Algonquin Round Table No Sirree! What was No Sirree? it was perhaps inevitable that they would write and stage their own revue. No Sirree!, staged for one night only in April 1922, Who was in it? Acts included: "Opening Chorus" featuring Woollcott, Toohey, Kaufman, Connelly, Adams and Benchley with violinist Jascha Heifetz What songs were in the play? "He Who Gets Flapped", a musical number featuring the song "The Everlastin' Ingenue Blues" written by Dorothy Parker and performed by Robert Sherwood Any other songs? "Zowie, or the Curse of an Akins Heart"; "The Greasy Hag, an O'Neill Play in One Act" with Kaufman, Connelly and Woollcott; Was it successful? With the success of No Sirree! the Round Tablers hoped What did they hope for? Kaufman and Connelly funded the revue, named The Forty-niners. The revue opened in November 1922 and was a failure, running for just 15 performances.
What other parts did the Round Table play in No Sirree?
What other parts did the Round Table play in No Sirree aside from "The Greasy Hag, an O'Neill Play in One Act"?
Given the literary and theatrical activities of the Round Table members, it was perhaps inevitable that they would write and stage their own revue. No Sirree!, staged for one night only in April 1922, was a take-off of a then-popular European touring revue called La Chauve-Souris, directed by Nikita Balieff.  No Sirree! had its genesis at the studio of Neysa McMein, which served as something of a salon for Round Tablers away from the Algonquin. Acts included: "Opening Chorus" featuring Woollcott, Toohey, Kaufman, Connelly, Adams and Benchley with violinist Jascha Heifetz providing offstage, off-key accompaniment; "He Who Gets Flapped", a musical number featuring the song "The Everlastin' Ingenue Blues" written by Dorothy Parker and performed by Robert Sherwood accompanied by "chorus girls" including Tallulah Bankhead, Helen Hayes, Ruth Gillmore, Lenore Ulric and Mary Brandon; "Zowie, or the Curse of an Akins Heart"; "The Greasy Hag, an O'Neill Play in One Act" with Kaufman, Connelly and Woollcott; and "Mr. Whim Passes By--An A. A. Milne Play."  The only item of note to emerge from No Sirree! was Robert Benchley's contribution, The Treasurer's Report. Benchley's disjointed parody so delighted those in attendance that Irving Berlin hired Benchley in 1923 to deliver the Report as part of Berlin's Music Box Revue for $500 a week. In 1928, Report was later made into a short sound film in the Fox Movietone sound-on-film system by Fox Film Corporation. The film marked the beginning of a second career for Benchley in Hollywood.  With the success of No Sirree! the Round Tablers hoped to duplicate it with an "official" Vicious Circle production open to the public with material performed by professional actors. Kaufman and Connelly funded the revue, named The Forty-niners. The revue opened in November 1922 and was a failure, running for just 15 performances. CANNOTANSWER
The only item of note to emerge from No Sirree! was Robert Benchley's contribution, The Treasurer's Report. Benchley's disjointed parody so delighted those in attendance
The Algonquin Round Table was a group of New York City writers, critics, actors, and wits. Gathering initially as part of a practical joke, members of "The Vicious Circle", as they dubbed themselves, met for lunch each day at the Algonquin Hotel from 1919 until roughly 1929. At these luncheons they engaged in wisecracks, wordplay, and witticisms that, through the newspaper columns of Round Table members, were disseminated across the country.

Daily association with each other, both at the luncheons and outside of them, inspired members of the Circle to collaborate creatively. The entire group worked together successfully only once, however, to create a revue called No Sirree! which helped launch a Hollywood career for Round Tabler Robert Benchley.

In its ten years of association, the Round Table and a number of its members acquired national reputations, both for their contributions to literature and for their sparkling wit. Although some of their contemporaries, and later in life even some of its members, disparaged the group, its reputation has endured long after its dissolution.

Origin
The group that would become the Round Table began meeting in June 1919 as the result of a practical joke carried out by theatrical press agent John Peter Toohey. Toohey, annoyed at The New York Times drama critic Alexander Woollcott for refusing to plug one of Toohey's clients (Eugene O'Neill) in his column, organized a luncheon supposedly to welcome Woollcott back from World War I, where he had been a correspondent for Stars and Stripes. Instead, Toohey used the occasion to poke fun at Woollcott on a number of fronts. Woollcott's enjoyment of the joke and the success of the event prompted Toohey to suggest that the group in attendance meet at the Algonquin each day for lunch.

The group first gathered in the Algonquin's Pergola Room (later called the Oak Room) at a long rectangular table. As they increased in number, Algonquin manager Frank Case moved them to the Rose Room and a round table. Initially the group called itself "The Board" and the luncheons "Board meetings". After being assigned a waiter named Luigi, the group re-christened itself "Luigi Board". Finally, they became "The Vicious Circle" although "The Round Table" gained wide currency after a caricature by cartoonist Edmund Duffy of the Brooklyn Eagle portrayed the group sitting at a round table and wearing armor.

Membership

Charter members of the Round Table included:

 Franklin Pierce Adams, columnist
 Robert Benchley, humorist and actor
 Heywood Broun, columnist and sportswriter (married to Ruth Hale)
 Marc Connelly, playwright
 Ruth Hale, freelance writer who worked for women's rights
 George S. Kaufman, playwright and director
 Dorothy Parker, critic, poet, short-story writer, and screenwriter
 Brock Pemberton, Broadway producer
 Murdock Pemberton, Broadway publicist, writer
 Harold Ross, The New Yorker editor
 Robert E. Sherwood, author and playwright
 John Peter Toohey, Broadway publicist

 Alexander Woollcott, critic and journalist

Membership was not official or fixed for so many others who moved in and out of the Circle. Some of these included:

 Tallulah Bankhead, actress
 Norman Bel Geddes, stage and industrial designer
 Noël Coward, playwright
 Blyth Daly, actress
 Edna Ferber, author and playwright
 Eva Le Gallienne, actress
 Margalo Gillmore, actress
 Jane Grant, journalist and feminist (married to Harold Ross)
 Beatrice Kaufman, editor and playwright (married to George S. Kaufman)
 Margaret Leech, writer and historian
 Herman J. Mankiewicz, screenwriter 
 Harpo Marx, comedian and film star
 Neysa McMein, magazine illustrator
 Alice Duer Miller, writer
 Donald Ogden Stewart, playwright and screenwriter
 Frank Sullivan, journalist and humorist
 Deems Taylor, composer
 Estelle Winwood, actress and comedian
 Peggy Wood, actress

Activities
In addition to the daily luncheons, members of the Round Table worked and associated with each other almost constantly. The group was devoted to games, including cribbage and poker. The group had its own poker club, the Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club, which met at the hotel on Saturday nights. Regulars at the game included Kaufman, Adams, Broun, Ross and Woollcott, with non-Round Tablers Herbert Bayard Swope, silk merchant Paul Hyde Bonner, baking heir Raoul Fleischmann, actor Harpo Marx, and writer Ring Lardner sometimes sitting in. The group also played charades (which they called simply "The Game") and the "I can give you a sentence" game, which spawned Dorothy Parker's memorable sentence using the word horticulture: "You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think."

Members often visited Neshobe Island, a private island co-owned by several "Algonks"—but governed by Woollcott as a "benevolent tyrant", as his biographer Samuel Hopkins Adams charitably put it—located on several acres in the middle of Lake Bomoseen in Vermont. There they would engage in their usual array of games including Wink murder, which they called simply "Murder", plus croquet.

A number of Round Tablers were inveterate practical jokers, constantly pulling pranks on one another. As time went on the jokes became ever more elaborate. Harold Ross and Jane Grant once spent weeks playing a particularly memorable joke on Woollcott involving a prized portrait of himself. They had several copies made, each slightly more askew than the last, and would periodically secretly swap them out and then later comment to Woollcott "What on earth is wrong with your portrait?" until Woollcott was beside himself. Eventually they returned the original portrait.

No Sirree!
Given the literary and theatrical activities of the Round Table members, it was perhaps inevitable that they would write and stage their own revue. No Sirree!, staged for one night only in April 1922, was a take-off of a then-popular European touring revue called La Chauve-Souris, directed by Nikita Balieff.

No Sirree! had its genesis at the studio of Neysa McMein, which served as something of a salon for Round Tablers away from the Algonquin. Acts included: "Opening Chorus" featuring Woollcott, Toohey, Kaufman, Connelly, Adams and Benchley with violinist Jascha Heifetz providing offstage, off-key accompaniment; "He Who Gets Flapped", a musical number featuring the song "The Everlastin' Ingenue Blues" written by Dorothy Parker and performed by Robert Sherwood accompanied by "chorus girls" including Tallulah Bankhead, Helen Hayes, Ruth Gillmore, Lenore Ulric and Mary Brandon; "Zowie, or the Curse of an Akins Heart"; "The Greasy Hag, an O'Neill Play in One Act" with Kaufman, Connelly and Woollcott; and "Mr. Whim Passes By—An A. A. Milne Play."

The only item of note to emerge from No Sirree! was Robert Benchley's contribution, The Treasurer's Report. Benchley's disjointed parody so delighted those in attendance that Irving Berlin hired Benchley in 1923 to deliver the Report as part of Berlin's Music Box Revue for $500 a week. In 1928, Report was later made into a short sound film in the Fox Movietone sound-on-film system by Fox Film Corporation. The film marked the beginning of a second career for Benchley in Hollywood.

With the success of No Sirree! the Round Tablers hoped to duplicate it with an "official" Vicious Circle production open to the public with material performed by professional actors. Kaufman and Connelly funded the revue, named The Forty-niners. The revue opened in November 1922 and was a failure, running for just 15 performances.

Decline
As members of the Round Table moved into ventures outside New York City, inevitably the group drifted apart. By the early 1930s the Vicious Circle was broken. Edna Ferber said she realized it when she arrived at the Rose Room for lunch one day in 1932 and found the group's table occupied by a family from Kansas. Frank Case was asked what happened to the group. He shrugged and replied, "What became of the reservoir at Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street? These things do not last forever." Some members of the group remained friends after its dissolution. Parker and Benchley in particular remained close up until his death in 1945, although her political leanings did strain their relationship. Others, as the group itself would come to understand when it gathered following Woollcott's death in 1943, simply realized that they had nothing to say to one another.

Public response and legacy
Because a number of the members of the Round Table had regular newspaper columns, the activities and quips of various Round Table members were reported in the national press. This brought Round Tablers widely into the public consciousness as renowned wits.

Not all of their contemporaries were fans of the group. Their critics accused them of logrolling, or exchanging favorable plugs of one another's works, and of rehearsing their witticisms in advance. James Thurber (who lived in the hotel) was a detractor of the group, accusing them of being too consumed by their elaborate practical jokes. H. L. Mencken, who was much admired by many in the Circle, was also a critic, commenting to fellow writer Anita Loos that "their ideals were those of a vaudeville actor, one who is extremely 'in the know' and inordinately trashy".

The group showed up in the 1923 best-seller Black Oxen by Gertrude Atherton. She sarcastically described a group she called "the Sophisticates":

Groucho Marx, brother of Round Table associate Harpo, was never comfortable amidst the viciousness of the Vicious Circle. Therein he remarked "The price of admission is a serpent's tongue and a half-concealed stiletto." Even some members of the Round Table disparaged it later in life. Dorothy Parker in particular criticized the group.

Despite Parker's bleak assessment and while it is true that some members of the Round Table are perhaps now "famous for being famous" instead of for their literary output, Round Table members and associates contributed to the literary landscape, including Pulitzer Prize-winning work by Circle members Kaufman, Connelly and Sherwood (who won four) and by associate Ferber and the legacy of Ross's New Yorker. Others made lasting contributions to the realms of stage and screen — Tallulah Bankhead and Eva Le Gallienne became Broadway greats and the films of Harpo and Benchley remain popular; and Parker has remained renowned for her short stories and literary reviews.

The Algonquin Round Table, as well as the number of other literary and theatrical greats who lodged there, helped earn the Algonquin Hotel its status as a New York City Historic Landmark. The hotel was so designated in 1987. In 1996 the hotel was designated a national literary landmark by the Friends of Libraries USA based on the contributions of "The Round Table Wits". The organization's bronze plaque is attached to the front of the hotel.
Although the Rose Room was removed from the Algonquin in a 1998 remodel, the hotel paid tribute to the group by commissioning and hanging the painting A Vicious Circle by Natalie Ascencios, depicting the Round Table and also created a replica of the original table. The hotel occasionally stages an original musical production, The Talk of the Town, in the Oak Room. Its latest production started September 11, 2007 and ran through the end of the year.

A film about the members, The Ten-Year Lunch (1987), won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
The dramatic film Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994) recounts the Round Table from the perspective of Dorothy Parker.

In popular culture
Portions of the 1981 film Rich and Famous were set in the Algonquin and one of the film's characters, Liz Hamilton (played by Jacqueline Bisset), refers to the Round Table during the film.

The Algonquin Round Table was featured in "The Young Indiana Jones and the Scandal of 1920", a 1993 episode of the TV series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, in which the title character meets the group and attends at least two lunches. Wonderful Nonsense - The Algonquin Round Table is a documentary produced for the DVD release of that film in 2008.

In season 2, episode 4 of Seinfeld entitled “The Phone Message” (1991), Jerry tells Donna, the woman he is seeing at the time: "Boy, I bet you got a regular Algonquin round table there", after Donna says she discussed a Dockers commercial with friends.

The 1994 film Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle concerns Dorothy Parker and her relationship with Robert Benchley and the larger group.

In 2009, Robert Benchley's grandson, Nat Benchley, and co-editor Kevin C. Fitzpatrick published The Lost Algonquin Round Table, a collection of the early writings of the group. Benchley's grandson Peter Benchley wrote the famous shark novel Jaws upon which the Steven Spielberg film is based.

See also

References

External links 
 Algonquin Round Table historical site History notes and news since 1999
 Algonquin Round Table at PBS's American Masters
 

American literary movements
American humorists
Culture of Manhattan
Literary circles
20th-century American literature
Ruth Emily Gillmore (26 October 1899 - 12 February 1976) was an English-born American stage actress.

Early years 
Gillmore was the daughter of Frank Gillmore, former president of Actors' Equity, and actress Laura MacGillivray and the sister of actress Margalo Gillmore. Her great-aunt was the British actor-manager Sarah Thorne, and her great-uncles were the actors Thomas Thorne and George Thorne. She was a fourth-generation actor on her father's side,

Career 
Gillmore's first professional appearance was as an unborn child in Maurice Maeterlinck's The Betrothal in New York City in 1918. Her later theatrical appearances included Edie Upton in The Robbery (1921), Jeanne in The Nest (1922), The '49ers (1922), [[Algonquin Round Table#No_Sir>ree.21|No Sirree!]] (1922), Gail Carlton in No More Frontiers (1931), and Mrs Howard in The Farmer Takes a Wife (1934-5).

She married theatre producer Max Sonino in Florence in Italy. They met when he produced the 1931 play No More Frontiers, in which she had appeared. Together they translated the Italian plays Finding Oneself (1933) by Luigi Pirandello, and Giovacchino Forzano's Gutlibi and The Bells of San Lucio. Their daughter was Mildred Sonino.

Gillmore taught speech and drama at the Buckley School.

Personal life and death 
With her sister Margalo Gillmore she was a member of the Algonquin Round Table.

Gillmore died in Nantucket, Massachusetts, on February 12, 1976, aged 76.

References

1899 births
1976 deaths
Actresses from London
American stage actresses
British emigrants to the United States
Actresses from New York City
20th-century American actresses
Algonquin Round Table
20th-century English women
20th-century English people The Namibia Davis Cup team represents Namibia in Davis Cup tennis competition and is governed by the Namibia Tennis Association. They did not compete between 2010-2011 and in 2017.

They best performance was in 2018, when they went undefeated to the 2019 Davis Cup Europe/Africa Zone Group II.

History
Namibia competed in its first Davis Cup in 2000.

Current Team (2018)

 Tukhula Jacobs
 Jean Erasmus
 Gideon Van Dyk
 Paul Alfred Schwieger (amateur player)

All players

All the players that represented Namibia since 2000.

Statistics
''Last updated: Namibia - Benin; 14 September 2019

Record
Total: 33–41 (44.6%)

Head-to-head record (2000–)

Record against continents

Record by decade
2000–2009: 16–28 (36.4%)
2010–2019: 17–13 (56.7%)

Note: 
1 In 2001 on the Relegation play-off group Togo-Namibia will not be played as they already played against each other in the previous round. Furthermore, the points gained at the matches played in the previous round will count for the table.
2 In 2002 on the Relegation play-off group Lithuania-Namibia will not be played as they already played against each other in the previous round. Furthermore, the points gained at the matches played in the previous round will count for the table.
3 In 2003 on the Relegation play-off group Madagascar-Namibia will not be played as they already played against each other in the previous round. Furthermore, the points gained at the matches played in the previous round will count for the table.
4 In 2004 on the Promotional play-off group Ghana-Namibia will not be played as they already played against each other in the previous round. Furthermore, the points gained at the matches played in the previous round will count for the table.
5 In 2005 on the Relegation play-off group Kenya-Namibia will not be played as they already played against each other in the previous round. Furthermore, the points gained at the matches played in the previous round will count for the table.
6 In 2006 on the Promotional play-off group Denmark-Namibia will not be played as they already played against each other in the previous round. Furthermore, the points gained at the matches played in the previous round will count for the table.
7 In 2007 on the Relegation play-off group Zimbabwe-Namibia will not be played as they already played against each other in the previous round. Furthermore, the points gained at the matches played in the previous round will count for the table.
8 In 2009 on the Relegation play-off group Andorra-Namibia will not be played as they already played against each other in the previous round. Furthermore, the points gained at the matches played in the previous round will count for the table.

See also
Davis Cup
Namibia Fed Cup team

External links

Davis Cup teams
Davis Cup
Davis Cup