‘A law against catcalls?’ asked my husband sceptically. ‘What next, criminalising booing and hissing?’
He often gets the wrong end of the stick, but in this case I hardly blame him, for the press retailed widely Liz Truss’s resolve to make a law against catcalls and wolf-whistles. But to an older generation like my husband’s, catcalling is something to do with the theatre.
In Practical Cats, T.S. Eliot assures us that Gus the Theatre Cat acted with Irving and Tree – Sir Henry Irving (1838-1905), who Shaw said revealed on stage ‘glimpses of a latent bestial dangerousness’, and Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1852-1917), noted for histrionic versatility. But then Eliot mentions Gus’s ‘success on the Halls, / Where the Gallery once gave him seven cat-calls’. The play on words, which puzzled me as a child, is on curtain-calls.
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