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Hassan: The Road to the Haymarket

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Timothy Kidd
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Extract

When Basil Dean died in 1978 at the age of ninety, his death broke a link, though not the last, with one of the most important stage productions of the 1920s. The history of that performance and of the play itself is a complex one; it tells us a great deal about the problems of matching poetry to the modern theatre. For among Dean's major achievements was the production of Hassan.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 4 , Issue 3 , May 1979 , pp. 198 - 213
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1979

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References

Notes

1. Flecker, J. E., Collected Prose (London, 1922) pp. 57–9.Google Scholar

2. Unpublished essay quoted in Sherwood, J., No Golden Journey (London, 1973) p. 155.Google Scholar

3. Bernard Shaw, letter in Preface by Flecker, H., Don Juan (London, 1925)Google Scholar. For a fuller study of their relationship and of the influence of Hassan upon Shaw's Saint Joan, see my forthcoming article in The Shaw Review (1979).

4. Lawrence, T. E., ‘Essay on Flecker’, Men in Print (London, 1940) p. 22.Google Scholar

5. Flecker, J. E., Some Letters from Abroad, ed. Flecker, H. (London, 1930) p. 46.Google Scholar

6. ibid., p. 82.

7. Dean, B., Introduction to Hassan, acting edition (London, 1951) pp. xi–xxi.Google Scholar

8. ibid.

9. ibid.

10. Dean, B., Seven Ages (London, 1970) p. 130.Google Scholar

11. Pope, W. Macqueen, The Footlights Flickered (London, 1959) p. 82Google Scholar. Note however that the author was publicity manager for Dean in ENSA.

12. For a full account of the contribution made by the company to lighting and sound technique, see Seven Ages, pp. 164–5, 191–2.

13. ibid., p. 145.

14. Jahoda, Gloria, The Road to Samarand: Frederick Delius and his Music (New York, 1969) pp. 192–5.Google Scholar

15. Seven Ages, p. 182. Dean does not mention that he borrowed the prison guard idea from this production.

16. ibid., p. 184

17. Scenario in Hassall, C., Edward Marsh (London, 1959) p. 259Google Scholar. All of the originals and most of the designs were lost in the debacle of the 1924 American production, but some idea of their quality can be gleaned from the photographs in Play Pictorial, Vol. XLIII, No. 261.

18. Ms in Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, stanza of the Pilgrim's Chorus excised, with the word ‘omit’. (It was the same censor who said of O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms that it was ‘just the sort of American play that should be kept off the English stage’.)

19. Miss Cathleen Nesbitt was in Edward Marsh's rooms in London in 1915 when the news came that Flecker had died. That was the first she had heard of the poet. Her companion Rupert Brooke was asked to write the Times obituary; he lent her a copy of his friend's poems. She played Yasmin in Hassan in 1923, and I was able to interview her at length about her memories of the production, still very vivid, on 25 June 1978.

20. ibid.

21. Jahoda, , op. cit., p. 200.Google Scholar

22. Seven Ages, op. cit., p. 189.

23. Nesbitt, , op. cit.Google Scholar

24. Dean, B., in Eddie Marsh: Sketches for a Composite Literary Portrait ed. Hassall, C. & Mathews, D. (London, 1953) pp. 38–40.Google Scholar

25. Dean, , Introduction to ‘Hassan’, op. cit., p. xix.Google Scholar

26. The Footlights Flickered, op. cit., p. 107.

27. No Golden Journey, op. cit., p. 223.

28. Knight, G. Wilson, The Golden Labyrinth (London, 1952) p. 337Google Scholar. Another critic, Squire, J. C., wrote in the London Magazine (10 1923)Google Scholar ‘If there is to be any life in the English theatre it will have to develop along Flecker's lines.’ Events have not borne out this view.

29. Yeats was an admirer of the lyric poetry of Flecker, which influenced his own. But he detested Hassan. ‘I can discover in it nothing but the perversity and petulance of the disease from which its author was already fading … Harun al Rashid is the greatest of all traditional images of generosity and magnanimity.’ Explorations (London, 1962) pp. 447–8. But one might note that a flaw in Yeats' own drama is the excessive nobility of the characters.

30. Some Letters from Abroad, op. cit., p. 107.

31. Seven Ages, op. cit., pp. 234–5.