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Vectia, Man-Made Censorship, and the Drama of Marie Stopes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2005

Esther Beth Sullivan
Esther Beth Sullivan
Affiliation:
Alaska Pacific University
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Extract

In the 1920s, the Royal Court Theatre still enjoyed the reputation earned earlier in the century by Harley Granville Barker and John Vedrenne, yet its daily fare was not remarkably distinctive from other West End theatres. In that context, an aspiring playwright was contracted to write a play for the Court's 1923 season. The playwright happened to be Marie Stopes, (in)famous author of the best-selling sex-education and birth-control manual Married Love. “Contracted” is the word Stopes uses. It could also be speculated that, in a year when the Court's five main undertakings had as many as five different producers and three different managers, the theatre was made available to Stopes, a celebrity on the London scene who had her own backing.

Type
Research Article
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 46 , Issue 1 , May 2005 , pp. 79 - 102
Copyright
© 2005 The American Society for Theatre Research, Inc.

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Footnotes

Esther Beth Sullivan is Director of Distance Education at Alaska Pacific University. Her research expertise is in feminist theory and criticism. Her work has appeared in Theatre Journal, Theatre Studies and Text and Performance as well as a number of anthologies.