The Whip (play)

The Whip is a melodrama by Henry Hamilton and Cecil Raleigh, first performed in 1909 at the Drury Lane Theatre in London. The play's original production had intricate scenery and spectacular stage effects, including a horse race and a train crash. There were later productions in the United States and Australia, and the play inspired two silent films.

Reception

Tallulah Bankhead offers a reminiscence of attending The Whip at the Manhattan Opera House as a child:{{cite book |title=Tallulah:My Autobiography |last=Bankhead |first=Tallulah |publisher=V. Gollancz |location=London |url=https://archive.org/details/tallulah0000unse/page/42/ |year=1952 |page=42}}

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The Whip was a blood-and-thunder melodrama in four acts and fourteen scenes imported from London's Drury Lane Theatre. It boiled with villainy and violence. Its plot embraced a twelve-horse race on a treadmill (for the Gold Cup at Newmarket), a Hunt Breakfast embellished by fifteen dogs, an auto-smash-up, the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's Waxworks, and a train wreck with a locomotive hissing real steam. It boasted a dissolute earl and a wicked marquis, and a heroine whose hand was sought by both knave and hero. It was a tremendous emotional dose for anyone as stage-struck and impressionable as our heroine.

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The heroine, "Lady Di" Sartoris, created by Jessie Bateman, was referenced in P. G. Wodehouse's Heavy Weather (1933).{{cite web |title=Heavy Weather by P. G. Wodehouse Literary and Cultural References |url=https://www.madameulalie.org/annots/pgwbooks/pgwhvw1.html#chapter05 |website=Madame Eulalie |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220629133736/https://www.madameulalie.org/annots/pgwbooks/pgwhvw1.html#chapter05 |archive-date=29 June 2022}}

Adaptations

A novelization by Richard Parker was published in 1913.{{cite web |last1=Parker |first1=Richard |last2=Raleigh |first2=Cecil |title=The Whip |url=https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/007667911 |publisher=The Macaulay company |access-date=14 March 2023 |date=1913}} The play was adapted into films of the same name in 1917 and again in 1928.

Sources

{{cite book |editor-last1=Poppiti |editor-first1=Kimberly |title=Equestrian Drama: An Anthology of Plays |date=25 July 2022 |doi=10.4324/9780429274152-5 |chapter=The Whip, by Cecil Raleigh and Henry Hamilton (1909) |edition=1st |publisher=Routledge |isbn=9780429274152 |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=s159EAAAQBAJ&pg=PT172 }}
{{cite journal |title=The Whip |journal=The Play Pictorial |date=1909 |volume=14 |pages=276–301 |publisher=Greening |language=en |url=https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=osu.32435053159703&seq=144 |url-access=limited }}

References

External links

{{IMDb title|qid=Q8851773|id=tt0008764|title=The Whip}}
[http://www.vam.ac.uk/users/node/8606 Photographs of the stage settings for The Whip]

Category:British plays

Category:1909 plays