Difference between revisions of "A Life of Pleasure"
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==The original text== | ==The original text== | ||
| − | A Victorian melodrama about a woman who falls victim to a heartless upper-class seducer and is finally rescued by her father. According to Roger Ball's article based on contemporary records[], the play was much admired at the time for its "sensational" penultimate act, which is set in Burma and features what all kinds of military activity, such as the bustle and humour of a camp, British forces marching through the jungle, horseman jumping across a chasm, and a pontoon train crosses a bridge built on stage for the troops and their baggage to cross, and finally the pursuit in which machine guns blaze and the stage ends up full of dead Burmese. (In Bristol these scenes were undertaken to the amazement of audiences by members of the 2nd Tower Hamlets Volunteers.) | + | A Victorian melodrama about a woman who falls victim to a heartless upper-class seducer and is finally rescued by her father. According to Roger Ball's article based on contemporary records[https://www.brh.org.uk/site/articles/lest-we-forget-a-life-of-pleasure/], the play was much admired at the time for its "sensational" penultimate act, which is set in Burma and features what all kinds of military activity, such as the bustle and humour of a camp, British forces marching through the jungle, horseman jumping across a chasm, and a pontoon train crosses a bridge built on stage for the troops and their baggage to cross, and finally the pursuit in which machine guns blaze and the stage ends up full of dead Burmese. (In Bristol these scenes were undertaken to the amazement of audiences by members of the 2nd Tower Hamlets Volunteers.) |
First produced at the Drury Lane Theatre, London, on 21 September 1893 and then transferred to the Princes Theatre, Bristol in December of that year, where it ran until February 1894. | First produced at the Drury Lane Theatre, London, on 21 September 1893 and then transferred to the Princes Theatre, Bristol in December of that year, where it ran until February 1894. | ||
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==Translations and adaptations== | ==Translations and adaptations== | ||
Revision as of 05:44, 2 July 2020
A Life of Pleasure is a play by by Henry Pettitt (1848-1893)[1] and Augustus Henry Glossop Harris (1852-1896)[2]
Contents
The original text
A Victorian melodrama about a woman who falls victim to a heartless upper-class seducer and is finally rescued by her father. According to Roger Ball's article based on contemporary records[3], the play was much admired at the time for its "sensational" penultimate act, which is set in Burma and features what all kinds of military activity, such as the bustle and humour of a camp, British forces marching through the jungle, horseman jumping across a chasm, and a pontoon train crosses a bridge built on stage for the troops and their baggage to cross, and finally the pursuit in which machine guns blaze and the stage ends up full of dead Burmese. (In Bristol these scenes were undertaken to the amazement of audiences by members of the 2nd Tower Hamlets Volunteers.)
First produced at the Drury Lane Theatre, London, on 21 September 1893 and then transferred to the Princes Theatre, Bristol in December of that year, where it ran until February 1894.
Translations and adaptations
Performance history in South Africa
Sources
Roger Ball. Lest we forget – A Life of Pleasure? The machine gun, colonial massacres and the Victorian theatre, on the website of the Bristol Radical History Group[4] Accessed on 2 July, 2020.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Pettitt,_Henry_(DNB00)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus_Harris
D.C. Boonzaier, 1923. "My playgoing days – 30 years in the history of the Cape Town stage", in SA Review, 9 March and 24 August 1932. (Reprinted in Bosman 1980: pp. 374-439.)
F.C.L. Bosman. 1980. Drama en Toneel in Suid-Afrika, Deel II, 1856-1912. Pretoria: J.L. van Schaik: pp.203-205
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