Oscar Asche, Orientalism and British Musical Comedy (review)

As its resonant series title suggests, Lives of the Theatre offers theatre history through biography – a notion so traditional as to seem positively modish today. The series preface offers "scholarly introductions to important periods and movements in the history of world theatre […] through the lives of representative theatre practitioners." The list of volumes recently published, however, includes eight named dramatists and only one book about any other theatre craft, under the title Michel Saint-Denis and the Shaping of the Modern Actor. The inclusion of the life of actor, arranger, entrepreneur, and lighting designer Oscar Ashe is all the more to be welcomed.

Under the rubric of "orientalism," Brian Singleton collects most of Ashe's productions, widening the theoretical concept to "exoticism" of many kinds, "a cultural practice that covered all art genres, predated the aggressive New Imperialism of the late Victorian period, and continued to thrive in the cinema and on the musical stage long after the Empire was dismantled" (11). He argues convincingly that "the Orient of Empire provided a forum for topical, contemporary, and relevant concerns" in early twentieth-century popular theatre (18). This is not to de-politicize the term, however; Singleton also demonstrates, in his consideration of Ashe's successes, from The Taming of the Shrew to Chu Chin Chow, that "orientalist representation […] was the cultural management of Empire" (87).

In this way, he is able to make sense of a career that began with an aesthetic moulded by Victorian pictorialism and youthful membership in Benson's Shakespeare company but moved in a radically different direction when Asche found personal acting success in roles that were, Singleton concludes, "a version of a variety act in his wrestling and murdering while dressed as an oriental" (76). Following a loosely chronological pattern, Singleton discusses Asche's Shakespearean acting and production as a whole, early in the book. He demonstrates how Asche's infallibly successful productions of those plays from the canon that provided parts suiting his narrow range of athletic villainy supported him through years of unsuccessful experimentation with the modern poetic drama.

Asche toured his native Australia in 1909–10 with triumphantly successful Shakespearean productions and Count Hannibal, an adventure s tory f rom a new historical novel that he had adapted as a vehicle for his own muscular and spectacular performances. On returning to England, he began to tap into "the market of the orientalist spectacular," embarking upon the path that would lead to the "megahit" musicals he staged and performed during World War I. With a nicely wry turn of phrase, Singleton encapsulates the inevitable critical and historical result of such a move: "his importance as a producer and player of the work of England's national playwright was swiftly to be forgotten. Asche turned to the popular theatre, and historians subsequently proceeded to virtually erase him from the histories of English theatre" (101).

The book's study of Chu Chin Chow, therefore, comes as something of a revelation to the modern reader, who has heard that this musical was a wartime hit but, at least in the case of the present reviewer, has been unaware of the extent, or the implications, of the piece's success. The play, a musical spinning-out of the Arabian Nights tale of "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," "very swiftly became both a theatrical mother and a whore (121)." Chu Chin Chow was "a cultural drug, fully licensed, for England's fighting men, deprived of female company, and traumatized by the horrors of battlefield slaughter […] [I]t was a familiar fairy tale of childhood, rewritten and transposed for an adult audience. The formula for success into which Asche had tapped so successfully was of eroticizing the fairy tale" (130). Singleton explores the show's extraordinary gluttony for all forms of popular spectacle. It begins with a slave-market spectacle, full of lavish costumes and exposed flesh, which was regularly re-dressed, like a manikin...