Frederick Lonsdale

• Born: February 5, 1881
• Birthplace: St. Helier, Jersey, Channel Islands
• Died: April 4, 1954
• Place of death: London, England

Other Literary Forms

Frederick Lonsdale’s success as a librettist for musical comedies and operettas was equal to his success as a playwright. His libretto for The King of Cadonia was clearly inspired by Anthony Hope’s novel The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) and in its turn influenced Ivor Novello’s operetta King’s Rhapsody (pr. 1950). Lonsdale’s most popular work in this vein was The Maid of the Mountains, which ran at Daly’s Theatre, London, for a total of 1,352 performances. Lonsdale collaborated with other leading musical theater composers of the early twentieth century English stage, including Paul Rubens, who did the music for The Balkan Princess (written with Frank Curzon) and Betty (written with Gladys Unger). He also had a hand in a number of adaptations of European successes, such as The Lady of the Rose and Katja the Dancer, both with music by the German composer Jean Gilbert (pseudonym of Max Winterfield); High Jinks, with a score by the Hungarian-born Rudolf Friml; and Monsieur Beaucaire, with music composed by André Messager, the last major writer of French operetta. Lonsdale’s last effort as a librettist was Lady Mary, which he coauthored with John Hastings Turner to a score by Albert Sirmay and Philip Craig.

Generally, Lonsdale seems to have been sought out by the impresarios of musical theater for his ability to supply sprightly, well-constructed books that blended wit and sentimentality. The most convincing testimony to his skill in this area is The Maid of the Mountains, which was second only to Oscar Asche and Frederic Norton’s Chu Chin Chow (pr. 1916) as the major musical success of London’s West End theater during World War I.

After his major drawing-room comedies had achieved success in New York, Lonsdale’s talents were also recognized and recruited by the film industry. He wrote, or had a hand in, several screenplays, including Alexander Korda’s vehicle for Douglas Fairbanks, The Private Life of Don Juan (1934; with Lajos Biro), and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s episodic World War II tribute to British patriotism, Forever and a Day (1943; with Charles Bennett, C. S. Forester, John Van Druten, Christopher Isherwood, R. C. Sherriff, and many others too numerous to mention). That he wrote so little for the screen can be attributed partly to his dislike of Hollywood (“I could never live in a film city because there is no conversation”) and partly to his habit of breaking contracts.

Achievements

Frederick Lonsdale reached his peak of acclaim in the 1920’s and early 1930’s, when his name was closely associated with sophisticated drawing-room comedies, such as those of Noël Coward, S. N. Behrman, and Philip Barry. During Lonsdale’s long career as a playwright, which extended from the staging of Who’s Hamilton? at the New Theatre, Ealing, in 1903, to the posthumous production of Let Them Eat Cake at the Cambridge Theatre, London, in 1959, his work was praised by such diverse theater critics as Henrik Ibsen’s archenemy Clement Scott of The Daily Telegraph, Arthur B. Walkley of The Times (London), The Sunday Times’s convivial James Agate, Heywood Broun of New York World, The New Yorker’s resident wit, Robert Benchley, and the British eccentric, Hannen Swaffer of the Daily Express. Typical of such critics’ comments was Benchley’s on Spring Cleaning’s New York production in 1923: “It is written with a respect for the audience’s intelligence and has an easy humor that brought a pleasant glow to this sin-hardened heart.” In the same vein, Agate, reviewing a revival of On Approval in London in 1933, observed that “time is powerless against true wit and diversion.”

Lonsdale’s reputation declined in the 1940’s and 1950’s, and indeed, in 1953, almost at the end of his life, he experienced the bitterness of an old established author being goaded by a critical wunderkind when Kenneth Tynan, writing in the Evening Standard about a revival of Aren’t We All?, said: “Frederick Lonsdale’s comedy, first produced thirty years ago, is what some would call gentle, others toothless: Where W. Somerset Maugham chews and digests his characters, Lonsdale merely mumbles them.” Years later, however, interest in Lonsdale’s work again arose. Though no innovator, Lonsdale was one of those artists who take a particular form and handle it with consummate skill and flair.

Biography

Unlike the heroes and heroines of his own plays, Frederick Lonsdale came from a decidedly humble background. Lonsdale was born Lionel Frederick Leonard on February 5, 1881, in St. Helier, the capital of Jersey in the Channel Islands. The third son of a local tobacconist and his wife, Frederick and Susan Leonard, Lonsdale was an unruly child who disappointed his family by refusing to attend school and by running off to Canada in his late teens on a romantic impulse. There he seems to have lived by his wits and, according to his own account, was not above perpetrating fraud to finance his passage back to England. On his return, he worked for some time on the Southampton docks and wrote plays in his spare time. When he moved back to Jersey in 1903, his first play had already been produced at a suburban London theater and had been noticed favorably by one of the leading British critics, Clement Scott, who had entered the theater by chance to shelter himself from the rain. The producing company brought the play to St. Helier that same year, and from that point Lonsdale began to be accepted into the more elevated reaches of Jersey society. His transformation from the “villainous and undisciplined child” of a small-town shopkeeper into an international celebrity whose smallest sartorial innovations made instant newspaper copy seems to have begun at about this time. Lonsdale was obviously a keen observer and a gifted mimic, and he rapidly assumed the manners and accent of the upper class, about which he was to spend much of his life writing.

In 1904, Lonsdale—still known in private life as Frederick Leonard—married Leslie Hoggan, the daughter of a retired colonel. For the first four years of their marriage, the young couple spent much of their time apart. Lonsdale had returned to England to pursue his career as a playwright and was not making sufficient income to provide a home for both of them there. Finally, however, he attracted the attention of a London impresario, Frank Curzon, who staged Lonsdale’s first successful work, The King of Cadonia, at the Prince of Wales Theatre in September, 1908. The young couple were reunited and soon afterward changed their names by deed poll from Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Leonard to Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Lonsdale, the name that the playwright had adopted as his nom de plume. From that time onward, Lonsdale’s success was assured, and with The Maid of the Mountains in 1917, he achieved sufficient financial security to enable him to play the man-about-town for the next two decades.

By the mid-1920’s, Lonsdale was equally celebrated in England and the United States. His marriage had failed, and he had separated from his wife and family. In the 1930’s, he was invited to Hollywood to write screenplays, primarily for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In that decade, his productivity as a playwright declined, and only three new works were staged between 1930 and 1940. With the advent of World War II, Lonsdale’s criticism of the war effort and his voluntary exile in the United States lost him the respect of many of his compatriots. Nevertheless, when the war ended, he returned to England and resumed his career as a West End playwright. From 1950 onward, he spent much of his time in France, but by that time, his particular brand of witty drawing-room comedy had begun to fall out of favor, and his income declined steeply. Furthermore, age brought with it an increasing uncertainty of temper that made him unpopular with many members of the theatrical profession. Lonsdale died in London in 1954. He was survived by his former wife, Leslie, and three daughters.

Analysis

Frederick Lonsdale’s work, placed in historical perspective, occupies the midpoint in what might be called “the rise and fall of the drawing-room comedy,” beginning not so much with Wilde as with Thomas William Robertson in the 1860’s, continuing through such work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Gay Lord Quex (pr. 1899) and Maugham’s Lady Frederick (pr. 1907), reaching a peak in the 1920’s with Private Lives and On Approval and declining in the 1950’s with such works as Terence Rattigan’s The Sleeping Prince (pr. 1953), William Douglas Home’s The Reluctant Debutante (pr. 1955), and Hugh and Margaret Williams’s The Grass Is Greener (pr. 1958). The shock waves that John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (pr. 1956) sent reverberating through the British theater made it difficult for any playwright thereafter to practice the art of light badinage among the denizens of Mayfair and Belgravia with quite such unselfconscious insouciance.

Comedy seldom gets a fair hearing from literary critics and historians, and writers who specialize in comedy must often be content with only the most condescending of acknowledgments. To point to Aristophanes and Molière, to Congreve, W. S. Gilbert, and George Bernard Shaw, will give pause only temporarily to those who regard comic playwriting as an inferior vocation. Yet, if one weighs Lonsdale’s work against the “serious” work of his British contemporaries, the comparison is not altogether in Lonsdale’s disfavor. J. B. Priestley’s time plays and expressionist experiments, the attempts of W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Ronald Duncan, T. S. Eliot, and Christopher Fry to revive poetic drama, the bourgeois realism of R. C. Sherriff, John Galsworthy, St. John Ervine, and John Van Druten seem no likelier to hold the attention of future audiences and readers than Lonsdale’s best comedies. The only British playwrights of the first half of the twentieth century who clearly surpass him are not the “serious” playwrights but other writers of comedy: Sir James Barrie, George Bernard Shaw, and Coward.

With all his failing, his laziness, his self-plagiarism, his too-easy cynicism, and his occasional sentimentality, Lonsdale at his best possessed some distinct countervailing virtues, not least among them being a consummate sense of theater and a keen eye for the foibles of the upper class. Above all, his basic respect for human honesty and decency raised his most assured work to the level of critical comedy, an achievement that might very well have earned for him a nod of approval from both Aristophanes and Molière.

Lonsdale’s plays were the product of an almost fatally facile talent. He wrote so easily and on the whole so successfully that he seems to have begun to regard his achievement as a species of confidence trick, similar to the one he claimed to have perpetrated as an adolescent in Canada. Peter Daubeney, the English director who staged But for the Grace of God in 1946, has spoken of Lonsdale’s “Olympian contempt for the theatre,” calling him “an outstanding example of a man who despises the very medium where he excels.” Clearly, though Lonsdale rivaled both Coward and Maugham in his ability to devise effective and amusing drawing-room comedies, he rarely attempted to extend his range. When he did—as in The Fake and The Foreigners—the result was invariably one of his rare failures at the box office. Maugham, on the other hand, though best in such high comedy as The Circle (pr., pb. 1921) and The Constant Wife (pr., pb. 1926), was able to write sardonic domestic comedies such as The Breadwinner (pr., pb. 1930) and effective melodramas such as The Letter (pr., pb. 1927). Coward, in whom sentimentality and romantic patriotism coexisted with cynicism and outrageousness, also stretched his talents to encompass not only the comedy of manners of Private Lives (pr., pb. 1930) but also the lower-class realism of This Happy Breed (pr. 1942), the suburban pathos of Still Life (pr., pb. 1936), and the epic social history of Cavalcade (pr. 1931). In itself, to be sure, such a narrow social range does not invalidate Lonsdale’s work, any more than it does the work of Jane Austen, Henry James, Ivy Compton-Burnett, or, for that matter, of William Congreve, Marivaux, or Anton Chekhov. The question that remains is how far Lonsdale succeeded in using the essentially atypical milieu of the English upper class to reflect something beyond itself.

A close examination of Lonsdale’s plays reveals not merely a fascination with the lives and manners of members of the English upper class but also a deeply divided attitude toward them. On the one hand, there is the apparent disdain for certain types who do not belong to the charmed circle—as in his occasional disparaging references to shop girls, Socialist politicians who never bathe, and illiterate Jewish theater managers. On the other hand, there is a moralizing tone in several of the plays in which the palms of honesty and worthiness are awarded to former chorus girls and women who live by their wits rather than to the aristocrats who patronize or exclude them. Another theme that emerges almost as consistently is that of the pleasures and perils of disguise. It is difficult to resist the temptation to speculate that both of these themes attracted Lonsdale so powerfully because he had emerged from a world of shop girls, advanced by living on his wits, succeeded finally in making London society accept him by adopting an upper-class persona, and ever after feared that some day he would be unmasked.

Monsieur Beaucaire

Lonsdale’s love-hate relationship with the aristocracy and his preoccupation with disguise predate his first successful West End comedies. They go back, indeed, to his days as the librettist of such works as The King of Cadonia and The Balkan Princess. Monsieur Beaucaire, though an adaptation of a French libretto based on Booth Tarkington’s novella (1900), illustrates the point almost perfectly. Lonsdale must have found it an appealing project because it attacks the hypocrisy and snobbishness of the upper class by unfolding the tale of a mysterious young French nobleman, the Marquis de Chateaurien, who is in love with an English noblewoman, Lady Mary Carlisle. His rival for Lady Mary’s love, Lord Winterset, unmasks him as Monsieur Beaucaire, a common barber. Lady Mary then rejects him, only to discover to her chagrin that the common barber is, in reality, under the multiplicity of disguises, Louis XV’s cousin, the Duc d’Orléans. Translated into the idiom of Lonsdale’s later work, its message becomes that it is unwise to snub a shop girl, for she may turn out to have the soul of a duchess. Other possible propositions that might spring from this—that a duchess may turn out to have the soul of a shop girl, or that the souls of both duchesses and shop girls could be equally worthy of consideration—seem not to have interested Lonsdale to the same degree.

Aren’t We All?

In his first really successful West End comedy, Aren’t We All?, Lonsdale was still in his first flush of infatuation with the peerage. His depiction of Lord Grenham and his heir, Willie Tatham, of Lady Frinton, and of such representatives of the jeunesse dorée as Arthur Wells and Martin Steele is on the whole benign. Quite untypically, in fact, Lonsdale reserves his sharpest barbs for a Church of England clergyman who is married to Grenham’s sister, Angela. Pompous, narrow-minded, hypocritical, and defensive, the Reverend Ernest Lynton is not so much a character as a caricature from Punch, and he clearly belongs to a world about which Lonsdale shows little knowledge or interest. His presence in the play, like that of his wife, is not essential to the main plot; he is there to provide an easily shocked target for Grenham’s worldly cynicism and to set up the curtain line, which is also the title of the play:

Vicar: . . . In answer to a simple remark I made last night, Grenham, you called me a bloody old fool! (Puts his head in his hands as if crying.)

Lord Grenham: (Puts his arm around his shoulder.) But aren’t we all, old friend?

To the degree that they are unable to separate appearance from reality, to penetrate disguises, or to refrain from leaping to conclusions, they are all indeed fools.

The play turns on a misunderstanding between two characters: Willie Tatham, Grenham’s son, and Margot Tatham, Willie’s wife. Willie is forced to wear the disguise of guilt, while Margot assumes the disguise of innocence. When the play opens, Willie has agreed to let Lady Frinton use his house to give a dance. Willie is worried and lonely. His wife has gone on a trip to Egypt, and he has not heard from her for more than a week. At the dance, a former actress with whom Willie is acquainted, Kitty Lake, is sympathetic to him, and they exchange a consoling kiss. Margot arrives home unexpectedly at that very moment and assumes immediately that Willie and Kitty are having an affair. Margot is unforgiving and proposes to leave Willie, but her very intransigence arouses the suspicions of her father-in-law, Lord Grenham. In an attempt to save his son’s marriage, he unearths a secret alliance that Margot has formed in Egypt and arranges a confrontation between her and the young man concerned. His plan fails, however, when the young man gallantly pretends not to know Margot. Margot’s mask remains secure, but her own confidence in her behavior toward her husband is shaken. Their peccadilloes cancel each other out, and at the end they go away together, reconciled.

The slightness of the plot is bolstered by two other concurrent actions: one in which Lord Grenham’s sister, Angela, is gradually humanized as she learns to discard the appearance of grim, repressive “virtue” and to appreciate her brother’s more flexible attitude toward life; the other in which Grenham is trapped into marriage with Lady Frinton by Margot, who, to revenge herself for his attempt to unmask her, places an announcement of their engagement in The Times. As in the main plot, changes are brought about in the circumstances of the characters as they are compelled to relinquish one set of attitudes for another.

Lonsdale’s reputation for wit is not, on the whole, reinforced by the dialogue of this play. Lonsdale clearly intended Lord Grenham to be the main conduit of this quality, but at best he is able to rise to the sub-Wildean: “All my life I have found it very difficult to refuse a woman anything; except marriage.” On the other hand, the dialogue generally is efficient, uncluttered, and has the rhythm, if not the content, of wit. Spoken, as it originally was, by first-rate light comedians, it seems to have persuaded audiences and critics alike that they had experienced the sensations of surprise and delight that true wit brings.

The Last of Mrs. Cheyney

In 1925, two years after the premiere of Aren’t We All?, Lonsdale’s most successful nonmusical play was staged. The Last of Mrs. Cheyney is, in a sense, an anomalous play because it resurrects the atmosphere and many of the devices of nineteenth century society melodrama. The echoes of, for example, Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan (pr. 1892) are very strong, particularly during the second-act climax, which involves a woman being trapped in compromising circumstances with a man of dubious reputation. Lonsdale, however, amusingly inverts the formula to create a comedy drama with several well-placed coups de théâtre. The one that ends the first act is particularly effective. Mrs. Cheyney, apparently a wealthy widow from Australia, is holding a charity concert in the garden of her house. The concert is attended by various representatives of London society, including the upright Lord Elton, the disreputable Lord Dilling, and Mrs. Ebley, a woman who has grown rich on the attentions of other women’s husbands. Lord Elton and Lord Dilling are both attracted to Mrs. Cheyney, but Elton’s intentions are honorable whereas Dilling’s are not. Rather unusually, Mrs. Cheyney’s establishment seems to be staffed entirely by menservants; one of them, Charles the butler, strikes a chord in Dilling’s memory. The butler is suspiciously gentlemanly, and Dilling suspects that they were at Oxford together. When the guests leave at the end of the concert, Mrs. Cheyney, who has represented herself as someone who neither smokes nor drinks nor swears, immediately lights a cigarette, burns her fingers on the match, and curses. Then, as she sits at the piano and begins to play, her menservants enter, sprawl on the furniture, and smoke. It becomes clear that they and Mrs. Cheyney are a gang of jewel thieves bent on relieving Mrs. Ebley of her pearls.

The play’s second act builds to a similar bravura climax. It is set in Mrs. Ebley’s house, where the characters from act 1 have assembled for the weekend. The plot to rob Mrs. Ebley is foiled by Lord Dilling, who, having recognized Charles as a jewel thief whom he had once encountered in Paris, switches bedrooms with Mrs. Ebley and catches Mrs. Cheyney as she comes in to steal the pearls. Dilling presents a proposition: Either Mrs. Cheyney can submit to him and remain undiscovered or he will ring the bell and turn her over to the police. Instead, Mrs. Cheyney rings the bell herself and, in front of Dilling, Elton, and the rest, hands back the pearls to Mrs. Ebley.

Act 3, adding a touch of Augustin Scribe and Victorien Sardou to the Wildean mix, revolves around a letter. Written by Elton to Mrs. Cheyney and containing a proposal of marriage, it also includes a number of painfully accurate pen portraits of the upper-class set in which Mrs. Cheyney has been moving and of which the stiff-necked Elton intensely disapproves. The possibility that Mrs. Cheyney might use this letter to cause a scandal prompts heavy bidding for its return. Elton writes Mrs. Cheyney a check for ten thousand pounds, and Mrs. Ebley promises to drop the charges of theft. Mrs. Cheyney accepts the check but then tears it up and informs them that she has already torn up the letter. The members of the house party, amazed by this, are even more amazed when they learn that it was she and not Dilling who rang the bell in Mrs. Ebley’s bedroom. Their attitude toward her changes; they see her as someone with a sense of good sportsmanship, which is their equivalent of honor. Somewhat surprisingly, she is willing to be reabsorbed into the set that has shown itself so eager to reject her, and, as the play closes, she agrees to become Dilling’s wife.

Lonsdale’s two chief themes echo throughout this play. Mrs. Cheyney is clearly more interested in being accepted by society than in thieving from it. As she says to Charles, her butler and coconspirator, toward the end of the first act: “I’m sorry, but I didn’t realise when I adopted this profession that the people I would have to take things from would be quite so nice.” Even when they have proved themselves not “quite so nice,” she is willing to forgive and be forgiven by them. On the other hand, the flaws of the play’s three main representatives of high society are repeatedly exposed to the audience. Lord Elton is priggish and pompous; Lord Dilling is a wastrel and a womanizer; Mrs. Ebley exploits her appeal for men. At the climax of the play, the unmasking of Mrs. Cheyney is paralleled by the unmasking of society itself. Lonsdale’s ambivalence is amply demonstrated.

The pleasures and perils of disguise are illustrated chiefly in the characters of Mrs. Cheyney and Charles, though William the footman, Jim the chauffeur, and George the page boy are also implicated in the masquerade. Mrs. Cheyney and Charles, however, unlike the latter three, who are lower-class “Cockney” types, are represented as people of grace, wit, and charm, educated people who might well have made their way into society by legitimate means but who have chosen a more adventurous course. At the same time, their actions are given a moral color that verges on Lincoln green, inasmuch as the people they rob deserve it, having in their turn, morally speaking, robbed others:

Charles: I’m not trying to persuade you, my sweet, but there is this to be remembered, the pearls we want from Mrs. Ebley were taken by that lady, without a scruple, from the wives of the men who gave them to her.

Mrs. Cheyney is persuaded, and she goes on to play a bold and dangerous game, seemingly courting exposure and disaster but winning through to acceptance and marriage into the peerage.

The Last of Mrs. Cheyney is a very skillful theatrical piece, with cleverly placed reversals, recognitions, crises, and climaxes. It is an admirable mechanism, like a fine example of a Swiss clockmaker’s art, and as such it can still be persuasive on the stage. Yet in The Last of Mrs. Cheyney, Lonsdale had not yet achieved as sure a grasp of his themes as he did in his next play, On Approval.

On Approval

On Approval is in many respects the most economical of Lonsdale’s comedies. It has only four characters, dispensing with the clutter of minor figures that in the earlier plays give substance and color to the milieu but contribute little to the action. The premise of the play is as self-consciously daring as that of Coward’s Private Lives, to which it also bears a certain structural resemblance. The principal characters, Maria Wislak and the Duke of Bristol, are as monstrously egotistical as Coward’s Eliot and Amanda, though they belong not so much to the smart set who honeymoon on the Riviera as to the landed gentry who grouse-shoot in Scotland. Like Private Lives, On Approval is a minuet of changing alliances. The action is initiated by the wealthy Maria, who decides that the pleasant but penniless Richard Halton may be a suitable candidate for her next husband. To try him out, she proposes to take him to her house in Scotland for a month. Her longtime enemy, the Duke of Bristol, decides that he will go, too, ostensibly to lend Richard moral support but actually to escape his creditors. The fourth member of the group is an attractive, good-natured pickle heiress, Helen Hayle, who follows in pursuit of the duke, with whom she is in love.

In the course of the action, Lonsdale leaves the audience in no doubt that the representatives of the ruling class are outrageously and comically tiresome. Not only do Maria and the duke berate and abuse each other incessantly, but also they treat the penniless Richard and Helen, the pickle-profiteer’s daughter, like servants. The effect of this is to draw Richard and Helen closer together, and finally they conspire to sneak away in the only available automobile, just as a massive snowstorm is beginning—a snowstorm that threatens to trap the monstrous Maria and the appalling duke together for several weeks. As Richard says: “It’s the kindest thing that has ever been done for them. Such hell as a month alone here together will make them the nicest people in the world.” This denouement recalls that of Private Lives, in which Eliot and Amanda tiptoe out of the Paris apartment to which they have eloped, leaving their respective spouses, Victor and Sybil, quarreling violently. Because Private Lives appeared two years later than On Approval, it is more than probable that Coward learned something from Lonsdale about the construction of sophisticated drawing-room comedies.

Clearly, in On Approval, Lonsdale has resolved his conflict with respect to acceptance/rejection by society. In this play, it is the upwardly mobile who are the “nice” people, unequivocally; the established members of society may yet become “nice” but only through undergoing an ordeal of isolation in uncongenial company. There is no falsely sentimental juxtaposition of gentlemen and jewel thieves, or duchesses and ex-chorus girls, with Lonsdale judiciously trying to hold the balance; here he rightly identifies with the aspiring middle class and asserts his own niceness against the arrogance of the upper class.

Lonsdale’s other perennial theme, of masks and unmasking, is also present, though in a subtler form than in The Last of Mrs. Cheyney. Maria Wislak takes Richard Halton “on approval” to find out if he is as pleasant and congenial as he appears to be. She decides that he is, but meanwhile Richard has found out that Maria is not as she has appeared to him for twenty years, “too good, too beautiful, too noble” for him; indeed, she is “one of the most unpleasant of God’s creatures.” Like Lady Mary Carlisle in Monsieur Beaucaire, Maria is deeply chagrined at this turn of events: “To think I brought the brute here to find out if I like him, and he has the audacity the moment I tell him I do, to tell me he doesn’t like me!” Similarly, Helen sees through the Duke of Bristol’s charm to the spoiled schoolboy underneath: “To make him a decent man he needs six months before the mast as a common sailor.” The misunderstandings and deceits that complicate the lives of the four characters in On Approval are much more character-based than in the somewhat mechanically contrived Aren’t We All? and The Last of Mrs. Cheyney.

The dialogue, too, is more distinctive, more deft and more plausible. Instead of the secondhand epigrams of Lord Grenham and Lord Dilling, there is the genuine crackle and tension of strong-willed people using language as a weapon to penetrate their opponents’ armor of conceit and self-absorption. The play’s witty lines cannot be taken out of context to survive as freestanding aphorisms; their humor depends entirely on the audience’s understanding of the characters of Maria, the duke, Richard, and Helen, and of the conflicts between them.

Let Them Eat Cake

On Approval is the high point of Lonsdale’s achievement as a comic playwright. Though he continued to write sporadically for another quarter of a century and though none of the plays he wrote in that period (except The Foreigners) lost money, he never quite repeated the artistic and popular success he reached with his comedies of the mid-1920’s. A typical example of his later work is Let Them Eat Cake, which like many of Lonsdale’s plays is a revision, or a renaming at least, of an earlier one. On Approval, for example, was a substantial revision of an early, unproduced work, “The Follies of the Foolish,” and Aren’t We All? was a reworking of The Best People. Let Them Eat Cake was first titled Half a Loaf (written in 1937), was produced in 1938 as Once Is Enough, reappeared as Half a Loaf at the Theatre Royal, Windsor, in 1958, four years after Lonsdale’s death, and finally opened at the Cambridge Theatre, London, in 1959, as Let Them Eat Cake. In it, Lonsdale reverts to the pattern of earlier plays such as Aren’t We All? Indeed, its theme of marital misunderstanding is not dissimilar, and its cast list is even more replete with titled characters, including the Duke and Duchess of Hampshire, Lord and Lady Plynne, Lord and Lady Whitehall, Lord Rayne, and Lady Bletchley. The main action involves Johnny, the Duke of Hampshire, who becomes infatuated with Liz Pleydell, the wife of his friend Charles, and Nancy, the Duchess of Hampshire, who attempts to save their marriage. Johnny is prepared to leave his wife and run away with Mrs. Pleydell to her orange plantation in South Africa. Nancy prevents them by the simple expedient of telling Mrs. Pleydell that she will not divorce Johnny, thereby rendering Mrs. Pleydell’s social status, if she persists in going off to live with him, uncomfortably precarious. In the rather unconvincing denouement, Johnny realizes that Mrs. Pleydell’s real object is not him, but his title, and that he has been suffering from the “temporary disease” of infatuation.

The main characters are even less attractive than those in On Approval, but in this case unintentionally so. There is also, as in Aren’t We All? and The Last of Mrs. Cheyney, a superfluity of minor figures who have little function other than to provide a sort of living decor. Furthermore, the dialogue has the secondhand ring of reach-me-down epigrams, common in the earlier plays, as in this exchange:

Lady Bletchley: What actually is cirrhosis of the liver?

Reggie [Lord Rayne]: A tribute nature pays to men who have completely conquered Teetotalism!

All in all, the play marks a regression in Lonsdale’s technique: less economical and integrated than On Approval and less splendidly theatrical than The Last of Mrs. Cheyney.

Bibliography

Donaldson, Frances. Freddy. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1957. This biography was written by the playwright’s daughter, herself an actress and author. She paints an affectionate portrait of her father, being careful to discuss the weaknesses as well as the virtues of his character. She tells the remarkable story of a young man who was a shopkeeper’s son and who had little formal education but who, because of his talent and native wit, transformed himself into one of the most successful authors of high comedy and chroniclers of England’s upper class during the 1920’s. She also notes that when one of his plays was revived in the 1950’s, critics such as Kenneth Tynan dismissed him as irrelevant.

Kemp, Philip. “Cry Ho! The Eccentricities of …On Approval.” Film Comment 35, no. 5 (September/October, 1999): 10-15. This essay on the 1947 film adaptation of Lonsdale’s On Approval discusses the film and contrasts it with the play.

Nicoll, Allardyce. English Drama. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Nicoll believes that Lonsdale occupied the middle ground between W. Somerset Maugham and Noël Coward and was overshadowed by both. Lonsdale lacked Maugham’s depth and Coward’s cleverness, and although he enjoyed great success before and immediately after World War I, his lack of ideas soon dated him. Bibliography.

Stevens, Lianne. “Gaslamp’s On Approval Gets Hearty Approval.” Review of On Approval by Frederick Lonsdale. Los Angeles Times, August 19, 1986, p. 2. This revival of On Approval at the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre demonstrated Lonsdale’s surge in popularity in the latter part of the twentieth century.