Cast:
John Boud, Alan Drake, Roger Fleming, Reginald Hamlyn, Paul Imbusch, Harry Ives, Ellen Knight, Bernard Mclaughlin, Gordon Millais, Gay Scott

Production Team:
Dorothy Boyd-Taylor, Martin Carr, Francis Foad, John Goldrick, Judy Hall, Stuart Hartley, Theresa Heffernan, Eric Kirby, Billee Laurence, Beryl Owen, Jose Roberts, Michael Vanner, Clifford Webb

PROGRAMME NOTE

Charles Vildrac was born in 1882. He started writing for the French theatre during the years following the Great War, when there was a reaction against the false theatricalism of Scribe and Sardou and the materialistic naturalism of Zola and other dramatists of the early years of the century. It was a time when there was a strong idealist and poetic movement in the French drama: in particular a group, of whom Jean-Jacques Bernard was the most notable, explored the dramatic possibilities of silence and of the undertones of dialogue, and produced what is often known as the Drama of the Unspoken. Vildrac's plays, though less subtle and less concerned with complex and repressed emotion than Bernard's, have some affinity with the Drama of the Unspoken.

Le Paquebot Tenacity, which we are seeing to-night, was written in 1920, and produced in the same year by Jacques Copeau at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier. It was later seen in New York in a translation by Sidney Howard. Other works by this author include Madame Béliard (1925), Le Pélerin (The Pilgrim, 1926), La Brouille (The Estrangement, 1930), and L'air du temps (The Atmosphere of the Times, 1938).