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Lot 169

STRACHEY (LYTTON)

22 November 2011, 10:30 GMT
London, New Bond Street

Sold for £312.50 inc. premium

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STRACHEY (LYTTON)

Autograph letter signed, to the sinologist John Otway Percy Bland, thanking him for "frank criticism" of his play [A Son of Heaven], and remarking: "No doubt you are right as to the incorrectness of the detail... To have reproduced the whole apparatus of Chinese life on the stage would have been not only beyond my capacity, but a sheer impossibility; and my idea was to give a transposition of values, which would produce something of the real effect upon a popular audience in England. However, perhaps really such an attempt was inherently impracticable. I must try something else!", 2 pages, headed paper, 8vo, 51 Gordon Square, 14 April 1921

Footnotes

LYTTON STRACHEY'S TRAGIC CHINESE MELODRAMA: A Son of Heaven, written in 1912, was described by Strachey as a 'tragic melodrama' set in Peking during the Boxer Rising of 1900. The play was based in part on the book China under the Empress Dowager (1910), which Bland, the recipient of this letter, had written in collaboration with the fraudster Edmund Backhouse.

In 1921 Strachey wrote to Bland asking whether, in his opinion, he ought to allow A Son of Heaven to be produced, and Bland advised against it on the grounds that he 'followed the historical course of events so precisely, and reproduced the chief actors in the Boxer Crisis in such a manner, as to necessitate, I think, accuracy in depicting them; and this is lacking...The play is to me unconvincing, because it lacks the correct oriental atmosphere, and the characters talk like Europeans' (Bland's letter quoted by Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: A Biography, revised edition 1971, p.897). In our letter Strachey replies to Bland's comments. The play was to receive two moderately successful charity performances in 1925; a notable feature of which, however, was the incidental music contributed by William Walton, influenced – or so Constant Lambert thought – by George Gershwin, who had taken London by storm that year.

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