The Dog Beneath the Skin by Christopher Isherwood

First published: 1935

First produced: 1936, at the Westminster Theatre, London

Type of plot: Satire

Time of work: The mid-1930’s

Locale: Mythologized Europe

Principal Characters:

• The Vicar of Pressan Ambo
• General Hotham
• Mrs. Hotham, his wife
• Miss Iris Crewe, of Honeypot Hall
• Sir Francis Crewe (the Dog), her brother
• Alan Norman, the unassuming protagonist
• First Journalist
• Second Journalist

The Play

The Dog Beneath the Skin opens in the garden of the vicarage at Pressan Ambo; the setting resembles that of a prewar musical comedy. The villagers promenade with several of the principal characters—the Vicar, General Hotham, his wife, and Miss Iris Crewe—who introduce themselves in lilting verse.

The Vicar explains the fairy tale quest that is to serve as the main structure for the plot. He says that the patriarch of Pressan Ambo, Sir Bingham Crewe, has died, leaving behind two heirs: his son, Sir Francis Crewe, and his daughter, Miss Iris Crewe. Sir Francis Crewe, however, has disappeared; consequently, Sir Bingham’s estate is left unsettled. Each year a man is chosen by lottery to find Sir Francis, and, if successful, his reward will be half of the land and Iris Crewe’s hand in marriage. So far, eight have tried, and eight have failed. This year, the task falls to Alan Norman, a somewhat unassuming young man whose success seems no more likely than that of his predecessors.

At this point, the Dog enters and “begins sniffing about.” It is apparent that both the Vicar and General Hotham have kept the Dog at one time or another. As the General puts it, he turns up “like the prodigal son,” stays one or two weeks, and then is off again, “cool as you please.” Alan takes the Dog along as he sets out on his quest.

After a brief scene in the saloon of a channel steamer, in which Alan meets the First and Second Journalists, the remaining two scenes of the act take place in the kingdom of Ostnia. There he witnesses preparations for the execution of several political prisoners. As the prisoners are led onstage with their wives and mothers, the Master of Ceremonies and the king of Ostnia discuss the matter as if it were itself a bit of show business, critiquing the previous execution and settling plans for the one now under way. Although the king is both apologetic and sympathetic, he carries out the execution with a gold revolver (amid Latin invocations to Zeus and Mars). The ladies of the court serve champagne and cakes as the queen attempts to comfort the bereaved wives and mothers. One of the women shouts “Murderers!!” and is “instantly and politely removed by footmen” as several courtiers “cough and look at the ceiling in pained embarrassment.” Alan Norman and the two Journalists enter to enquire after Sir Francis. No one seems to have heard of him, but the king suggests that they try the red light district. They do, but do not find Sir Francis among the prostitutes and drug addicts of Ostnia.

The second act opens in Westland, a highly politicized and militarized lunatic asylum. At the back of the stage, overlooking the lunatics, there is a large portrait of a man in uniform, beneath which “Our Leader” is written. Instead of a face, the Leader of the Lunatics has a loudspeaker. Two medical officers push Alan onstage in a wheelchair and leave him with the lunatics, bound in a straitjacket. The Leader of the Lunatics, through the loudspeaker, makes a blatantly paranoid speech against the threats to the safety of their homeland. Noticing that he does not cheer their leader, various lunatics threaten Alan, but the Journalists and the Dog succeed in rescuing him. Sir Francis Crewe is not to be found among the lunatics of Westland.

During a transitional scene in a railway car, Grubstein, a shady sort of profiteering financier, suggests that they look in Paradise Park. There, the stage is set to resemble “a beautifully-kept lawn,” and a number of people are walking about in sports clothes or pushing themselves about in wheelchairs. Paradise Park is the haunt of poets, lovers, and hypochondriacs; they are all too self-involved to know the whereabouts of Sir Francis Crewe.

The third and final act takes place in the Ninevah Hotel, located, as the introductory chorus tells us, in “a center of culture.” Alan, the Journalists, and, after some squabbling with the hotel staff, the Dog all make their way to the restaurant. A revue is in progress, representing “all that is mechanical, shallow, silly, hideous and unbearably tragic in the antics of a modern cabaret.” When Miss Lou Vipond appears onstage, Alan Norman exclaims, “By Jove, she’s a stunner.” Despite the warning of the journalists—“she’s brought enough good men to their ruin”—Alan immediately forgets Miss Iris Crewe and falls in love with Miss Vipond. He goes off in search of flowers.

In the following scene, the stage is divided in half. To the right is Miss Vipond’s bedroom, to the left the corridor outside. When the curtain rises, the corridor is lit, revealing the Dog, off in a corner. The hotel manager and a caravan of waitresses, pages, and chambermaids carry onstage an array of champagne, frocks, and furs for Miss Vipond. The lighting shifts as the scene progresses to the bedroom. Alan is embracing Miss Vipond, who is “a shopwindow dummy, very beautifully dressed.” They carry on an amorous conversation. (When Miss Vipond speaks, Alan runs behind her and speaks for her in falsetto.) As Alan begins to undress Miss Vipond, the lights come up on the Dog, who, after a lengthy satiric monologue, takes off his dogskin, lays it aside, and exits as Sir Francis.

At this point, the manager enters and presents Alan with a bill. Alan cannot pay it, and the manager exits to get the police. When Sir Francis slips back onstage to retrieve his disguise, Alan recognizes him as the object of his quest. After a brief moment of elation, he remembers that the Manager is returning with the police. At Sir Francis’s suggestion, he dons the dog costume and slips past the Manager and the police.

The final scene takes place once again in Pressan Ambo and the garden of the vicarage. A platform draped with a Union Jack and other flags of the empire occupies the greater portion of the stage. Sir Francis is once again wearing his dog disguise, but he now walks upright wth the costume head draped behind “like a monk’s cowl.” General Hotham, his wife, and Miss Iris Crewe all take their places on the platform as the Vicar delivers a long, patriotic sermon, recalling the similar speeches by the king of Ostnia and the Leader of the Lunatics. Mildred Luce, rendered hysterical by the speech, exclaims: “My sons were murdered, and they were bigger and handsomer than you’ll ever be, any of you!” Reminiscent of the bereaved widow of Ostnia, her outburst makes the “most painful impression on all present.”

The finale of the play has undergone some evolution. In the published version, Mrs. Hotham quickly leads Mildred offstage. The General restores order and, before Alan can reveal the success of his quest, announces that Miss Iris Crewe is engaged to be married to a well-known munitions manufacturer; Alan cries out, “Shame.” Sir Francis then steps forward to reveal that he had been among them all along, disguised as the Dog. Both the Vicar and the General are dismayed, but Sir Francis condemns them for their hypocrisy and renounces his inheritance. He and Alan go off together with others from the village to join “a unit in the army of the other side,” ostensibly the Socialist Party.

In the first production version, however, when Mildred Luce grows distraught at the Vicar’s sermon, Sir Francis explains that the loss of her sons is all a neurotic fantasy, the result of poverty and an unsympathetic social system. Mildred, in her hysteria, takes a gun and kills Sir Francis.

Dramatic Devices

At one level, The Dog Beneath the Skin is obviously intended to be a bit of satirical fun. Blatantly slapstick in its visual presentation—Sir Francis, for example, in his dog costume—it resembles the musical comedies and revues of its time. The fairy tale quest contains few genuine surprises and serves mainly as a pretext for broad political burlesque and caricature. On the whole, the effectiveness of the play depends largely on the verbal virtuosity of its playwrights and on an audience attuned to the unconscious ironies of naïve or self-indulgent characters.

On another level, however, the choruses which appear between scenes strike an ominously serious and morally didactic tone often quite different from the scenes they introduce. Derek Verschoyle, who reviewed the original production for The Spectator, summed it up nicely. It differs from musical comedy, he said, “chiefly in its assumption of a comprehensive moral outlook”; while the choruses “are eloquent and often moving,” they are nevertheless difficult to reconcile with the burlesque of the plot. Even those critics who praise the play have felt it necessary to apologize for the work’s lack of dramatic unity.

Auden and Isherwood must have themselves felt the difficulty. Indeed, the end of the play was revised not only for the initial production but again for the 1947 production at the Cherry Lane Theater in New York. In 1957, while teaching at Smith College, Auden asked his students to devise yet another closing scene.

Despite the tensions that inevitably arise in the staging of the play, however, most contemporary critics agree that the play is imaginative and ambitious in its attempt to draw together diverse elements. If it is not altogether satisfactory, the language of the play retains vitality, its satire its bite, and the choruses some pathos. As Charles Osborne has suggested, it retains “great energy and pace, and a really imaginative production, with appropriate cuts, would very likely reveal it as still able to entertain audiences in the theater.”

Critical Context

Some critics have suggested that the patchwork manner of its composition may well have created many of the difficulties with the dramatic unity of The Dog Beneath the Skin. It is the first full-scale collaboration between Auden and Isherwood; in it, they draw together several of their earlier pieces. Several of the choruses, the main structure of the plot, and the Vicar’s long sermon near the end come from an earlier, unpublished piece by Auden alone, “The Chase” (wr. 1934). “The Chase,” in turn, had borrowed elements from an even earlier Auden and Isherwood collaboration, The Enemies of the Bishop: Or, Die When I Say When (1929).

“The Chase” has three interwoven subplots. The first, Alan Norman’s search for the missing heir and his distraction by Miss Vipond, survived intact in The Dog Beneath the Skin, while incorporating elements of the second, in which two boys escape from a reformatory—one dressed as a dog, the other as a young woman. The third subplot, which rather tenuously links the others, involves a workers’ strike at a lead mine. The missing heir, as well as the two escaped boys, had joined the workers’ movement.

Faber and Faber had accepted “The Chase” for publication, but, having some misgivings, Auden withdrew it and revised it, following Isherwood’s suggestions to eliminate the sexual implications of the young boy dressed as a girl and the political proselytizing centered on the strike. It remained, however, largely the work of Auden. The Dog Beneath the Skin, as it evolved from “The Chase,” became dramatically more compact and more burlesque in tone, but many of the broader social and psychological concerns were lost.

The trend was reversed somewhat in the next Auden and Isherwood collaboration, The Ascent of F6 (pb. 1936, pr. 1937). Like The Dog Beneath the Skin, it uses a fairy tale quest. The mountain F6 lies between British and Osnian Sudoland, and the first white man to reach its summit will rule both. The interest of the play, however, is sustained not by the specifics of its satire, but rather by the psychology of the characters in their quest for social power. Auden’s long, Pulitzer Prize-winning poem The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1948) focused on man’s isolation in a world of crumbling social traditions and beliefs without using the fanciful trappings of The Dog Beneath the Skin and The Ascent of F6.

Sources for Further Study

Auden, W. H. In Solitude for Company: W. H. Auden After 1940—Unpublished Prose and Recent Criticism. Edited by Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Buell, Frederick. W. H. Auden as a Social Poet. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973.

Carpenter, Humphrey. W. H. Auden: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.

Davenport-Hines, Richard. Auden. New York: Pantheon Books, 1995.

Duchêne, François. The Case of the Helmeted Airman: A Study of W. H. Auden’s Poetry. London: Chatto and Windus, 1972.

Fuller, John. A Reader’s Guide to W. H. Auden. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1970.

Mendelson, Edward. Early Auden. New York: Viking, 1981.

Osborne, Charles. W. H. Auden: The Life of a Poet. London: Michael O’Mara, 1995.