Du Bose Heywood’s novel Porgy was adapted for the stage by his wife Dorothy and was successfully presented in the New York in 1929. British theatrical entrepreneur Charles B. Cochran arranged for it to be brought to London where it opened at His Majesty’s Theatre in late April 1929. It returned to America in June. The reviews, often illustrated by photographs of the stage and the performers, have been examined and are presented here.

The weekly theatrical magazine the Era published an interview with the Heywoods on 17 April 1929 (page 9). Other publications praised the producer Rouben Mamoulian.

The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (20 April 1929, p 40) observed that the novel “has proved as difficult to dramatise as any novel by Dickens”, and that the production was “strangely unsatisfying” and in “an incomprehensible dialect”. The day before the West London Observer (page 4) commented “half of what is said cannot be heard or understood”. The play was a novelty.

Country Life (20 April 1929, p 65) advised that Porgy  was unlike Al Jolson’s Sonny Boy, had no resemblance to the “coal-black mammies of Messrs. Layton and Johnston” [a very popular American duo who sold many thousands of records in Britain], and was not remotely like Uncle Tom’s Cabin. At the other end of Britain’s social scale, the left wing Daily Herald called Porgy “A Charleston Play That Surprised London” and was “the most interesting and unusual play that has been seen in London for a long time”. The reviewer warned “the players not only speak a dialect, but speak it very fast and make no concession to their foreign [i.e. British] audience. But it is a play which must on no account be missed”.

British audiences were unused to American accents – films were only just appearing with sound (initially Jolson, a black-face singer).

Reviews included “magnificent” (Southwark and Bermondsey Recorder, 19 April 1929, p 3), “as drama it is disappointing” (Daily News, 11 April 1929, p 7), “one of the finest stage pictures I have ever seen” (The People, 14 April 1929, p 12) and “a superb melodrama of a melodramatic people” (Daily Chronicle, 11 April 1929, p 5). The Scotsman didn’t like it at all. The Bystander previewed the play – “a sensation in America” (27 March 1929, p 14) and had illustrated reviews on 17 April and 15 May.

Cochran, who had brought other black American performances to Britain, recalled in his 1932 autobiography I Had Almost Forgotten (pages 223-224) that Porgy “should have drawn all London to His Majesty’s. Certainly nothing so fine in the way of realistic production has ever been seen upon the London stage”. He and his business partner lost about £3,000 – “a comparatively small loss, considering that we paid the return fares from New York for nearly one hundred people”.

Porgy became the musical Porgy and Bess, with the genius of George Gershwin – an American opera.

See Harlan Greene (editor), Porgy & Bess. A Charleston Story (Charleston SC: Home House Press, 2016).