A separate volume should be written on ‘Realism in the British Musical Play’ . Part of that volume would indeed be about the genre’s attempt to offer an accurate reflection of real life; a substantial part of the volume would be about the inability of the British musical play to do it. In opera we may recognise verismo as a heightened portrayal of a ‘realistic’ event, as in Giordano’s Andrea Chénier or Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur or Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. Verismo holds up the glass to life, the unflattering light of day, sordidity, pans across the drawing room with its chintzy cheeriness to the kitchen sink. The heightening itself is of course often courtesy of the music, and this is as true of the British musical as it is of opera. A comprehensive history of the British musical verismo would probably trail back to Gilbert and Sullivan. There would surely be someone prepared to argue that Iolanthe is a truthful representation of peers or indeed of the late nineteenthcentury fairy, and that Trial by Jury offers an insight into what went on in a Victorian courtroom, even though the fantastical elements confuse. Looking through the titles of British musical plays presented in London in the twentieth century, their links with reality do not jump off the page, but in the mid-1950s there were definite movements, rather than a movement, to rectify the failing.

The death of Novello sharpened the perception of what the British musical lacked; without a comparatively significant figure, the genre’s reliance on operetta seemed out of time, only emphasised by the fact that Novello’s work had been supremely melodic and successful. By 1953, some rumblings of dissatisfaction of what the British musical had become were sounded. Seeing how important the contemporary was to modern life – ‘Fabrics are contemporary; wallpapers are contemporary. Contemporary furniture occupies an honoured station on the first floor’ – V. C. Clinton Baddeley considered it