More about The Hooligan

After submitting the previous post yesterday, I browsed through Googlebooks and found two (in my opinion) interesting references to The Hooligan. They confirm that the play was unusually shocking and caused extreme reactions in the audience.

I should mention that I have posted this information, and the information in my previous blog posting, to Savoynet, and that my friend Wikipedia Sam is in the process of adding these quotations to the entries for The Hooligan. So Wikipedia is copying from me, not I from it.

In Dornford Yates's 1952 book As Berry and I Were Saying (House of Stratus edition, 2001):

"Berry put in his oar.

"'D'you remember Gilbert's The Hooligan? He was an East-End Jew. And that master, Jimmy Welch, in the title role?'

"'Shall I ever forget it? Women screaming and fainting all over the place. Scene--The Condemned Cell. A cut about twelve by eight in a great back cloth. At The Coliseum, not long before the first war. Which goes to show that Gilbert knew his world.'

"'I'll say he did,' said Berry." (p167)

It may be important to add that Yates's later "Berry" books were really disguised reminiscences, and this fictional conversation clearly derives from Yates's own memories.

In Holbrook Jackson's essay "Why Do We Laugh?" in his volume of essays Occasions (Grant Richards, 1922):

"I always felt that the laughter provoked by [James Welch's] characterization in The Man in the Street was an expression of relief from the underlying tragedy of the thing. But if there is any doubt about that, there could be no doubt whatever about the small gasps of hysterical laughter during his realistic interpretation of the condemned man in Gilbert's little tragedy The Hooligan. The theme is so painful as to be almost unbearable. I have seen people walk out in the midst of this play unable to stand any more of it. Yet those who remained in the grip of the horror, watching Welch revealing the fear of a condemned man during his supposed last few moments on earth--the fear of a man who is half idiot, and who has very little worth preserving in his life--those who remained laughed every now and then at the humour of it. Some things may be too deep for tears, but nothing is too deep for laughter." (pp94-95)