ERIC MASCHWITZ

He has written a few songs that people sing, a few plays that are still occasionally performed; he has had great happiness from women and made several good women unhappy, seen men die beside him in a war, worked hard at too many things, honoured his father and mother and in general done his damnest (which is perhaps a poor substitute for his best). He is congenitally incapable of jealousy, lamentably unsuspicious of other people's motives; he laughs and weeps too readily and is considerably lacking in moral courage.'
- Maschwitz describing himself, No Chip on my Shoulder

One of the most prominent, and certainly among the most prolific, writers for musical theatre from the 1930s to the mid-1950s, Eric Maschwitz was born in Edgbaston, a suburb of Birmingham, on 10 June 1901, into a family that came from Lithuania. He was educated at Repton School, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. His theatrical inspirations were obvious: at Repton he had already written a three-act play about an entire family that died from venereal disease. His career was to be based on rather more innocent fare.

He wrote quickly, writing short stories, working for a literary agent, ghosting for incompetent writers and publishing some novels, including The Passionate Clowns, under his (often used) pseudonym of Holt Marvell. In 1926 he was made Assistant Head of Outside Broadcasting for the BBC, beginning an association with that organisation that dominated much of his life. The following year he was made the editor of the Radio Times, a post he relinquished in 1933, when he was appointed Variety Director of the BBC. From the late 1920s he also began to build a solid reputation as the creator of picturesque musical plays. They were really operettas in disguise, a form that he only started to shake off in the 1950s. One such was Good Night Vienna, written expressly for BBC radio with the composer George Posford (one of his most frequent collaborators). It went on to a successful 1932 film starring Anna Neagle and Jack Buchanan, and was mounted for a stage tour in 1946. There was a suspicion that Maschwitz's musical plays were more appropriate for provincial rather than London presentations.

A tour of another Maschwitz-Posford operetta, The Gay Hussar, was sent out on the road in 1933, but it was only when the script and score underwent revision that the show re-emerged to find West End success as Balalaika at the Adelphi Theatre in 1936. Kt was luxuriously but dumbly filmed in Hollywood in 1939. Posford was also the composer for Maschwitz's Paprika at His Majesty's Theatre in 1938. When it flopped, Maschwitz simply revamped it and restaged it as the renamed Magyar melody, seen at the same theatre the following year. According to its author, Magyar melody 'was neither a specially good play nor a particularly bad one', and its star, Binnie Hale, helped keep the curtain up for 105 performances.

For the 1940 revue New Faces, Maschwitz notably wrote the lyric for 'A Nightingale sang in Berkeley Square'; Manning Sherwin's melody helped to establish the song as a sentimental favourite of the war years. Waltz Without End (Cambridge Theatre, September 1942) was an extravaganza built around the life of Chopin (and plundering his music for the songs). It wasn't among the best of Maschwitz's librettos. The show managed 181 performances before being taken up by the amateur operatic movement, for which Maschwitz was happy to provide suitable shows for the rest of his career.

With Ronald Jeans, Maschwitz co-wrote the revue Flying Colours seen at the Lyric Theatre in August 1943. War blues were dispersed for a time by its stellar players, including Miss Hale and Douglas Byng. In March 1946 at the Cambridge Theatre Maschwitz was the lyricist for Evangeline, a British attempt at making a musical of James Lavers' Nymph Errant, with music by Posford and Harry Jacobson and a shimmering leading lady in Frances Day. The show bombed, and the score vanished for ever. The following year Maschwitz wrote some lyrics for the variety-style revue Starlight Roof and in 1948 there was a return to musical plays with the old-fashioned operetta (some might say floperetta) Carissima at the Palace Theatre. It had music by Hans May about which nobody got very excited, a preposterous plot and some lusty singers, and lasted a healthy 466 performances. It also got two separate TV productions, the second of which (in 1959) starred no less than Ginger Rogers on a rare visit to Britain.

Although Carissima was hardly the work to mark out Maschwitz as a writer of distinction, he seemed unwilling to desert his old-fashioned format. For Belinda Fair, a costume musical written for the lovely Adele Dixon, Maschwitz worked again with the composer Jack Strachey (with whom he had written his most famous and well-remembered song 'These Foolish Things'). Inspired by seeing Dixon play Robin Hood in a Christmas pantomime, Maschwitz contrived his plot about an eighteenth century girl who masquerades as a man and joins the army, where she falls in love with her colonel. It had a mild run of 131 performances at the Saville and Strand Theatres in 1949.

In fact, Maschwitz was on the verge of his greatest successes, and some of his most distinguished work. Zip Goes a Million, a cleverly crafted vehicle for George Formby, opened at the Palace Theatre in October 1951, achieving 544 performances. The show had a top-drawer score from Posford, writing at the top of his form. There was another outstanding hit, Love From Judy, produced at the Saville Theatre in 1952, but this was the last of Maschwitz's commercially successful musicals. Happy Holiday, an attempt to musicalise Arnold Ripley's old thriller The Ghost Train, was rounded on by the critics and ignored by theatregoers, briefly seen at the Palace Theatre in 1954. Maschwitz had, to put it mildly, been unenthusiastic about writing it for Emile Littler - 'I assured him that the scheme was doomed to failure from the very start, it was impossible to make a musical entertainment of a story which depended, if it were to be effective at all, upon the audience being mystified and scared'. Maschwitz 'practically went on my knees in the office, begging not to be associated with the enterprise'.

Almost as unlucky was a small-scale musical, Romance in Candlelight, a divertissement that won very few admirers when it was pushed on at the Piccadilly Theatre in 1955 for 53 performances. Sam Coslow's songs interrupted Maschwitz's libretto. Happily, Maschwitz's London career in musicals ended on a surer note with Summer Song, based on the life and music of Dvorak, at the Princes Theatre in 1956. His book was little more than adequate, but some of Maschwitz's lyrics were very fine - they showed Maschwitz the equal of Oscar Hammerstein II - and the performances of the first-rate cast helped the attractive show to a respectable run.

Over the years, Maschwitz had also written screenplays and other novels, sometimes in collaboration with Val Gielgud, and various plays, including the one-performance play Thirteen For Dinner. His autobiography, No Chip On My Shoulder, published by Herbert Jenkins in 1957, seemed to reveal a man of real humanity. He died in London on 27 October 1969.