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The Wide-Ranging Scope of ‘A Damsel in Distress’: Guest Post by Tony Ring

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On 11th May, 2019, my wife and I were able to meet our daughter and members of her family near Bury, in Lancashire, for the first of about ten performances of the play A Damsel in Distress, written by Ian Hay and P G Wodehouse, and first performed in 1934.  The performance we attended was presented by the small Whitefield Garrick Society, a local theatre group.  What they had not realised was that their first night was just one day after the centenary of the publication of the first instalment of the Saturday Evening Post serialisation of the novel, on the 10th May, 1919.  Their audiences didn’t remain in ignorance, as the anniversary was highlighted in their programme.

This coincidence demonstrates two things about Wodehouse – the longevity of his writing, and the hint which it offers of the different forms of his work.  The purpose of this article is to expand on the latter point, and propose the suggestion that A Damsel in Distress represents its most comprehensive illustration.  (At various points in this article, I will abbreviate the title to ‘the Damsel’, and P G Wodehouse’s name to ‘Plum’ or ‘PGW’.)

Wodehouse’s relationship with the Saturday Evening Post had started in 1915, when it published the serial of Something New (the American name for Something Fresh) in seven parts.  The Damsel was PGW’s fourth serialised novel to appear in its pages, this time in eight parts, and by the end of 1919 it had also published ten of his short stories.  Damsel was published in book form in the United States by George H Doran on 4 October, 1919.

Surprisingly, book publication in the UK was not its next appearance, even though Herbert Jenkins Ltd released it on 15 October, for a silent movie adaptation had already been produced by Pathé Exchange and released in the USA as A Damsel in Distress on 12 October!  And there was to be an even more unexpected surprise four or five years later.

In 1922 or 1923, Pathé had launched Pathé Baby, a form of early home movie cut down to a 9.5mm frame width, and significantly edited from the original film.  The diameter of each reel was only 50 millimetres, resulting in about three minutes running time per reel.  Some clever techniques were utilised to maximise the use of the limited space.  All silent movies incorporate ‘Intertitles’ on which descriptive text appears, and on normal silent movies this frame would be duplicated many times to give the viewer time to read the text.  With the Baby, space was too precious, and each frame representing an intertitle was notched so that it would catch in the projector, and the operator would have to release it when the viewers had finished reading it.

A Damsel in Distress silent movie was released in the Baby format, probably in 1924, bearing the catalogue number 739, and is the only Wodehouse-related film that I am aware of to receive this treatment.  Even though the credit as ‘Scénariste’ was given to Wodehouse, you wouldn’t guess from the revised title it was given that it had anything to do with him.  The female star was June Caprice, and a reasonable guess about the title, Mam’zelle Milliard, is that it was a reference to her marriage in 1923 to Harry F Millarde.  He was a film director who was to direct June Caprice in a total of eight silent films, but not in this one.

By the time this silent movie was released, there had been another book version.  The first translation appeared in 1921 – in Swedish.  It was entitled EnFlickaitrångmål, created by Ulla Rudebeck and published by Hökerberg.  Three more translations, into Finnish, Dutch and Russian were published before the next main event, a dramatised version by Wodehouse and Ian Hay playing for 234 performances at the New Theatre in London in 1928.

Illustration of the Various Uses to which the Damsel has been put

In terms of the number of performances, A Damsel in Distress was PGW’s most successful play in the UK, and its run coincided in part with two other new plays on the West End stage for which he was co-author – Her Cardboard Lover and The Play’s the Thing.  The review in Theatre World in September 1928 included the comment that the Damsel was ‘a farcical comedy that will be a boon to all amateur theatrical societies for years to come.  It is the sort of play that no child need be afraid to take its parents to.’ 

To offer just one illustrative snatch of dialogue, the heroine Maud Marsh says the following to George Bevan, an American theatrical director who is in love with her, so far unreciprocated:

“Mr Bevan, I’m going to pay you the rarest compliment a woman can pay a man.  I’m going to tell you the truth.  Won’t you sit down.”

The play was presented with varying casts at more than forty theatres during the next four years, and has appeared from time to time right up, as we have seen, to the production in 2019.

And so we move into the 1930s, to see what else happened to the Damsel.  Before we reach 1937, the date of a Hollywood musical based on the book, it is necessary to return to the list of translations, for the Czech, Polish and Portuguese translations were published in this period.  So was an Italian translation, in 1931.  And another – different translator and different publisher – in 1932.  And yet another – in 1935.  The details were as follows:

1931  Una signorina in imbarazzo, A Mozzati, Bietti

1932  Una donzella in imbarazzo, Francesco Palumbo, Libreria Editrice Monanni

1935  Un capriccio e poi, Alfredo Bianchini, SACSE Milano

In 1937, Wodehouse had been working in Hollywood for the second time in his career, and was about to return home when he was invited to join the production team (RKO-Radio Pictures) for a musical version of the Damsel starring Fred Astaire and featuring music by the Gershwins.  The script proved to be a substantially redrafted version of book and play, with additional ideas added to respond to the qualities of the chosen actors, but Wodehouse played a significant role in its development. 

Why was the book selected for cinema treatment at this time?  According to a number of commentators including the late Benny Green, since George Gershwin had met Wodehouse in 1917, he had come to believe that the story of the novel reflected his own career.  Like the book’s hero George Bevan, he too was from Brooklyn, and had become a successful American composer who went to Britain to supervise the London production of a Broadway hit.  Accordingly, George Gershwin is thought to have used his considerable influence to have it made on screen as a musical, with Ira Gershwin even writing a lyric, Stiff Upper Lip, for the film, as a tribute to the language used by some of Plum’s young male characters.

His work on the Damsel was PGW’s last personal involvement with Hollywood, and completed the range of productions for which the story was the basis.  But it was not wholly the end of the story.  In Italy, for example, there was a fourth translation published in 1939, entitled ‘Una magnificaavventura’, translated by Gian Dauli and published by TEL Milan, and there were other translations in Norway in 1938 and Spain in 1944.

After the war, things were much quieter.  A new Finnish translation in 1951 and a German translation in 1964 was a lone post-war translation until a new Swedish version, now entitled Flickaifara, translated by Birgitta Hammar, was published by Bonniers in 1979.  In 1994, yet another Italian, Rosetta Palazzi appeared on the scene, producing ‘Una demigella in pericolo’ for Mursia.  Apart from a Russian translation in 2002 and one in Hungarian in 2010, it does, now, seem that that particular well has run dry.  (The original novel in English has, of course, been included in the 99-volume Collectors’ Wodehouse series published by Everyman between 2000 and 2015, and appeared in 2003.)

But using the novel as a basis for theatrical productions did not cease.  Apart from further presentations of the 1928 Hay-Wodehouse play, there have been a number of new musical adaptations, using the outline of the novel’s story and a selection of George-and-Ira Gershwin songs, not all used in the 1937 film.  The first of significance was probably A Foggy Day, presented at the Shaw Festival, at Niagara-on-the-Lake in Canada in 1998, and this proved so successful that itwas reprised at the equivalent festival the following year.

In 2015 the Chichester Festival in England featured the première of another new musical version, although this time the title A Damsel in Distress was retained.  About half the lyrics which were included had been in the 1937 film, but all the lyrics in the show were composed by the Gershwin brothers.In the original story, the principal setting for the story had been called Belpher, a town on the south coast which had suffered badly from a scandal of the contaminated local oysters.  Local residents attending the 2015 production would have recognised that had been a thinly veiled reference to Emsworth, just along the coast from Chichester, where Wodehouse had lived for many years, and which had given its name to his famous fictional Earl.  In the film of the Damsel and in this production, however, the setting was renamed Totleigh – another fictional place with Wodehousean connotations, best known as the Gloucestershire home of Sir Watkyn Bassett.

And that completes the review of a century of A Damsel in Distress, probably the most widely adapted Wodehouse story in existence.  How apt that its centenary was celebrated by yet another theatrical performance.

Note

This article had first appeared in the December 2021 issue of Jeeves, the annual journal of The Wodehouse Society in Sweden (WSS).

About the Author

It would be well nigh impossible to find a P. G. Wodehouse enthusiast who has not heard of Tony Ring. His name pops up often and in a surprising variety of places: from journal articles and forewords of new editions, to theatre programmes. Tony’s books on Wodehouse’s life and work adorn the book shelves of many of us, and his sparkling presence has enlivened Wodehouse society events around the world. It is an honour and a privilege to host his article on this website.  

Few other posts which mention A Damsel in Distress

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