ENSA – approaches to a reassessment
The Entertainments Services Association (ENSA) was the British war-time organisation which provided entertainment for the armed forces. At the end of the war, it had organised tens of thousands of shows, had employed thousands of artists and had entertained hundreds of thousands of people. Yet since then ENSA has been almost forgotten and largely written out of the established histories of the war. If mentioned at all ENSA has been ridiculed and belittled, and criticised for the poor quality of its shows, its belligerent director and the financial support it received. In 1945 ENSA was accused of mismanagement, its funding was withdrawn, and the grand victory parade in London took place without ENSA involvement.
In this paper I offer a reassessment of the organisation as one that was in fact groundbreaking and revolutionary. The fact that ENSA provided employment when this was hard to come by and paid everyone the same basic salary, that it did away with fancy costumes and expensive designs, and produced simple, cheap and versatile sets that could be in different performance conditions, ran counter to some of the underlying principles of a capitalist theatre industry. ENSA also represented an enterprise that attempted to bridge gaps between ‘high’ and ‘low’ entertainment. Its branching out into classical music and serious drama brought together performers, aesthetics and ideologies which would otherwise hardly have mixed. Under Drury Lane’s roof they did. Although this did not happen by design it arguably created – perhaps for the first time ever and since – a truly National Theatre at Dury Lane.