([NUTCOMBE GOULD, Mary Dorothy, Compiler]. EDWARDIAN ALBUM CONTAINING ORIGINAL THEATRE PROGRAMMES, including an original 1907 programme for Elizabeth Robins's play "Votes for Women!"... [Various places, including London, Manchester, Birmingham and Exeter] 1903-1909. £750
ALBUM-CUM-SCRAPBOOK. Folio; with 25 programmes and various press clippings pasted into album, together with a manuscript copy of the poem 'The Romance of Britomart' written directly onto album leaves; bound in the original half black roan, spine ruled in gilt, some rubbing and surface wear, but an appealing collection nonetheless.
Scrapbook of original theatre programmes for performances from 1903 to 1908 attended by Dorothy Nutcombe Gould, together with various siblings and friends, particularly appealing for containing programmes of early Peter Pan performance's, and Mary Robins' important suffrage play, Votes for Women, for the original run in 1907.
'Votes for Women' opened on April 9 1907 at the Royal Court for a run of eight performances, with Dorothy and her sister Winifred attending on April 26th (so inscribed on the front of the programme). Directed by Harley Granville Barker, who changed the title from its anodyne original 'The Friend of Women', and added an exclamation mark. 'Not that its author, Elizabeth Robins (1862-1952), needed any encouragement. She was an American actress who emigrated after her actor husband committed suicide by jumping into Boston's Charles River wearing full theatrical armour, and was nothing if not hard boiled...' The critics loved the middle act, which dramatised a suffrage rally in Trafalgar Square with a cast of 40 actors, a painted backdrop of the square, a plaster cast base of Nelson's Column and two vast "Votes for Women!" banners. For the Sketch it was "the finest stage crowd scene that has been seen for years"; to the Observer, it was "a marvel of verisimilitude akin to that which might be achieved by a joint use of megaphone and cinematograph". Beerbohm, writing in the Saturday Review, felt that Dorothy Minto, playing one of the speakers, "caught exactly the spirit of her part - the blithe spirit of the budding platformist". The Illustrated London News praised Agnes Thomas, playing a speaker identified in the script only as "A Working Woman", for having "just the rasping Cockney tones, the termagant attitude, that are required" but carped: "There never were such speeches in Trafalgar Square."'(https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2003/mar/1 9/theatre.artsfeatures I ).
Votes for Women! led to a flurry of suffrage drama. Elizabeth Robins first attended "open-air meetings of the suffrage union" when the Women's Social and Political Union moved its headquarters from Manchester to London in 1906. It was then that she "abandoned" the current play she was writing and worked to complete the very first suffrage drama. "The more Robins became immersed in the work, the more she became converted to the cause".
Also pasted into the album are programmes for performances of 'Peter Pan' at Prince's Theatre, Manchester on the 22nd January and the Prince of Wales' Theatre, Birmingham on the 16th May, both in 1907 – evidently Dorothy was enthralled!; a 'Farewell visit of Henry Irving and his Company' to the Theatre Royal Exeter on February 13, 14 & 15 1905, where amongst other performances he reprised his role of Shylock in the 'Merchant of Venice'; and concluding with a performance of Gilbert & Sullivan's 'The Mikado' on the 8th June 1908 at the Savoy Theatre.