- Originally published on the Bartitsu.org site on Thursday, 20th April 2017
A short review from The Stage of 14 September, 1911, concerning a one-act polemic play that featured fight choreography by Edith Garrud:
On Monday evening Mr. Martyn Roland and Miss Eva Quin appeared at the London Pavilion in their “matrimonial mix-up” entitled What Every Woman Ought to Know, and met with a gratifying reception from a large audience.
What every woman ought to know in this special instance is ju-jitsu; and the story of the sketch is concerned with the successful taming of a drunken brute of a husband by a wife who has taken lessons in the Japanese methods of self-defence, and who downs her noble lord and master every time he makes a rush at her. In the end, of course, the husband and wife are reconciled, and there is every indication of a happier future, provided that the husband can always remember that discretion is the better part of valour.
Miss Eva Quin plays cleverly as the muscular wife, but Mr. Roland’s acting as the drunken husband is perhaps a shade too realistic, a circumstance which robs the sketch of some of the comedy it ought to possess.