Don't Listen, Ladies ! 1948-49

The following link is to an article I wrote for the September 2021 edition of Wooster Sauce - The Journal of the P.G.Wodehouse Society on the 1948-49 production of the Wodehouse play Don't Listen, Ladies !

Link to article

The shadow of WW-II loomed large over this production. Wodehouse’s wartime experiences have been well-documented and the author Sacha Guitry had reached his own accommodations with the Nazis. In contrast the actor Denholm Elliot who opened in the play had only six years earlier played Eliza Doolittle in “Pygmalion” whilst a prisoner in Stalag VIII-B

A minor error was introduced during the typesetting of this article. Hardy Amies was the costume designer for Don't Listen, Ladies ! rather than Kings Rhapsody as stated.

The hand-written diaries of the "first nighter" Anthony Heap are held by the London Metropolitan Archives. The pocket diary for 1948 is Reference: ACC/2243/022.

Heap was quite indefatigable going to the theatre very frequently despite rarely being pleased with what he saw. Having been sadly disappointed by what he had seen on the 1st and 2nd of September 1948 (mentioned in the article) on the 3rd he saw the review “Sugar and Spice” at the St. Martin’s: “Rarely have I seen so consistently mediocre and thoroughly boring a revue” he gloomily reported.

Two good books in English about Sacha Guitry are:

Sacha Guitry. The last boulevardier by James Harding (Methuen 1968)

Sacha Guitry by Bettina Knapp (Twayne Publishers 1981). This deals largely with Guitry’s extensive and innovative film work in the 1930s and his later work in the 1950s when he indulged his penchant for playing powerful figures from French history. The apogee of this tendency to megalomania came in the film titled in the USA “Royal Affair at Versailles” (1954) where Guitry, transformed into his idolised “sun king” Louis XIV, leads a parade of literally thousands of players personifying two centuries of French history down the grand stairway in the garden of Versailles.

I was only aware that this play even featured in the Wodehouse canon from reading Tony Ring’s excellent Second Row, grand circle: a reference guide to the contribution of P.G.Wodehouse to the legitimate theatre which 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 the play’s reception in New York.

The main reference for basic data about London stage productions in the era is The London stage 1940-1949: a calendar of productions, performers, and personnel by J.P.Wearing (Published 2014). This reference credits the fictitious Stephen Powys as the co-author and mis-identifies him as Virginia de Lanty, as do a number of contemporary newspaper reviews. Interestingly the original Samuel French play text credits Wodehouse but only in the Copyright notice.