ABSTRACT
A few British playwrights did adopt a quasi-Expressionist dramaturgy, including Violet Paget whose Satan the Waster, a ‘philosophic war trilogy’, opens in hell, where Satan plans ‘a ballet of the nations’ – a great war. Beginning in ‘No place, Nowhere’, and moving on to ‘the theatre of the world’, the play is too wordy for the stage, and the author herself advised reading rather than performance. The Gate repertoires in 1926 and 1927 were consistently experimental, and then in the autumn of 1927, the theatre moved to somewhat more comfortable premises on the site of Gatti’s Victorian Music Hall. With a low stage and a steeply raked auditorium, the actors at the new Gate were unusually close to the spectators, which intensified the Expressionist angst. By now the Group’s different artists were going their various creative ways, though they still wanted contact with the Group.
