PETER BILLINGHAM
In act 2, scene 4, of Shakespeare’s problematic comedy Twelfth Night (1602) the female character Viola, in role-disguise as the young man Cesario, is in dialogue with her/his newly found patron, the Duke Orsino:
VIOLA: My father had a daughter loved a man
As it might be, perhaps were I a woman
I should your Lordship.
ORSINO: And what’s her history?
VIOLA: A blank my lord. She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i’th’bud,
Feed on her damask cheek. She pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed? …
ORSINO: But died thy sister of her love, my boy?
VIOLA: I am all the daughters of my father’s house,
And all the brothers too; and yet I know not.
(107–20)
This short extract embodies some of the key themes and issues surrounding the unique but little-known touring British theatre company: the all-female Osiris Players, founded by a woman of impressive tenacity and commitment to the social and cultural value of theatre, Nancy Hewins (1902–78) (see fig. 11.1).
This company toured Shakespeare principally though not exclusively throughout the Second World War to villages and small towns, quite often playing in non-standard and even non-theatre venues to war-torn communities throughout the west midlands of England. In doing so they reversed in gender terms the original performance conventions of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. They also demonstrated a remarkable commitment to a belief in the intrinsic cultural and restorative value of theatre and especially, canonically, the plays of Shakespeare. I first came across the Osiris Players as a minor, virtually forgotten footnote of British theatre history whilst researching my doctoral thesis from the late 1980s through into the early 1990s. My research, published under the title Theatres of Conscience, examined and discussed the work of four small British touring theatre companies during the Second World War and the two decades following 1945. The four companies were the Pilgrim Players, the Adelphi Players, the Compass Players, and the Century Theatre.
11.1. Nancy Hewins as General Burgoyne in the Osiris production of Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple. Photograph reproduced from Marie Crispin’s copy of an Osiris promotional brochure. Photographer unknown.
The Pilgrim Players were formed by Elliot Martin Browne, who was a close friend of T.S. Eliot and directed the premieres of all Eliot’s verse dramas. Browne was also a friend and associate of George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester and an ardent and courageous public voice against the blanket-bombing of German cities in the latter part of the war, fearful of the mass numbers of German civilians that would suffer through this strategy. Bell was also in sympathetic and regular contact with the German liberal theologian Dietrich Bonheoffer, who was executed by the Nazis in April 1945 for his involvement in the unsuccessful plot to assassinate Hitler. Richard Heron Ward, the founder of the Adelphi Players, also had significant wider political and radical religious associations in that he was an activist in the Peace Pledge Union, which was founded in the mid-1930s in Britain as a cross-political if largely left-liberal anti-war coalition. Ward worked as a personal assistant to Canon Dick Shepherd, priest of St Martins in the Fields.1 Both the Pilgrim Players and the Adelphi Players were committed to a vision of taking theatre to the people and especially so under the traumatic socio-cultural conditions of war. They were not in any sense propagandists in intention or repertoire but rather believed in the innate value of theatre to enrich and transform lives.
The important sense in which the conditions of war facilitated a renewed interest in cultural activities is central to a wider understanding of why companies such as the Osiris Players were necessary for public morale. It furthermore explains why their work was so welcomed, even if the quality and standard of production and acting was varied. The conditions of wartime undoubtedly highlighted that sense of cultural heritage in the darkness of those times. Of course there were other individuals and companies who contributed to and were committed to the therapeutic value of culture in wartime Britain. The Old Vic was a major presence both in London and the regions, although its charismatic founder Lillian Bayliss had passed away in 1937; Tyrone Guthrie took over her mantle and through the 1939–40 season his commitment to casting an ‘all-star’ company (including Robert Donat, John Gielgud, Lewis Casson, Cathleen Nesbitt, and Fay Compton) helped provide high-quality theatre in the opening year of the war. In November 1940 the Old Vic’s Governing Council took the much criticized decision of moving the company out of London to a regional base, the Victoria Theatre in Burnley, Lancashire. Throughout the war Donald Wolfit, the legendary actor-manager made famous posthumously by Ronald Harwood’s play The Dresser,2 continued to perform in London and also toured the provinces.
I came across the existence also of the Osiris Players through the chance comments of a former actor with the Adelphi Players I had interviewed in 1986; it transpired that the Osiris had toured some of the same venues as the Adelphi. In the autumn of 2008 in another chance conversation, this time with Dr Philip Crispin of the drama department at the University of Hull, England, I mentioned my intention of trying to unearth details about the Osiris, possibly for an article or conference paper. He told me that his mother, Mrs Marie Crispin, a retired professional actress, had begun her acting career with the Osiris Players more than fifty years previously. While Marie Crispin did not join Osiris until 1955, the core company, which dated back to its prewar origins, was still in place, and she was thus able to share with me first-hand accounts related to working and living conditions with the prewar and wartime companies. In the postwar years theatre companies with the word ‘Players’ in their title were increasingly seen as ‘amateur’ in status,’ so it is not surprising therefore that the Osiris Players were rechristened the Osiris Repertory Company in the post-1945 period.
I made arrangements to meet with Marie Crispin and interview her about her time with the Osiris Players. It was through this meeting that I began to find out more about this unique company. Equally importantly I gained access to a small but invaluable documentary collection of photographs, posters, and programs that she had kept over the years.3 In this relatively short essay I can only hope to introduce the Osiris Players and place them in the wider context of touring theatre in Britain between 1939 and 1945. To that end, I will continue by returning to a short overview of other companies, including the Adelphi Players, the Pilgrim Players, and the Compass Players, and the values and ideals that inspired their work. The rest of this discussion will be devoted to an exploration of the Osiris, their origins, ideals, and challenging life on the road performing Shakespeare under the social, economic, and cultural conditions of wartime Britain.
The decade prior to the start of the Second World War had seen the emergence of what historians of the liberal left subsequently called the Popular Front in British social, cultural, and political life. It was a somewhat eclectic network, rather than a formal movement, with relatively fluid connections in places that embraced liberal and radical Anglican Christians such as Bishop Bell and Canon Shepherd. The Popular Front was also facilitated through individuals such as the publisher Victor Gollancz and his Left Book Review and Left Book Club. Socialists and pacifists within the Labour Party and the rapid rise in membership and activity of the British Communist Party in the 1930s were other important signifiers of organized opposition to rising militarism and the threat of fascism in Europe. In theatre the former association of amateur working-class agit-prop groups known as the Workers’ Theatre Movement coalesced into the Unity Theatre.4 English choreographer Rupert Doone (a former lover of Diaghilev) and his London-based Group Theatre also played a significant role, utilizing talents and involvement of W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and Benjamin Britten among others. This company of principally gay artists with broadly left-wing political aims and sympathies was also significant in a period when homosexuality itself was illegal. While it would be simplistic to suggest any deeper connection between the two companies, there is nevertheless some wider historical of evidence of artists creating work from an effectively ‘hidden’ and counter-cultural position during this period.
It was out of these disparate strands that people such as the novelist and playwright Richard Ward founded the Adelphi Players and the artist and anarchist-communist John Crockett established the Compass Players. Along with these two companies, Browne, who had also directed the premiere of Murder in the Cathedral, went on to form the Pilgrim Players. The impetus for this touring theatre company was Bell’s founding of the Religious Drama Society of Great Britain in the late 1920s. At the outbreak of war, the British government, recognizing the morale-boosting value of the arts, decided to support and facilitate the performing arts – especially theatre, music, and dance – for the wartime population. The formation of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) represents the first state-sponsored arts production in Britain. At the close of the war the CEMA metamorphosed into the Arts Council of Great Britain. During the war CEMA was able to facilitate the essential infrastructure for the provision and organization of venues, subsidies for petrol vouchers (without which motorized transport for touring would have been impossible), as well as advertising and publicity. A total of seventeen other touring theatre and dance companies supported by the Council for Education Music and the Arts during the war years have been identified, including Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop and the Ballet Joos, a contemporary dance company of exiled Dutch dancers.
Not surprisingly in propaganda terms, the war against Germany in particular was presented as a war and struggle for hearts and minds between the traditional values of a Christian-oriented Western civilization and a similarly defined English cultural history against an ideology that was violently opposed to such cultural and historical narratives. In this wider context Shakespeare as a dramatist and furthermore as a cultural icon of privileged values of ‘humanity,’ ‘Christianity,’ ‘valour,’ and ‘truth’ was the preeminent playwright to be supported and promoted by the authorities.
Universal suffrage for women was not achieved until 1928, eleven years prior to the outbreak of war, and prewar British society was also patriarchal and reactionary, demanding that women who were trained as teachers and nurses withdraw from these professions on becoming married. Against this social, cultural, and political backdrop, the emergence and existence of the Osiris Players constituted a remarkable paradox and contradiction. Here was a company of women committed to the mission of producing Shakespeare – but also playwrights such as Ibsen, Shaw, and Congreve – on their own terms. The initial and crucial drive and energy and the material means for the realization of this vision came from a young woman with a well-to-do, upper-class background named Nancy Hewins. The other young women who joined her idiosyncratic artistic crusade were also inevitably from the middle and upper-middle classes. This core of long-standing personnel included Kay Jones, ex-Somerville College, who had trained at the Old Vic and who served both as principal male lead and as Hewins’s long-suffering personal assistant; she was also fellow lesbian (though not Hewins’s lover). The class-demographics of the Osiris reflected the fact that in the prewar period educational opportunities for working-class women were basic, to say the least, providing at best a working literacy and numeracy and training in traditional ‘female skills’ such as cooking. In this crucial respect, the anti-patriarchal credo of the Osiris was as much if not more reflective of a degree of personal liberty dependent upon economic privilege as upon the wider emancipation of women. Unlike the later ground-breaking feminist theatre companies of postwar Britain – such as Monstrous Regiment and Clean Break, who embodied, fused, and questioned the politics of gender, sexuality, and the left – Osiris did not see itself in organized political opposition to reactionary or patriarchal views of women. While Hewins was undoubtedly a classic example of the kind of broadly progressive, university-educated, upper-class women of the period known as Bluestockings,5 she saw her theatre work as principally an expression of the possibilities and potential of the theatre and of women; Hewins and her confederates were proud bearers of that term and its associations.
While it is true that the self-confessed ‘revolutionary pacifist’ of the 1930s Richard Ward sought not to conflate art and politics, the absence of any wider political sensibility in Hewins’s vision and practice remains intriguing. As potentially and radically problematic and unsettling as the theatrical convention of ‘boys-as-girls’ in Elizabethan public playhouses undoubtedly was, Hewins’s mid-twentieth-century ‘girls-as-boys’ equally, if without conscious self-regard, provoked the quasi-Freudian anxiety buried in the collective unconscious of the social establishment. Without wishing to attribute or privilege special meaning to a single character in one Shakespeare play, I would suggest that there is a kind of collective, socially and culturally constructed Freudian slip in Viola/Cesario’s poignant existential paradox: ‘I am all the daughters of my father’s house and all my brothers too.’ Here is a ‘breeching’ of the dominant conventions of the performance of gender roles: an anxiety of what unjust power relations were concealed and might be revealed.
If the fluidity and relativity of gender-formations implicit within that paradox were to provoke and necessitate social, economic, and political reality in mid-twentieth-century Britain, then who would iron the costumes and place them on their hangers in the stage that is the world? Furthermore, and possibly even more troublingly, who would decide who should wear which costumes and – embarrassment upon confusion – who would know who was kissing whom? What employment would chaperones find in such a world turned upside down? Might there indeed be an emerging world in which the very idea of a chaper-one might not be needed and would become extinct?
The Osiris company was founded in 1927 as the Isis Players – an amateur theatre group committed to performing Shakespeare to the tough inner-city children of London’s infamous East End. These two names are fascinating in terms of mythic connotations: the nature-goddess Isis was associated as both the wife of the Egyptian god Osiris but also though her own cult as the enactment of the destruction and resurrection of Osiris. One can only speculate as to the potential significance of the naming of the all-female professional company arising out of the origins of its amateur, female-named antecedent. Might Hewins have subconsciously imagined, notwithstanding the emancipation of women in the year following the new company’s foundation, that a male-oriented name might subdue their all-female identity in a socially and culturally useful way?
Hewins continued to lead Osiris until its demise in 1963. Throughout its long existence’ Osiris was based in her large country house in the Worcestershire countryside, a county adjoining onto Warwickshire: the birthplace and final resting place of course of William Shakespeare. There was a large barn in the grounds of her house, and it was here that the company not only rehearsed but also slept in the haystacks, regardless of the weather or time of the year. Before and after the war, they travelled in a Rolls-Royce and an Austin Healey, both motor-cultural indicators of class, wealth and esteem. The Austin towed a truck containing properties and costumes (see fig. 11.2), while the Rolls, always driven by Hewins, towed her personal caravan in which she lived a life of almost regal isolation. The fact that her car could accommodate seven passengers was the sole criteria in defining the size of the company. In the postwar years this seclusion was interrupted on a fortnightly basis when two actresses from the company would, on a strict rota system, cook for Hewins; as recompense they were allowed to sleep on bunk-beds in a curtained-off area of the caravan – a tangible reward considered against the deprivations of sleeping on the floors of church halls or in bales of hay in barns. During the war, however, owing to the severe and necessary rationing of petrol, Hewins, like Ward, was most suspicious of the interference that might accompany state support for their respective enterprises. While Ward partially compromised by accepting petrol vouchers to enable his company to travel further afield and reach even more theatre-starved communities, he refused to accept an annual payment from CEMA of fifty pounds (a significant amount of money at that time). Hewins would not compromise on either account; her company travelled, with some eccentricity, by horse and dray throughout the towns and villages of the Cotswolds from their base near Worcester. It was not until after the end of the war that the Rolls-Royce and the caravan were resurrected from their garages.
11.2. Osiris company members loading the van with costumes and props in wartime Britain. Photograph reproduced from Marie Crispin’s copy of an Osiris promotional brochure. Photographer unknown.
When Marie Crispin first came upon the company in 1955, she was just over twenty years of age and had completed training as a teacher, her first choice of actor-training having been discouraged by her parents. Nevertheless, having secured the employment security of her teacher’s qualification, she was encouraged to explore any possibilities that might exist to find work as an actor. At that time Osiris, with a sublime audacity characteristic of Hewins throughout her very active life, was playing all-female, open-air Shakespeare in a public park in Stratford, only a stone’s throw from the Stratford Memorial Theatre, with all of its associations of the high-cultural establishment. Crispin saw a performance and asked if she might be auditioned for the company. No audition was required; she joined in the late summer of that year and toured with them until May 1956. In the process she gained her Equity card – an absolute necessity if she was to earn her living as an actor.
Unlike Ward’s Adelphi Players or Crockett’s Compass Players, of the same era and however fractious or imperfect they proved in practice, there was no question of company meetings with the Osiris; furthermore, there was neither the will on the part of its founder nor the means in terms casts limited to seven performers, to discuss repertoire. Hewins ran the company as an essentially benign if sometimes bad-tempered autocrat. She ruthlessly ‘edited’ the plays they performed (long-standing Shakespeare favourites included As You Like It, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and Henry V) but even these pragmatically abridged versions still necessitated multiple casting and playing. As Marie Crispin observed, one of the finest lessons she learned through her time with the Osiris was the ‘fine art of the quick change.’ Costumes and sets were fairly rudimentary and although Crispin remembers that, ‘we made the language work reasonably well,’ she also recollected, though not without fondness, that ‘once invited to perform, there was seldom an invitation to return.’
As the journalist Paul Barker observed, ‘The war was Hewins’s finest hour. Osiris put on 1,534 performances of 33 plays, 16 of them Shakespeare. For reasons of economy, the company was never larger than seven women. Everybody did everything: acting, props, cooking, changing tyres. On stage, scenes were cut and transposed to make the doubling work’ (16).6 Barker went on to describe their production of Macbeth, which he had seen as a child in a local West Yorkshire cooperative hall: ‘Hewins played Lady Macbeth in a ferocious red wig, changing her make-up at top speed so that she could become the Porter within a few lines. By the time the company closed, in 1963, Hewins reckoned she had taken 129 parts herself, in 55 plays’ (16).
Such ingenious adaptations of plays and re-editing of scenes to accommodate a small company was a common and regular necessity amongst other touring companies of the period; examples include Crockett’s Compass production of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus and Richard Ward’s Flora Whitely, an assemblage of scenes and characters from Shakespeare. Ward, recognizing that wartime audiences had an insatiable appetite for Shakespeare but lacking the personnel or means to produce an additional, even abbreviated play, essentially employed a collage approach. Possessing two very strong actresses with prewar professional training and credits, Ward created a fictional older actress – Flora Whiteley – who in nostalgic reflection relives some of the major speeches from her career as a Shakeapearean actor. The play was very popular with audiences, providing a reassuring assemblage of familiar and well-loved speeches from Shakespeare’s plays.
Like Hewins, Ward and Crockett also came from wealthy upper-class English backgrounds and all three were committed to an aim of ‘theatre for the people’ long before this phrase became the mantra of many left-wing theatre companies of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Red Ladder, Belt and Braces, and The General Will. Hewins’s father was the first director of the London School of Economics and her godmother was the socialist activist and writer Beatrice Webb. She was educated at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, in the 1920s, where she threw herself into the Drama Society (OUDS) with more enthusiasm than she showed for her studies, although although she did graduate with an Honours degree. Social class and economics combined with the perfect timing of a donation of forty pounds from her father’s friend, the newspaper magnate Lord Rothersmere, enabled the fledgling Isis amateurs to turn professional with the inaugural Osiris production of The Merchant of Venice in December 1927. We know that this production toured schools in London’s economically and socially infamous East End, but unfortunately there are no further details of specific venues or cast lists.
It was in the company’s production of As You Like It in Kent, during the first decade after the Second World War that Marie Crispin made her first appearance with the company, and indeed her first professional acting role of any kind, playing Rosalind. Crispin recalled that the dramatic relationships of such characters mirrored what she termed many ‘sentimental friendships’ that inevitably grew in an all-female company living under such intense conditions. Such ‘sentimental friendships’ ranged from her own deep but platonic friendship with another new young actress (they had joined at the same time) to relationships that were clearly intimate and lesbian. Crispin commented that this spectrum of relationships rarely if ever created problems within the company, and remembered that should a romantic or emotional crisis temporarily flare up, Hewins’s usual remedy was a teaspoon of brandy and a ‘maternal’ confidential chat. Hewins herself seems to have directed all of her own energies into the running of her beloved company and her own passionate commitment to acting: this passion was, however, of questionable and certainly erratic quality. Like her male counterpart of that generation, the legendary actor-manager Donald Wolfit, she led by autocratic example and brooked no dissent. Wolfit, unlike Hewins, was an actor of undoubted power and charisma, but both leaders shared a view that there was a central spotlight on them in whatever principal role they were performing. The sole task of the rest of the cast was to remain outside its illuminating radiance.
In later years Hewins said, in explanation of not marrying, that: ‘I always loathed being tied in any way and couldn’t have run a career and a household’ (qtd by Crispin). In a period when male homosexuality was a criminal offence and many men lived in terrible fear and guilt, lesbianism endured rather disturbing invisibility, both socially and culturally; in British society it was not so much ‘the love that dare not speak its name’ but rather the love that had no name to speak of.
As Marie Crispin clearly recalls, the company’s sole commitment was to the play itself and especially to Shakespeare, with Hewins’s often repeated assertion that ‘the play must come alive and speak directly.’ A concrete instance of this strong sense of the immediacy and materiality of theatre and of Shakespeare came in a production of Macbeth: Marie Crispin (cast as both the Porter and one of the Three Witches) playing to a school audience in rural West Ireland was nervously touched by a young boy who announced, astonished, to his friends ‘She’s real you know!’ The Osiris toured south and west in the Republic of Ireland with increasing frequency in the post-1945 years. This reflected a substantial demand for productions of Shakespeare in schools in Ireland, a principally rural country outside of a relatively small number of cities and towns. At the same time the demand for touring theatre in England that had been present in wartime was now shrinking, a reflection of the sudden return to more traditional models of employment as women were encouraged to return to or remain in the home as domestic providers. Furthermore it was evidence of the seminal Arts Council’s policy decision in the first decade after the war to support building-based theatres and limit if not discourage touring theatre. Osiris toured schools and Catholic seminaries principally; it is hoped that further research will facilitate a more detailed tracing of touring routes and venues.
Osiris was to all intents and purposes, like the Adelphi, Pilgrim, and Compass Players, a cooperative with shareholders limited to current members of the company. In wartime the Adelphi Players paid themselves what they called the ‘Tommy rate’ of £2 per week,7 regardless of role or status within the company. After the war, Actors’ Equity (the actor’s union) insisted on an actor’s minimum wage. Marie Crispin and the others were paid ten shillings a week plus ‘all found’ (that is, board and lodging, however basic, provided free of charge). During the war, to eke out their meagre payment and also, no doubt, to further demonstrate their war-labour commitment, actors in the company made gas-mask cases and took jobs in Cotswold shops, always pooling their money and eating a great deal of black pudding, a common wartime dish.8
In June 2004 We Happy Few, a play inspired by the Osiris company, written by and starring Imogen Stubbs, opened in London’s West End at the Gielgud Theatre. While Hewins, no doubt, would have been pleased that her company and lifelong vision had not been consigned to the dusty lower shelves of English theatre history, she would equally certainly have been as unconvinced by the play’s rather idealized account of the sepia-tinted past. Unfortunately We Happy Few endured very mixed reviews, resulting in a short run, and it disappeared with depressing speed.
In conclusion, the Osiris actors were not motivated or driven by any overt or explicit ideological or left-liberal feminist values or aspirations. Nevertheless, in supporting the national war effort by bringing their productions of Shakespeare to many communities who previously might not have seen either his or any other plays, I believe that the Osiris company was waging another equally crucial if ‘secret’ war, a war against reactionary hearts and minds in British society of that time regarding the role, status, and legitimate aspirations of women. Just as working-class women, such as my own mother, discovered a new economic and personal independence through doing ‘men’s work’ in factories during the Second World War, the Osiris actors were also doing ‘men’s work’ while reversing the politics of representation of the late sixteenth- and early to mid-seventeenth-century stage. It is interesting, in this respect, that Marie Crispin remembers that Hewins did not see the company as ‘women-playing-men’ but rather as actors playing Shakespeare, with zeal and to the best of their intentions. The standard of acting was varied and the necessities of touring theatre under such conditions meant that sets and costumes were basic and often improvised, but Nancy Hewins and the others were breaking exciting new ground.
Who ironed the costumes, who chose which ones to wear, and who kissed whom, and who had the empowerment of enacted gender and social status to choose whom to kiss was an existential, political, and social challenge lived by millions of women (and homosexual men) long after the Osiris actors had taken their costumes off for the final time. Government and state propaganda in the immediate postwar period was powerful and unrelenting in its insistence upon women returning to their ‘natural’ place in the home and their equally ‘natural’ role as homemakers. For any woman who had the opportunity to see the Osiris in production, might not their performances have suggested at least a passing thought that there could be yet other ‘unnatural’ opportunities for them as women? If it were ‘unnatural’ for women to love women, and men to love men, and for women to ‘become men’ in these robust Shakespearean productions, then what kind of ‘natural law’ or morality had authorized men to ‘become women’ five hundred years before?
The fact that women were increasingly and ultimately able to begin to answer that question for themselves and on their own terms, and to consider ‘her story’ as well as the ‘his story’ of patriarchal readings of social, cultural, and political change, was contributed to in no small measure by the pioneering work of Nancy Hewins and the actors of the Osiris Players. The artistic quality of the company was undoubtedly varied, although it included some fine individual performances from those who had received professional training. Nancy Hewins herself (a ‘large Lady Macbeth in a bright red wig’ as Marie Crispin fondly recalled) was almost certainly more successful in her real-life role as entrepreneurial visionary than in any role she played on stage.
Orsino asks ‘Cesario’ of his sister: ‘What was her history?’ It was of course a hidden and secret history that societal pressures and prejudices required to be disguised, even as Viola could only find a public voice by adopting a fictional male persona. It was also a history that would inevitably form my post-Marxist cultural materialist reading of human history and evolution, a narrative that would welcome and encompass others who are marginalized, whether in terms of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or class. For every Cesario there was also a Caliban or Bianca.
It is a history that is still being written and we should remember and express our thanks to those women of the Osiris across the three decades of the company’s existence for writing a small but key passage of progressive change through their efforts: truly a labour of love. As for me – pass me that iron! Let’s ‘press’ on!
1 St Martins in the Fields, London, is a handsome neo-Classical church designed by Sir Christopher Wren, architect of St Paul’s Cathedral.
2 The Dresser was later made into a film starring Tom Courtenay and Albert Finney.
3 This essay and the further research I intend to carry out on Osiris could not have happened without her enthusiasm and willingness to be interviewed and share her memories. All quotations and other information from Marie Crispin come from personal interviews I conducted with her in December 2008. I dedicate this essay to her and to that intrepid band of female actors and their indomitable leader and founder, Nancy Hewins.
4 In 1939 Richard Ward commented that the Unity Theatre had ‘died of propaganda.’
5 The term Bluestocking, used to refer to an intellectual or literary woman, has its origins in mid to late eighteenth-century London society. A social group formed in England’s capital city in 1750 by three women – Hannah More, Elizabeth Montagu, and Elizabeth Carter – met for literary discussions. Certain progressive-minded male scholars and writers also attended, and it was the fashionably informal blue woollen stockings worn by Benjamin Stillingfeet that gave the group its enduring name.
6 Barker’s article, published in the English liberal-left newspaper The Guardian in 2004, was only the second article about the Osiris ever to appear.
7 The so-called Tommy rate was the weekly wage received by an army infantry man or ‘Tommy.’
8 Black pudding (sometimes called pig’s pudding) is an old, traditional form of inexpensive meat produce. In appearance it resembles a large sausage, coloured black with a white mosaic pattern through it. As it provided a very cheap form of meat and protein it was always associated with the urban and rural working class. In recent years it has enjoyed a wholly unexpected revival in the context of a resurgence of ‘traditional’ English foods and menus.
Barker, Paul. ‘Shakespeare’s Sisters.’ The Guardian 26 June 2004: 16.
Billingham, P. Theatres of Conscience 1939–53: A Study of Four Touring British Community Theatres. London: Routledge Harwood, 2002.
Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
