Whiz Bang Editorials
“The Bull is Mightier Than the Bullet”
Is the theater becoming immoral? The majority of critics claim it is. The WHIZ BANG disagrees on this point. We claim the motion picture development has stopped the sporadic growth of suggestive plays on the legitimate stage.
The immoral, or at least suggestive plays made their first appearance in any large number twenty years ago. Witness “Three Weeks,” “Sappho,” “Du Barry,” and others, and still today you will find these plays in oblivion. Together with them, the women who starred in such plays are almost unheard of today. Most prominent among these is Olga Nethersole.
She was an English governess in the ’80’s and startled London with her portrayals of “The Transgressor,” “Magda” and other productions of like character.
Twenty years ago Miss Nethersole shocked two continents with her “Sappho Kiss.” She always maintained that playing the parts of these easy women would “make” her. Witness her interview of more than five years ago, in which she is quoted as having said:
“People have not understood that I chose to play prostitutes because I have felt it my work to aid the world by showing the suffering in it. If I felt that I had not been chosen for this task I should never have given my life to it.
“Do you know the story of Alexander Dumas, the younger? He was an illegitimate son, whose father refused to wed his mother. Thereupon the son gave up his life to the cause of woman and wrote his plays with the suffering of woman uppermost. ‘Camille’ will live forever.
“I have felt that if I could show the suffering and the misery that illicit passion causes I could do something for the world, could point a way toward removing the evil.”