Sophie: Introducing Wodehouse to New Fans and Old
As you know, because you read this blog assiduously, this year the Shaw Festival is presenting the wonderful Jeeves and Wooster in Perfect Nonsense, a great adaptation of The Code of the Woosters, at Niagara-on-the-Lake (NOTL), Ontario. As part of their seminar programming, the Shaw organizers invited Bob Rains and myself to give an introduction to the world of Wodehouse.
Everyone can go see a play or two at NOTL, but for theatre super fans, the Shaw Festival runs a few different series over the spring, summer, and fall. All info can be found at shawfest.com/beyond, but, briefly, there’s the Shaw Seminar (seven plays in four days), the Play by Play (five plays over three days), and the Shaw Symposium (all about Bernard Shaw and his contemporaries). All these programs include pre- or post-theatre presentations, guest speakers, and daily lunches.
As one of the Shaw Seminar’s guest speakers, I was invited, along with Bob, to summarize the whole of the Wodehouse world in about three quarters of an hour for a group of about 40 participants in preparation for the play Perfect Nonsense. Impossible, of course! We had to settle on a few bits which might interest such an audience. Bob’s great knowledge of Wodehouse’s theatre career would cover the second half of our talk, which meant that I had only about 20 minutes to introduce Bertie and Jeeves and the writings of Wodehouse more broadly.
We started with a book giveaway: One person answered the question “What novel is the play based on?” correctly and won herself a copy of The Code of the Woosters. We also gave copies of What Ho! Wodehouse and Plum Pie to two deserving people who had never read Wodehouse (such people do exist!). I then said a few words about the show’s stars, Jeeves and Bertie, and their relationship, and gave some examples of other fictional characters who form similar duos (think of Holmes and Watson). I touched very briefly on the Code of the Woosters, as I didn’t want to give away too much, only to emphasize that much comedy was added to Wodehouse’s prose on the stage. Mainly, I tried to insist on the immense volume of Wodehouse’s oeuvre, the exquisite craftmanship of his writing, and the world of eternal summer he left us. I tried to drill into my listeners that in such a world comedy is key. This comedy rests on the solid foundation of many, many linguistic techniques. I did manage to give a few examples of those, among which were Wodehouse’s skilful use of French phrases. Being francophone myself, I couldn’t resist reading out the opening paragraphs of The Luck of the Bodkins! I also had to mention Wodehouse’s profound admiration for Shakespeare and got two people to play Jeeves and Bertie in an extract from Jeeves in the Offing, where Bertie is trying to remember Hamlet’s father’s speech about “knitted socks and porcupines”.
The group we had the pleasure to talk to was a mix of Canadian and American theatre lovers who had travelled from all over to attend the Shaw Seminar programming. Some regulars from California and Vancouver join the program annually, with some patrons attending every year since 1992.
There was not very much time left for questions. But one participant asked our opinion about the portrayal of women in Wodehouse fiction, which is always an interesting topic. Then we had the opportunity to chat with couple from Toronto who wanted recommendations for their 11-year-old grandson, a fan of Just William stories. We came up with The Man with Two Left Feet; Young Men in Spats; and Eggs, Beans and Crumpets. I had the pleasure of bumping into the same couple later that evening at the theatre. I said I hoped that their grandson would enjoy PGW; they said they had already bought the books!
All in all, I had a fabulous time and intend to attend the Shaw Festival again.
–Sophie Delhaes
Bob: A Beautiful Place, A Successful Talk
First off, if there’s a more beautiful and inviting place on this earth than Niagara-on-the-Lake (NOTL), Ontario, I’ve never found it. If you don’t believe me about the beautiful part, just search NOTL on Google Images. If you don’t believe me about the inviting part, let me encourage you to come and see for yourself.
No matter what you may have heard recently, every Canadian I have met has been the opposite of nasty. NOTL sits where the Niagara River flows into Lake Ontario, across the river from the USA. So, obviously, the Americans wanted to conquer it and the rest of Canada as well. Thomas Jefferson famously wrote in 1812, “The acquisition of Canada this year, as far as the neighborhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching; and will give us experience for the attack of Halifax the next, and the final expulsion of England from the American continent.” It turns out that the U.S.’s acquisition of Canada is not quite as easy as one or more American presidents have believed. But, indeed, those Americans did shell NOTL’s Fort George in 1813 and occupied the town that is now NOTL for several months. When finally forced to retreat, those nasty Americans burned the place down for good measure. Whilst you can find out about this sad saga on a visit to NOTL, the nice Canadians don’t make a big deal about it and don’t seem to hold a grudge. (BTW, when I was taught in high school that those bastardly Brits burned Washington, D.C., in 1814, the textbook and teacher neglected to mention that the Brits didn’t start the fires; we did.)
NOTL would be a simply lovely place to visit on its own, what with its location, its waterfronts on the lake and river, its preservation, its amazing flowers everywhere, its beautiful houses and parks, its restaurants, its ice cream and gelato emporia, its wineries, its 16-mile bikeable path along the river to those falls you may have heard of, etc., etc., etc. But wait, there’s more!
The Shaw Festival, begun in 1962, is a huge draw. It now runs from February to December, with plays and musicals performed in a number of venues in the very walkable downtown area. Whilst the festival is named for George B. himself, the vast majority of shows are by others. How, you may ask, would one find out about the offerings at the festival? It’s easy. Just google the Shaw and sign up for the (free) info, and you and your inbox will never be lonely again. This year Sweetie and I did a whirlwind, five-day, cultural tour de force, taking in Heartbreak House; Sleuth; Amadeus; One for the Pot; Funny Girl; and, of course, Jeeves and Wooster in Perfect Nonsense.
Which, of course, brings me to the main point. Those clever and inviting people at the Shaw invited TWS to give a series of three talks about PGW to groups of culture vultures who convene in NOTL to take in a number of shows and talks together. More specifically, it was Warren Bain, the Shaw’s Interim Manager of Education, a man who has played the role of Bertie Wooster on stage, who contacted high exalted TWS poohbahs and asked that we educate and entertain in June, July, and August. And, you know, if you ask a Wodehousean to talk about Wodehouse, your only problem will be getting him or her to stop.
I had the great good fortune to be teamed with the delightful Canadian Sophie Delhaes, whom Sweetie and I had palled around with this past March at Wodehouse in the Springtime in Chichester, England. Sophie is smart, knowledgeable, and—best of all—organized. She gave me my marching orders. She divided our talk, like all of Gaul, into three parts, with me taking up the rear. My assigned mission was to discuss Wodehouse as a theatre man. This gave me the impetus to delve into the matter further; to reread Lee Davis’s excellent Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern: The Men Who Made Musical Comedy; and to consult various other sources, including the omniscient and always helpful Neil Midkiff.
I began by extolling Wodehouse’s output as a playwright who authored or coauthored 39 produced plays between 1911 and 1968. And Wodehouse as a lyricist, writing lyrics for produced shows between 1904 and 1960. Then, for a musical interlude, we played “Bill” from Hal Cazalet and Sylvia McNair’s CD The Land Where the Good Songs Go. I proceeded to discuss Wodehouse as writer or cowriter of the book for numerous musicals, working with many of the greats, including the Gershwins and Cole Porter, which gave me an excuse for playing “Anything Goes.”
From there I went on to talk about Wodehouse as a theatre reviewer for Vanity Fair and the serendipitous meeting on December 23, 1915, of Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern. I explained that if you had been taught as a youth that the modern American musical comedy was created by Rodgers and Hammerstein in Oklahoma (1943), as I was, or Kern and Hammerstein’s Show Boat (1927), you were misled. Rather, the modern musical with its integrated songs and book owes its birth to Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern and their fabulous “Princess Shows,” some, but not all, of which premiered at New York’s Princess Theatre. Courtesy of Neil Midkiff’s researches, I was able to explain, chapter and verse, why the Princess Theatre had exactly 299 seats. Courtesy of Bruce Montgomery, I listed the unsurpassed five Princess Shows that premiered in the miracle year of 1917 (while Wodehouse was also busy producing novels and short stories at an amazing pace). I lauded the final Princess show, Sitting Pretty, which received very favorable reviews but had a short run, probably because Kern would not allow its songs to be recorded, hence not played on the radio, or to be played in cabarets.
I then quoted Dorthy Parker who described Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern as her “favorite indoor sport.” And I shared the anonymous poetic review in the New York Times, attributed to George S. Kaufman:
This is the trio of musical fame,
Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern:
Better than anyone else you can name,
Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern.
Nobody knows what on earth they’ve been bitten by:
All I can say is I mean to get lit and buy
Orchestra seats for the next one that’s written by
Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern.
And, of course, Alan Jay Lerner, of Lerner and Loewe fame, who said, “P. G. Wodehouse inaugurated the American musical.”
My last quote was from the Master himself, who wrote with characteristic modesty: “When in due course Charon ferries me across the Styx and everyone is telling everyone else what a rotten writer I was, I hope at least one voice will be heard piping up, ‘But he did take trouble.’”
Finally, I ended with a plug for the Sitting Pretty in Garden City convention.
And that about tuckered me out.
–Bob Rains
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