From Page to Stage

From Page to Stage

Mar 28, 2024 | Dr Phil Errington, Recent Articles

Live theatre is, by its very nature, transient. It is experienced by an audience on a specific evening and, after the curtain falls, it is only the memory of the performance that remains. Or is it? 

In this blog I’d like to look at a few special scripts that are textual witnesses to the changes that happen during rehearsal. They help provide a context or evidence for this most ephemeral of short-lived spectacles. 

​But, first, let’s take a very quick look at other types of source material. Most stage shows are based on something else. Shakespeare plundering the chronicles of Holinshed is well-known. As are sources for musicals. There should be no prizes for knowing the inspiration behind Bart’s Oliver!, Minchin’s Matilda, Boublil and Schonberg’s Les Misérables, or Loesser’s Guys & Dolls. With a few obvious exceptions, however, it’s rare to find a hugely successful adaptation of an extremely well-known book. There have, for example, been musical versions of Jane Eyre, Frankenstein, The Lord of the Rings, and Robinson Crusoe. But they’ve rarely been palpable hits. On the other hand, Fiddler on the Roof is far better-known than the source stories by Sholem Aleichem. I’d also suggest that more people are familiar with The Sound of Music than The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, or The King and I than Anna and the King of Siam. There are, naturally, plenty of musicals based on films, or jukebox musicals which have no book source. There are musicals based on comic strips (The Addams Family, Annie and, my personal favourite, Snoopy! The Musical) or true events, or biographies, or plays, or a vast number of other sources. My point is that, within the book world, there are excellent opportunities to assemble a collection of interesting source texts that have significant interest as books in their own right.

How source material has been developed and transformed from page to stage provides many insights into the creative process. But once that process has started, to what extent can we chart or understand this development? It’s at this point that original scripts become important.

At Peter Harrington, we are privileged to be handling some scripts from the significant theatre collection of Clive Hirschhorn, the distinguished film and theatre critic for the Sunday Express and whose histories of the film industry include The Warner Bros (1978) and The Hollywood Musical (1981). The collection includes a number of rehearsal scripts used during the creative process and these provide a fascinating insight into the development of some exceptional productions.

 

A working rehearsal script for West Side Story was once owned by Mickey Calin, who created the role of Riff. It’s a fascinating combination of carbon and mimeographed leaves and suggests that changes to the script were distributed in carbon copies to appropriate members of the cast (to replace mimeographed pages). The text was seemingly being revised throughout rehearsals. In all, this copy has 27 different sections in either carbon or mimeograph. One section, Act 1, scene 2, is represented twice. One part, Act 1, scene 8, is not represented at all (beyond a title). It is significant that the musical numbers are indicated within the script, but that the lyrics are not present. The songs “America”, “Maria”, and “I feel pretty” are named, but the opening number “When you’re a Jet” is simply introduced as “Riff sings first chorus of song”. Elsewhere there are a large number of changes to the text for the character of Schrank (Officer Krupke’s sidekick), suggesting that ownership of this script changed during the rehearsal period. Intriguing notes also include a few snatches of “America” with “Puerto Rico, you lovely island / Island in the tropic breezes”. This is not exactly the version that survived to the opening night. Given that Clive Hirschhorn worked within the theatre industry, he frequently had an opportunity to acquire an interesting signature or inscription. This script is no exception. It is inscribed by the author of the “book”, “To Clive Hirschhorn, Best wishes, Arthur Laurents, 4/21/99” and the lyricist has provided an inscription using Clive’s occasional pseudonym, “To Clive Errol, Stephen Sondheim, 4/24/98”.

 

If West Side Story changed the Broadway musical in the late-1950s, it was the partnership of Rodgers and Hammerstein who first started to shake things up in the mid-1940s. Oklahoma! is generally remembered as a musical in which musical songs are integrated into the action to advance the plot (compared with stand-alone numbers which did nothing for the narrative). It was in Carousel, their second musical, in which this was further developed. The courtship of Billy Bigelow and Julie Jordan is one of the longest in any Broadway show and through dialogue, underscore and song the story advances in a new and stunning way. It is therefore exciting to have the rehearsal script owned by Jan Clayton, the creator of the role of Julie, and see a small change in her dialogue in this scene. The line as present on the mimeographed script is “I like to watch the moon upon the sea”. This has been changed by hand to “To watch the moon come closer to the sea”. A significant revision is the scene when Billy dies and is received into Heaven by the characters of “He” and “She”. It was a scene that caused Rodgers and Hammerstein considerable difficulty. Rodgers would later refer to the characters as “Mr and Mrs God” and the general feeling was that the scene didn’t work. It was cut and a replacement character, the Star-Keeper, created. The original scene is, however, contained in the present script.

 

When the original owner, Jan Clayton, left the cast for another show, she evidently asked some of her fellow cast members to inscribe her script. She was, evidently, going to be missed. Inscriptions include “Dear Jan, I wish the west could send us more leading ladies like you. Everyone in the company loves you and how we’ll miss you – But, we are wishing you all the success in the world in Show Boat and then on and on and on and on” and “Some replacements are ok – but you are Julie”.

Turning to plays, the Hirschhorn Collection includes a rehearsal script of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, formerly owned by Beatrice Straight who created and won a Tony Award for the role of Elizabeth Proctor. Set during the Salem witch trials of the 1690s, The Crucible was a thinly-veiled attack on the persecution of left-wing individuals in the US, known as McCarthyism. The play won the 1953 Tony Award for “Best Play” (and therefore made Miller the first recipient of two Tony Awards in this category). It opened on Broadway on 22 January 1953 starring Arthur Kennedy as John Proctor, Walter Hampden as Deputy-Governor Danforth, E. G. Marshall as Reverend John Hale, Madeleine Sherwood as Abigail Williams, and Beatrice Straight. During the run, Miller revised the piece and added a brief scene between Abigail Williams and John Proctor that motivated their clash in the following court room scene. The present script appears to represent the text in this revised version. It differs, however, from the version published by the Viking Press in April 1953. Miller’s published edition is aimed at readers, not actors. There are lengthy descriptions of characters which would be out of place in a rehearsal script. Of significance are very precise staging directions in the present script, later changed for publication. The rehearsal script is also provided with stresses indicated by underlining to certain words. These stresses are abandoned for the published version. The script is signed by the author on the title page.

 

Another hugely important American play from the 1950s is Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The work would win Williams his second Pulitzer Prize and the version in the Hirschhorn Collection is a rehearsal script for the pre-Broadway tryout in Philadelphia. An academic research paper, published in 1996, entitled “A Preliminary Stemma for Drafts and Revisions of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” noted that one task in Williams scholarship (and “perhaps the most daunting of all”) is “to collate, put into sequence, and analyse the… drafts and revisions that lie behind… Williams’s published work”. The present script is one of those drafts and includes two aspects omitted in later versions. These comprise an episode in which Big Daddy sensually touches Maggie’s stomach to determine if she’s pregnant, and Brick’s admittance that “I might be — impotent”. In the present script, Margaret’s last speech, in which she makes reference to a cat on a tin roof, is longer than the published version.

The transition from page to stage is a process that includes a large number of talented individuals and can create a wonderful experience in the theatre. The scripts that originate from rehearsals can help us understand something of the creative process and provide a fascinating insight into this most transient of creations.

Dr Phil Errington, Senior Specialist, has been known to indulge in amateur dramatics. From Gilbert and Sullivan to Sondheim, roles include Scrooge to Prince Charming!

BROWSE PERFORMING ARTS
Damnably Subversive but Extraordinarily Real: The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists

Damnably Subversive but Extraordinarily Real: The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists

Aug 29, 2012 | Economics, Literature

First edition of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell

First edition of The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell, in the original dust jacket (1914). – SOLD

Touring Britain this summer is the Townsend Productions theatre adaptation of Robert Tressell’s* socialist novel The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists. A semi-autobiographical account of the plight of the working class, the story follows a group of construction workers and the single employee who tries to “arouse his workmates to the evils of the system which exploits them… Sardonic and satirical in tone, the novel’s great strength is its minute and convincing observation of the hero’s workmates, whose ‘philanthropy’ consists of letting employers reap the surplus value their labour produces” (ODNB).

The author, real name Robert Philippe Noonan (1870–1911), was the illegitimate son of an inspector in the Royal Irish Constabulary. He settled in South Africa for ten years, where he helped found the Irish Brigade, which fought against Britain in the Anglo-Boer War. However, he left Africa in 1899 before hostilities broke out and settled in Hastings. “Working in the building trade at subsistence wages, he contracted tuberculosis, was influenced by socialist writers such as Robert Blatchford, and became an active member of the unusually large Hastings branch of the Social Democratic Federation, whose banner he painted. He spent his spare time during the last ten years of his life writing by hand the 1800-page manuscript of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, which brought posthumous fame” (ODNB). He died in the Royal Infirmary in Liverpool; having previously set out to start a new life in Canada he got no further, was taken seriously ill, spent time in the workhouse, and “was buried in a pauper’s grave in the city’s Walton Park cemetery.” Kathleen, his orphaned daughter, sold the manuscript for £25 to the publisher Grant Richards, who described it as, this “damnably subversive, but … extraordinarily real” novel. Alan Sillitoe subsequently called it “The first great English novel about the class war”, and Michael Foot praised its “truly Swiftian impact”. What is certain is the authenticity of its voice which offers “a unique view of early twentieth-century working-class life through the eyes of an articulate proletarian.”

Popular since its first appearance, The Ragged Trousered-Philanthropists was reprinted numerous times and sold more than 100,000 copies by 1940.  First editions such as this one are rare, particularly in the dust jacket, as the novel was produced in one of its publisher’s characteristically small print runs. Another interesting point about the book is that it was the only one advertised on the rear panel of the dust jacket to James Joyce’s Dubliners, with the ad printed in an unusual block format:

Ad for The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists on the dust jacket of Dubliners.

Ad for The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists on the dust jacket of James Joyce’s Dubliners.

*Although the title page of the manuscript is clearly signed Tressell (which was how Noonan wrote the word for a painter’s trestle in his manuscript), for some unknown reason the author’s name was printed as Tressall in this first edition and in the Grant Richards abridged cheap edition of 1918.

 

The Birth, Death, and Rebirth of an English Genius: Shakespeare’s First & Second Folios

The Birth, Death, and Rebirth of an English Genius: Shakespeare’s First & Second Folios

Apr 23, 2012 | Early Modern Books, Literature, Shakespeare

Tradition holds that William Shakespeare was born on 23 April, in 1564, though it’s impossible to know the date for sure. What is known is that he was baptised at Holy Trinity, the parish church of Stratford-on-Avon, on the 26th of the month, so was probably born sometime between the 21st and 23rd. The 23rd of April is also recorded as Shakespeare’s date of death in 1616, and it is this untimely event that we have to thank for the preservation and promotion of his works in the First Folio, and ultimately his enshrinement as one of England’s great geniuses.

Shakespeare was only 52 when he, Ben Jonson, and the poet-playwright Michael Drayton “had a merry meeting, and itt seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a feavour there contracted”. As a memorial, his friends and fellow members of The King’s Men, John Heminges and Henry Condell, decided to produce a collected edition of his plays.

Eighteen of Shakespeare’s plays had been published during his lifetime, individually in cheap and probably unauthorised quarto editions, some of which became bestsellers. These often error-riddled editions are described in the First Folio as “stol’n and surreptitious copies”, and some seem to have been reproduced solely from the memories of actors trying to make a little cash on the side. This continued after his death, and in 1619 the publisher Thomas Pavier and printer William Jaggard produced ten quarto plays ostensibly by Shakespeare (though two were not actually his work), and this may have spurred Heminges and Condell to complete their own collected edition and reassert the King’s Men’s authority over the texts.

It wouldn’t be an easy process. Though the King’s Men held the copyrights to many of the plays, it took years to negotiate for others, which remained with the publishers of the quarto editions. Though these publishers did not have what we today would consider intellectual priority over the works, they had been the first to enter them in the Stationer’s Register, which gave them the copyrights. Some even had to be brought in as partners, earning shares of the proceeds of the First Folio based on how many plays they contributed. Willaim Jaggard himself served as the head printer on the project until his death in 1623.

The printing began in early 1622 and took around two years to complete, with the earliest known sale of a First Folio occurring in December 1623. The choice of the imposing folio format was vital to the book’s success, “giving the volume the instant status of a classic:  it is a weighty tome, a book for individuals’ libraries, a collection perhaps to be owned rather than read… It was also expensive, probably not less than 15s. a copy and often costing £1 or more”. Prior to this, theatre in England had been considered low-brow, and no collection of plays had been published in such a lavish manner. The First Folio elevated not only Shakespeare’s reputation but that of playwriting in general.

Most importantly, the First Folio included 36 of Shakespeare’s 38 known plays, 18 of which had never before been printed and would probably have been lost to history if not included. And the texts, edited by Shakespeare’s close friends and his fellow writers and actors, are considered the most authoritative of all early printings. Shakespeare’s reputation today rests largely on the publication of the First Folio.

Despite its expense, the book sold well enough that a second edition, the Second Folio, was required in 1632. Published by a syndicate of five firms, copies appear with one of five different imprints depending on which publisher sold them. Our copy, pictured above, has the scarcest imprint, that of the publisher John Smethwick, who owned the rights to four plays: Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and The Taming of the Shrew. Despite the importance of these titles, Smethwick’s small contribution of four plays meant that his share of finished copies was relatively low, and his imprint correspondingly scarce. Also of note–the second Folio contains the first appearance in print of John Milton, who contributed a poem to the Effigies leaf that did not appear in the first edition.

Two more folio editions of Shakespeare’s plays were published by the beginning of the eighteenth century, followed by a number of important editions edited by authors such as Samuel Johnson and Alexander Pope. Today, though, the most highly sought-after editions are still the early folios, with the First Folio becoming one of the most valuable books in the world. Around 750 copies were printed, but only 230 survive, and of those only 40 are complete. Most extant copies are held in libraries, and in the last decade, only three have been sold at auction, all achieving prices in the millions of dollars. As much as we hate to have second-best books here at Peter Harrington, the Second Folio is a second-best we’re glad to have, as it is the earliest edition of Shakespeare that is practicably obtainable on the market.

BROWSE SHAKESPEARE