Berkeley Square

[Leslie Howard as Peter Standish in
Berkeley Square, Lyric Theatre, London]

After years of disappointments on Broadway, Leslie Howard finally had a string of successes. It had been ten years since Howard made the decision to "try" acting and he was finally seeing the rewards. Howard had received rave reviews for The Green Hat and Her Cardboard Lover and was now an actor in demand. He got his first chance to star in a purely dramatic role in Escape, touted (due to a misunderstanding) as the last play John Galsworthy would ever write.

Sometime in the late fall or early winter of 1927 while Howard was appearing at New York's Booth Theatre in Escape—a play for which Howard would receive his best reviews ever and be firmly accepted as a dramatic actor—producer Jed Harris stuck his head into Howard's dressing room and said, "You were not bad, not bad at all. Come and see me sometime. Good night." Leslie called out into the hallway after him, "What about Berkeley Square?" (For all you Americans who don't know, it is pronounced "Bark-ley.")

You see, back in 1926 Leslie had been extolled the virtues of Berkeley Square by his friend and theatre critic Alexander Woollcott who had somehow gotten his hands on the script straight from London where it had already been staged. Woollcott convinced Howard that the part of Peter Standish was made for him and that only Howard could do it justice. Leslie was very interested in time travel—one of his acquaintances and an original stockholder in Leslie's film company was H. G. Wells, after all. Howard was also very interested in the possibility that mind could survive death. He knew Harris now owned the rights to the play.

Well, Howard finally heard from Harris some weeks later and Harris invited Leslie to his office to discuss the play. Unfortunately, by the time vague Leslie showed up, Harris had already left New York for his winter vacation in Florida. But, Howard did manage to get a copy of the script out of Harris' office. And he loved the play.

Berkeley Square was written chiefly by John Balderston, an American living in London, from an unfinished story, "The Sense of the Past," abandoned at the turn of the century by Henry James. James attempted to finish the story later, after WWI, but didn't seem to have the mental capacity required to finish the complex storyline. The novel was published posthumously but it wasn't treated favorably by critics.

The principal character, Peter Standish, was an American who was traveling to London just after the Revolutionary War to marry Kate Pettigrew. The very forward-thinking Peter Standish of the eighteenth century has a relative, another Peter Standish, living in the twentieth century in the very same house in Berkeley Square, London. The modern Peter Standish is obsessed with the past and time travel and has all the papers and letters of the original Standish. He longs to experience the life of the previous Standish. The previous Standish longs to experience the scientific wonders he imagines in the future. By the wills, or mental longings, of the two men they somehow manage to trade places with each other. The adventure of the modern Standish transported to 1784 is the substance of the play.

Even though H. G. Wells had written The Time Machine (1895) well before Berkeley Square made its appearance on the London stage in 1926, this was a very new concept to theatergoers of the mid-1920s. Unlike The Time Machine, which deals with the negative attitudes an inventor encounters when he explains time travel to his friends in the present, Berkeley Square deals with the problems the time traveller has when he is transported to the past and the risks he takes of being considered a lunatic because of his knowledge of the future.

In a commentary by the playwright and novelist Charles Morgan which appeared in The New York Times in March, 1929, Morgan explains the problem:

"In a beautiful scene and amid beautiful costumes, we see Peter struggling with the manners of the past—causing a sensation at White's because he turns his back in horror when the Prince of Wales, "the First Gentleman in Europe," blows his nose with his fingers, and [Standish] causing an even greater sensation by insisting on washing himself all over every day and despising the dandies of the period because they will not do likewise. He meets the great Duchess of Devonshire at a ball, and dazzles and confuses her by sprinkling his conversation with the epigrams of Oscar Wilde. He upsets Sir Joshua Reynolds by talking of a portrait of Mrs. Siddons As The Tragic Muse at a moment when the portrait is but begun and its title is still a secret. He gets into an infinity of trouble because he knows too much of the future and is forever letting his knowledge of it appear, with the result that he is solemnly believed to be a magician practicing the black arts."

When the modern Peter Standish has had his fill of the smells, the dirtiness, the inconvenience and the small-mindedness of those in the past and is ready to return to 1928, there is only one problem. He has fallen in love with a girl who can't travel through time with him and is destined to remain in 1784. And it is not the girl the original Standish traveled to London to marry. It is her sister, Helen. Standish has no machine to transport her. The play needed work but Howard wanted to be the one to bring it to the American stage.

Howard contacted Harris again but Harris was only offering the part if Howard would agree to a five-play deal. Leslie Howard could barely be pinned down for lunch tomorrow let alone a five-play deal that could possibly take over the next three years of his life. He declined. But he couldn't stop thinking about Berkeley Square. He knew the author was in England so he cabled John Balderston in an end-run around Harris. Unfortunately, even though Balderston wanted Leslie for the part, Harris now owned the rights to the play. Leslie tried to forget about it. Again he couldn't. He told his wife that the thing was "burning holes in my brain." Howard thought of his good friend, Gilbert Miller, who Leslie was now in partnership with. He sent a cable to Miller, who was also in London. Howard soon received the following response: "Dear Partner, have bought Berkeley Square. Good luck, but don't blame me. Gilbert."

After 173 performances as Matt Denant in Escape, the play finally ended its New York run and went on the road to Boston, Hartford, New Haven, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Toronto and Montreal. By spring Leslie was itching to get back to England. He had already arranged to reprise his role in Her Cardboard Lover in London, this time with Tallulah Bankhead as his female lead. After selling their Long Island home, along with their possessions, the Howard's took off for London, on separate ships—you'll have to read my Leslie Howard Chronology • 1928 to discover why.

After Her Cardboard Lover was well underway and Leslie's life had calmed down, he began work on Berkeley Square, stopping with his wife at Balderston's home in Trevor Square every night after his performance in Her Cardboard Lover. There, the two wives kept their husband's awake by the constant flow of beer and cheese—a problem for Leslie's fragile intestines—and toiling at rewriting, reorganizing, rearranging, adding to and subtracting from the existing Berkeley Square, making it into the sensation it became.

[Leslie Howard as Peter Standish of 1928 in
Berkeley Square, Lyric Theatre, London]

[Leslie Howard as Peter Standish of 1928 in
Berkeley Square, Lyric Theatre, London]

[Leslie Howard as Peter Standish and Valerie Taylor as Kate
Pettigrew in Berkeley Square, Lyceum Theatre, New York]
Museum of the City of New York

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