R.S.V.P. 1926

RSVP at The Vaudeville is a a good revue. Letter to Carol Brown 3rd June 1926

The Vaudeville Theatre, which stands on the northern side of the Strand opened on the 23rd of February 1926 with a revue called 'R.S.V.P' by Archie de Bear. It is actually the Third Theatre on this same site since 1870, having been reconstructed three times over its long history.



The revue R.S.V.P., including Alice in Lumberland, 'a fantasy in three phases,' written by Archibald de Bear, with ballet and incidental music by Norman O'Neill, with additional scenes and lyrics by Reginald Arkell, was produced at the Vaudeville Theatre, London, on 23 February 1926. With dances arranged by J.W. Jackson and the ballet choreographed by Quentin Tod, with settings, costumes by Clifford Pember, the piece included a cast headed by Cyril Ritchard, Robert Hale, J.H. Roberts, Quentin Tod, Joyce Barbour, Mimi Crawford and Enid Stamp-Taylor. The number of performances is uncertain because of the General Strike, but is thought to be in the region of 294, closing on 6 November 1926.



Some of the revues included:

SITTING ON TOP OF THE WORLD (by Lewis Young and Ray Henderson) Cyril Richards with Mimi Crawford

MY BACHELOR DAYS (by Austin Melford and Melville Gideon)

WORSE-THAN-ANY-MARY (by Greatrex Newman). Cyril Richards played Hale Fellow Well Set in this parody of MERCENARY MARY, a "Hippodrome success".

ALICE IN LUMBERLAND by Archibald de Bear; Cyril Richards played Mr. Brown-Jones and the Mad Hatter to Mimi Crawford's Alice.

FAMILY BRIDGE (by J. H. Roberts and Greatrex Newman); Cyril Richards played the irascible Major Trevor.

HOW D'YOU DO? (by James Heard and Melville Gideon)

SENTIMENTAL ME (by Lorenz Hart and Richard Rogers) Cyril Richards with Mimi Crawford, J.H. Roberts and Joyce Barbour

HOUP-LA!, the finale which involved the entire company.

Pirandello's The Man With the Flower in His Mouth

I'm writing an unpleasant story (inspired by Piandello's 'Man with a Flower in his mouth'), about a man with cancer of the lip, and almost at the end of his tether, who invites his old doctor down for the weekend. They pass the time away over the fireside by exchanging yarns, and my man with cancer of the lip keeps forgetting that there's anything wrong with him.

Subsequently...but that's as far as I've got, and I've committed the one fatal error in writing a short story, writing the beginning before the end. Letter to Carol Brown 10th June 1926

As Sherrill Grace says in her annotation to Malc's Collected Letters - "an intriguing choice of model for the seventeen year old Lowry." The short story is now lost if it was ever completed.

The play is a one-act "dialogue", derived with small variations, from the novella La Morte Adosso (1923). The dialogue takes place in a bar, late at night, between a man who is dying of an epithelioma ("il fiore in bocca") and a peaceful businessman who has missed his train. In other words, between someone who intensely lives the little time left to him and someone who is rich with time to spend idly and irresponsibly, waiting for the morning train and entirely absorbed by the banal contretemps.

The exceptional nature of the moment, for the man who feels death upon him--to use Pirandello's phrase--and the normality of it, for the one who is absorbed in the usual affairs of life with its small daily commitments, mark the two ends of the dialectic which is animated in the grand soliloquy of the protagonist.

He lucidly analyses his last sensations on earth, evoking scenes of common life, particulars of a quotidianity which are receding from him irremediably and which, for this reason, make precious the memories of even the most trivial events. In the solemnity of his solitude, he seems to have gained unexpected awarenesses of the life that is leaving him and of death. With no sense of regret or repentance, he almost seems to bitterly enjoy his unrepeatable experience marked by the echo of the end, which allows him to dedicate himself with interest to observing the anonymous life of others, in order to grasp its sense. Wikipedia

On July 14, 1930, Luigi Pirandello's play became the first drama ever broadcast over the then-experimental medium of television:

BBC radio producer Lance Sieveking's reaction to the new medium of television was very much as a place in which he could experiment with new ideas. In collaboration with Val Gielgud he brought an adaptation of Luigi Pirandello's short play L'Uomo dal Fiore in Bocca (1923) to 30-line television as "The Man with the Flower in His Mouth".

In 1967, Radio Rentals who owned the Baird brand approached the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) Television Service to co-operate in recording a reconstruction of "The Man with the Flower in his Mouth" for the Ideal Home Exhibition later that year. The video at upper left is the one performed in 1967, with fairly accurate 30-line equipment specially constructed by technician Bill Elliot at Granada. The reconstructed play was authentically re-produced and presented by the original producer, Lance Sieveking, supported by the original art-work, and used the original incidental music which had been retrieved from the 1930 gramaphone disc. The actors were students from ILEA, who were coached by Sieveking himself.
Baird Television

You can watch the reconstruction here:

Benn W. Levy’s This Woman Business

While in London on no account miss seeing a play called “This Woman Business.” by Benn Levy, whom I wish I knew. Letter to Carol Brown June 1926

The above photo from The Theatre World and Illustrated Stage Review shows Fay Compton and Frank Cellier as Crawford and Addleshaw with Leon Quartermaine as Hodges in a scene from Benn W. Levy’s comedy, This Woman Business, Haymarket, London, 15 April 1926.

‘A Witty Comedy.

‘The theme of this amusing comedy is woman, and the five characters who occupy the stage for most of the time are, professedly, woman-haters. They spend their time in theorising about woman, in the abstract, and avoiding her, and escaping from her society, individually.

‘In the delightful seclusion of a country house in Cornwall, where four of them are guests of the most extreme misogynist of them all, one Hodges, they air their views about this disturbing creature, woman. The only member of the much-maligned sex who is there to disturb the serenity of the purely masculine atmosphere is Nettlebank, the parlour-maid [played by Evelyn Culver]. But even in Nettlebank, unimportant though she is, feminine appeal is so strong, that Honey, the youngest member of the party, finds himself compelled against his will to kiss her.

‘In the midst of a discussion between these five men as to the manifest defects of this lower order of being, who, yet, has such an unfortunately magnetic effect upon them, a girl appears on the scene. She is a typist, who has run away from her employer’s office, having first stolen some money. She had come to find shelter with her old nurse, whose cottage used to stand on the site of Hodges’ country house.

‘The Story of the Play.

‘How the woman-haters shelter her, in spite of the fact that she is a thief and has but the shadowiest ideal of truthfulness, is the plot of the play. How Crawford, the typist, two-thirds true woman and one-third minx, mothers them all in turn and charms their critical theories into nothingness, is the oldest story in the world, but so wittily and amusingly told, that we seem to be listening to it for the first time.
‘Hodges, not recognising a symptom of the malady that has seized him - extreme exasperation with the object of his devotion - finds, with a shock, that he is in love with Crawford, and, finally, throws his essay on woman at her feet, and she tears it up with a smile of triumph. This is the end of the play.

‘Fine Acting.

‘Fay Compton, as Crawford, is as delightful as ever, although the part does not make a great demand upon her powers.

‘As the Judge, O.B. Clarence adds yet another picture to his gallery of masterpieces. Leon Quartermaine, as Hodges, is successful. Bromley Davenport as Crofts, and Frank Cellier as Addleshaw, are both excellent. Clifford Mollison as Honey, and Sebastian Smith as Brown, give good performances.

‘The characterisation throughout is amazingly good. The dialogue is witty and clever, and the humour is real.

‘Another point upon which one may congratulate the author is that none of the characters are unduly exaggerated. They might so easily have been, specially, perhaps, in the case of Addleshaw, who is accused, though with some unfairness, of having persecuted his typist. But the refreshingly unhypocritical remarks that fall from his lips, and the admission that Crawford herself is not wholly blameless in the matter, bring the whole scene to a common-sense level, very different from the stereotyped treatment of such things to which one is too often accustomed, on the stage.

‘The fundamental truth, round which the whole situation in this amusing comedy is woven, emerges as the play proceeds, and gives the average audience what they so insistently clamour for, like children at a school-treat, "something to take away."’
(A.G., The Theatre World and Illustrated Stage Review, London, June 1926, p.29)


Benn Wolfe Levy (7 March 1900 – 7 December 1973) was a Labour Party Member of Parliament in the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. He was educated at Repton School and University College, Oxford and served in uniform in both World Wars. Outside politics, Levy was a successful playwright who also wrote (and on occasion directed) for the movies. He was married for more than 40 years to the American-born screen and stage actress Constance Cummings; they had one daughter and one son. As an MP, Levy made an unsuccessful effort to abolish theatrical censorship in Britain, and towards the end of his life, he was the principal author of a report opposing the arguments for censorship made by Francis Aungier Pakenham, 7th Earl of Longford. Read more on Wikipedia

De Mille's Male and Female 1919

Thanks awfully for the snap, GloriabetogoodnessBebedaniels-Swanson. I wish I could be a Thomas Meighan to you. But unfortunately my hair is untidy. My shoes always dirty. My face is a Z 15 model and above all - I am not Six Foot Two. Letter to Carol Brown 2nd June 1926

Malc's joke about gloria-be-to goodness, includes the names of the film stars Gloria Swanson and Bebe Daniels who along with Thomas Meighan starred in Cecil B. De Mille's film Male and Female 1919. Male and Female is famous for the scene pictured above when Gloria Swanson had to act with a lion. This amused me as there are countless references to lions in Malc's works which relate to Leo his star sign.



Male and Female is a 1919 silent film directed by Cecil B. DeMille. Its main themes are gender relations and social class. It is based on the J. M. Barrie play "The Admirable Crichton".


The film centers on the relationship between Lady Mary Loam (played by Gloria Swanson), a British aristocrat, and her butler, Crichton. Crichton fancies a romance with Mary, but she disdains him because of his lower social class. When the two and some others are shipwrecked on a desert island, they are left to fend for themselves in a state of nature. The aristocrats' abilities to survive are far worse than those of Crichton, and a role reversal ensues, with the butler becoming a king among the stranded group. Crichton and Mary are about to wed on the island when the group is rescued. Upon returning to Britain, Crichton chooses not to marry Mary; instead, he asks a maid, Tweeny (who had fancied Crichton throughout the film), to marry him, and the two move to the United States.



The film contains two famous scenes, indicative of de Mille's predilections as a filmmaker. An early scene depicts Gloria Swanson bathing in an elaborate setting, attended by two maids, lavishing her with rose-water and bath salts, silk dressing gown and luxurious towels. Toward the end of the film, a fantasy sequence about ancient Rome shows Swanson posed as Gabriel von Max's famous painting, "The Lion's Bride", which involved her being photographed with an actual lion.
Wikpedia Read more on Wikipedia

You can watch the whole movie below:

The Bat 1926

Malc refers to the stage version of the The Bat in a letter dated June 1926 to Carol Brown, his teenage friend in Caldy.

You can watch a 1926 film version below

A silent film based upon the Broadway play by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood, this Silent Gem was directed by Roland West in 1926, later being Remade as the Bat Whispers in 1930 (by Roland West) and again in 1958 in the Bat starring Vincent Price, also available at the Archive. Oh, and when I say silent, I mean silent - this was transferred from a 16mm print and was probably meant to be played with live musical accompaniment.

SYNOPSIS: The Bat, a masked criminal, terrorises a mansion filled with the guests of a mystery writer, a mansion in which a robber has hidden $20,000 of Stolen money.
The House guests along with a detective search for Clues - them being the location of the money and the identity of the Bat.

N.B - As many Batfans will know, this film is where Bob Kane got the Inspiration for the comic book superhero "Batman" - if you look, you'll notice the Bat-signal, here used to frighten the guests before the Bat attacks.

Sound: Silent - No Music, No Vocal Track - Live Accompaniment preffered
Colour: B&W
Genre: Horror/Mystery
Release Date: 1926
Director: Roland West
Internet Archive