20 June 2023

‘Justice’ – Players in the Pub

PLAYERS IN THE PUB 20 June 2023. Entry by donation.
presented by members and friends of New Theatre

JUSTICE by John Galsworthy (Nobel Laureate 1932 and author of The Forsythe Saga)
DIRECTED BY Lyn Collingwood and Sharron Skehan.

John Galsworthy (1867-1933) was born in Surrey on 14 August 1867 into a wealthy family whose property included a large estate on Kingston upon Thames, now the site of three schools. His father was a lawyer and company director. After attending Harrow and Oxford, Galsworthy was called to the Bar in 1890 but left England to travel abroad, ostensibly to study marine law. In 1893 as a passenger on the clipper Torrens returning home from Adelaide he met seaman Joseph Conrad and the two future novelists became close friends.

Using the pseudonym John Sinjohn, Galsworthy published a short story collection From the Four Winds in 1897 and a full-length novel Jocelyn in 1898. His father’s death brought a legacy and the freedom to pen works under his real name. The Island Pharisees, which he considered his most important work, was published in 1904. The Man of Property, the first in his Forsyte Saga trilogy, appeared in 1906; it was not until 1921 that the epic chronicle was completed. His plays include The Silver Box (1906), Strife (1909), Justice (1910), Loyalties (1922), Windows (1922), Old English (1924) and Escape (1926). In his writings Galsworthy campaigned on social issues such as censorship, the class system, prison reform and animal welfare. Although dismissed by Virginia Woolf as an Edwardian “stuffed shirt”, he was a dedicated supporter of women’s rights.

In 1895 Galsworthy began an affair with Ada Nemesis Pearson Cooper, unhappily married to his cousin, an army major. The couple wed in 1905 and remained together until Galsworthy’s death. They had no children. Passed over for military service in the First World War, Galsworthy worked as a hospital orderly in France. In 1919 he turned down the offer of a knighthood on the grounds that writing is its own reward. In 1921 he was elected first president of the PEN international literary club, and in 1932 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died from complications arising from a brain tumour on 31 January 1933; his ashes were scattered from an aeroplane over the South Downs.

In his lifetime Galsworthy’s reputation rested mainly on his plays. After his death his name fell into obscurity, but his reputation was revived by the 1967 success of the televised adaptation of The Forsyte Saga, the unhappy experiences of its central character Irene based on those of his wife during her first marriage.