The Whip (play)

"The Whip" is a play first performed in 1909 at the Drury Lane Theatre in London. A melodrama with intricate scenery and spectacular stage effects including a horse race and a train crash, the production would tour overseas and inspire a 1917 film by the same name.

Tallulah Bankhead offers a reminiscence of attending "The Whip" (at the Manhattan Opera House) as a child:

The Whip "was a blood-and-thunder melodrama in four acts and fourteen scenes imported from London's Drury Lane Theatre. It boiled with villainy and violence. Its plot embraced a twelve-horse race on a treadmill (for the Gold Cup at Newmarket), a Hunt Breakfast embellished by fifteen dogs, an auto-smash-up, the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's Waxworks, and a train wreck with a locomotive hissing real steam. It boasted a dissolute earl and a wicked marquis, and a heroine whose hand was sought by both knave and hero. It was a tremendous emotional dose for anyone as stage-struck and impressionable as our heroine." [cite book|title=Tallulah:My Autobiography|author=Bankhead, Tallulah|publisher=University Press of Mississippi|year=2004|id=ISBN 978-1-57806-635-3 p. 39.]

Notes

External links

* [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0008764/ IMDB page for 1917 "The Whip" film]