This Day in Theater History (Henry James Flops With 'Guy Domville')

January 5, 1895 – This is the second consecutive day that this site commemorates a dramatic debacle. But this disaster had a far different artistic fallout than Broadway’s Frankenstein.

On this date, Henry James’ Guy Domville premiered at London’s St. James Theatre. The nervous playwright initially planned to spend the evening in a pub, then bought a ticket for Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, only to decide during intermission to look in on his own play after all. 

At curtain time, stepping forth to acknowledge the usual cries of “Author! Author” coming from the well-heeled people upfront, he was angered by derision from the rear – whereupon, as James noted later in a letter to his brother William, ensued a 15-minute battle “of the most gallant, prolonged and sustained applause with the hoots and jeers and catcalls of the roughs.”

The disappointment was all the more crushing because Guy Domville represented James’ latest in a half-dozen attempts to scale the ramparts of the theater world. 

I was astonished to find in reading the recently published concluding volume of Sheldon Novick’s biography of James that, though a scion of serious money in early America (his grandfather, an immigrant from County Cavan, Ireland, not only corrected surmised that Albany was about to become a great commercial crossroads, but also bought land in Syracuse when development was practically nonexistent there),James found himself so pinched for money that he was forced to live by his pen. (Fortunately, that pen was extremely prolific.)

I thought at first that attending all those mid-afternoon teas and hobnobbing with all those London dukes and Continental artistes had stretched James’ funds to the breaking point. But Novick, while admitting that his subject had “aristocratic tastes,” convincingly points to changing tastes that limited the audience for James’ brand of literary, introspective fiction.

With fictional markets drying up, James looked further afield and thought he spotted an opening for easy money (or, at least, easier than he’d known) on stage. His reasoning must have been tantalizingly simple – if so many lesser minds could make money in this form, why couldn’t he, the acclaimed author of The Portrait of a Lady?

So James studied all the models for the conventional well-made plays of the time and paid careful heed to his director-producer collaborators. While the first fruits of this were not particularly successful, he had every reason to hope for Guy Domville. And, indeed, the perceptive George Bernard Shaw, in his pre-playwrighting incarnation as a normally waspish critic, had fine things to say about this play, calling it a “story of fine sentiment and delicate manners, with an entirely worthy and touching ending.” 

But the show’s actor-manager, George Alexander, ended up replacing it after a modest run with a more promising moneymaker, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.
While not suffering the “vastation” that had afflicted his philosopher father in midlife, James was forced to do a painful reassessment of his work. Clearly, playwrighting took up an unconscionable amount of his energies – and now, it was plain, it wouldn’t be repaid in royalties. It was back to fiction, come what may.

James’ return to the novel was marked by a more psychological, experimental, and bolder approach than he’d employed previously. The Awkward Age (1899) consists almost entirely of dialogue – an experiment repeated, nearly a century later, in Philip Roth’s novel Deceptions (1990).

The three long novels that are generally believed to cap James’ “late” or “major” phase – The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1905) – are not to everyone’s taste. 

I must confess that though I thoroughly enjoyed the adaptations of The Wings of the Dove – the 1997 film starring Helena Bonham Carter, Linus Roache, and Alison Elliott, and a 1959 version for TV’s Playhouse 90 starring Dana Wynter, James Donald and Inga Swenson in comparable roles--I was forced to lay the book aside, at least temporarily repulsed by the gilded, rococo ornamentation that James laid onto each sentence. 

But many of James’ other works in the last 15 years of his active career are powerful, including What Maisie Knew, The Turn of the Screw, and The Beast in the Jungle.

James is not the only novelist-cum-playwright who achieved theatrical success posthumously. Canadian man of letters Robertson Davies observed that Charles Dickens, whose highly theatrical public readings in the voices of individual characters, such as Oliver Twist cutthroat Bill Sykes, contributed to his death, never really wrote a successful play himself. 

Yet The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby became the hot (and, at $100 a pop, most hideously expensive) Broadway ticket of 1981. Several weeks ago, The New York Times took note of the fact that A Christmas Carol had become a theatrical warhorse from coast to coast during the Christmas season.

Similarly, James has provided fodder for the theater world after his death – most notably in The Heiress, an adaptation of his short novel Washington Square. And filmmakers have turned to him repeatedly with The Innocents (Truman Capote’s adaptation of Turn of the Screw), The Wings of the Dove, and The Bostonians. Even the opera world has embraced James, as he has been taken on by composers Benjamin Britten (Turn of the Screw) and Dominic Argento (The Aspern Papers).