The Happy Land - Background

Background

The year before the play opened, Gilbert told The Era, "As I consider that I am quite as well qualified to judge of what is fit for the ears of a theatrical audience as can be, I have systematically declined to take the slightest notice of his instructions". The Happy Land is a blank verse musical burlesque of Gilbert's earlier play, The Wicked World. The plot roughly follows that of The Wicked World, with the disastrous powers of love replaced with the disaster of "popular government".

As in The Wicked World and several other Gilbert works, the play concerns chaos that is wreaked in Fairyland when an element of life in the mortal world is imported. In The Wicked World, this element is "mortal love", while in The Happy Land, it is "popular government", which is delivered to Fairyland by Gladstone, Lowe, and Ayrton. Stedman calls this a "Gilbertian invasion plot". The three men depicted, and clearly identified by their make-up and by costumes designed after contemporary cartoons in Vanity Fair, were, respectively, Britain's Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer and First Commissioner of Works. The three characters were described in the cast list as Mr. G., Mr. L., and Mr. A. Gladstone's government is portrayed as mean and uncaring of Britain's national interests, degrading British prestige abroad. The three men are seen to lack substance and taste. The daring political attack was almost unprecedented on the English stage. The opening night response was described by Edward Righton, who played "Mr. A.":

" appeared, rising through the clouds, there burst upon us another gale of boisterous merriment, which increased and increased in volume as we rose higher and higher, until the three figures from Vanity Fair stood on the stage; then the applause resembled the roaring of cannon or claps of thunder."

Edward, Prince of Wales, attended the play on opening night at the Royal Court Theatre on 3 March 1873. Appalled at this attack on the government of which his mother the Queen was the (at least titular) head, he notified Lord Sydney, the Lord Chamberlain and Britain's official censor at the time, about the nature of the play. The Lord Chamberlain revoked the play's performance license on 6 March 1873, while a public inquiry was made. This found that "the piece licensed and the piece acted were virtually different productions, unwarrantable alterations and enlargements having been introduced at the rehearsals, which the Lord Chamberlain would never have authorised."

Comparing the license copy, which he had approved, with the prompt copy, which was performed, the Lord Chamberlain claimed in a "Memorandum" that "in the prompter's copy there were eighteen quarto pages of additions, interpolations, and deviations from the original licensed text; and that in the original there was no indication whatsoever to point the allusions to individuals.... The manager expressed regret at what had occurred, and begged that the piece might be allowed to be performed as originally licensed, promising to adhere verbatim to the text, and to avoid anything which should convert the general allusions into personalities" including the make up of the actors. The theatre was only dark for two or three nights before the play was allowed to reopen. However, Miss Litton, the manageress, claimed that the eighteen pages were merely the number that contained a modification of some sort, and that she believed it was acceptable as it was being done elsewhere. She also published the script as it was originally performed - with the cut sections written in all capital letters, and posted a notice that read:

Notice. - The Happy Land. - Miss Litton begs to inform the public that the Lord Chamberlain has forbidden Messrs. Fisher, Hill, and Righton to make up their faces in imitation of Messrs. Gladstone, Lowe, and Ayrton. - Royal Court Theatre, March 6.

The scandal, which was great enough to be included in the Annual Register's "Chronicle of Remarkable Occurrences", generated widespread publicity for the play, and, even without the makeup, everyone knew who was really being portrayed. In fact, wrote The Times, "the Lord Chamberlain has proved a mighty instructor ... everybody perfectly knows whom are intended to represent, and every line they utter is the signal for an approving roar." The critics mostly praised the piece, although papers disagreed on whether or not the stage should be more subject to censorship than the press. For instance, The Manchester Guardian wrote that the satire made "Many a brilliant sally at the supposed short-comings of the present government." Meanwhile, Gilbert was having some trouble keeping up the pseudonym. Shirley Brooks may have thought F. Tomline was Henry Labouchère, but reviewers and others were beginning to link him with Gilbert. Worse, Gilbert's friend and collaborator Frederic Clay began vigorously defending him against the absolutely true allegations, forcing Gilbert to quietly take him into his confidence. The Athenaeum commented that the play was "written with such talent, and catching very well the very spirit of Mr. Gilbert's manner and method that we cannot but suspect that the interest of Mr. Gilbert in it has not stopped with mere superintendence of stage management, as announced." The play became one of the big hits of the season, running for 142 performances until the theatre closed for summer renovations on 9 August 1873. It then enjoyed a lengthy provincial tour and being immediately revived when the theatre reopened on 14 October 1873.

However, for the Lord Chamberlain, the whole affair was a fiasco. His action "raised the question of censorship of the stage in an acute form" and questions about why only the stage should be subject to censorship began to be asked in quarters beyond the theatre: one parliamentarian, Sir Lawrence Palk, MP for East Devon threatened to bring it up in the House of Commons, and some suggested that the Lord Chamberlain was demonstrating political bias in his censorship of the play. One historian wrote that the play:

revealed in a clear and popular form the conservative Tory anguish as the balance of political power tilted away from the aristocracy, and land owners, and the upper middle class, and toward the lower middle class and the workers. Gilbert, in his topsy-turvy manner, stigmatized the ethics and morality of popular government, as the Liberal program was called, and predicted the dire consequences for England of this innovation. Governmental wisdom and virtue could rise no higher than their source, and under popular government the source was the new electorate, motivated by profit, greed, and the crude desires of the mob. At home the quality of British life would sink to the level of the cheap and nasty, and abroad, good-bye to national honor. England under the Liberals was on the way to becoming a second rate power, at the mercy of its mightier neighbors across the channel. According to Gilbert, this was the gloomy outlook for Great Britain under popular government, and it reflected, as the critical reception of The Happy Land showed, a large body of contemporary opinion.

Gilbert returned to the West End later that year with a new play, The Realm of Joy, set in the lobby of a theatre performing The Happy Land, which rehashed aspects of the scandal, even going so far as to attack the Lord Chamberlain himself, referring to him as "The Lord High Disinfectant". The whole affair had proved such a political liability for the Lord Chamberlain, however, that he had no choice but to order The Realm of Joy to be licensed, with only the "usual changes". Nevertheless, Gilbert never again directed his satire against specific persons: rather, he aimed his "hose of common sense" at types, such as Sir Joseph in H.M.S. Pinafore, the Major-General in The Pirates of Penzance and Ko-Ko in The Mikado, who are incompetent persons that have risen to a high government position. In later years, Gilbert appears to have become ashamed of the subversive tone of The Happy Land: in 1909, testifying to a joint committee on stage censorship, he said that his "maturer judgement" on the play was that the Lord Chamberlain's "interference was absolutely justified". It was not until 1968, that the power of the Lord Chamberlain to censor plays was revoked.