two great periods of change’. This more pessimistic attitude, showing ‘the sadness of things [as being] more emphatic than their splendour’, can be felt in Sutro’s mixed messaging; in spite of moments of frivolous comedy, his plays are unsettled by a persistent undercurrent of doubt as to the viability of the existing social order. Masterman describes the negative aspect of the Edwardian age in terms of a profound, though not necessarily obvious, change:

The idea of decline, the hallmark of a much more wide-spread zeitgeist, is also implicit in MacQueen-Pope’s longing for a golden era, as well as in Sutro’s veiled cynicism.

Through his work across both the independent and the commercial theatre, Sutro became an effective mediator between different theatrical models and a good reference point for the general trends of the period. He lived an eventful life on the fringe of high society, never becoming part of the ‘smart set’ but staying close enough to notice its predominant features. As a member of the Garrick Club and the Dramatists’ Club, Sutro played an active part in the London theatrical community, where he established many connections, facilitating introductions and acting as a source of support to others. One of the first important connections that he made was between Maurice Maeterlinck and the budding independent theatre in London. Sutro brought Maeterlinck into England, both as his official translator and as his informal business representative, at an important moment in the 1890s when various critics and playwrights were trying to establish alternative theatre models. The arrival of Maeterlinck, through a collaboration between J. T. Grein and Aurelien Lugné-Poe’s Théâtre de l’ Œuvre mediated by Sutro, was one of the elements that pushed the drama of that decade closer to the European avant-garde. Sutro describes the encounter in his characteristically casual tone:

He then introduced Maeterlinck to some of the people who would shape the course of modern drama in the years to come:

This was, for Sutro, the promising start of a friendship and literary collaboration which lasted for the rest of his life.

What might seem strange at first, considering Sutro’s exposure to Maeterlinck’s aesthetic, is how little it influenced him. Sutro’s ironic portrayal of the ‘smart set’, with an emphasis on its excesses and absurdities, could not be further removed from the Symbolist drama of Maeterlinck. While the former was anchored in the customs and manners of the Edwardian era, and concerned itself with the practical choices made by characters within a definite moral framework, the latter was removed from any specific time and place, prioritizing ‘an inner reality expressed in dreams, childhood memory, and the unconscious’.Footnote ¹⁴ In Maeterlinck’s ‘Dramas of Unconsciousness and Instinct’, Sutro rightly recognized a ‘curious fatalism [running] through them all’: ‘the men and women before us are merely unravelling the web that Destiny has spun round their lives – Destiny being a mysterious and inexorable force whose behests they must blindly obey.’Footnote ¹⁵ Though awed by Maeterlinck’s expressive power and the unique effects it could achieve on the stage, Sutro grounded this idea of destiny in a portrayal of the struggle against more definite, inherited social values.

The difference in method and style between them does not necessarily imply a fundamentally different viewpoint. The conflict in Maeterlinck’s drama, albeit diffuse, springs from a sense of restlessness which disturbs the equilibrium of the characters’ lives. In Alladine and Palomides, which Sutro translated, the tragedy is set in motion by the young cavalier Palomides suddenly falling in love with the Greek slave Alladine at the court of Ablamore. This breaks the existing engagement between Palomides and the king’s only surviving daughter, Astolaine, who is resigned and accepts the authority of a more genuine love. Ablamore’s resulting jealousy eventually leads to the imprisonment and death of the lovers. On the surface, the play hinges on a love triangle complicated by the involvement of the king, but the rudimentary structure does not account for the prevailing fatefulness that drives the characters towards their doom. Astolaine comprehends the imperative behind the lovers’ impulse, and tries to find an explanation for her father’s madness: ‘Hitherto nothing had happened, in this palace, where all seemed to have been steeped in slumber since the death of my sisters; then a strange unreasoning restlessness seized hold of my poor father – he began to chafe under this tranquillity that yet would seem to be the least dangerous form of happiness.’Footnote ¹⁶ Maeterlinck goes beyond mere structure, minimizing the plot for the sake of the underlying sense of mystery which denies a rational explanation to the unfolding events. The logical continuity of the play is repeatedly interrupted by intimations of ‘a monstrous force, crushing all life and all hope’.Footnote ¹⁷ The only possible redemption is through resignation and a commitment to the greater truth of an insightful experience, regardless of its tragic consequences.

Sutro, rejecting mysticism, remains on the level of structure: the restlessness of his characters, which springs from a similar chafing under the ‘happiness that dwelt in the very uniformity of … existence’, manifests itself in the practical framework of their relationship with each other.Footnote ¹⁸ Idealism is pitched against the concrete demands of society, as defined by money, status, and conflicting interests. Sutro’s notion of fate, while allowing for an element of unpredictability, is essentially moral and pragmatic, determined by the individual’s behaviour in relation to the socially imposed boundaries. In this sense, Sutro is much closer to the comedy of manners, or the problem plays of Pinero and Jones. The love triangle in a Sutro play is the defining structural characteristic beyond which there is no other organizing principle – in other words, the drama is immanent in the concrete actions of the characters.

Even though Sutro did not integrate Symbolist elements into his plays, he was influenced by Maeterlinck’s theoretical formulation of modern drama in two significant essays: ‘The Tragical in Everyday Life’ and, to a greater extent, ‘The Modern Drama’. The former acknowledges ‘a tragic element in the life of every day that is far more real, far more penetrating, far more akin to the true self that is in us than the tragedy that lies in great adventure’.Footnote ¹⁹ The genuine tragic element appears in the simple, even trivial, aspects of daily life. The playwright has to look beneath the surface of familiar experience in order to destabilize the audience’s complacent assumptions about it. As noted earlier, the assumptions of the ‘fashionable’ West End audience were based, to a great extent, on strict notions of class limitation and differentiation. For Sutro, the tragical element would manifest itself primarily in the domestic sphere, in those inherited attitudes which solidify into a constricted way of life. But Maeterlinck takes it a step further, maintaining that, ‘readily as we all may feel this, to prove it is by no means easy, inasmuch as this essential tragic element comprises more than that which is merely material or merely psychological’.Footnote ²⁰ He defaults to a mystical sphere of ‘Thousands and thousands of laws’ – ‘mightier and more venerable than those of passion; but, in common with all that is endowed with resistless force, these laws are silent, and discreet, and slow-moving; and hence it is only in the twilight that they can be seen and heard’.Footnote ²¹ These obscure laws are not entirely human; they shape human action in unknowable ways but are not intrinsic to it. This is the main difference between him and Sutro, for whom human passion, without necessarily approving of its moral implications, is one of the shaping forces of the drama. The struggle is one between this human impulse and an ideal of goodness, honesty, and integrity; but the abstract ideal, often misinterpreted by the characters, is the only counterweight to the otherwise material and psychological components of the story.

In ‘The Modern Drama’, Maeterlinck provides a more objective definition of contemporary drama. One tendency he notices is ‘the decay, one might almost say the creeping paralysis, of external action’; another, the ‘desire to penetrate deeper and deeper into human consciousness, and place moral problems upon a high pedestal’; ‘and finally the search … for a kind of new beauty that shall be less abstract than was the old’.Footnote ²² With the influence of Ibsen (as mediated by the polemics of George Bernard Shaw and William Archer), as well as a recalibration of Victorian melodrama, the focus on moral problems becomes almost ubiquitous. What is surprising in Sutro’s work is that he manages to combine both humorous entertainment and a disillusioned exposure of high society. In this sense, Sutro follows Oscar Wilde’s comedies in their use of moral paradox and self-contradiction as a form of implicit critique. Indeed, by 1907 Sutro had become identified as a scourge of the ‘smart set’, mentioning in an interview of that year that ‘money’ was ‘the sin of the “smart set” – whether English or American’, a sin whose implications he explored at length.Footnote ²³

Another of Maeterlinck’s key realizations, which has much in common with Shaw’s The Quintessence of Ibsenism, is that action in modern drama arises from a confrontation between duty and personal inclination, thus being internalized – ‘the conflict between a passion and a moral law, between a duty and a desire’.Footnote ²⁴ In the context of a Victorian sense of moral inflexibility, what starts as an apparently harmless notion of duty turns into a fixed code of behaviour, and finally into a dangerous illusion. For Shaw, ‘the repudiation of an established duty at every step’ is necessary to progress, recognizing in the work of Ibsen a sustained effort to demystify ideals that no longer serve their original purpose.Footnote ²⁵ Maeterlinck is equally uncompromising when he maintains that there is ‘scarcely a falsehood or error, a prejudice, half-truth or convention, that is not capable of assuming, that does not actually assume, when the occasion presents itself, the form of a duty in an uncertain consciousness’.Footnote ²⁶

For Sutro, the conflict between duty and desire, and the different forms it can take, becomes a common thread. But unlike Shaw, he is sympathetic towards the people, wrong as they might be, who fall prey to illusion, being willing to accept that not all forms of duty are necessarily bad. At his best, he is a keen but nonetheless compassionate observer of human nature, capable of revealing and condemning its various follies. Or, as described by his friend J. T. Grein, ‘his humour is germane to sarcasm [and] he is never so happy as when, in a subject of substance, he can inveigh against the craze and malady of the age’.Footnote ²⁷ Even in his most popular plays, such as John Glayde’s Honour and The Walls of Jericho, there is a lingering sense of discontent that cannot be overcome by the story’s apparent resolution. The tragic element persists beyond the fall of the curtain, as we realize that the formal conclusion does not cancel out the effects of the conflict. It might also indicate Sutro’s ongoing struggle with form, in which the neat ending of the well-made play is increasingly destabilized.

Honour and Illusion

Before the breakthrough of The Walls of Jericho (1904), Sutro had spent the better part of the 1890s trying to get a foothold in the theatre. A lot of his time was spent on translations, as he diligently made his way through Maeterlinck’s work:

The translations of the plays were intended for publication in book form rather than theatrical production, in editions which complemented Maeterlinck’s prose works. Around the same time, he collaborated with Arthur Bourchier on The Chili Widow, an adaptation from a French play (Alexandre Bisson’s Monsieur le Directeur ), which opened in September 1895 at the newly refurbished Royalty Theatre. In spite of its considerable run, the production ended up losing money. In his review, Bernard Shaw put down the production’s failure to the superficial acting and its lack of ‘artistic character’, rather than any deficiency of the play-text. Dominated by Bourchier’s ‘managerial policy’ of ‘breeziness, and rattle, and intense comic consciousness’, and accompanied by the company’s chorus of ‘Squawking voices, grinning faces, foolish antics’, the performance was defined by a ‘persistent Philistinism’. Even the audience, Shaw adds, was a ‘somewhat unsophisticated, not to say chuckleheaded one’. In spite of it being an amusing play, the miscasting of Violet Vanbrugh, the ‘thoughtlessness’ of Bourchier, and the production’s ‘extravagance of caricature’ made it resemble the work of ‘the romping, gleeful amateur’: ‘the facetious undergraduate who dresses up for a lark, the awfully jolly girl who can act like anything, and the funny man with accomplishments, including the banjo’.Footnote ²⁹

Towards the end of the decade, in another attempt to get ahead, Sutro worked with George Meredith on an adaptation of his novel, The Egoist. Unfortunately, however, the contractual negotiations fell through, the project was dropped, and the play was never performed. By the late 1890s, Sutro was caught between his ambition to break into the commercial theatre and the effort to establish a functional independent theatre with other playwrights. In 1897, according to Sawin, ‘at the invitation of William Archer, Alfred joined Archer, Elizabeth Robins, and H. W. Massingham to form the New Century Theatre’, the purpose of which was ‘to produce noncommercial plays for short runs’. The initiative was short-lived: the theatre’s first production (of Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman) took place in 1897, but by 1899, despite acquiring a ‘substantial subscription’, it was ‘unable to continue’.Footnote ³⁰ The frustration occasioned by the unexpected financial complications, and the reluctance of the public to support the venture, might account, to some extent, for Sutro’s decision to write for a more commercially oriented theatre. In spite of the various disappointments and false starts of the decade, by 1900 Sutro had managed to complete his first play, The Cave of Illusion.

In The Cave of Illusion, David Hollesdaile, a successful writer, has to choose between his devoted wife and the inspiring friendship of Gabrielle. After eloping with her, he becomes disillusioned and recognizes that he should have remained faithful to his family. On the point of returning home, Gabrielle reveals to him that she is pregnant with his child, and the play ends on a moral conundrum. The first crisis comes when Clara Hollesdaile, David’s wife, begins to understand that her sacrifice has been in vain:

The register of the language, falling between dialogic exposition and critical self-reflection, aims at the externalization of emotion in a moment of genuine pathos. Clara’s speech brings out the fact that the marriage had rested on the assumption that the wife would be subordinated to the whims of the artist-husband. Clara, who has dedicated her life to the family, is contrasted with Gabrielle ‘who hasn’t a child of her own and with twenty servants to do the work’ (p. 64). The dichotomy is evident: the former has done her duty towards her family, and by extension towards a society based on traditional values. The latter has enjoyed the freedom conferred by money and leisure to determine her own course, even if she is not exempt from the judgment of others. This juxtaposition expands into a conflict between opposed ideas of womanhood, a recurring theme in Sutro’s plays. The ‘natural instincts’ of women (p. 16), as good wives and mothers, are contrasted with the image of the self-defining woman, standing on ‘the heap of ashes known as domestic virtues’ (p. 23):

The irony of the situation takes the form of a circular plot, ending on the same problem with which it began. Gabrielle disturbs the conventional family only to reenact it at the end, with the same dire results: Hollesdaile becomes disillusioned; the disillusionment seeps into his writing; and he tries to break away, by which point it is too late to escape the consequences of his actions, and so his castigation is complete.

The play was never produced, but it was published in a limited edition with an introduction by Maeterlinck. It remained an exclusively literary work which Sutro regarded as a ‘succés d’estime’ (‘which means that a few copies were sold, but without much profit to author or publisher’).Footnote ³² Bernard Shaw’s informal critique of the play, in a letter to William Archer (dated 9 July 1900), picked on the outworn theme of adultery, which limited it to a superficial domestic conflict. Lewis Sawin thought this to be an oversimplification, maintaining that it is instead concerned with ‘the misery caused by various illusions’, particularly ‘the illusion that existence – or artistic creativity – can be carried on in isolation from duties and responsibilities.’Footnote ³³ In this view, duty appears as a necessary part of life, and indeed the ending suggests that, one way or another, it is inescapable. There seems to be an implicit moral: if Hollesdaile had recognized his indebtedness to his wife from the beginning, the suffering he inflicted on himself and the others could have been avoided. The return to a reassessed conservative viewpoint is characteristic of Sutro’s technique: after showing the limitations of a narrowly applied notion of duty (or womanhood, or another ‘ideal’), he nonetheless acknowledges its social necessity in a wider sense. In spite of this ambivalence, however, we cannot take Shaw’s critique for granted; as Sutro adopts the adultery theme, he also problematizes it. Rather than keeping the reference point external, either on the level of plot development (as in the traditional well-made play) or in the moral condemnation of the social circle (represented by relatives, friends, and other supporters of the status quo), the motivations and consequences of adultery are internalized, hinting at a deeper psychological conflict as the driving force of the play. The adultery theme, then, serves a different purpose, revealing the ironic restlessness which, in trying to escape itself, only deepens the interpersonal divide which made adultery possible in the first place.

The theme of conflicting duties is developed further in John Glayde’s Honour, a more cynical play than The Cave of Illusion. A review in the Athenaeum called it ‘an actuality, a thing of the day [which] presents a faithful, exact, and on the whole lamentable picture of life under conditions imposed by the relentless pursuit of pleasure and gain’.Footnote ³⁴ The play premiered at the St James’s Theatre, known as a particularly elegant venue which ‘had something of the feeling of one of the very best clubs in that district of clubland, of which only “the best people” were members’, with George Alexander starring in the title role.Footnote ³⁵ ‘The Stage’ Year Book named it the best play of 1907, describing Sutro as ‘one of our strongest forces in dramatic authorship’.Footnote ³⁶ Part of Alexander’s fashionable audience would have recognized itself in Sutro’s portrayal of the ‘smart set’, but, perhaps in order to defamiliarize it, Sutro set the play in contemporary Paris rather than London, allowing for a certain distance to avoid an overly direct critique.

The plot follows Muriel, the neglected wife of the great industrialist John Glayde, who, out of boredom and loneliness, starts an affair with Trevor Lerode. Glayde’s suspicions, upon his return to Paris, lead to the discovery of their imminent elopement. Instead of a predictably melodramatic ending, he agrees to leave Muriel, in a moment of triumphant renunciation:

The tone is both ironic in its mock-magnanimity, and solemn in its genuine renunciation of future happiness. The carefully balanced cadence and the repetition of ‘I shall’ – perhaps in ironic echo of the ‘I will’ of the marriage ceremony – suggests the moralizing decree of a self-possessed man, but it also reveals his ultimate failure to take responsibility for the situation. Somehow, having lost his wife and his dignity, John Glayde tries to maintain the upper hand. Muriel and Trevor cannot enjoy the prospect of their marriage after being humiliated by Glayde’s offer, an act through which he seems to have reclaimed the moral high ground while actually reverting to a commonplace morality. The play ends on a desolate note, foreclosing the future happiness of the characters.

Throughout the play, Glayde repeatedly admits his blame in neglecting his wife. In this sense, his lapse of duty in relation to the marriage is much greater than hers. Assuming that he could keep her in the background while fulfilling his personal ambitions, he denies her the right to a self-determined life:

The speech is characteristic of Sutro’s insertion of a moment of self-analysis into the plays. The internalization of the conflict contrasts with the characters’ tendency to reveal their intimate thoughts through speeches that are neither pure monologue nor fully integrated dialogue. There is a formal contradiction between the language of self-analysis, meant to ‘picture’ the inner conflict to the audience, and the development of the action which remains external to it. The action shows the characters’ inability to learn from their mistakes and to meaningfully incorporate that moment of realization into it, thus contradicting the need for a fuller self-understanding. In short, while revealing an awareness of their mistake, they remain blindsided to its implications and fail to change their attitude in relation to the social framework within which they act.

On a thematic level, John Glayde echoes David Hollesdaile’s struggle with idealism in The Cave of Illusion, caught between his own achievements and the happiness of his family. Once it is too late to change the course of events, his only option is to salvage his ‘honour’, the hollow concept which takes the place of genuine human connection. Having lost the affection of Muriel, he can only console himself with an illusion of greater integrity and moral righteousness. But the flawed man hiding behind these excuses can feel the pain of an irreversible loss. The play moves from the conflict of duty, as it appears in both the man of the world and his wife, to what Sawin calls ‘the ever-present Sutro theme of truth and honour versus deception’.Footnote ³⁸ Here, Sutro’s moralizing tendency becomes more apparent, but it is undercut by the implications of the action: the greatest deception is not that of interpersonal betrayal (in this case, adultery), but the underlying self-deception that eventually leads to betrayal. John Glayde, in the process of gaining the moral high ground and, in a sense, redeeming himself, has lost incomparably more: he sacrifices the tangible joys of an imperfect life for abstract values in which he does not really believe.

The naive scenario in which Muriel Glayde and Trevor Lerode can happily elope is repeatedly undermined by their entourage, with the secondary characters acting as the raisonneurs of the play. Muriel and Trevor are the sentimental pair, prepared to sacrifice long-term stability for a more immediate passion. They are contrasted with Chris Branley and the Princess, pragmatic society people, who can see through their rash decision and try to dissuade them. The callous dandies, cured of idealism through experience, become extreme cynics for whom love is subordinated to practical gain. But the lovers fall into the other extreme, unable to understand the social context and consequences of their impulsive actions. The play develops a kind of dialectic between the two groups, as sentimentality is countered with cynicism, and vice versa. John Glayde is caught between the two perspectives, at the point of realization that neither is tenable by itself. Either one, in isolation, requires sacrifice – of his career and sense of real-world impact on the one hand, and of his domestic fulfilment on the other. Branley, speaking as the experienced lover, favours his artistic profession and the personal fulfilment of work over the promises of a romantic affair:

Disinterested love is trivialized and reduced to the material level in which passion is only a temporary whim. The lesson of Hollesdaile’s disillusionment in The Cave is here anticipated by Branley’s insistence on the fact that no relationship is strong enough to resist the pressures of poverty, frustration, and regret. Sutro seems to suggest that this ideal, so fervidly pursued in Maeterlinck’s plays, is ruled out from the beginning by a society that prioritizes financial stability and the appearance of respectability – the two elements that both facilitate the domestic arrangement and belie its superficial value.

In the Princess’s view, Muriel is on the point of exchanging one form of discontent for another:

The parallelism between the two dialogues (Trevor–Branley and Muriel–Princess) hinges on the word ‘happy’, on the idea that personal renunciation is the principal condition for happiness. To be ‘perfectly happy’ or ‘awfully happy’ in high society, according to the raisonneurs , is a pragmatic choice. Here, Sutro underlines the similarity of the problem for both men and women, equally hemmed in by the social and economic expectations of their set. The attempted resolution of the two conflicting viewpoints (the pragmatism of the raisonneurs and the idealism of the lovers) through John Glayde’s appeal to personal integrity feels unconvincing, and the lingering discontent emphasizes the flimsiness of Glayde’s self-righteous attitude.Footnote ³⁹

Sutro on Women

The two defining themes of Sutro’s work may be identified as the social role of women (in terms of various conceptions of the emergent ‘new woman’) and the changing power balance between different classes, as seen in the decline of the aristocracy and the challenge of the self-made man. Sutro ends his memoirs, Celebrities and Simple Souls (1933), with an overview of the changes he witnessed during his lifetime: ‘As I look back on this long life of mine, the greatest change I have known is in the women, their attitude towards life and towards men.’Footnote ⁴⁰ Although the change is seen to be overwhelmingly positive, as with any significant change, it involves a reassessment of values, especially of the ‘old idea of the home’:

Sutro was both baffled by the fast pace of change, and prescient enough to avoid the reductions of a simplistic morality.Footnote ⁴² Apart from his personal views, though, we may understand his ambivalence towards conventional moral discourse in the context of what Joseph Donohue calls the ‘inherent conservatism of the commercial theatre’, taking into account the fact that ‘change may have come more slowly to the theatre of the Edwardian age than to its fiction, poetry, and other imaginative writing’.Footnote ⁴³ To the extent that this is true, he would have been influenced by the theatrical medium in a way that might not apply, for instance, to his occasional short prose or his translations of Maeterlinck. Nevertheless, debates over the ‘place and treatment of human sexuality’ remained an important feature of the Edwardian period, and something from which Sutro did not shy away.Footnote ⁴⁴

While Sutro did not necessarily break new ground with his female characters, we can find a range of subtly subversive women in his plays. Not as strongly delineated as the Saint Joans, Mrs Warrens, and Cleopatras of Bernard Shaw’s heroines, Sutro’s women are nevertheless perfectly adapted to their milieu in order to represent its contradictory opinions. At the beginning of The Cave of Illusion, Mrs Melissent sets the terms of the debate by using the General’s prejudices against him, declaring that ‘women were very different then – they were in the chrysalis stage’:

The light-heartedness of these exchanges belies the harsher reality of a woman’s limited agency, whether married or not. While Mrs Melissent retains the upper hand, the metaphor of the butterfly encapsulates the two sides of the debate, containing both a new social ideal and the persisting prejudices which it must overcome. The fast-paced dialogue and the short, alternating lines underscore the tension at the heart of the argument; neither perspective is definitive, as each one is reinforced or contradicted by the developing events of the play. Similarly, in The Fascinating Mr Vanderveldt, Clarice recognizes the paradox of opposed perspectives co-existing within the same person, accusing her own family of hypocrisy: ‘Mamma, you and Clementina are very indignant at our being denied the suffrage – I had rather women began to show some confidence in their own sex – then men would respect us, too!’Footnote ⁴⁵ There is a stark difference between what the characters profess to believe and their actual behaviour: in spite of her indignation at being denied the suffrage, Clarice’s mother is the first to condemn any deviation from the conventions of propriety as a sexual transgression. Sutro’s characters are caught in a transitional stage, recognizing that many aspects of conventional morality are inadequate without yet being able to escape them. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Sutro was never polemical, presenting instead both sides of an argument, sometimes making it difficult to tell whether he was catering to the prejudices of the audience or challenging them.

In Mollentrave on Women, Sutro satirizes the eponymous pseudo-psychologist and so-called expert on women’s behaviour. The play premiered in February 1905 at the St James’s Theatre, but this time without George Alexander in the cast (though Sutro’s professional relationship with him was to resume in 1908, when Alexander performed in The Builder of Bridges for Edward VII at Sandringham). The critical reception of Mollentrave was mostly positive, with Max Beerbohm describing it as a ‘delightful little comedy’ and A. E. W. Mason noting that ‘the characters are fresh and keenly observed, and the dialogue natural without being commonplace’.Footnote ⁴⁶ The title character may allude to Bernard Hollander, the famous Edwardian phrenologist, whose ambivalent views on the suffragette movement combined scientific observation with vague notions of women’s ‘high mission, involving the necessity of healthy living and healthy thinking’, as opposed to anything that could lead to ‘overexcitement and overstrain’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Hollander was described as a prolific writer and a popular and effective speaker, able to communicate his ideas to a public beyond the medical field.Footnote ⁴⁸ In Sutro’s play, Mollentrave has written a best-selling book in which he reduces women to predictable patterns of behaviour: ‘you will find, between these covers, a most careful, complete investigation on scientific principles, of the baffling, perplexing creature known to us as Woman!’Footnote ⁴⁹ His daughter’s unassuming intelligence is pitched against his ridiculous theories: ‘And you really believe,’ she says to him, ‘That I, a creature with a heart and soul, am pigeon-holed in your book, and bound to conform to its maxims!’ (p. 45). The poetics of courtship, as exemplified by Mollentrave, reveal the superficiality of a world in which social values are interchangeable as long as they fall within the acceptable bounds. Mollentrave becomes the director of a scene in which romance is reduced to an ‘odious comedy’ (p. 52) that follows his script. Such metatheatrical comments invoke the inferior genres that Sutro tries to overcome: elements of farce and melodrama indicate their generic limitations, and the well-made construction is partly tongue-in-cheek.

The play’s implied joke is that Mollentrave’s ridiculous marriage plot eventually succeeds, but for completely different reasons from the ones he had imagined. His insights prove to be both right and wrong, as he successfully predicts the end while misunderstanding the means. The play’s ending reveals him in the posture of the lucky quack, the irony of which goes blissfully unnoticed by him. His overconfident notion of causality proves to be a simple coincidence: ‘Every single event, all that has happened, was merely the inlay, the minute fragments that dove-tailed – and produced this! … After all, my dear fellow, what is it? A little knowledge of human nature!’ (p. 86). Human nature has remained as unpredictable as ever, and it is only within the artificial structure of Mollentrave’s experiment that it can be delimited and explained. Similar metatheatrical comments appear throughout Sutro’s one-acters, suggesting a certain complicity and sophistication on the part of an audience familiar, and maybe even bored, with the common theatrical tropes. In The Man in the Stalls, for instance, a professional theatre critic describes the average contemporary play as ‘either so chock-full of intellect that they send you to sleep – or they reek of sentiment till you yearn for the smell of a cabbage!’; at the same time as archly commenting on adaptations from the French (of the sort Sutro himself had many times supplied): ‘well, we know what that means. Husband, wife, and mistress. Or wife, husband, lover… . And you make it English, and pass the Censor, by putting the lady in a mackintosh, and dumping in a curate!’Footnote ⁵⁰

Sutro’s practice of challenging the established conventions without fully overcoming them places him somewhere between the modernist tendency to transfer the ‘disquietude’ of the artist to their patrons (as Dennis Kennedy formulates this ‘radically new relationship with the bourgeois audience’) and the Victorian assumption of a ‘comfortable, one-for-one relationship with the tangible facts of the quotidian world’.Footnote ⁵¹

Walls Come Tumbling Down

The Walls of Jericho, produced a few months before Mollentrave on Women, but probably written around the same time, became Sutro’s biggest success both in London and abroad. According to a review written by Ralph D. Blumenfeld in 1905, the two plays were the ‘most successful [ones] of the season in London’,Footnote ⁵² despite the difference of their tone and thematic approach. The Walls of Jericho premiered at the Garrick Theatre in October 1904, under the management of Arthur Bourchier, with him and his wife Violet Vanbrugh in the leading roles. The collaboration between Sutro, Bourchier, and Vanbrugh repeated that of their 1895 production of The Chili Widow, but to much greater acclaim: the play ran for 423 performances in London before transferring to the United States.Footnote ⁵³ Sutro had written it with the encouragement of William Archer, who thought it ‘the very thing for Arthur Bourchier’.Footnote ⁵⁴ After the repeated rejections and setbacks of previous years, Archer’s encouragement worked as a catalyst for Sutro’s first success and the productive period which followed. Sutro mentions in his memoirs that, ‘in the fashion of those days, I had peppered the play with marquises, earls and the like; my dames were all of high degree; and I had never mixed in those exalted circles, nor did I number among my acquaintance any person of higher rank than a knight’. Nonetheless, the play elicited ‘congratulations from everyone, introductions to real Marquises and Marchionesses, thumps on the back from friends’.Footnote ⁵⁵ The critique of the ‘smart set’ was subtle enough to appeal without giving offence.

The play’s plot follows the disillusionment of Jack Frobisher, who, having made a fortune in Australia, returns to England to marry into the aristocracy. We are introduced to Frobisher as an outsider to the ‘smart set’, a man who feels a sense of duty towards the less fortunate and tries to channel his wealth into the improvement of society: ‘Frobisher and [Marchmont] both sob over the working classes, and howl for millenniums,’ declares Hannaford, the play’s elderly dandy. ‘Add Hamlet to General Booth and flavour with Tolstoy– you have our son-in-law!’Footnote ⁵⁶ Such an attitude is juxtaposed with that of Jack’s father-in-law, the Marquis of Steventon, a poor nobleman trying to secure his finances, who belongs to a bygone era when one’s name and reputation were guarantees of influence: ‘There was a time when I could get a thousand guineas down, and three hundred a year, for signing my name. Oh, we’ve fallen on evil days!’ (p. 25). The older values of a strictly hierarchical society are disrupted by the independence of the self-made man. For the aristocratic pauper, money has become a means of survival, whereas the self-made man uses it as a vehicle for social change.

The conflict, though seemingly determined by the superficial love triangle (Jack Frobisher–Alethea Frobisher–Harry Dallas), is in fact a conflict between different worldviews. On the surface, it manifests itself as a family scandal, fuelled by jealousy and suspicion. But it only hides a more fundamental incompatibility between husband and wife, representative of their respective backgrounds:

Reminiscent of a Wildean epigram, Alethea’s response reduces the heightened ideal to a concrete disease which can be cured through a decisive intervention. The Marquis is defined by a similar sense of cynicism, seen as a quintessentially modern mindset. ‘The sensible husband rejoices when his wife selects a foolish Dallas to flirt with,’ he opines, before concluding that ‘The age we live in is an elastic age; we must all be … elastic to-day’ (p. 14). The same epigrammatic technique is now ridiculed to reveal the shallowness of the characters’ ideas and their moral confusion. In spite of his remark, the Marquis cannot accept the elasticity of the age when his own son threatens to break with tradition by marrying beneath him. The Walls of Jericho depicts a society caught between the old ideals, which cannot yet be completely refuted, and the new, which are imposed by cultural and economic changes. Jack Frobisher can only escape the cross-currents of these clashing forces by leaving the ‘smart set’ altogether. His desertion of high society is a recognition that it is declining and cannot be salvaged. As with other of Sutro’s plays, the condemnation is partly implicit, mediated by the familiarity of a common form – the love triangle as the organizing principle of the story, shown in the more familiar light of a trivial intrigue. Sutro’s fame and success were, for the time being, assured.

Post-War Experiments

More than a decade later, in The Choice (1919), the landscape of social, economic, and political change anticipated in Sutro’s earlier plays had become an actuality. The play was written after the First World War and first produced at Wyndham’s Theatre in September 1919, with Gerald du Maurier in the leading role. With the new gender dynamics imposed by the war, the suspension of many suffrage organizations, and the Representation of the People Act coming into effect in 1918, women’s place in society, as well as in the home, had changed significantly. A similar shift can be seen in the play’s depiction of class: the remnants of the aristocracy have now become powerless, rendered as mere parodies of their former selves. The main mission of Lady Jemima and Lord Sandhills, Clarissa’s relatives in The Choice, is to see her married off with a settlement. With their finances rendered precarious by the war, their whole livelihood depends on an advantageous marriage, but the power is now in the hands of the international industrialist who lives and acts by different standards. Lady Jemima believes in ‘sentiment’ (‘with a sixpenny stamp on it’), and Sandhills ‘dreams of his head being carried about on a pike [by Bolshevists]’, an avariciousness that borders on delusion.Footnote ⁵⁷ The epigrammatic style alternates with moments of exaggerated pathos, gradually moving from the portrayal of genuine human defects to a kind of unmitigated caricature:

In the successful businessman John Cordways, Sutro presents us with an updated John Glayde, forced to choose between an abstract ideal of justice and a compromise for the sake of the others. And even though the theme is similar, the characterization is harsher – the industrialist is more unyielding, the aristocrats more ridiculous, and the young lovers more predictable. Sutro’s technical apparatus starts to show through in a transition to the ‘late style’ of his final years of playwriting.

The plays of the 1920s started to drop in popularity after a last success with The Laughing Lady (1922). Another play of that decade, A Man with a Heart (1925), is a good example of the extent to which Sutro’s approach had changed. The play opened at Wyndham’s Theatre in March 1925, with Gerald du Maurier once again in the leading role. Earlier that year, Sutro had seen the premiere of Noël Coward’s The Vortex and been impressed by the young writer’s talent. The shift in Sutro’s style can perhaps be explained in terms of an attempt to remain relevant within a new, fashionable cynicism, heralded by Coward’s early plays. And so in A Man with a Heart, the intricacies of adultery become a sort of game, a mere convention in the lives of the characters. The love triangle, which had previously been charged with moral responsibility and a sense of danger, is now devoid of any seriousness. It has become a blasé fact of married life with which the characters entertain themselves in order to escape their boredom. The same patterns of deception, mistrust, and reconciliation repeat themselves in various permutations, with the feeling that there is much less at stake. What before would have been controversial has now become merely vapid:

There is no more pretence to respectability as the formerly accepted ideals are debased. Gisèle’s coy euphemism for ‘that little happening’ is immediately invalidated in her next line, which acts as a gloss on the play’s overarching thematic – without a fuss for a kiss, there is no real social (and by extension, dramatic) tension and the old moral framework collapses. In terms of the staging, the exits and entrances become perfunctory and largely unmotivated. The characters are more dehumanized, barely affected by each other’s decisions, and their puppet-like motions are limited to a predictable pattern. The dialogue often consists of sharp one-liners that gradually remove the veneer of tact and politeness which had been part of both Sutro’s style and the Edwardian code of manners. Emotion, having reached a high point of intensity, starts to fester, and the tone loses its former sentimentality. Or rather, the sentimental outlook is ridiculed and shown to be closely linked to its counterpart – cruel detachment:

The petty deceptions which the characters inflict on each other, rather than laying the foundations for an appeal to personal integrity, only function to punctuate the tedium of their existence. As they return to a restlessness much more pernicious than anything in the earlier plays, Sutro returns to an almost Maeterlinckian static drama in which mood prevails over action. The main difference is that, whereas Maeterlinck had explored its tragic potential, for Sutro it springs out of the absurdism of a comedy taken to the extreme.

That actions previously charged with moral implications become meaningless suggests a change in attitudes towards moral discourse in the theatre. ‘Morals are out of fashion,’ Sutro noted in the early 1930s, ‘at least, on the stage and in our more serious works of fiction’: ‘and manners – on the stage – are out of fashion too. Though that is incorrect, perhaps; autres temps, autres mœurs ; manners have changed.’Footnote ⁵⁹ His final plays can be read as an attempt to adapt to changing ‘manners’ in the theatre, often misfiring because they fail to become effective as entertainment. Or perhaps they can be read as a way of showing that a form of theatre deprived of a moral backbone can become inhuman. Thus, A Man with a Heart comes closer to being a detached exploration of the mechanics of desire, and their reflection on the level of dramatic structure, than a probing of genuine humanity. If, in his initial distancing from Maeterlinck, Sutro had sacrificed mysticism for a more clearly defined social dynamic, in the late plays, anything that could transcend the fallen state of an amoral world becomes inconceivable. A Man with a Heart and the succeeding plays were too unpalatable for the average theatregoer while failing to break significantly new ground, or at least come across as novelties, in dramatic scope and technique.

Bernard Shaw noticed in Sutro’s final plays an increased experimentation with convention, a distancing from his proven recipe for success, and an indifference towards audience expectations. Shaw makes his position clear in a letter written after seeing The Desperate Lovers, first produced at the Comedy Theatre in January 1927:

The implication is that Sutro has distanced himself from the ‘theatrical’, in favour of a more literary experiment. Something in the stagey playfulness of the dialogue seems to have alienated the audience. From the initial stage directions, introducing us to a room with ‘a few ultra-modern pictures, of which the meaning is generally lost in a blaze of colour’, to the incessantly epigrammatic dialogue structure, the whole play has a self-consciously irreverent air.Footnote ⁶¹ For instance, an exchange between Constantia and her servant presents class tension as a contest of wits in which the servant has the advantage:

Sutro satirizes the dramatic types that he had previously relied on. The lawyer, ‘a master of exposition, [who] has made everything perfectly clear’ (p. 28) is interrupted on the brink of an important revelation when the other characters stop to straighten a painting on the wall. One of the common conventions of the well-made play – the letter brought in on a salver – is used to the point of ridicule. Conventional morality is repeatedly reversed, either through a statement – ‘In these days, when living is so expensive, one has to be very economical with the truth’ (p. 37) – or in the reconfiguration of the two couples at the end: ‘Alexander can’t object to Everard marrying Genevieve, as he wanted to marry her himself. Everard can’t object to Alexander marrying Eulalie as he wanted to marry her himself. So why not?’ (p. 108). Horace Shipp, failing to appreciate the element of satire, noted in a contemporary review that the events of the play ‘form a framework of artifice so remote from life that it must succeed as art or fail abjectly’, concluding that ‘Mr Sutro took just one step too far from reality’.Footnote ⁶² The Desperate Lovers, subtitled ‘A Frivolous Comedy in Three Acts’, anticipates a lighter, but simultaneously more self-conscious, type of absurdist comedy. The assumptions of ‘reality’ and of the theatre are parodied; in a similar way to Shaw’s farces and extravaganzas, the play has to be taken on its own terms, without any pretence to genuine seriousness, to be enjoyed as a veritable ‘ jeu d’esprit ’.

Sydney W. Carroll, the retired drama critic of The Sunday Times, sent Sutro an appreciative letter after seeing the play in which he praised its ‘fantastic humour, unfortunately rarely to be seen on the English stage’, adding that most of the audience had missed the point of the joke.Footnote ⁶³ This gesture of appreciation became the exception to the rule during a prolonged period of commercial and critical failure. The bad reviews, the box-office losses, and the shortened runs distanced Sutro from producers and effectively finished his career. Despite the occasional trickle of encouragement from his friends, he felt that his time in the theatre had come to an end and stepped back definitively after the failure of Living Together in 1929. Well aware that he had made many compromises for the sake of success, but proud of the place he had carved out for himself in the established theatre, he was not entirely surprised when it eventually cast him out. There was a feeling in the air, shared by such other seasoned playwrights as Jones and Pinero, that a certain style of theatre had become obsolete. While not on the same literary level as his canonical peers, Sutro still made a noteworthy contribution to a theatre that, he thought, was capable of sophisticated argument and a sustained engagement with important questions.

Alfred Sutro was never part of the vanguard of modern theatre, and he never attempted to be, but he diligently pushed the ranks from behind – in his casual, self-effacing way – during what proved to be a multifaceted period of change in the history of British drama.