Basil Rathbone: Peter Ibbetson

A play in four acts by John N. Raphael (based on the novel by George du Maurier). Opened at the Savoy Theatre, London, February 4, 1920, and ran through April 3. The play then transferred to the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, where it ran from April 26 to May 29, 1920 (106 performances total). Produced by Constance Collier by arrangement with J.B. Fagan. Stage manager, J. Wallett Waller; Assistant Stage Manager, Frank M. Quinn; Acting Manager, William J. Rice; General Director, William Burchill.

Cast of Characters

Peter Ibbetson	Basil Rathbone
Colonel Ibbetson	Gilbert Hare
Major Duquesnois	William Burchill
Mr. Lintot	Leonard Calvert
Raphael Merrydew	Stafford Dickens / Grosvenor North
Guy Mannering	Basil Roscoe
Crockett	Jay Dee
Bishop	Harry Collier
Charlie Plunket	Fernley Bisshopp
Landlord of the Tete Noir Inn	Clifford Heatherley
Chaplain	Cyril Sworder
Doctor	Leslie Norton
The Prison Governor	Fred Neigh
Mary, Duchess of Towers	Constance Collier
Mrs. Deane	Jessie Bateman
Mrs. Glyn	Frances Weatherall
Madge Plunket	Madge Murray
Diana Vivash	Pauline Grey
Victorine	Gladys Dale
A Sister of Charity	Eva Quilford-Quin
Mdme. Seraskier	Olive Noble
M. Pasquier de la Mariere	Eric Lugg
Mdme. Pasquier de la Mariere	Ethel Carrington
Gogo	Dennis Rivers
Mimsey Seraskier	Madeline Robinson

In this beautiful love story, Peter Ibbetson dreams of his childhood and of his happy days with a little girl named Mimsey. He had been raised in Paris until his parents died, and his English uncle brought him back to England. Growing up with his cruel uncle as guardian was hard. Peter becomes a lonely, hard-working architect. He meets and falls in love at first sight with Mary, the Duchess of Towers. Peter discovers that the Duchess is in fact his childhood friend Mimsey, now grown up. After that meeting, they are parted forever in real life, but they dream the same dream, and thus share a life together in their dream world.

One evening Peter quarrels with his uncle regarding lies his uncle told about Peter's mother. In justified rage, Peter kills him. On the night that he is sentenced to be hanged, Mary comes into his dream again and tells him that the sentence will be commuted, and that after she is separated from her wretched husband she will make his life happy. Then comes an ideal dream-life of twenty-five years, that must be read to be understood and appreciated, during which Mary’s outward life is spent in philanthropy and Peter’s is spent in jail. When she dies, and their mutual dream-life ends, Peter becomes wildly insane. She visits him once after her death, and gives him strength to recover and write this singular autobiography.
He dies in a criminal lunatic asylum, we are told, and whether he was mad, or the story is true, is left to the imagination.

Based on George du Maurier's 1891 novel, John Raphael's play Peter Ibbetson was written in 1899. Raphael was unable to find someone to produce the play until he met Constance Collier. After a single performance in London in 1915, Collier brought the play to the USA and produced it on Broadway in 1917. John Barrymore played the title role of Peter Ibbetson.

After a season in New York and a full year on the road, Constance Collier returned to England, determined to produce Peter Ibbetson on the London stage. Seeking a leading man who could equal John Barrymore's interpretation, Collier interviewed Henry Daniell, George Relph, and Basil Rathbone. In his autobiography, Rathbone wrote that after interviewing with Constance Collier, he felt confident that he would get the part. The following day he was enjoying a drink in a London pub when Henry Daniell walked in. Basil was dismayed to discover that Henry was up for the same part! And then George Relph joined them and they learned that he, too, had auditioned for the role of Peter Ibbetson! Each of them felt that the interview with Miss Collier had gone well, and that he had been awarded the role. George Relph then pointed out that the actor who had quoted the lowest salary to Miss Collier no doubt got the job. Relph had quoted twenty-five pounds per week, Daniell twenty pounds, and Rathbone ten pounds. And Basil had indeed gotten the part!

Unfamiliar to the critical audiences of London, 27-year-old Basil Rathbone was an overnight hit. "That first night," he exclaimed, "will never leave me. All the fine men of the theatre, the actors whom I'd worshipped from a distance, were there. And they walked up on the stage to congratulate me! Forbes Robertson, whose 'Hamlet' I'd seen four times. Sir John Hare and all the rest!" ("Buoyant Battler," Modern Screen, December 1937)

"Peter Ibbetson" reached London a few nights ago—after one of the most desperate efforts to reach any place that any play ever indulged in. It was in about 1895 that George du Maurier, in collaboration with John Raphael, made his novel into a play, and for a full twenty years the play traveled from the office on one London manager to that of another, never finding production. Along about 1915, Constance Collier, chancing to sit next to Mr. Raphael at a dinner, learned of the play and became interested in it, and in the hope of snaring some London producer she gave it a single performance, for a war charity, at his majesty's Theatre. Miss Collier, of course, played Mimsi, and the cast included many other well known players. But the London managers, to a man, remained apathetic. In the course of events Miss Collier came to America, bringing the play with her, and renewed her efforts to obtain a production. It was obtained, finally, after tremendous difficulty, and then only on a co-operative scale, with even the stage decorators accepting a share in payment for their services. the success of the production at the Republic Theatre, with the Barrymores and Miss Collier in the cast, is too recent to require comment. But John Raphael, who had waited more than twenty years for his play to find production, died three weeks before the opening of the piece in New York. The success here, of course, smoothed the way for a London production. In it Miss Collier is once more acting the Duchess of Towers, and presumably—although details as to the play's reception are lacking—rejustifying her faith in the play.

—New York Times, February 15, 1920

In an interview for Screen Book magazine Rathbone said, "Our present life is extremely practical and we need, as much as possible, to create moods of illusion—we must not forget how to dream. My first successful play and possibly, my dearest memory of the stage, was Peter Ibbetson. In it, my beloved one, Mary, Duchess of Towers, taught me how to dream true, and the tragic life of Peter was changed into exalted happiness. Though he passed the last twenty years of his life in prison, he had his dreams which were reality to him, and he knew—'that stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage!'" ("Peer of the Costume Drama," Screen Book, May 1938)

"The revival of Peter Ibbetson at the Savoy was a big success. Storms of applause greeted each curtain." —Variety, February 13, 1920

"The first four performances of Peter Ibbetson at the Savoy broke the records of that house for the last ten years." —Variety, February 20, 1920

When Daphne du Maurier saw Basil Rathbone in her grandfather's play, she was smitten with the handsome young actor. She later wrote:

"Upon an earlier piece of pink blotting paper there is the drawing of a heart, pierced by an arrow, and the words, 'I love Basil,' scribbled upon it. This, I know very well, refers to the actor Basil Rathbone, who had performed as the hero in the adaptation of Grandpapa's novel Peter Ibbetson, staged some months before. It was time, I must have told myself, that I too found an idol or 'crush,' ... and Basil Rathbone, dark and handsome, made a fine candidate, especially when he helped us at the hoopla stall, over which M presided at the annual Theatrical Garden Party. Passion withered when he appeared—I think at a garden party D and M gave at Cannon Hall—wearing a straw boater, and though I tried hard to flog the dying embers ... I didn't succeed. I wondered what I should have said had I known that over twenty years later he would act the part of wicked Lord Rockingham in the film adaptation of one of my own novels, Frenchman's Creek, and in pursuit of the heroine, Dona, crash down a staircase to his death?" —Daphne du Maurier, Myself When Young: The Shaping of a Writer (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1977)

In 1940, Rathbone recalled Daphne's admiration. “Daphne du Maurier ... flattered my vanity when she was a young girl of 14. I was appearing with her father, Gerald du Maurier, in her grandfather’s play, ‘Peter Ibbetson.’ She adored everything her grandfather had written and I was for the run of the play, at least, her hero. She was a lovely young girl and I was just at the age when a bit of worship did me a lot of good.” —“Handsome Villain,” The Milwaukee Journal, June 2, 1940

Peter Ibbetson
Production at the Savoy

What is the magic secret of this tear-compelling play? Play? No, it is not that. It is without form or continuity, a series of stray episodes, a jumble of present and past, a blend of actual life and dream life, with one big splotch of violent melodrama which is so soon upon you and so soon over that you wonder whether that also was not a passing dream. But Du Maurier's novel is like that, too. Only you can skip the longueurs in the book—there are some—and you have the delight of the Du Maurier drawings, with all the people so elegant and all so tall, and the beautiful face of the Duchess—which still has a grave, gracious beauty fro those who know where to find the original.

In the play the longueurs have disappeared, or almost—for, perhaps, the Duchess's address d'outre tombe is one. And, of course, the Colonel's death at Peter's hand is more thrilling as a thing seen than as a thing read. Thus, there is the scenic amusement of a Victorian ballroom in the seventies, with polkas and mazurkas (or are they schottisches?), and the quaint (to our taste ravishingly quaint) costumes and coiffures of the ladies in that period.

But why do we talk of these things? Not in them is the play's secret to be found. We must look for it rather in the central mood or key of the play (faithfully reproduced from the book)—a melancholy minor key, a mood of reverie, of dreaming back into the past. Not that the past, shown in dissolving views, is very affecting in itself. You have vignettes of a Second Empire family, little pictures of innocent domesticity, with prattling children and indulgent elders. But it is the melancholy of the past as past, as irrecoverable, except in dreams, as a life that is now death, that affects you. Mentem mortalia tangunt. Who has not felt Peter Ibbetson's yearning to recover the distant past for one moment, to see again the children that we were and hear again the voices of the dead? It is because Du Maurier's story so sincerely and so beautifully expresses this yearning that we are so profoundly moved.

It required the most loving care to transfer this spirit intact from the book to the stage—we all know what havoc the stage is apt to work among tender fancies and spiritual moods, how by materializing them it is apt to coarsen and spoil them. No mere technical dexterity will suffice; sympathy, or, as we have said, loving care, is the indispensable thing; and happily, the present stage version has found this indispensable thing. the result is a work not easy to classify dramatically—it will go into none of Polonius's categories. It is an atmosphere, a mood, a dream, call it what you will; but the one thing that imports is that it achieves beauty.

Mr. Basil Rathbone (Peter) and Miss Constance Collier (Duchess) and Miss Jessie Bateman (a dainty mid-Victorian beauty) are just the passing, hovering figures of a dream, and play consistently in harmony with that idea. the one intrusion of definite substantial reality is the Colonel, the melodramatically wicked Colonel. He is played "for all that he is worth" by Mr. Gilbert Hare, who has a great gift for "composing a part, for enriching it with minute detail, for giving it outline and air and style. He makes an unforgettable figure of the Colonel. To judge from the deep silence of attention with which the house followed each act and from the violent applause into which it burst when each act was over, it was greatly moved by the play. We are not sure that our own warmest thrill was not caused by the appearance of the big dog, the dear Du Maurier big dog that one used to know so well. There was another bit of the past revived, something of one's own old affections, really far more to us than any of Peter's.

—The Times, February 7, 1920

"Mr. Gilbert Hare makes a superbly vain uncle, and Mr. Basil Rathbone a Peter full of charm and interest." —The Sphere, March 13, 1920

"In Basil Rathbone the English stage has found an emotional actor of the first class, a young man whose power of expressing sorrow, at all events, is so great that in one night he climbs to the very topmost pinnacle, among the few really gifted actors of his time." —National News, February 1920

In 1921 a silent film version of Peter Ibbetson was directed by American George Fitzmaurice. Titled Forever, it was written by scenarist Ouida Bergere, who was then married to Fitzmaurice. In 1926 she became the wife of Basil Rathbone.

In his autobiography, Basil Rathbone wrote: "The success of Peter Ibbetson was also linked with the years to come. The authoress of the silent picture version of the story was one day to become my wife. But at this moment neither of us had heard of one another." (In and Out of Character, p. 45)

Peter Ibbetson opened at the Savoy Theatre on February 6, 1920, and played six nights and two matinees each week until April 3. On April 26 the play transferred to the Royal Court Theatre in Sloan Square.