Barrie, Sir J.M.

This unpublished sketch belongs to an event which Denis Mackail has described as being, "even in that legendary, luxurious season...a startling and outstanding affair". What Barrie organised and called a "Cinema Supper" was a banquet for about 150 invited guests from the stage and society world hosted at the Savoy Theatre on Friday 3 July 1914. A series of sketches were presented to the guests, performed by well-known theatrical stars, including Irene Vanbrugh, Gerald du Maurier and Granville Barker. The final sketch by Barrie, represented in the present typescript, was performed by Marie Tempest, Graham Browne and O.P. Heggie. After Marie Tempest gets shot by mistake, G.B. Shaw is represented as rising in the stalls and protesting that if anyone is to be shot it should be Barrie since, with all the flashing of lights that has been going on, they have all been conned by this supper ("...Dismay of Mr. Shaw on discovering that he can't hear himself speak in the Movies..."), the scene finishing with Shaw summoning Howard de Walden and G.K. Chesterton to storm the stage ("Shaw turning to wave to them --Wells always crying 'Why should Shaw be leader'".)

In fact, the 'joke' behind all this was that the guests were being filmed by cameramen throughout the banquet to produce a film that might eventually be edited for use as introduction to a scene in a stage review. This idea was pursued the very next day, when Shaw, Chesterton and others were persuaded to be filmed in Hertfordshire dressed in cowboy suits and playing their parts. Unfortunately, however, the joke went flat. Many people had already been suspicious about the event, many were not amused, the Prime Minister Herbert Asquith formally protested that he had attended in the false belief that it was a private party, and even the filming the next day caused concern as Shaw found out that Barrie intended to make the film public. To cap it all, the dinner took place five days after the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. In brief, this was one of Barrie's most fantastic, but least successful, enterprises. 

The opening brief travesty, "still another version" of The Adored One, is a joke at Barrie's own expense, since he had been working for two years or more on this play, unsuccessfully produced at the Duke of York's Theatre on 4 September 1913. Its first act would eventually be adapted as Seven Women (1917).