The Great War and popular modernism
Pat Hanna's 'Louis XI'
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2016.25Keywords:
The Great War, Pat Hanna, 'Louis XI', popular theatre, cultural dislocationAbstract
Pat Hanna’s Famous Diggers, a professional vaudeville theatre troupe comprising ex-Great War Anzac soldiers (initially, mainly New Zealanders, as Hanna was himself) played for nearly two years (1923–24) at the old Cremorne Theatre in Brisbane. One item Hanna premiered at the Cremorne was Louis XI, a short (ten-minute) comic sketch he wrote himself. Modernism in the inter-war years, given its usual location within avant-garde aesthetics, high culture, internationalism and radical politics, is not — with the notable exception of Brecht’s cabaret work in the 1920s — usually associated with popular theatre. While one comic playlet hardly challenges that positioning, Louis XI was a direct result of the Great War’s profound reshaping of modern life. Many of the dramatised sketches performed by Hanna’s company, including Louis XI, were structured around a contrast between events as they had occurred in the trenches and as they were portrayed in a utopian or dystopian fantasy, sometimes triggered by shell shock or a dream. Several, again including Louis XI, involve the past, and express the curiosity and cultural dislocation Australian- and New Zealand-born soldiers felt as they moved for the first time through real-life landscapes and architecture they had known only from popular history and romance.
References
Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Planetarity: Musing modernist studies’, Modernism/Modernity 17(3) (2010), 471–99 at 475. I would like to thank Belinda McKay who, in her contribution to the ‘Queensland Modernism’ symposium on 10 February 2016, drew attention to Friedman’s article.
Mimi Colligan, ‘Hanna, George Patrick (Pat) (1888–1973), Australian dictionary of biography (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1983), p. 186.
For more details of Hanna’s and other similar companies, see Richard Fotheringham, ‘“Laughing it off”: Australian stage comedy after World War 1’, History Australia 7(1) (2010), 1–20.
Advertised as King Louis XI (Brisbane Courier, 7 February 1924, p. 2) and reviewed there the next day (p. 9). It was copyrighted the next year as Louis XI (G.O. Brown to Hanna, 8 October 1925, Copyright Office entry 14222, GP Hanna Papers, Victorian Arts Centre Performing Arts Museum, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne), although the script itself on all but the first page uses the title Shell shock.
Brisbane Courier, 8 February 1924, p. 19.
See, for example, Geoffrey Serle, John Monash: A biography (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1982), pp. 351–2.
See the Australian War Memorial accounts at https://www.awm.gov.au/battle-honour/E63 and https://www.awm.gov.au/military-event/E156.
Paul K. Saint-Amour, ‘Introduction: Modernism and the lives of copyright’. In Modernism and copyright (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 18.
David Carter, Always almost modern: Australian print cultures and modernity (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013), p. x ff.
Maria DiBattista and Lucy McDiarmid (eds), High and low moderns: Literature and culture, 1889–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 3–4.
In Hanna Papers (uncatalogued). The collection includes over one hundred scripts performed between 1919 and 1929.
See https://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/drama/research/projects/seasideprom.
G.J. Mellor, Pom-poms and ruffles: The story of northern seaside entertainment (Clapham: Dalesman, 1966). Although there seem to have been no entertainment units performing for the troops (unlike in World War II and since), many English performers enlisted and formed concert parties when not in the front line: ‘The First World War played havoc with the Pierrot troupes . . . Baritones and comedians faced tanks and mud. Sopranos and soubrettes filled shells and drove trams’ (1966: 31). See also ‘Papers relating to English concert parties and Pierrot shows, 1900s-1970s’, GB 029 EUL MS 225, University of Exeter: http://archiveshub.ac.uk/data/gb29-eulms225. For illustrations of Hanna’s company in Pierrot costumes, see Fotheringham, ‘Laughing it off’.
See ‘Lucile, fashion designer: papers, 1890–1933’, Victoria and Albert Museum: Archive of Art and Design, http://www.vam.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0012/250122/lucile_aad-2008-06_20140723.pdf; in particular item AAD/2008/6/38 Lady Duff Gordon’s vaudeville act album 1 volume 1917: ‘Large format album with 18 black and white photographs mounted on paper featuring Lady Duff Gordon’s Vaudeville Act “Fleurette’s dream at Peronne” to benefit the Secours Franco-Americain pour la France Devastee’. The act was performed in New York at the Booth Theatre on 18 and 19 October.
Marlis Schweitzer, ‘Patriotic acts of consumption: Lucile (Lady Duff Gordon) and the vaudeville fashion show craze’, Theatre Journal 60(4) (2008), 585–608 at 585–6.
Schweitzer, ‘Patriotic acts of consumption’, pp. 588–89. The present-day lingerie company Lucile, though it has no direct connection to Lady Duff-Gordon’s fashion house, perpetuates the phrase ‘Fleurette’s Dream’ for a range of women’s silk underwear: http://lucileandco.com.
Brisbane Courier, 8 February 1924, p. 19.
Argus (Melbourne), 26 April 1928, p. 18; 25 April 1928, p. 20.
Age (Melbourne), 9 October 1920, p. 20. A letter in the Hanna Papers dated ‘Perth 4-7-23’ and signed by Marks states, ‘Knowing that the following sketches are the property of GP Hanna’ and lists eighteen scripts which he gives an assurance he ‘will neither play, produce, or attempt to sell same to any person’. This suggest that Marks was their author and that he had sold the copyrights to Hanna.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Bairnsfather.
The World’s News (Sydney), 29 March 1919, p. 5, http://www.trove.nla.gov.au.
Townsville Daily Bulletin, 1 September 1927, p. 3, http://www.trove.nla.gov.au.
Saint-Amour, ‘Introduction’, p. 18.
Peter Decherney, ‘Gag orders: Comedy, Chaplin and copyright’, in Saint-Amour, Modernism and copyright, pp. 163–4.
Decherney, ‘Gag orders’, p. 165.
Oral history interview with Wilson Irving, 17 April 1991. State Library of Queensland, Brisbane. Record no. 71148748020002061. Ts, 140 pp, p. 40. I would like to thank Professor Patrick Buckridge for drawing my attention to this source.
See the entries for these artists in Australian variety theatre archive: Popular culture entertainment 1850–1930, https://www.ozvta.com.
‘Jim Gerald’, Australian variety theatre archive; Nancy Bridges, Curtain call (Sydney: Cassell Australia, 1980): ‘George Wallace, Roy Rene, and Jim Gerald were the star comedians, the Big Three who commanded the highest salaries and the most lavish trappings to surround them’ (p. 32).
I discuss this at length in ‘Laughing it off,’ pp. 3ff.
Age (Melbourne), 21 July 1920, p. 16.
Brisbane Courier, 8 February 1924, p. 9.
Julian Croft, ‘Responses to modernism, 1915–1965’, in Penguin new literary history of Australia, gen. ed. Laurie Hergenhan (Ringwood: Penguin, 1988), pp. 409–29.
Unidentified, but possibly Thomas Firmin McKinnon, the Courier’s literary editor at this time, who was strongly opposed to modernism in literature. I would like to thank Professor Patrick Buckridge, who mentioned this at the ‘Queensland Modernism’ symposium on 10 February 2016 and subsequently pointed me to the source: Desmond MacAulay, ‘McKinnon, Thomas Firmin (1878–1953)’, Australian dictionary of biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/mckinnon-thomas-firmin-7400/text12867.
See http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/4h14/hanna-george-patrick; ‘Credit for the founding of the Clan Hannay Society goes to Pat Hanna, cartoonist, film star, and producer, from Melbourne, Australia. It was his enthusiasm and untiring efforts that made the Hannas, Hannahs and Hannays conscious of the great tradition of their family. In London in October 1959, he met another enthusiast, the late John Hannay, Deputy Mayor of Chelsea, and out of this meeting the Society was born’ (‘Ancient History of the Hannahs’, A Hannah Family of West Virginia, p. 2, http://staff.washington.edu/jhannah/HannahBook/Ch01%20AncientHistory.pdf.
