John Drinkwater — English Playwright
By: Steve Newman Writer
Tags: History, Books, Playwrights, Biography, Writers Life

John Drinkwater — English Playwright

Drinkwater by Wm. Rothenstein. Image: National Portrait Gallery

In the 1980s there used to be a large second-hand book shop on the balustraded first floor of the Victorian Wayfarers arcade in Southport. The shop became a favourite haunt of mine over the two years or so I lived in that most beautiful, but strangest, of towns.

On one particular visit I came across — in two volumes — the Collected Plays of John Drinkwater. They were first editions published by Sidgwick and Jackson in 1925 and priced at £16.50 for the two. I had to have them. I still have them.

I knew some of Drinkwater’s work at the time, but a bit more about the man, mainly through his connection with the Birmingham Rep and as one of the founders of The Malvern Festival. He was also a governor of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre and was, back in 1920, less than whole hearted in his acceptance that the theatre, for financial reasons, be used as a cinema during the winter months. His fellow governor, George Bernard Shaw, was delighted with the idea of Charlie Chaplin slap-sticking across the big screen in Stratford’s memorial to the Bard. In fact Shaw thought the theatre was a monstrous mish-mash of a building that needed burning down. When it did burn down in 1926 the playwright was delighted and one of the first to put his hand in his pocket to help build a new one. Mary Pickford’s Pollyanna was the first film screened there in 1921. I doubt if Drinkwater went to see it.

I was quite taken with Drinkwater’s poetry when I first read it back in the 1960s. A lot of it is very good especially the stuff written when he was on the periphery of the so-called Dymock Poets based in bucolic Gloucestershire at the start of World War One. But some of it was less than good because of the use of bad or unnecessary rhyming, although, it must be said, you can hear the future Ted Hughes here and there, and the poems do have a real sense of time and place.

Of his poetry and drama Drinkwater, in his preface to the Collected Plays, wrote that:

“ …a writer, when he is gathering together the work of a good many years may be allowed to say a few words by way of explanation to his friends. When I so collected the poems that I had written up to the year 1923, I said nothing about them, because one cannot argue about one’s own poetry. For better or for worse it is there, and there it will remain, of a permanent quality for changing tastes to like or dislike. But the drama is a more empirical affair, more subject to outside influences, and created more directly in relation to external necessities…but it will serve for the moment to say that poetry is written by the poet to please himself and drama to please himself and the audiences…”

The first play of Drinkwater’s I read was Robin Hood & The Pedlar, but I was by then, as with some of his poetry, rather put off by the play’s stiff pageant-like versifying, but having said that Drinkwater is a brilliant story-teller, with sharp, clear, and witty dialogue that must have influenced the young Noel Coward.

When I first entered that Southport book shop I’d just had a play produced at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and was looking for all the help I could get for a play I was thinking of writing about Walt Whitman (that didn’t actually materialise until ten years later), and reading just a few lines of Drinkwater’s plays, Abraham Lincoln, and Oliver Cromwell, prompted me to buy those books. They have been a great investment.

John Drinkwater was born on June 1st 1882 in Leytonstone, London. Two years later his father, Albert Edwin Drinkwater, a school master, moved his family (via Hackney) to Notting Hill, where they settled at 1 Ladbrook Crescent. In 1886 the thirty-four year old Albert Drinkwater gave up his job as a headmaster to become a playwright and actor.

By 1891 things must have become pretty tough after Albert’s change of career (which doesn’t seem to have been hugely successful), with the nine year old John sent to live with his maternal grandfather, John Beck Brown, who had an ironmongers business in Oxford. Perhaps John was sent to Oxford because his mother, Annie, was ill (she died soon after John’s move), and perhaps Albert was possibly touring with nowhere else for the child to go.

His grandfather sent John to the City of Oxford School the year he arrived, leaving six years later. His grandfather had died in 1895, after which John lived in a boarding house on the Banbury Road, run by a clergyman.

Drinkwater admits he was no great scholar, much preferring sport to Latin and Shakespeare.

After leaving school the handsome fifteen year old John Drinkwater managed to get a job as a clerk with an insurance company in Oxford, moving with them, in 1901, when the company re-located to Birmingham. And it was in Birmingham, just a year later, that he was introduced to theatre director Barry Jackson, who cast him as Fabian in a production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night the actor/manager was staging in his own back garden.

The two men became firm friends and colleagues.

Drinkwater writes:

“ My affections have never been divided between poetry and the drama. For some time in the early years at Birmingham it was an ambition to help as far as one could towards the restoration of the two upon the stage in union. I remember that John Galsworthy warned me that the shadow of the man Shakespeare was across the path of all who should attempt verse drama in these days. The experience of Rebellion showed me that in that direction at least he was right.”

It’s wasn’t really Drinkwater’s fault that he didn’t take heed of Galsworthy’s advice, for verse drama had become something of vogue in the two or three years before WWI. In fact it had become hugely popular with amateur groups wishing to stage large outdoor theatrical pageants, with Drinkwater creating and directing one with the Cadbury workforce in Bournville, which proved to be both popular and memorable, not least for the enthusiasm that an ‘unskilled’, to quote Drinkwater, company of actors can achieve when roused.

The First World War pretty much put paid to that.

In 1918 Drinkwater came up with his most popular play, Abraham Lincoln, which sees the playwright getting to grips with a grittier kind of drama using a sparse form of prose that has, in his words, “…the enthusiasm and poignancy of verse…to make it beautiful without letting anybody know about it.”

Although Drinkwater will insist on a chorus, the body of the play is a masterful piece of work, with dialogue that slashes and burns with passion and anger:

The following is short piece, twenty-six pages in, from a scene where Lincoln is being judged fit to stand for President.

Lincoln. I can take any man’s ridicule — I’m trained to it by a…somewhat odd figure that it pleased God to give me, if I may so far be pleasant with you. But this slavery business will be long, and deep, and bitter. I know it. If you do me this honour, gentlemen, you must look to me for no compromise in this matter. If abolition comes in due time by constitutional means, good. I want it. But, while we will not force abolition, we will give slavery no approval, and will not allow it to extend its boundaries by one yard. The determination is in my blood. When I was a boy I made a trip to New Orleans and there I saw them chained, beaten, kicked as a man would be ashamed to kick a thieving dog. And I saw a young girl driven up and down the room that the bidders might satisfy themselves. And I said then, “ If ever I get a chance to hit that thing, I’ll hit it hard.”

It’s interesting to note that when this was written, only fifty-two years after the end of the Civil War, it must (should) have hit home when performed here and in the US, with the KK still lynching African-Americans and burning their homes. With this play John Drinkwater, at the age of thirty-six, has come of age as a playwright, and although he hasn’t left the verse completely behind: what there is has been written in a Whitmanesque fashion that uses rhythm more than rhyme.

The play has a cast of forty (expensive) and brings in such characters as William Seward, Caleb Jenkins, General Grant, John Wilkes Booth, and Frederick Douglass, and, at the end, General Lee and, as with Shakespeare, the action is often off stage, with argument and vivid description building the tension, and the sorrow and hope, as the passing of the abolition amendment drawing ever the nearer.

Within this play are the bones of Spielberg’s film Lincoln in the sense that it’s contained within rooms where expression is compressed into a volcanic pressure that is only released with a superb and controlled use of the English language.

John Drinkwater spent some of WWI working in a Birmingham munitions factory, writing Lincoln in his spare time, and there is a sense of a real weariness that Drinkwater somehow passes on to his President Lincoln -extraordinary.

The play was first produced at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre to great acclaim, and starred Frank McGlynn as Lincoln.

Lincoln was the making of John Drinkwater, turning him from an insurance clerk who dabbled in drama into an internationally respected playwright and authority on drama and a man who could add weight to the board of any theatre or festival panel.

Three years after Abraham Lincoln came Oliver Cromwell, which is a stunning piece of work that at last shuns verse, replacing it with hymns and folk songs (with music by George Drinkwater) and some of the most powerful and passionate speeches in English drama. The play did well, with a season in Stratford and London. It’s a play that needs reviving, and was a great inspiration for my own play: 1651: An Evening with Oliver Cromwell.

Cromwell was followed two years later by Robert E. Lee, which isn’t bad but lacks the passion of the other two, maybe because it’s about a man, albeit brave, who nevertheless fought for slavery and not against it.

For me his reputation as a playwright rests on Lincoln and Cromwell, which still read well a century after they were conceived and born. It’s a good legacy to have.

To have been one of the creators of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, and its manager for a while, is something we should continually thank him.

Drinkwater married twice and always seemed a happy man. Take a look at some film clips of him with Edward Elgar and George Bernard Shaw during one of the Malvern Festivals where he seems to be enjoying himself hugely.

John Drinkwater died in March 1937 from a heart attack after watching the University Boat Race, where Oxford won for the first time in fourteen years.

Drinkwater was a man of the theatre of his day who undoubtedly helped create the theatre we have today, and those who have been a part of it for the last century.

Drinkwater wrote:

“ The theatre always has been, and always must be, the knock-about arena of the arts, and no one should go into it who is not prepared to give and take cudgellings. But there is no reason why courtesy and good temper should not be the rule of the ring, so long as mere ignorance is disqualified as it should be.”

He was always the gentleman.