Here is a wonderful excerpt about this play from Screenplays.
Exercise Bowler began on the stage of the Arts Theatre in London in late April 1946, where it was presented by the Reunion Theatre Association. It later transferred to the Scala, where it was running when the cast went into the studio at Alexandra Palace. Reunion Theatre was formed by actors and actresses who had been released from the services, and according to a note in the Observer, it began in Baghdad in 1943 (Ivor Brown, Theatre and Life, 28 April 1946, p. 2). The company also produced a successful show called And No Birds Sing, but my initial research can discover nothing more.
The theatre production began with the presentation of a supposedly successful, sentimental West End drama about a boy going off to fight in the war. Cue an interruption by three ‘soldiers’ from the audience who expose the clichés and silence the first cast. But then a character called ‘the Manager’ comes on stage to say that all they have so far is a first act – what happens next? Which leads to a debate about the challenges of civilian life and the prospects for post-war Britain. The most prominent theatre critic of the time, James Agate, was impressed, even though he acknowledge that the ‘message’ was ‘a little too wooly and left-wing for my liking’:
This play has an immense amount to say, is inventive, brilliantly theatrical and magnificently laid out for actors. Best of all, it is not pretentious in the blank-verse manner beloved of the high-brow poetic dramatist. (‘Alas and Hurrah!’, The Sunday Times, 21 April 1946, p. 2)
Authorship of the script was credited to ‘T. Atkinson’, but of course ‘Tommy Atkins‘ was a slang name for the British soldier, especially during the First World War. The psuedonym hid the contributions of William Templeton, Peter Powell (who directed the stage production) and Alec Clunes. Clunes is particularly interesting, for as well as being the father of actor Martin Clunes, he was a theatrical producer, staging among other post-war dramas Christopher Fry’s verse drama The Lady’s Not for Burning, the director of the Arts Theatre, and an actor whose roles include that of Hastings in Laurence Olivier’s 1955 film Richard III. His Wikipedia entry also notes that he was a conscientious objector during the war. (For more about him, go here.)
