Margaret Webster: A Life in the Theater (review)

Milly S. Barranger’s biography of Margaret Webster (1905–1972) is a straightforward, detailed reportage on the mid-20th-century director/actor’s hardworking life in the theatre. The only child of British actors Dame May Whitty and Ben Webster, Webster was a product of the “born in a trunk” upbringing common to theatre families. She launched her career as a young character actress in Britain. After a series of fortunate if somewhat accidental events, Webster landed her first job as a theatre director in Britain, and went on to gain prominence as a director of stage classics in the United States. In the 1940s, her productions of Shakespeare’s less-produced history plays (Henry VIII, Richard II), as well as the more popular tragedies (Macbeth, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet), attracted the attention and approval of mainstream audiences and critics across the U.S.

Webster made her name directing for the Broadway stage, the Metropolitan and New York City Operas, as well as for numerous “bus and truck” touring companies, including the short-lived Margaret Webster Shakespeare Company. She was pioneering in her risky, radical choice to cast black actors in classical productions in the early 1940s (including Paul Robeson as Othello); in the late 1940s, with Eva Le Gallienne and Cheryl Crawford, she established the ill-fated American Repertory Theatre, which was dedicated to producing seasons of classics. Throughout her career, Webster took on challenging acting roles in addition to directing and producing.

Interestingly, it is not until the very end of Barranger’s book, in an excerpt from Le Gallienne’s obituary for Webster—her longtime friend, sometime lover, and frequent collaborator—that we learn that Webster’s greatest passion in the theatre was acting, not directing (306). This fact drops onto the page without comment or response from Barranger, which is often the case in the book. Indeed, although Barranger takes scrupulous care in reporting on Webster’s accomplishments and correspondence year by year, and the book is a veritable encyclopedia of the big names in 20th-century British and American theatre history, Margaret Webster: A Life in the Theater lacks a critical or theoretical framework of any kind.

This is especially surprising, since the book is the latest volume in the University of Michigan’s esteemed Triangulations Series, which focuses on the interconnections between lesbian/gay/queer studies and theatre/drama/performance. The biography contains little insight on the impact of Webster’s lesbianism on her life and work. Webster’s relationships with Le Gallienne and with British novelist Paula Frankel are simply reported on; the most useful analysis of the power struggles in Webster’s relationship with Le Gallienne are gleaned in excerpts from Helen Sheehy’s biography of Le Gallienne (1996).

Webster was one of many theatre and film artists investigated, interrogated, and blacklisted during the McCarthy era. This is the most interesting chapter of Barranger’s biography, where the author offers an astute interpretation and analysis of Webster’s choices at this difficult time, challenging Webster’s own account of the period in her memoir, Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage (1972). It is disappointing that Barranger’s narrative does not sustain this sharper edge, however. No mention is made, or critique offered of the fact that Webster, who was renowned for championing black performers in her productions of Shakespeare in the U.S., chose to produce and direct all-white productions in apartheid South Africa (1961/62). Similarly, the section covering Webster’s work in the 1960s in the U.S. (some productions took place on college campuses) lacks any discussion of the director’s attitudes about or involvement in the political upheaval at the time, when many theatre artists were becoming politicized.

Barranger’s biography begins with a clear, concise chronology of “high points” in Webster’s life and work; the book also contains a few black-and-white photographs of...