Remembering the First World War on the British Stage 1919-1939

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This project will offer the first sustained assessment of how English theatre remembered the Great War between 1919 and 1939. It will argue that in responding to the historical, cultural and psychological enormity of the war, and in witnessing its lasting impact, drama shaped and energised long standing debates about how to honour the dead and how to effect the process of individual and national reconstruction. The project's primary concern is to show how an ongoing dialectic about appropriate forms of memorialisation and a conviction to tell the 'truth' about the war gave rise to a body of work representing a wide range of social, political and gendered perspectives. In this it will provide a necessary revaluation of current scholarship which, in neglecting or underplaying significant aspects of the corpus, misapprehends the ways in which the memory of the war was recovered and instrumentalised. By offering a detailed account of missing narratives, the impact of physical and mental illness upon veterans and their families, women's war roles, the German experience of the war, the politics of peace, internationalism, and pacifism - my project will show how inter-war playwrights negotiated the imperative to commemorate the losses of the war, and to acknowledge its achievements, whilst speaking to the changing needs of the present. By mapping how these concerns fluctuated throughout the period, the genre can be more precisely aligned with studies of non-dramatic writing of the interwar period (Einhaus 2013, Frayn 2014).The project has developed out of my longstanding interest in how writers of the interwar period represented their experiences of war and its aftermath. Inspired by my UGRS project on the reception of Sherriff's Journey's End and related plays such as Coward's Post-Mortem, I studied responses to the war in drama and life writing of the 1920s and early 1930s in three final-year modules. All involved archiva research - at Birmingham, the British Library and the Imperial War Museum - and all three contributed first class marks to my overall First. At MA level I am extending these interests in the period with essays on modernism and publishing history, and a Dissertation on the fiction of Rose Macaulay (1881-1958), including her pacifist novel Non-Combatants and Others (1916). This research experience, supported by the MA Research Skills module and coupled with my knowledge of the interwar period, puts me in a strong position to complete a valuable doctoral project within schedule.