In 1939, on the cusp of the Second World War, W. H. Auden wrote three elegies: ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’ and ‘In Memory of Ernst Toller’. The last is a melancholic ode to the exiled German poet, playwright and activist whom Auden and his collaborator Christopher Isherwood met in 1935 in Sintra, Portugal, while writing their play The Ascent of F6. In his essay collection Exhumations, Isherwood remembered Toller as ‘beautiful, with the immediately striking, undeniable beauty of a peacock, or a great lady of the theatre […] He was all that I had hoped for – more brilliant, more convincing than his books, more daring than his most epic deeds.’

Auden's poem presents Toller, who took his own life at the Mayflower Hotel in New York in May 1939, as one of the ‘war-horses’, an ‘example to the young’. Here Auden suggests a potential legacy for the suffering artist, a legacy that might escape from the lonely hotel room where he languished in debt, haunted by images of children wounded and scarred by the Spanish Civil War. ‘What was it, Ernst,’ Auden asks, ‘that your shadow unwittingly said?’ This chapter takes Auden's question as its catalyst to track what indeed it was that Toller's shadow unwittingly said and continues to say to British theatre. Later in the poem he encourages Toller to ‘lie shadowless’, to rest and allow the next generation to take up the mantle. The shadows had haunted him and, for Auden, led to his death. And yet, the question of what Toller left behind, the silhouette he casts, stands. For Toller's work has a fascinating yet broken legacy on the British stage. In the 1920s his plays enjoyed unrivalled popularity amongst leftist theatre companies eager to discover activist voices that were also aesthetically experimental. Falling out of popularity, Toller was rediscovered in the 1980s and 1990s, and retains an influence over twenty-first-century theatre too. In this chapter I track this historiography, claiming Toller's combination of poetry and politics as the key reason for his appeal.