The Dancing Girl

The Dancing Girl is a play in four acts by Henry Arthur Jones, first performed at the Haymarket Theatre, London, in January 1891. The play was one of Jones’s major commercial successes of the 1890s and one of the works that established his reputation as one of the leading playwrights of the period.

The play centers on the figure of Drusilla Ives, a young Quaker woman from a strict religious family who has been leading a secret double life as a fashionable London dancer under the name Diana Valrose. The double life is eventually exposed and the play works through the various complications that result, including the moral and religious questions raised by Drusilla’s deception, the romantic complications involving the various men who have been involved with her in her two identities, and the family drama of the Ives household as they confront the truth about their daughter.

Jones was working in the mode of serious social comedy that the better English playwrights of the late Victorian period were developing in response to the influence of Ibsen and the broader continental dramatic experiments of the time. The play takes seriously the moral and social questions it raises about religious hypocrisy, female ambition, and the conflict between strict religious upbringing and the broader cultural possibilities available to talented young women in late Victorian London. The treatment is more nuanced than the conventional melodrama of the period had been and contributed to the slow elevation of English theatrical taste that was occurring during the years before the First World War.

The play was a substantial commercial success and ran for several months in its original Haymarket production. It was revived in various productions in subsequent decades and was for a time one of Jones’s most frequently performed works. The role of Drusilla offered actresses substantial dramatic material and was a favourite vehicle for leading actresses of the period.

Jones occupied an interesting position in the late Victorian theatrical world. He was admired by Bernard Shaw and the New Drama critics for his serious approach to dramatic subjects while also remaining a commercial success on the standard West End stage. The play runs about a hundred pages in standard form. For readers interested in late Victorian English theatrical drama on serious moral subjects, this is a representative example. It pairs naturally with Jones’s other major plays.