''Paid on Both Sides: A Charade'' was the first dramatic work written by

W. H. Auden Wystan Hugh Auden (; 21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973) was a British-American poet. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in ...

. It was written in 1928 and published in 1930. It was performed in New York in 1931 and then at the

Cambridge Festival Theatre The Theatre Royal was built in the Barnwell suburb of Cambridge, England, in 1816. It closed later that century but reopened as the Cambridge Festival Theatre from 1926 until 1935. The building, in which part of the interior of the theatre surv ...

on 12 February 1934 (seven months after Terence Gray departed) in a programme of "experiments conducted by Joseph Gordon Macleod" which also included ''Deirdre'' by W.B.Yeats and ''An Animation of a Lay of Horatius Cocles'' by Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay. For the Auden "charade" the actors in Cambridge were seated on chairs on both sides of the stage. The "actors" were Flavia du Pre, David Raven, Noel Iliff, Sanchia Robertson, Peter Hoar, Robert MacDermot, Don Gemmell, Else Bley, John Hamilton, David Marsh, John Izon, Clephan Bell, Garrett Jones, Diana Morgan, Cicely Nicks and Macleod as the "Chorus". The theatre programme described the content: "Two families (or classes or industries or nations) are at feud. The Lintzgarth side marries into the Nattrass side; but at the wedding the Nattrass mother, in revenge for the death of her elder son, incites her younger son to shoot the Lintzgarth bridegroom; and the peace and mutual toleration that had been promised are ruined by personal animosity." Lintzgarth and Nattrass are real places which Auden found in his exploration of the North Pennines and

Alston Moor Alston Moor, formerly known as Alston with Garrigill, is a civil parish and electoral ward in Cumbria, England, based around the small town of Alston. It is set in the moorlands of the North Pennines, mostly at an altitude of over 1000 feet. T ...

. The former is a house at

Rookhope Rookhope is a village in County Durham, in England. A former lead and fluorspar mining community, it first existed as a group of cattle farms in the 13th Century. It is situated in the Pennines to the north of Weardale. W. H. Auden once calle ...

, the latter at Alston. The latter is also a family surname in the area.Nattrass may be explored in this search https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Nattrass+Alston&t=ffsb and in this source Ancestry which explicitly connects it to Alston saying "Northern English: habitational name from a place called Nattrass in Alston, Cumbria." http://www.ancestry.co.uk/name-origin?surname=nattress&geo_a=t&geo_s=us&geo_t=uk&geo_v=2.0.0&o_iid=41013&o_lid=41013&o_sch=Web+Property . Both retrieved 17 April 2016. ''Paid on Both Sides'' is a brief dramatic work that combines elements of Icelandic sagas, modern psychoanalysis, and English public-school culture. Auden wrote it in two versions, a brief first version written in mid-1928 that was published after his death, and a longer version, written later in the year, that was first published in ''

The Criterion ''The Criterion'' was a British literary magazine published from October 1922 to January 1939. ''The Criterion'' (or the ''Criterion'') was, for most of its run, a quarterly journal, although for a period in 1927–28 it was published monthly. It ...

'' in 1930 (Auden's first publication outside of school and university magazines) and again in his 1930 volume of ''

Poems Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in a ...

''. The play is dedicated to

Cecil Day-Lewis Cecil Day-Lewis (or Day Lewis; 27 April 1904 – 22 May 1972), often written as C. Day-Lewis, was an Irish-born British poet and Poet Laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972. He also wrote mystery stories under the pseudonym of Nicholas Bla ...

References

Plays by W. H. Auden 1930 plays Works originally published in The Criterion {{1930s-play-stub