Harley Granville-Barker, actor, director, playwright, manager and critic, was a pasha of the Edwardian London stage. As a director, his Midsummer Night’s Dream of 1914 was a theatrical landmark. His own plays were provocative and controversial. The Secret Life, for example, was an analysis of the torpor of the British ruling classes. Waste, involving a married woman’s lethal abortion, was suppressed by the Lord Chamberlain. In 1916, aged 38, at the peak of his celebrity, the great Harley Granville-Barker volunteered for a walk-on part on the Western Front as a Red Cross auxiliary.
Last week I came across an account of his opening night in the trenches, as related to a military doctor, Dr Harold Dearden, and repeated in that man’s riveting Great War diaries, published in 1928 under the title Medicine and Duty.
I read obsessively about the Great War, and for occasional relief Thomas Hardy
As London’s leading luvvie entered the darkened front-line trench (reports Dr Dearden’s informant) he was so frightened that as he progressed along it his knuckles beat a tattoo against the wooden sides.
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