Brother Alfred (1913)

The following link is to an article I wrote for the December 2021 edition of Wooster Sauce - The Journal of the P.G.Wodehouse Society on the 1913 production of the Wodehouse play Brother Alfred.

Link to article

You might think it would be a difficult task to find information about a production that played only 14 times to near-empty houses in 1913. However Brother Alfred has several things in its favour.

Firstly coverage of the West End theatre in the newspapers and magazines of the day was much more comprehensive than today. The British Newspaper Archive contains a number of contemporary reviews of the play in both daily newspapers and magazines such as the Pall Mall Gazette referenced in this article. The archive also contains archives of The Stage, The Tatler, and The Illustrated London News and other publications which provide full coverage of theatre. The slightly less accessible Gale Digital Collection contains in addition an archive of The Times, Telegraph, Punch and others.

The second aid to research is that Brother Alfred involved two subjects which are still enormously popular and which have therefore been subject to years of research. The first is of course Wodehouse himself. Tony Ring’s excellent Second Row, grand circle: a reference guide to the contribution of P.G.Wodehouse to the legitimate theatre contains summaries of the plots of the plays, quotations from them, a non-London performance history, cross-referenced material from other Wodehouse sources, and other interesting notes. This reference supplied the information I used on Grossmith interfering in the writing of the play and on his and PGW’s attempts to revive it in America.

The main reference for basic data about London stage productions in the era is The London stage 1910-1919: a calendar of productions, performers, and personnel by J.P.Wearing (Published 2014).

The second area of extensive existing research relates to Gilbert and Sullivan. The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive contains a massive amount of information relating to them and their productions including the biographical information on the actor Arthur Hatherton used in the article.

The anecdote about Maud Cressall is from W.S.Gilbert: A Classic Victorian and His Theatre by Jane W. Stedman.

In addition the level of ongoing interest in both Wodehouse and Gilbert and Sullivan means that Wikipedia entries relating to them tend to be generally full and reliable though where I have used them I have usually checked the original sources too.