Unveiled against the backdrop of Hitler’s manoeuvres on the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, the opening night of Dodie Smith’s Dear Octopus at the Queen’s Theatre on September 14, 1938 was unlike almost any other West End opening before or since.
Its subject-matter couldn’t have been further removed from the gathering war-clouds – it centred on a family reunion for a golden wedding anniversary in a country house – yet that grim shadow infiltrated the auditorium. As Valerie Grove wrote in her biography of Smith, later renowned as the author of The Hundred and One Dalmatians: “During the first half, the house was subdued, faces grave and laughs few… Then, in the first interval, [a critic] arrived… with the news, which spread like wildfire through the theatre, that Chamberlain was flying to meet Hitler at Berchtesgaden… It was as if the whole audience heaved a sigh of relief. From then on the play went superbly.”
The rest is cataclysmic history. And it was as if when the curtain fell on the play in 1940 a shroud came to be draped over the dramatic output of the 1930s. Few recall Dear Octopus’s success or that Smith was one of the Thirties’ most feted playwrights. Or, further, that women playwrights – Clemence Dane, Molly Keane and Elizabeth MacKintosh among them – were a force to be reckoned with.
If “interwar” theatre tends to be wrongly clumped as one homogenous thing, Thirties drama is often framed, if at all, as conservative, frivolous, domestic. A casual observer might be forgiven for thinking that the Thirties begins with Noël Coward’s Private Lives (1930) and ends with his Present Laughter (1939), and there’s little in-between. There’s the perception, to borrow a phrase or two from Coward’s biographer Oliver Soden, of “anyone-for-tennis filler” and “crashingly middle-class” concerns. That’s only partially correct.
Perhaps the main stumbling-block to admiration is our own (inverted) snobbery. The middle-class milieux and articulacy of many plays of this era – marked by economic depression following the Wall Street Crash – became fixed as problematic after the “kitchen sink” revolution of the 1950s, and to this day we recoil a bit, with Thirties revivals few and far between. The impending staging of Dear Octopus at the National is its first revival since a 1967 West End run.
