Title page

TWO PLAYS | By | J. KAHANE | LONDON | SHERRATT AND HUGHES | Manchester: 34 Cross Street | 1912

Collation

8vo. [x] 11–118 + [ii]. 19 × 12.5 cm. Edges untrimmed.

Pagination

[i] half-title; [ii] copyright; [iii] title-page; [iv] blank; [v] dedication; [vi] blank; [vii] contents; [viii] blank; [ix] section heading; [x] blank; 11–118 text; [119–120] blank.

Binding

White stiff paper wrappers.

Front panel: Woodcut, white on black, of a Greek warrior with helmet, shield and sword. TWO PLAYS | BY J. KAHANE [black on white]

Spine: TWO PLAYS. J. KAHANE. [printed horizontally, bottom to top] | 1/- | net. [black on white]

Rear panel: Blank.

Publication

1912

Notes

First edition.

The two plays are The Master and Black Magic. In his preface to the first US edition of Laugh and Grow Rich [see C–2(b)], Kahane describes the plays as ‘a grisly pair of tragedies, the milder of which ended in a murder; in the other, the people showed every sign of living unhappily ever after – much worse, of course, than an ordinary, reasonable murder’. The Master, a one-act play, received its only performance when it served as a curtain-raiser for H. M. Richardson's The Awakening Woman at the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester, on 28 November 1913. It was produced under the auspices of Esme Percy's company, and Percy himself played James Gillon. The theatre programme refers to the playwright as ‘J. Cahane’. Kahane writes in his memoirs of the play also being staged in Dublin by Ben Iden Payne, as a curtain-raiser to a Shaw play. Kahane further maintains that a production of Black Magic garnered him a mention in one of James Agate's books (Agate, like Kahane, was an alumnus of Manchester Grammar School). In his war memoir Lines of Communication, Agate describes Kahane as ‘that very advanced young playwright of the violet sunsets and the purple passions – or the purple sunsets and the violent passions, I forget which’.

The illustration on the front panel is the work of Ernest Marriott, a fellow member of the Swan Club in Manchester and a close friend of Kahane. Marriott's initials appear in the top left hand corner of the design.