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:[1]

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.

The heroine, "Lady Di" Sartoris, created by Jessie Bateman, was referenced in P. G. Wodehouse's Heavy Weather (1933).[2]

Adaptations

A novelization by Richard Parker was published in 1913.[3] The play was adapted into films of the same name in 1917 and again in 1928.

Sources
  • Poppiti, Kimberly, ed. (25 July 2022). "The Whip, by Cecil Raleigh and Henry Hamilton (1909)". Equestrian Drama: An Anthology of Plays (1st ed.). Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780429274152-5. ISBN 9780429274152.
  • "The Whip". The Play Pictorial. Greening. 14: 276–301. 1909.

References
  1. Bankhead, Tallulah (1952). Tallulah:My Autobiography. London: V. Gollancz. p. 42.
  2. "Heavy Weather by P. G. Wodehouse Literary and Cultural References". Madame Eulalie. Archived from the original on 29 June 2022.
  3. Parker, Richard; Raleigh, Cecil (1913). "The Whip". The Macaulay company. Retrieved 14 March 2023.


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