After fifty years practice, I have no difficulty transliterating Russian into the Roman alphabet using three different Anglo-American systems; it’s so automatic I can practically switch my brain off as I do it… But I cannot hold the hundred or so Modern Humanities Research Association rules for bibliographic referencing, plus tricky sub-variations, in my head as I check my Bibliography of three hundred entries. I glaze over after two pages and it’s a waste of time continuing. I have to come back and tackle the next two pages twenty-four hours later. It’s the only way to encourage accuracy. Even so I keep spotting errors in what I’ve done already. Perhaps an ‘editor’ will insist on a different system anyway!
This anaesthetising activity has, however, brought a most unexpected benefit.
One of my bibliographic minefields is J.P. Wearing’s indispensable compendium of London theatre productions between 1890 and 1959. It comes in seven ‘volumes’ of decades, plus one of accumulated indexes, but some of these ‘volumes’ are in two or three books, they have different publishers, and some of these decade-volumes are now being brought out as a second edition in single volumes. There was nothing for it but to go back to the University (copyright) Library and examine the actual books.
Whilst I was at it, I decided, for absolute surety, to check all of Wearing’s entries for the London productions of George’s plays — data I had first extracted four years ago and relied on ever since. Oh dear…oh dear oh dear oh dear: absorbed (I suppose) in the seminal 1925 production of George’s translation of The Cherry Orchard, I had completely missed another entry for 1925. To be honest, I was not completely disbelieving that I’d done this, as my fallibility/dementia seems to have waxed as the book wore on, but I was certainly amazed at what the missed production was. One could never have guessed it.
Philip Harben stage-manages a pancake on television, c. 1960
On Sunday 13 December 1925 The Fountain was performed at the Strand Theatre, now the Novello, at the corner of Catherine Street and Aldwych. It had an incredibly impressive cast. In fact, key parts were played by the actors who had premiered it to great acclaim in London and Glasgow in 1909: Mary Jerrold as Chenda, Frederick Lloyd as James Wren, Hubert Harben as the East End vicar Tom Oliver. But it only saw one performance. Why?
An answer might be indicated by the fact that (a) the original twenty-one speaking parts seem to have been reduced to twelve, (b) the Harben family were at the core of the production.
It would certainly be possible to mount a viable production of The Fountain with twelve actors and, perhaps, some doubling. It would save a lot of money. The production might even have been more effective in this streamlined state than in its thirty-actor original, and George would undoubtedly have approved. But Mary Jerrold was actually Mrs Hubert Harben (both wife and husband were to become successful film actors), Hubert Harben not only played Tom Oliver but was the producer (today ‘director’), and the stage manager was their nineteen-year-old son Philip, who was destined to become the first TV celebrity chef.
It seems to me, then, that this 1925 cut-down production of The Fountain was probably the brainchild of the Harben family. Perhaps they wanted to show managers, agents and the professional Sunday-going audiences one of their past theatrical hits in the hope of the play being revived commercially with Jerrold, Harben and Lloyd starring? The very first production of The Fountain, after all, had been on a Sunday and Monday for the Incorporated Stage Society at the nearby Aldwych Theatre, and it had taken off from there, reaching its acme of popularity with two touring productions in 1912. However, nothing further came of the Harben venture. My guess is that in 1925 the subject of the play was perceived as too Edwardian, i.e. ‘passé’, to bring in the audiences.
There is another possibility. In 1909 the Harbens became friends with the Calderons. Mary Jerrold had even — to critical acclaim — played Arkadina in the English premiere of The Seagull at Glasgow following on from her triumph in the Glasgow Fountain. George dedicated the first publication of The Fountain (1911) to MISS MARY JERROLD, THE CHARMING CREATOR OF “CHENDA”, and even in the 1922 volume of his plays, edited by Kittie, the dedication was TO MISS MARY JERROLD. Perhaps, then, the Harbens mounted this one-off 1925 production of The Fountain as a tribute to George ten years after his death, out of affection for Kittie, and in the wake of the impact made on the British theatre six months earlier by the London Cherry Orchard? (The third and last publication of The Fountain as a one-off was also in 1925.) Nothing, in my experience, is ever done in the theatre purely for altruistic reasons, but these factors might have fed into the 1925 production as well as it being a showcase for the Harbens, Lloyd, and other actors resting between engagements. The production could have been financed not just by the Harbens but by other actors in the cast, and perhaps even Kittie.
The problem with this hypothesis is that so far there is no evidence for it. It is not mentioned in any of Kittie’s papers (mind you, she might not have been able to see the performance if she was still tied up with the aftermath of Mrs Stewart of Torquay‘s death on 24 November 1925). There seems to have been only one review, but for the theatre profession this would be a significant one: it was in The Stage of 17 December 1925. This organ is notoriously difficult to recover online, in hard copy or microform. I await my digitised image through Inter-Library Loan.
Perhaps this image will explain a thing or two. I am keen to write a new paragraph into the biography if the production is connected with George’s memorialisation, of course, and if, like the Pienne portrait, it introduces some different ‘lighting’ into the story of Kittie’s life after she left Hampstead disastrously for Petersfield in December 1922.
Related
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
George Calderon, 1912
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Captain of the 11
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
George Calderon c.1901
Another wildcard!
After fifty years practice, I have no difficulty transliterating Russian into the Roman alphabet using three different Anglo-American systems; it’s so automatic I can practically switch my brain off as I do it… But I cannot hold the hundred or so Modern Humanities Research Association rules for bibliographic referencing, plus tricky sub-variations, in my head as I check my Bibliography of three hundred entries. I glaze over after two pages and it’s a waste of time continuing. I have to come back and tackle the next two pages twenty-four hours later. It’s the only way to encourage accuracy. Even so I keep spotting errors in what I’ve done already. Perhaps an ‘editor’ will insist on a different system anyway!
This anaesthetising activity has, however, brought a most unexpected benefit.
One of my bibliographic minefields is J.P. Wearing’s indispensable compendium of London theatre productions between 1890 and 1959. It comes in seven ‘volumes’ of decades, plus one of accumulated indexes, but some of these ‘volumes’ are in two or three books, they have different publishers, and some of these decade-volumes are now being brought out as a second edition in single volumes. There was nothing for it but to go back to the University (copyright) Library and examine the actual books.
Whilst I was at it, I decided, for absolute surety, to check all of Wearing’s entries for the London productions of George’s plays — data I had first extracted four years ago and relied on ever since. Oh dear…oh dear oh dear oh dear: absorbed (I suppose) in the seminal 1925 production of George’s translation of The Cherry Orchard, I had completely missed another entry for 1925. To be honest, I was not completely disbelieving that I’d done this, as my fallibility/dementia seems to have waxed as the book wore on, but I was certainly amazed at what the missed production was. One could never have guessed it.
Philip Harben stage-manages a pancake on television, c. 1960
On Sunday 13 December 1925 The Fountain was performed at the Strand Theatre, now the Novello, at the corner of Catherine Street and Aldwych. It had an incredibly impressive cast. In fact, key parts were played by the actors who had premiered it to great acclaim in London and Glasgow in 1909: Mary Jerrold as Chenda, Frederick Lloyd as James Wren, Hubert Harben as the East End vicar Tom Oliver. But it only saw one performance. Why?
An answer might be indicated by the fact that (a) the original twenty-one speaking parts seem to have been reduced to twelve, (b) the Harben family were at the core of the production.
It would certainly be possible to mount a viable production of The Fountain with twelve actors and, perhaps, some doubling. It would save a lot of money. The production might even have been more effective in this streamlined state than in its thirty-actor original, and George would undoubtedly have approved. But Mary Jerrold was actually Mrs Hubert Harben (both wife and husband were to become successful film actors), Hubert Harben not only played Tom Oliver but was the producer (today ‘director’), and the stage manager was their nineteen-year-old son Philip, who was destined to become the first TV celebrity chef.
It seems to me, then, that this 1925 cut-down production of The Fountain was probably the brainchild of the Harben family. Perhaps they wanted to show managers, agents and the professional Sunday-going audiences one of their past theatrical hits in the hope of the play being revived commercially with Jerrold, Harben and Lloyd starring? The very first production of The Fountain, after all, had been on a Sunday and Monday for the Incorporated Stage Society at the nearby Aldwych Theatre, and it had taken off from there, reaching its acme of popularity with two touring productions in 1912. However, nothing further came of the Harben venture. My guess is that in 1925 the subject of the play was perceived as too Edwardian, i.e. ‘passé’, to bring in the audiences.
There is another possibility. In 1909 the Harbens became friends with the Calderons. Mary Jerrold had even — to critical acclaim — played Arkadina in the English premiere of The Seagull at Glasgow following on from her triumph in the Glasgow Fountain. George dedicated the first publication of The Fountain (1911) to MISS MARY JERROLD, THE CHARMING CREATOR OF “CHENDA”, and even in the 1922 volume of his plays, edited by Kittie, the dedication was TO MISS MARY JERROLD. Perhaps, then, the Harbens mounted this one-off 1925 production of The Fountain as a tribute to George ten years after his death, out of affection for Kittie, and in the wake of the impact made on the British theatre six months earlier by the London Cherry Orchard? (The third and last publication of The Fountain as a one-off was also in 1925.) Nothing, in my experience, is ever done in the theatre purely for altruistic reasons, but these factors might have fed into the 1925 production as well as it being a showcase for the Harbens, Lloyd, and other actors resting between engagements. The production could have been financed not just by the Harbens but by other actors in the cast, and perhaps even Kittie.
The problem with this hypothesis is that so far there is no evidence for it. It is not mentioned in any of Kittie’s papers (mind you, she might not have been able to see the performance if she was still tied up with the aftermath of Mrs Stewart of Torquay‘s death on 24 November 1925). There seems to have been only one review, but for the theatre profession this would be a significant one: it was in The Stage of 17 December 1925. This organ is notoriously difficult to recover online, in hard copy or microform. I await my digitised image through Inter-Library Loan.
Perhaps this image will explain a thing or two. I am keen to write a new paragraph into the biography if the production is connected with George’s memorialisation, of course, and if, like the Pienne portrait, it introduces some different ‘lighting’ into the story of Kittie’s life after she left Hampstead disastrously for Petersfield in December 1922.
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