1891 Ibsen had written his play Ghosts in 1881. Although the ‘pox’ figures often enough in Renaissance and 18th-century literature, Ibsen’s work was the first time that syphilis had been realistically – horrifically – depicted on the British stage. The British stage was not ready in 1881. It was ten years before, to evade the heavy hand of the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship, a ‘members only’ performance was mounted in London, on 13 March 1891.
This was a period when venereal disease was a major public concern (particularly its debilitating effect on the armed services), and legislation – the notorious ‘Contagious Diseases Act’, introduced in 1864 – permitted the forcible incarceration of women diagnosed diseased (but not men). The Act had been repealed, amid controversy, in 1886.
The attack on Ghosts was led by the Daily Telegraph drama critic, Clement Scott, who declared it (in a much echoed diatribe): ‘An open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly; a lazar-house with all its doors and windows open … absolutely loathsome and fetid … Crapulous stuff.’ Not the kind of thing that theatres proclaim on their pavement placards. Scott went on to anathematise Hedda Gabler as a display of ‘appalling selfishness’ (a strange, but typically moralistic, objection).
Scott (1841–1904) embodied the core of West End theatre conventionalism. He had been the leading drama critic in England for going on 30 years, and had been on the Telegraph since 1871. A convert to Roman Catholicism, he routinely took a stern moral line on what he reviewed. He was plausibly suspected of having too close a connection with actor-managers – notably Henry Irving and Beerbohm Tree (Scott was married to the sister of George Du Maurier, the dramatic adaptation of whose Trilby made Tree’s fortune). Accusations of his being too close to what he was supposed to offer objective judgement on, and receiving what amounted to bribes, led to a libel trial in 1882 (which Scott won) and a cloud of suspicion that was never dispersed. Scott, it may be said, had no interest – intellectual or financial – in the old theatrical order being shaken.
Shaken it was. ‘Ibsenism’ (under the manifesto of G.B. Shaw’s Quintessence of Ibsenism), and the leadership of William Archer, became a movement that eventually brought the English theatre into the 20th century. Scott was not in post to see the turn of the millennium. In 1897 he was fired from the Daily Telegraph for having declared in an interview that the acting profession led, inevitably, to immorality among actresses. And, presumably, lots of VD.